Humanising War: The Balkans and Beyond

A notable feature of the propaganda surrounding the war on terrorism has been the tendency of coalition leaders to fall back on what Michael Ignatieff calls the “dominant moral vocabulary” of the 1990s (The New York Times, February 5, 2002): the discourse of humanitarianism and human rights. Washington reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring advertising and public relations consultants to “humanise the war” in Afghanistan (Channel 4 News, November 6, 2001), though the results were bizarre. President George W. Bush invited American children to donate a dollar to the Red Cross while his airforce deliberately bombed the organization’s facilities in Kabul and Kandahar; and Afghan children had trouble distinguishing the aid packages from the cluster bombs, both dropped by US planes. By the time the invasion of Iraq started in March 2003 political leaders seemed to have all but forgotten about searching for WMD, let alone combating international terrorism, instead promising to “liberate” the Iraqi people. It is as if the war on terrorism cannot be justified on its own terms, and has to be invested with some higher “moral” purpose in the form of humanitarianism or upholding human rights.