him, friends and enemies have concluded that the poor man was only doing his job, because he could hardly have said otherwise. This is right. The pope (from his own standpoint about the truth) exercised his intellectual function and said that we must not make war. The pope is obliged to say that, if we wish to follow the Gospels to the letter, we must turn the other cheek. But what am I to do if someone wants to kill me? «That’s your lookout,» the pope ought to say, «your problem»—and casuistry on self-defense would then come into play only with a view to making up for human frailties, which no one ought to feel obliged to provide a heroic defense of. The position is so impeccable that if (and when) the pope adds something else that can be understood as a practical suggestion, he abandons his own intellectual function and makes political decisions (and that’s his problem).

If this is the case, it needs to be said that for the last forty-five years the intellectual community has not been silent on the problem of war. It has talked about it, and with such missionary commitment that the world’s view of war has been radically modified. Never as on this occasion have people felt all the horror and ambiguity of what was happening. Apart from a few lunatics, no one had ideas in black and white. The fact that the war broke out all the same is a sign that the intellectuals’ discourse has not been an unqualified success. It has not been sufficient, and has not been granted sufficient attention historically. But this is an accident. The modern world looks at war through eyes different from those with which it looked at the problem early in the twentieth century, and if someone were to talk today of the beauty of war as the only form of world hygiene, he would go down not in the annals of literature but in those of psychiatry. What has happened to war is what has happened to crimes of passion or the lex talionis: people still do these things, but the community now considers them to be evil, whereas it once judged them to be a good thing.

But these would still be moral and emotional reactions (and at times ethics itself can accept exceptions to the prohibition on killing, just as the collective sensibility can accept horrors and sacrifices that guarantee a greater good). There is a more radical way of thinking about war: in merely formal terms, in terms of internal consistency, by reflecting on its conditions of possibility—the conclusion being that you cannot make war because the existence of a society based on instant information, rapid transport, and continuous intercontinental migration, allied to the nature of the new technologies of war, has made war impossible and irrational. War is in contradiction with the very reasons for which it is waged.

Over the centuries, what has been the purpose of warfare? War was waged to defeat an adversary, in order to benefit from his defeat, and in such a way that our intentions—to act in a certain manner, to attain a certain result—were tactically or strategically conceived with a view to making our adversary’s intentions impracticable. To these ends it was necessary to field all the forces at our disposal. At the end of the day, the game was played out between us and our adversary. The neutrality of the others, the fact that our war did not bother them (and that to a certain extent it allowed them to profit from it), was a necessary condition for our freedom to maneuver. Not even Clausewitz’s «total war» could escape these restrictions.
It is only in our century that the notion of «world war» was born, in other words a war capable of involving even societies without a history, like Polynesian tribal societies.

The discovery of atomic energy, television, air transport, and the birth of various forms of multinational capitalism have resulted in some conditions that make war impossible.

1. Nuclear weapons have persuaded everybody that an atomic conflict would produce no winners and a sole loser—the planet. But after the realization dawned that atomic war is antiecological, the conviction grew that all wars are antiecological and cannot be otherwise. Anyone destroying forests with substances like Agent Orange (or polluting the sea) declares war not only on neutral powers but on the earth as a whole.
2. War is no longer waged on a front between two sides. The scandal of the American journalists in Baghdad is the same as the scandal, of far greater dimensions, of millions and millions of pro-Iraqi Muslims who live in the countries of the anti-Iraqi coalition. In the wars of the past, potential enemies were interned (or massacred), while compatriots who spoke in favor of the enemy’s cause from enemy territory were usually hanged as soon as the war was over. But war can no longer be frontal, because of the very nature of multinational capitalism. That Iraq was armed by western industry is no accident. It falls within the logic of mature capitalism, which eludes the control of individual states. When the American government finds that the television companies are playing the enemy’s game, it still thinks it is faced with a plot hatched by pro-Communist eggheads. In the same way, the television companies labor under the illusion that they are the impersonation of Humphrey Bogart, who has the corrupt gangster listen to the sound of the printing presses over the telephone as he says: «It’s the press, old chum, and you can’t stop it.» But the logic of the news industry demands that it sell news, preferably dramatic news. It is not that the media refuse to play along with war: the media are merely a pianola performing a piece previously transcribed on its roll. In modern wars, therefore, everyone has the enemy behind the lines, something Clausewitz never could have accepted.
3. Even when the media are gagged, the new technologies of communication permit an unstoppable flow of information—and not even a dictator can prevent this, because such technologies make use of fundamental infrastructures that he cannot do without either. This flow of information assumes the role played in traditional wars by the secret services: it neutralizes every surprise action—and you cannot have a war in which it is impossible to surprise the enemy. War produces a general exchange of intelligence with the enemy. But information does more: it continually allows the enemy to speak (while the aim of all wartime policy is to block enemy propaganda), and demoralizes the citizens of the contending parties with regard to their own government (while Clausewitz points out that a condition for victory is the moral cohesion of the combatant). Every war of the past was based on the principle that the citizens, believing it to be a just war, were anxious to destroy the enemy. Now information not only shakes the faith of the citizens, it also leaves them vulnerable when faced with the death of the enemy—no longer a distant and vague event but instead unbearable visual evidence.
4. All this interacts with the fact that, as Foucault put it, power is no longer monolithic and monocephalous: it is diffused, packeted, made of the continuous agglomeration and breaking down of consensus. War no longer pits two native lands one against the other. It puts a multiplicity of powers into competition with one another. In this game individual centers of power gain an advantage, but at the expense of the others. Whereas traditional war made fortunes for arms merchants, and this gain reduced the importance of the temporary suspension of some kinds of commerce, the new warfare, while it still enriches arms merchants, triggers a worldwide crisis for industries like air transport, entertainment and tourism, the media themselves (which lose out on advertising revenues), and the entire industry of the superfluous in general—the backbone of the system—from the construction market to car manufacturing. When news breaks of a war in progress, the stock market bounds upward, but one month later the same market makes a similar leap when the first signs of a possible peace begin to emerge. No «cynicism» in the first case, and no virtue in the second. The stock market records the oscillations in the play of powers. In war some economic powers find themselves in competition with others, and the logic of their conflict overwhelms that of national powers. While the industry of state consumption (such as armaments) needs tension, that of individual consumption needs happiness. The clash is played out in economic terms.
5. For all these and other reasons war no longer resembles, like the wars of the old days, a «serial» intelligent system, but rather a «parallel» intelligent system. A serial intelligent system, used for example to build machines capable of translating or drawing inferences from some given information, is instructed by the programmer so that it can make, on the basis of a finite number of rules, subsequent decisions, each of which depends on an assessment of the preceding decision, in accordance with a tree structure, made of a series of binary disjunctions. Old-fashioned military strategies went like this: if the enemy has moved his troops to the east, then perhaps he intends to proceed southward; I shall therefore move my troops in a northeasterly direction, to bar his way in a surprise move. The enemy’s rules were our rules too, and each party made one decision at a time, as in a game of chess.

A parallel system, on the other hand, requires the individual cells of a network to assume