Unlike other radically new developments in means of transportantion, communication, and information, this virtual revolution [in military and diplomatic affairs] is driven more by software than by hardware, and enabled by networks rather than agents, which means adaptation (and mutation) is not only easier, but much more rapid... the international system has entered a state of economic, cultural, and political flux. And when order and predictability decline, leaders reach for the technological fix. (xiv)On its own, virtualization does not embody a revolution in diplomatic or military, let alone human, affairs. However, deployed with the new ethical and economic imperatives for global democratic reform and neoliberal markets, it could well be. In spite and perhaps because of efforts to spread a democratic peace through globalization and humanitarian intervention, war is ascending to an even "higher" plane, from the vitual to the virtuous... (xiv-xv)
The United States, as unilateral deus ex machina of global politics, is leading the way in this virtual revolution. Its diplomatic and military policies are increasingly based on technological and representational forms of discipline, deterrence, and compulsion that could best be described as "virtous war." At the heart of virtuous war is the technical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary, actualize violence from a distance --with no or minimal casualties... (xv)
Unlike other forms of warfare, virtuous war has an unsurpassed power to commute death, to keep it out of sight, out of mind. Herein lies its most morally dubious danger. In simulated preparations and virtual executions of war, there is a high risk that one learns how to kill but not to take responsibility for it. One experiences "death" but not the tragic consequences of it. In virtuous war we now face not just the confusion but the pixilation of war and game on the same screen. (xvi)
Right about the time rogue states disappeared, individual global villains started to show up. The State Department website, taking a cue from the FBI, began to sport wanted posters for a "Rewards for Justice" program that offered $5 million for information "leading to the transfer to, or convicyion by, the International Cmiminal Tribunal of Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, and Ratko Mladic." Perhaps this is a new characteristic of virtuous warfare: that as states dematerialize and deconstruct, as national entities become more fluid, as simulations and scenarios reach for a credible threat, the public image of the foreign enemy is (only) reducible to a wanted poster. This is the conundrum of virtuous war: the more virtuous the intention, the more we must virtualize the enemy, until all that is left as the last man is the criminalized demon.
(100-101)Virtuous war --indefinable, oxymoronic, and paradoxical, with good intentions and unintended consequences-- might capture but cannot resolve the greatest challenge ahead: how to live in close proximity and high vulnerability with others? By virtuous war, from on high, we might attempt to technically fix and ethically justify our differences with others. However, as in the case of past global violence, especially those that target the vampire heart of the sovereign state, we can be sure these efforts wil come back to haunt us... (203)