Fog of Peace: Finding the End-State of Hostilities

摘要

The U.S. armed forces have engaged in a number of military operations other than war since the Vietnam War. The latest of these are Kosovo and East Timor. None of these conflicts has conformed to traditional wars. These conflicts are not the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Diplomacy and military action co-exist in the modern theater of war. Another type of involvement is that similar to the intervention in Macedonia-where foreign troops have been inserted to prevent the breakout of fighting. These types of conflicts do not contain the certainties that accompanied World Wars I and II. Here, success and failure are more ambiguous. It may be said that the end-state of hostilities may not have been achieved in any of these places. Macedonia remains at risk given the high level of ethnic tensions. None of these places is peaceful. The author of this monograph provides us with a new way of thinking about peace and how to achieve it. Peace, he argues, arrives only when domestically centered progress is established in a post-conflict environment. The end of hostilities is only the end of the shooting. It is not the end of danger. It is not the end of the animosities or typically the conditions leading to the hostilities. As a result, the end of hostilities represents the beginning of a transition to peace-not peace itself.