After Bosnia, what role for the 'new pessimists'?

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): The people I'm not going to feel sorry for if the Bosnian war winds down are the arm-chair strategists. They have misled us more than once. They mustn't be allowed to do it again.

They had a hard time, briefly as it turned out, when the Cold War suddenly and unexpectedly ended. They thought they held perpetual tenure in the chair of missile heads and choke points.

But suddenly, the art of crises had evaporated and the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, opined that he was "running out of demons".

There were all sorts of attempts to turn up the heat on issues that had lain cooking slowly on the back burner, such as Islamic fundamentalism and the Chinese South Sea adventurism, but public opinion didn't respond the way it used to.

Despite intellectual stimulus in American egg-head magazines -- Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations in Foreign Affairs, Steven David's Why The Third World Still Matters in International Security, and Robert Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy in Atlantic, nothing really put the Cold War worriers back in business. Then Bosnia came along.

You and yours were instant lap-top bombardiers, firing off in every medium. Even half the old anti-Vietnam make-love-not-war crowd, from President Bill Clinton down, decided they couldn't get through middle age without compensating for their youthful dalliance with Gandhian thought; Proving that in nearly every man there is a primeval urge to strut their military stuff.

Yet, if Bosnia is wrapped up before Christmas, what are they going to do? Chechnya and Rwanda have gone off the boil. Saddam Hussein's teeth continue to be pulled. In Palestine, the wolf is lying down with the lamb. North Korea has been cauterized (or is it Carterized?). Central America has returned from briefly being America's backyard, to its more habitual status of backwater. Even Haiti has gone quiet.

Bosnia, if not this year then next year, will probably retreat into the Balkan shadows, becoming as significant a political memory as Cyprus, whose Christian population in 1974 was ethnically cleansed by Turkish Moslems and which is today a long- forgotten "bitter lemon", a divided island policed by long- suffering UN battalions.

With Bosnia behind us, perhaps we can at last begin to lever ourselves out of what Charles Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, calls the "New Pessimism" which, by re-arousing our Cold War militaristic instincts, has kept defense budgets high and political innovation in chains.

We could, if Bosnia does wind down, make a fresh start at looking at the post-Cold War world. The truth is that despite former Yugoslavia, despite Iraq, Rwanda and Somalia, we are living in a less violent age than the so-called frozen Cold War. The Cold War, with its proxy conflicts, was a time of enormous blood-letting, in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Central America and the four corners of Africa. Bosnia today cannot even compare with the smallest of these -- Bosnian casualty rates are half those of Central America or Angola. There are, by far, fewer wars today than there used to be and after Bosnia, I would hazard war will become even more infrequent.

Power today grows less and less out of the barrel of a gun and more and more out of economic, scientific and cultural development. The world, except for part of the mind of China, but a diminishing part, is no longer ideologically driven. And even though religion of the more fundamentalist kind fuels conflicts in countries as diverse as Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and Algeria, it shows no sign of providing fuel for the pursuit of hegemony. Islamic fundamentalism, the most bothersome if over- rated manifestation of religions' passions, is devoid of predatory characteristics. Its aggression is essentially defensive, an attempt to preserve its world from the intrusions of "western modernity".

This, then, is the time to start worrying about war a little less and peace a little more. It is the right time to get military budgets way down and arms sales firmly under wraps. A significant cut in military spending could do wonders for our most pressing ailments -- our health care and educational systems, and our over-high interest rates -- the badly neglected fundamentals in most societies that could, at last, be seriously corrected. Russia could get the helping hand it has long deserved and that its recent economic upturn gives a new call for. Africa could be rescued from its free-fall. The atmosphere of the UN could be transformed.

If the Bosnian Autumnal clouds go over, we may at last get the blue sky the end of the Cold War winter should have given us. This time we shouldn't allow the ideological pessimists to narrow our vision. There are too many important and productive things to do.