The Missing Compass
after the Cold War
No event in this Century has produced geopolitical-political
shock waves comparable to those produced with the end of the Cold
War. For the two previous global earthquakes of our Century - the
end of World War I, and World War II - there were traditional
measurements for the size and implications of the earth movements.
There were also political giants in the free world capable both
of analyzing the challenges and grasping the opportunities in the
wake of these quakes. Yet in the wake of the Cold War, when we
needed even more the Pericles-like leadership of a Woodrow Wilson,
and a Marshall and a Kennan and a Truman, we were left instead
with a series of mediocre "Cleons" trying to provide
leadership in the world's most influential countries.
The vacuum in today's political leadership is alarming enough. But it assumes a more perilous dimension when we face up to a comparable vacuum in spiritual leadership. The unprecedented capacities to disseminate the implications and prophetic message associated with of our new world disorder from a Christ-centered perspective, are largely lost in an all too cluttered array of tele-evangelists and self-serving, ersatz prophets. Where are the spiritual leaders today who can provide a Christ-centered world view? Where are the prophets who can articulate a Christ-centered moral and ethical code to help direct our conduct in this new, inverted world?
Might this dilemma recall the revelation given Saul, on becoming the Apostle Paul, to bypass human spiritual leadership in the New Testament Church and go directly to the Source? Paul was led into the desert to commune directly with the Person he met on the road to Damascus. What better way for Paul to gain insights into how his life and mission would need to change in the wake of a world so recently turned upside down by the earthly incarnation of the Son of God!
Our post-Cold War earth shift in no way parallels the changes the Apostle Paul faced - the physical, historical, and spiritual earth shift accompanying the earthly visitation of God through Jesus Christ. But Paul's response may offer guidance for us today - when human spiritual leadership seems to be absent, or seems to sound so many uncertain trumpets. God may be compensating for today's spiritual leadership vacuum by calling believers to a renewed direct reliance on the Word of God in the Bible, and direct communion with him through Jesus Christ. What better way to discover how we should live in today's wobbly, uncharted, and dangerous world!
The Secular Challenges
Before considering certain changeless spiritual principles for
Christ-centered conduct in our disordered post-Cold War world,
let us consider the secular magnitude and character of some of
our current geopolitical earth movements. These earth shifts
should no longer be uncertain mysteries in either the secular or
spiritual worlds. Yet for the secular transformations,
traditional geopolitical thinkers continue to express surprise,
denial, and resistance to shifting their own strategic concepts
to fit the new political realities. What seems most to challenge
secular analytical thinking, and understanding concerning
practical implications, are the traditional strategic lodestars
of:
Balance of Power - Global, and regional, power balances have now shifted to balances and imbalances in increasingly small places. With the removal of the constraints of the superpower global balance, man's ugliest and darkest instincts have been unleashed in some of the world's smaller and tougher neighborhoods. Restoration of balance, stability - and even humanity - in these small, "insignificant" places will be slow in coming. It may not come at all until larger, responsible states are eventually shamed into discharging their responsibilities to deal with these barbaric manifestations of man's basic sinful nature.
Deterrence - Once symmetrical superpower deterrence (that is, of all but certain superpower-sponsored client conflicts) now gives place to uncertain, asymmetrical - and usually unsuccessful - attempts to deter and pre-empt human rights abuses, small wars and civil strife. Because conventional wisdom considers many of today's conflicts as strategically insignificant, it becomes convenient to write off these conflicts as sub-clinical in the geo-political sense. Deterrence and/or preemption, if tried at all in these places, tend to mirror this anemic perception of the threat.
National Sovereignty - Throughout most of this century, national sovereignty has remained a near inviolate standard for inter-state relations. Now with the increased publicity to the inhumanities horrible leaders are capable of visiting on persons under their control - ethnic cleansing, genocide, use of food as a weapon - serious, civilized states have selectively imposed embargoes, no-fly zones, de facto occupations and other limits to sovereignty in a few of the world's ugliest neighborhoods.
For the future, however, limits to sovereignty may well be constrained by what appear to be increasing national limits to fortitude, justice, and even to morality itself. Two major reasons seem to stand out. First, few, if any, states have demonstrated the determination or the competence to design embargoes and other limitations that punish oppressive leadership without inflicting even more punishment on the innocent victims of the oppression. Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and Cedras' Haiti are prime examples. The other reason is the self-blackmail of far too many leaders, whose own internal human rights lapses make it imprudent to criticize, or act upon human rights violations - however horrific - on the part of others. One of the most disillusioning features of public service for a moral, ethical person has to be the compromises leaders make in the light of their own guilt.
Situational Awareness - Concerning
New Enemies, New Friends, and New Interests
New Enemies, New Threats - The free
world no longer has a readily identifiable "evil empire"
as its principal enemy and threat. Today's enemies, and the
threats they propagate, are more shadowy, elusive - and evil -
than any evil empire of the Cold War. These enemies are today's
warlords, crimelords, and megomaniacal faction leaders. With
their evil leadership and power-hungry, corrupt governance, these
enemies personify the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In their
wake is horrific human suffering and displacement, unspeakable
violations of human rights, civil strife, epidemics, hunger,
starvation and death.
We err morally and ethically today when we trivialize these "soft" humanitarian threats because they do not rise to the level of vital national security, political, or economic interest. In fact, these threats create enormous moral issues when they savage the humanity, human rights, and very existence of innocent victims under their control.
I was appalled at a recent peace support operations conference where prominent European civilian and military leaders asserted that is was inappropriate to label anyone an enemy now that the Cold War was over. I had to counter with the question: "Why has it taken the civilized world so long to label Milosovic the enemy in Serbia; Tudjman the enemy in Croatia; and Karadzic, along with representatives from all factions, the enemies in Bosnia?" Their only answer: "As a practical matter, it was important to maintain the fiction of respectability for some of these persons as long as they might be useful for a political solution."
Such specious reasoning kept in place far too long the fig leaf of respectability for leaders in the former Yugoslavia; similar reasoning seems to keep respectability in place today for leaders responsible for much of the instability in Rwanda from 1990 on, and for those responsible for Russian barbarism in Chechnya today. Reconciliation, restoration, and return to civil society generally remain on hold until the perpetrators of crimes against humanity are labeled and held accountable.
There is another serious problem associated with the reluctance to identify enemies. If international peace support operations carry neutrality to it limits, who is there to take the side of the innocent victims that these peace support operations are all about? We saw the result of this kind of airy-fairy, "no enemies" attitude when victims needed the protection of the so-called United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) in the early days of the Bosnian tragedy. The UN civilian in charge, and even military commanders in some cases, repeatedly delayed or blocked the use of military force needed to take the side of these innocent victims - against the enemies of humanity that were ethnically cleansing them. This absolutely immoral and indefensible practice marks one of the saddest chapters in both United Nations leadership, and in the leadership of key United Nations member states.
To be sure, impartiality of the peacekeeping force is essential. Since there are rarely any "good guys" among the warlords and faction leaders, it is wrong for the international effort to be selective in assessing guilt among these sorry packs (as in the pursuit of Aideed in Somalia). Impartiality is an important virtue on the modern humanitarian battlefield. But neutrality of an international intervention force can be an absolute abomination! The civilian and military components of the international effort must generally see themselves as partisan with the innocent victims of today's humanitarian tragedies. For example, when it is necessary for a peace support force to shoot its way through a faction checkpoint to get relief supplies to suffering victims, such action should always be presented as allowing nothing to get in the way of the primary purpose for being there. Such action should not be characterized as selectively taking sides against the faction manning the checkpoint.
New Friends to Deal with these Enemies - During the Cold War, the key component of the free world's security arsenal was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO remains an important military player. But the composition of the total friendly "order of battle" is far more diverse and complex today. To begin, the main burden in countering today's humanitarian/human rights threats is borne by civilian, rather than military, agencies. Because today's threats savage and displace so many people, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is normally designated the lead international agency on the friendly force side. UNHCR has the internationally agreed mandate to provide legal protection, emergency assistance, and durable solutions for the diaspora of refugees. For practical reasons, UNHCR has increasingly taken on the relief requirements of internally displaced persons, as well. (Their needs, after all, tend to be the same as those of refugees. And it is both economically and morally preferable to preclude their costly flight and fate as refugees by assisting emergency victims in their own country.)
This humanitarian, human rights main effort is supported by the other three operational agencies of the UN system. These are the: UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR); United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF); and the World Food Program (WFP); For the complex humanitarian emergencies in Bosnia and Kosovo, the civilian main effort expands to include other agencies such as: the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia (OHR); Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); UN Special Prosecutor, and International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY); UN International Police Task Force (IPTF); International Organization for Migration (IOM); Multinational Specialization Unit (Carabinieri - MSU); the World Bank (IBRD); and the European Community Monitoring Mission (ECMM). At the actual relief implementation levels, there are literally hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in loose affiliation with a few of the legally mandated international organizations (IOs) mentioned above.
The military component of this new Total Force on the friendly side no longer constitutes the main effort. This military role reversal has important implications in international response in today's complex humanitarian emergencies. For example, until the Cold War ended, military forces could legitimately attempt to keep refugees and displaced persons out of the way of their tanks and military movements. By contrast, much of the new military role is to keep military movements out of the way, and in support, of civilian humanitarian and human rights assistance to refugees, displaced persons, and other innocent victims of today's complex humanitarian emergencies.
These new military commissions are also accompanied by very important omissions. These omissions include avoiding taking on hands-on humanitarian relief tasks that the appropriate civilian agencies usually perform far more efficiently. And civilian agencies do these tasks at about one tenth the cost that would be incurred by a military unit. This means that that the military role in the new Total Civil-Military Force is to do what only military forces can do in the time required to minimize human suffering and casualties.
The new military role also requires commanders to accept most of the same risks that civilian agencies are prepared to take to get the humanitarian job done. Providing close-in protection, along with overall security can be dangerous work. While prudent force protection must continue as a commanders responsibility, it must not become his or her mission. No longer should civilians fill the bulk of today's body bags on the modern humanitarian battlefield. For U.S. forces in particular, it is disturbing to note the fixation on iron-clad force protection and zero casualties. This fixation, if continued, will doubtless pose the major obstacle to overall mission accomplishment, and eventual military exodus, in such places as Bosnia and Kosovo.
New National Interests - Until the end of the Cold War, there was little ambiguity about what it took for political leaders to place their nation's troops in harm's way. It was, in the first instance, for reasons of vital national security. It might also extend to vital political and economic interests - reasons cited for engaging Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War.
Yet for conflicts that place U.S. troops in harm's way today, it is a stretch to find even a derivative security, political, or economic interest. In each U.S. troop deployment to a post-Cold War complex humanitarian emergency, with the exception of the special Haitian case, the national interest has been to stop acute human suffering and horrific violations of human rights.
Regrettably, U.S. and some other western political and military leaders tend to delay military deployment until the humanitarian and human rights situations have reached apocalyptic proportions. It sadly becomes a question of how many genocide victims are required, how many innocent victims must be ethnically cleansed, before political leaders are shamed into taking military action. By this time, in places such as Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo, the casualty list becomes so high that military force becomes little more than a wasted, wasting asset, pathetically mired in these humanitarian battlefields for indefinite durations.
And the ultimate abomination in these political leadership failures is the attempt to atone for delay or inaction with apologies after the fact - as was the case for genocide in Rwanda. The world's cluster of civilized states must come to accept the principle that with respect to engagement in complex humanitarian emergencies, being truly presidential, or prime ministerial, means never having to say you are sorry.
New interests, that have become tantamount to "vital" for the U. S. and much of the peace-loving world, have evolved into the interests of humanity and human rights. Jaded geo-politician will continue to deny that such "soft" concerns merit the status of "vital". Over the objections of such cynics, these interests have approached the status of "vital" principally because they are vital to the preservation of our own national humanitarian and civilized character.
For Christian believers, it also a recognition of our personal condition as creatures of God, with the spiritual distinction of a God-created soul. For such followers of Christ, whose spiritual strength can overcome cynicism, and leap beyond humanism, these interests must occupy a very special place in their relationship with Christ, and in their service to his Kingdom.
How Should We Then Live?
This part becomes very personal. It should not be construed as a
single-handed attempt on my part to make up for the lack of
either political or spiritual giants in the post-Cold War world.
Rather it draws on a personal journey that has depended, probably
not enough, on communion with the few political and spiritual
role models that do exist. And while it has never approached the
direct learning experience of an Apostle Paul, it has included
"desert" interludes where I learned what it meant to
live by faith and not by sight. Interludes where Christ was,
indeed, the only intermediary with God. What follows are some of
the principles identified - often grudgingly, usually painfully,
and generally inadequately - that have brought some light to my
own personal path.
In looking backwards on this path, these lessons stand out: God always provided more grace than light. And he always provided both grace and light far in excess of my capacity to comprehend, utilize, or certainly to deserve. From the flawed product that has emerged, here are sketches of some of the principles that have helped. They are presented in the hope that they might also be useful to other civilian and military leaders trying to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God in these trying times.
Speaking the Truth, in Love - We will all eventually face the tension between preserving truth, and preserving relationships - or even our careers. It is the tension the prophet Nathan faced when he confronted King David with his sin. Nathan chose truth, and survived the consequences. Other Old Testament prophets did not.
An analysis of the effectiveness of the German General Staff attributed much of its vaunted productivity to truthfulness. Whatever its members might have told those outside their elite circle, they were committed not to lie to each other. Truth reigned above everything - above relationships, career, promotion, security, and social acceptance.
Truth sometimes requires a brutal out-spokenness. Truth in love can also require an uncompromising prophetic role. For the military person, it means knowing and practicing the truth of what is worth resigning for, as well as worth dying for. It bothers me, as a former military person, that no military officers saw fit to resign over the inept, and arguably immoral, U.S. and European policies that prevailed from the outset of the current tragedies in the Balkans. As a former State Department employee, I am proud that three American foreign service officers (while receiving patronizing treatment from the top level of the State Department), and one civil servant, did resign. But I must ask the question, "Was there a moratorium on ethics in the military, even among so-called moral military leaders, during this period?"
Speaking the truth in love has special meaning for senior civilian and military relationships that some of us establish through various official and personal networks. A particular example are relationships formed through the worldwide prayer breakfast movement. In the latter case, one often faces the test between practicing truth and preserving relationships and unity.
Prayer breakfast friendships are forged, for example, with sometimes unsavory political and military leaders who could benefit from a frank exchange of the truth in love concerning their behavior. Failure to play the prophetic role in such contacts is usually explained by the importance of maintaining a friendly relationship with the sinner (increasing with the seniority of the sinner), as long as one detests the sin. It is heady stuff, for example, to be drawn into the personal circle of a head of state, or chief of armed forces. And what is wrong with befriending even an egregious human rights violator, as long as you tell him or her that you may not agree with all they do, but that the bond of friendship will continue no matter what? Many well-meaning believers in these prayer breakfast circle proudly denounce any agenda - except eternal friendship - in such relationships, thus excluding any prophetic unpleasantries. Yet in the absence of speaking the truth in love, they may unwittingly help perpetrate even murderous behavior on the part of a manipulative head of state or armed forces commander. And in the process, these well-meaning prayer breakfast types may grievously let down national believers suffering under oppressive leadership of the persons these naïve believers are paling around with. This hurts even more when these persecuted national believers have unsuccessfully begged outside believers involved in this unholy communion to use the access of the prayer breakfast relationship to speak the truth in love to their oppressors
Allowing relationships to triumph over truth would seem to deny Jesus' practice of bringing an agenda to every encounter, every relationship, every situation. Nowhere did Jesus exempt his followers from a similar practice. Otherwise, Stephen might never have been stoned; Peter might never have bee crucified; and the Apostle Paul might have had an easier time with Festus, and Agrippa, and with the authorities in Rome that eventually killed him.
Nice sentiments, you say, but have you ever personally put a relationship with a head of state to such a test? I have, in fact, after a long series of diplomatic negotiations with a prominent African head of state. The official relationship had reached the point of friendship. I felt it was ready for the test of bringing up some questionable practices on his part that were threatening peace and stability in the Great Lakes Region of Africa - even if it should result in my banishment from Statehouse. My mortified European traveling companion was figuratively sliding under the conference table as I read from the Scriptures about going the "second mile" in a particular situation. The president listened, confessed that he was a believer, although back-slidden, and agreed to, and subsequently implemented, the specific steps suggested for going the second mile.
This example is cited - not to contrast unfavorably the practices of other believers' encounters with offending senior leaders. Rather it is to demonstrate that if such a friendship is real, it can deal with the truth of an unpleasant agenda; it also suggest that if the friendship cannot be nurtured to the point of openness and frankness about serious problems, then the relationship is probably not worth having.
Accountability - A central component of ethical leadership is accountability. Following the Mylai massacre of women and children in Vietnam, every commander had drilled into him his accountability for everything his subordinates did - no matter how far away the commander might be from the offending incident. As an aviation battalion commander, I knew that I would be fired if anyone, anywhere in my command made a mistake in applying the rules of engagement.
This accountability was the most difficult requirement to practice of all my duties as commander of a combat helicopter battalion in Vietnam. On one occasion two of my pilots, obeying the rules, gave a person in black pajamas the benefit of the doubt in a free-fire zone. They started circling him in the mandatory requirement to detect a weapon before shooting. Suddenly a Kalashnikov materialized from his black pajamas, and one of the pilots was dead. It wasn't just troops that questi oned the rules after that. I agonized over my own accountabilities. Was I more accountable to preventing loss of innocent life than to protecting my troops?
A few weeks later my troops taught me the lesson that they were professional enough to enable their commander to be accountable for both force protection and loss of innocent life.
I was commanding the helicopter gunships in a prisoner rescue operation in Cambodia in 1971. It was a complicated tri-partite operation - U.S.helicopter gunships, Vietnamese ground forces, and Cambodian liaison officers, with a Vietnamese colonel as the overall force commander. At first light my gunships swooped over the target village as the combined force started their sweep of the area. In the confusion, a khaki-clad man on a bicycle started pedaling furiously away from the village. The lead gunship pilot called me to say he could not see a weapon. I consulted with the busy Vietnamese commander in the back seat of my helicopter who quickly ordered, "Shoot him!" I wasn't so sure, so I asked the pilot if could draw a line of machine gun fire in front of the bicycle, then use following fire to herd the man back to the village where the combined force could search him. That was all the challenge this dead-eye gunship pilot needed. Surgically, he shot close enough to stop the man, then kept advancing the fire line as the man pushed his bicycle back into the village. There the cyclist was searched, found unarmed and innocent, and his life was spared. I had disobeyed an order, but my troops had proved they were good enough to back me up and show how both of us could live with such unpopular and risky rules of engagement.
The accountability solutions never seem to be simple, however, for the military leader. He may be convicted about what is right for him, but why does the accountability "buck" too often stop with him at battalion, or division, level and rarely reaches the theatre commander when a mistake is made at the end of the line? And why is ethical behavior and absolute accountability the norm for a military person, while moral lapses and non-accountability are too often the norm for their civilian political masters? And most difficult of all, why is it the norm for a military person to be relieved over a serious mistake on his watch, while his civilian masters seem to be able to keep their jobs - even to trivialize their accountability with cheap, sanctimonious apologies when caught in their own sins of omission and commission?
I don't have the answer. I just know that Christ's followers have an edge in accessing the strength to discharge their responsibilities and accountabilities. And they can be given the wisdom to accept that a flippant apology is not a safety net available to them to make it all right when they fail the accountability test.
Sacrifice - Even though the Cold War is over, there are still things worth dying for. As previously noted, today's sacrifices, today's body bags on humanitarian battlefields from Africa to Central Asia to the Balkans, are mostly civilian. When a senior military person in the Pentagon was confronted with a military intervention option for Liberia's civil war, he responded: "That's too dangerous for the military. Civilians have to do those jobs."
As noted at the outset, there is a pre-disposition in the U.S. military, perhaps more than in others, to avoid casualties at all costs. Too often force protection has gone beyond a commander's responsibility and becomes his or her mission. This practice leaps out of a sterile, academic debate when it interferes with reaching the desired end-state of the overall civil-military mission. Blind application of force protection should concern both political and military leaders when this practice prolongs indefinitely the desired military exodus from humanitarian battlefields such as Bosnia and Kosovo. A division commander preparing to deploy to Bosnia expressed his pre-occupation of "bringing all my troops back alive". This is certainly his responsibility, but when it becomes his overriding pre-occupation it would appear to pose an ethical problem. Avoiding the risks essential to mission accomplishment will not affect the length of time this particular division remains in Bosnia. They are out of there in six months or a year no matter what - so they try to make their tenure as safe and painless as possible. But what does their retreat into a zero casualty comfort zone do to helping civilian agencies accomplish the dangerous tasks that could eventually stop the cycle of continuous military rotations into Bosnia?
One quick example. In the summer of 1998, individual German states were bussing refugees back to Bosnia and dumping them on the doorstep of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Representative in Tuzla. To avoid putting these unwilling returnees in tents at the airfield (recalling the haunting image of Srebrenica's pathetic survivors who were collected there in 1995), the UNHCR Representative asked for protection from the Commander, Multinational Division-North to house them temporarily in the Zone of Separation (ZOS) between the entities. The MND-North commander refused the request, stating that he did not feel conditions were yet appropriate for refugee/displaced person return.
This response seemed both mindless and unethical in light of the fact that:
From 1998-on, refugee/displaced person return has been the centerpiece of the international civil-military presence in Bosnia. That's the overriding civilian mission that military commanders are there to support.
The refugees that needed shelter and MND-North protection were already back, thanks to the unethical behavior of German states that unceremoniously dumped them on the UNHCR doorstep.
Refusal of an appropriate military role, essential to accomplish the overall civilian mission of refugee return and restoration of civil society, while not extending the tenure of that particular MND-North rotation, certainly decreed the extension of the time that military forces per se will need to remain in Bosnia.
Do you have trouble seeing the ethical issues here? Maybe they become clearer when one realizes that a major reason for refusals of military missions in Bosnia - from the beginning of the Implementation Force (IFOR) in December 1995 - have been the fear of casualties. Political leaders fear casualties because of what they might do to their standing in domestic polls and their election chances. Military leaders fear casualties - not because they are no longer physically courageous, but because they infer prohibitions on casualties from their civilian masters. Rightly or wrongly, many U.S. military officers fear how their military superiors, acting on these inferences of political constraint, might use the taking of casualties to truncate their careers. It is these fears that seem to shed light on the ethical question - a question that must first be dealt with by civilian leaders who set the climate and give the orders, and then by the military commanders who execute them. An ethical solution to this dilemma probably requires some concentrated civil-military "huddling" at senior policy-making levels, together with a thorough ethical debate within the armed forces themselves.
Discernment -The discussion so far would seem to lead to the conclusion that ethical behavior in today's new world disorder profits from a rigorous "war-gaming" of the consequences of what we do - and fail to do - in both the civilian and military arenas. This kind of rigor might help political leaders identify ethical and humanitarian impacts of actions normally taken only in response to last week's polls. It might help military leaders conditioned to "stay in their lanes" to at least start to think outside their lanes, and be more aware of how their presence and actions affect the operations they support in the civilian lanes next door.
Because war-gaming of impacts and consequences is far from second nature to civilian leaders, part of the needed out-of-lane military thinking should concentrate on fostering this practice with their political masters. The need for evaluating impacts and consequences before the fact takes on special significance as we see humanitarian/human rights interests evolving into vital national interests for several responsible states.
The ethical, moral test for decisions taken or not taken would require attempts to measure humanitarian/human rights impacts of both action and inaction for each defining issue that a key nation confronts. What constitutes a "defining issue"? Here are some suggestions:
Standing by while Germany recognized Croatia in the early Nineties. What was obvious to serious observers at the time was that while Yugoslavia would eventually dismember into separate entities, an explosive dismemberment had to be avoided at all costs. Clearly ethnic cleansing, even before the term had been invented, would be a consequence of a catastrophic break-up in such a rough neighborhood. What was also obvious was the potential that such summary, reckless recognition might encourage, and appear to legitimize, violent secessions elsewhere - notably in the former Soviet Union, and especially in Chechnya.
U.S. and German encouragement to Croatia in mid-1995 to undertake and finish the invasion of the Kraina - despite the specter of the consequent displacement of over 200,000 innocent people, with no advance provisions for their relief and safety.
Reluctance to call it genocide, together with four months of U.S. hand- wringing and delay over delivering armored personnel carriers for the United Nations peacekeepers in Rwanda in 1994. This reluctance and delay marked the period during which most of the approximately one million innocent persons were slaughtered.
NATO targeting and destruction of bridge after bridge on the Danube in the spring of 1999, despite questions about the military importance of these bridges - and the inevitable high cost to European and American taxpayers to re-build these bridges and restore normal commerce along the length of the river.
I believe these and others like them are "defining" ethical and moral issues because they mark the times when the U.S. and other so-called civilized countries failed the test of defining their own humanity and civilization. Destruction of the Danube bridges illustrated the perils of ad hoc military action, absent a controlling civilian comprehensive campaign plan - together with the inevitable consequences of taking military decisions in a political vacuum.
We seem to legislate impact statements in Europe and the U.S. in most important areas, including gender, environment, and small businesses. Why are there no requirements for humanitarian impact assessments for key political decisions taken, or not taken? Why has it become more politically correct to be a "tree-hugger" than to be a "people-hugger"? Why has re-cycling aluminum cans become more important than saving human life and property put at risk by careless political and military action?
Conclusion
I believe that time has run out on our protests of surprise and
innocence concerning what the post-Cold War world is really like,
and how followers of Christ should conduct themselves in it. The
person who knows God and understands the nature of man can see
that our new world is full of perils, but holds few surprises.
I suggest that the Christian world view post-Cold War is that of a highly predictable world. The unfolding of twenty-seven complex humanitarian emergencies today (compared to an average of three during much of the Cold War) certainly should have taught us the haunting predictability of root causes and scenario sequence of these emergencies. But lessons from today's human tragedies at best are only identified lessons. They are almost never lessons-learned. Otherwise, why did the serious, civilized world permit Bosnia to clone itself in Kosovo; or Africa's Great Lakes Region to continue practicing sub-clinical genocide between bouts of real genocide; or Russia's repeating itself in Chechnya; or Abkhazia being cloned in South Ossetia and in Daghestan; and other horrors already being spawned in the wings?
How we live in this perilous and predictable world depends upon our personal value system. The great educator, John Gardner, gave a brilliant lecture on values at Harvard and the first student question was, "What is the foundation for your own value system?" Gardner hung his head, and after a long pause answered, " I do not know".
Followers of Christ have access to a knowable, changeless value system. This value system assists in making our changed world knowable. How we should then live, can also be knowable in the light of these Christ-centered values. Building on this value system, the practices of Truth; Accountability; Sacrifice; and Discernment can, with God's help, make how we should then live doable, as well.
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