Peace Kills: America's Fun New Imperialism

Overview

Peace Kills is P. J. O'Rourke's sardonic field guide to American foreign policy at the turn of the twenty-first century, written from the perspective of a libertarian journalist who prefers markets to ministries and distrusts both utopians and empire builders. Published in 2004, it gathers dispatches from war zones, failed states, and Washington salons to poke at the pieties that surround humanitarian intervention, nation-building, and the rhetoric of peace. O'Rourke advances the paradox at the heart of the title: attempts to impose peace by committee and good intentions often prolong conflict, while decisive, even ugly force can sometimes shorten it. He calls America's posture an accidental empire, built less from lust for conquest than from wealth, technology, and a tendency to blunder into custodianship of the world's worst problems.

On-the-ground reporting

The book’s bones are travelogues. O'Rourke visits Kosovo after NATO’s bombing and finds the wreckage of a humanitarian war that settled old scores without settling the future. He moves through Israel and the Palestinian territories amid the Second Intifada, where security barriers, checkpoints, and suicide bombings make abstractions about peace look naïve. He drops into Egypt and the broader Arab world to sketch the authoritarian quiet that masks brittle economies and bottled-up dissent. In Afghanistan he tracks the aftermath of the Taliban’s fall, where victory has left a vacuum that warlords and aid NGOs fill unevenly. In Kuwait and Iraq, before and after the 2003 invasion, he encounters both the relief of liberation from Saddam Hussein and the hazards of a plan that never quite got past the slogan stage.

Targets and arguments

O'Rourke’s argument is that Americans hate foreign policy until it becomes unavoidable, then try to do it with a combination of moral uplift, overwhelming firepower, and managerial incompetence. He flays the United Nations as a talk shop that mistakes unanimity for legitimacy and paper agreements for realities on the ground. He mocks the grandiosity of nation-building and the idea that elections and NGOs can conjure up civil society where institutions and trust are absent. Yet he is no isolationist. He favors muscular responses to clear threats, supports toppling tyrannies like the Taliban and Saddam, and insists that free trade and open societies are the best instruments of peace. His quarrel is with what he sees as the sentimentalism of peace activism and the hubris of planners who imagine they can reengineer cultures with briefing books.

Tone and style

The voice is caustic, brisk, and loaded with jokes that bite in several directions. O'Rourke takes aim at left-leaning idealists who romanticize multilateralism and at right-leaning hawks who confuse victory with governance. He relishes local detail, traffic circles in Cairo, bureaucracy in Pristina, the snacks and small talk of military bases, and uses them to puncture big ideas. The humor is a protective layer over hard-edged judgments: that war is sometimes necessary, that peace can be a euphemism for stalemate, and that governments are poor at socially engineering other nations even when their cause is just.

Place and legacy

As a snapshot of post-9/11 attitudes, the book captures the mood of confidence and anxiety that framed the Afghan and early Iraq wars. Some of O'Rourke’s certainties, especially about democratization in Iraq, read with more ambiguity in light of later events, but the core skepticism about bureaucratic salvation and the celebration of liberal economics retain their bite. Peace Kills aligns with his larger body of comic reportage: travel as a way to interrogate ideology, laughter as a solvent for cant, and a preference for the messy virtues of liberty over the tidy abstractions of plans.