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Peacekeeping
Ehrenreich
It's a conundrum that routinely paralyzes the left: The news brings us the horrors of postmodern warfare--concentration camps in Bosnia, mass slaughter in Rwanda, hundreds of thousands homeless in Zaire. On the one hand, we want to do something. On the other hand, as thinking people possessed of some historical memory, we have reasons to distrust the one instrument available for accomplishing this something - the U.S. armed forces. What if they start killing the locals, as they did in Somalia? What if they start getting killed themselves? So while commentators in the New Republic and the New York Times bray confidently about the urgent need to intervene or not, we dither, change the subject, and feel inwardly like fools or moral failures.
Both our impulses, though, are dead-on right. Peacekeeping is the right thing to do; it's just that the military is the wrong thing to do it with. Militaries exist for one reason--to make war--and to expect them to stop wars is logically akin to hoping a flame-thrower will extinguish a burning building. If peacekeeping is to be one of our nation's major missions in the world, then we're going to need a genuine peacekeeping force.
The odd thing is that no one seems to have thought much about what a peacekeeping force might look like and how it would be different from the existing military. Yet if peacekeeping is essential to national security, which is how the Pentagon claims to see it, you'd think it would be worthy of some tough-minded strategic cerebration. Historically, nations do not fare well when they try to fight the wars of the present with the armies of the past--pitting mounted knights against massed, gun-bearing infantry, for example. Since everyone from generals to former anti-war protesters seems to think peacekeeping is a good thing to do, why not do it right?
There is one way in which the ideal peacekeeping force would resemble the current military: They would be armed. Nothing fancy like SAMs or F14 fighter planes, but enough hand-held firepower to, say, dissuade a belligerent from raping his neighbor or torching her home. Ideally, the U.S. would launch a huge R&D effort to develop a technology of peacekeeping: Magnetic devices that disable every gun in the region, for example, or see-through, city-sized shields that repel artillery shells. But until the new technology is ready for use, our peacekeepers will need a modicum of good old-fashioned firepower--if only to protect themselves.
Other than that though, a real peacekeeping force would bear little resemblance to any conventional armed forces. For one thing, the emphasis would be on the humans rather than the hardware. Each individual peacekeeper would need intensive training and education in peacekeeping skills, starting with a rudimentary ability to speak the relevant languages. Remember the Somalian intervention, where it turned out the U.S. military had a maximum of one member capable of communicating with Somalians, and as a result, leaflets dropped by U.S. planes turned out to say something deeply offensive in Somali? How many of our troops in former-Yugoslavia speak Serbo-Croatian? Yet, until we have an army of talented mimes, how can we expect to make peace among people we can't even say "hi" to or "where are the land mines buried?"
Language skills are just one part of the educational investment we'd have to make in each individual peacekeeper. What about mediation skills? Construction skills, to help in housing refugees and rebuilding infrastructure, along with some working knowledge of sanitation? First aid and primary medicine? In fact, it's hard to think of a craft or discipline that would not come in handy to someone trying to put a break on genocide or war-induced famine and plague. Ideally, peacekeepers would have at least a four-year college education covering anthropology, psychology, history, philosophy (all, of course, taught from a rigorous multicultural perspective), epidemiology, and all aspects of communications technology. Too expensive, you say? Then just compare the cost of educating a few thousand peacekeepers to the price of a single fighter plane.
If the existing military wants to play a role in peacekeeping, it will of course have to undergo a complete cultural make-over. Basic training wouldn't be six weeks of continual hazing aimed at deconstructing the human personality, but a crash course in understanding and getting along with others. Obviously, drill sergeants who harass their female underlings would have no place in a peacekeeping force, along with anyone who displays a taste for white supremacy or similar anti-peace ideologies. The whole millennia-old military culture of guts and glory, male-bonding and machismo, would be about as useful in this "army" as crossbows and broad swords are in the conventional one.
There is one old-fashioned military value a peacekeeping army would want to revive, however, and that is a willingness to die for the sake of the mission. Unlike almost any army in history, the U.S. military has, for the last half-dozen years, diligently avoided putting itself "in harm's way." This is understandable: Why should anyone die to "punish" Saddam Hussein or for some equally twisted official purpose? In fact, why should anyone ever want to die for the sole purpose of killing and maiming others? But peacekeepers (who would needless to say have to be volunteers) would enter the service knowing that they might, indeed, end up risking their lives so that others will live. Otherwise, the business of protecting the peacekeepers themselves - with ever more cumbersome weapons technologies--would swallow up the peacekeeping mission.
So here's a goal for the left--or, ecumenically speaking--people of conscience generally: A massive shift of resources from war-making to peacekeeping, preferably administered by some Department of Peace totally removed from the Pentagon. Some may argue for a multinational force under the auspices of the UN, but each country may have good reasons for wanting to develop a peacekeeping capacity of its own. Imagine what this country would be like, for example, after a few decades of serious and well-funded peacekeeping. We'd have a growing population of "peace veterans," and they wouldn't be militia-freaks or VFW-style chauvinists or post-traumatic wrecks. They'd be an army of organizers, a cadre of community leaders.