A coalition of the willing

As I write this column from my brother’s house outside Philadelphia, Sunday the 23rd, the second Gulf War is already well underway. The coalition troops of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" are muscling their way deep into Iraq, while US warplanes periodically soften up the population of Baghdad and other key cities with bombing sorties designed to "shock and awe" them into submission.

These planes carry awesomely powerful ordinance, including the 20-ton "mother of all bombs" designed to flatten even the hardest-reinforced underground bunkers. And yet power, water, and other utility services apparently continue to function even amid all of the infernal explosions. Civilians are being spared, to an extraordinary degree, the type of "collateral damage" that has attended all previous wars in history, as the United States uses all its technological prowess to take out only military objectives targeted for destruction.

This will be the first important lesson coming out of this war – how technologies based on computer IC chips now make it truly possible to kill only the enemy and spare their families. It is thus misleading for critics of this war to argue from the experiences of Vietnam 30 years ago, or even the first Gulf War a decade ago, as if military technologies had not progressed by leaps and bounds in the intervening period.

Can it be possible to wage a war that is not only just, but humane? For the first time, technology makes that possibility real.

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Even before the "shock and awe" bombing phase started, the US opened the war by air-dropping literally millions of leaflets behind enemy lines, urging Iraqi troops to surrender and civilians to cooperate in bringing down Saddam Hussein’s regime, in order to minimize armed confrontation.

In fact, the casualties have been surprisingly light, certainly on the coalition side where, so far, more soldiers have been killed in self-inflicted accidents than at the hands of the enemy. This will worsen, of course, especially as the coalition troops begin to run up against the elite Republican guard units entrenched around Baghdad. But not, it seems likely, by the orders of magnitude seen in previous wars.

The guarantor of this unprecedented restraint has been the pervasive presence of the media at all levels of this conflict. From grunt reporters "embedded" within military units to senior TV correspondents hooked up by satellite phone from the heart of Baghdad, the phenomenon of 24-hour news coverage is forcing everyone – even Saddam – to try to behave in a civilized way.

This is the second important lesson from this war – how the media has made world opinion just as important to war planners as military objectives. Now it’s no longer enough just to spare the enemy’s families. To be truly successful, the coalition must be able to spare both military and civilian populations, by destroying only physical facilities and "shocking and aweing" human beings into surrender.

Can it be possible to wage a war that is not only just and humane, but also relatively bloodless? The media is certainly forcing at least the coalition forces to try.

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Armed not only with the latest military technology but also a lot of media savvy, the United States all by itself has forced the rest of the world to take sides, one way or the other, as it has successively ratcheted up its confrontation with Saddam, up to and including the waging of war.

It is interesting to watch how other nations’ behaviors changed from before to after the actual start of hostilities. The emblematic example was France. When it saw that President Bush was dead serious about his 48-hour deadline, it abruptly switched from active opposition to a willingness to support the coalition "if Saddam uses chemical or biological weapons."

How noble, and how generous, of the French indeed.

But by no means are they alone in their mistrust and resentment of American leadership. These are attitudes that can be found in pretty much the rest of the globe, to varying degrees, cutting across all manner of ethnic, religious, or economic boundaries. The protesters may wear American jeans and eat American fast food and watch American movies, but they are bound together as much by their antipathy to American policies as by their shared affinity for American lifestyle and culture.

What in fact they are shouting is, "We don’t want to be led, whether by America or by anybody else." Which brings us to the third lesson from this war – how leadership can truly be a lonely burden.

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The need for leaders and leadership is something one would think self-evident, learned as early as in the playground, when the rest of the kids have to rely on one among them to organize the rules of the game and keep everyone more or less in line.

Businesses know the buck has to stop with someone at the top; there is no such thing as leadership by committee. Even the most freewheeling of democracies ultimately delegate executive responsibility to one person alone. Especially on weighty matters like the waging of war, there is room only for one commander in chief.

These simple facts of life, however, are invariably challenged when it comes to the affairs of nations – as if nationalism somehow operates to change the rules of human behavior in some fundamental, mysterious way. But of course, the real world does operate under those same facts of life, writ large.

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In a world driven by hundreds of national boundaries, there can be no building of a global community across those boundaries without one country’s leadership. In an era marked by the replacement of a prolonged superpower showdown with a multitude of inter-tribal conflicts, there can only be one keeper of the peace. The unconditional surrender of the Soviet camp factually shows what determined peace-keeping can achieve.

At a time when global consensus is achieved only rarely, let alone spontaneously, the platinum standard of reference must come from one set of values that can claim to be shared by the widest possible number of human beings. It is these shared values upon which can be built the true, new "coalition of the willing."

Individual freedom, equality before the law, political democracy, market economics, inclusiveness, tolerance for differences – these are the values not only of Americans, not only of the waves of immigrants who make up America, but increasingly as well, today, of the hundreds of homelands that over the centuries have sent their immigrants to America’s shores.

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Of course the world’s leader need not be the United States. Lord knows that we haven’t gone wanting for candidates.

And yet if you polled one million men on the street across the world and asked them – between the US and (name another country), which one would you trust with the technology to wage a humane war, the sensitivity to world opinion to try for a bloodless war, and the values to initiate only a war it can prove to be just – what would be the likely response?

To paraphrase a popular quotation about democracy: Americans are really the worst people to lead the world – except for everyone else.

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Readers can write Mr. Olivar at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.