Introduction

IN his introductory remarks to the conference at which the papers in this volume were presented, Kenneth Prewitt, then the dean of the Graduate Faculty at the New School University, called human sacrifice a remote historical subject. I would like to begin by disagreeing with that point. Human sacrifice is once again being practiced, certainly among the Palestinians, but also by other Muslims. The idea of just war in modern times is both a norm and a restraint. But this is the case largely—one might indeed say only— for the established military of established states, and more or less Western polities. Of course, not all of these militaries, states, or polities abide by its terms, or puzzle over its nuances. But, as I think our speakers will show, the limits that just war puts on practice is in effect also a limit on goals and purposes. After all, the idea of just war began as a limit on goals and purposes. In any case, this is another instance of the permanent encounter of means and ends—a demanding, often searing encounter. It is now a long time, maybe 60 years, since any realistic belligerent , or sane one, has declared its aim to be the unconditional surrender of its adversary—although sometimes one feels that unconditional surrender might be better and more humane than the ongoing bloodletting that characterizes so many ethnic wars in the modern world. And this is the case even though total victory increasingly seems to be the purpose of the chiliasts against whom the just-war-conscious militaries increasingly find themselves fighting. Indeed, codes of honor in war, which are codes of justice too, even when respected mostly in the breach, are now one-sided affairs. The United States, Great Britain—dare I say Israel? Yes, I dare say Israel—not only puzzle about the justice of SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Winter 2002) Introduction BY MARTIN PERETZ their cause, but how their tactics affect it. More than that, they take losses to ensure this justice, often because their societies will not tolerate anything else. But there is a bitter irony in this. Their present enemies, our present enemies, care not at all about what is thought by others to be just or unjust. They are not in that tradition . Indeed, I would not be surprised if their view of us— dithering here and especially in the military academies over the justice of military acts and political aims—is that ours is the dithering of useful idiots. The papers that follow are written by Michael Walzer and Richard Holbrooke. Michael Walzer has been formulating intricate and soaring philosophical norms for concrete political issues for more than four decades. From his first book (actually his doctoral dissertation), Revolution of the Saints, through Just and Unjust War and Exodus and Revolution to various other volumes on the dimensions and ambiguities of citizenship, especially in plural societies, and as political theorist, historian, moralist, journalist, and polemicist, he has truly wrestled with what has made our time so problematic, bitter, and at least in Michael’s vision, sometimes also hopeful. Richard Holbrooke is a man in the grand tradition of the Anglo-American thinker-diplomats—a tradition begun on this soil with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Although other descendents have been few in recent years, Holbrooke, as actor and commentator, practitioner and historian, promises the tradition’s resilience. Holbrooke’s experience with the deployment of two kinds of power, in war and in the search for humanitarian rescue and peace—that is, national power and the emerging and the ever more necessary and also problematic, if not slightly cynical phenomenon of international or multilateral power—is singular. He both struggles as a policymaker and reflects as a thinker. But we can assert, without any doubt, that many thousands of people are still alive because of the work of Richard Holbrooke. 914 SOCIAL RESEARCH ...