On April 26, 2007, friends, colleagues, and family of the late American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Jeane J. Kirkpatrick gathered in Washington to celebrate the publication of her final book, Making War to Keep Peace. Allan Gerson was counsel to Ambassador Kirkpatrick during her service at the United Nations beginning in 1981. He was a resident scholar at AEI from March 1987 to September 1989. In 1991, he published The Kirkpatrick Mission: Diplomacy without Apology. Excerpts from his remarks about his dear friend and colleague appear below. Mr. Gerson took the photograph of Ambassador Kirkpatrick that graces the cover of the book.

Jeane Kirkpatrick's Making War to Keep Peace captures not only the life of her mind, but her spirit. It is Jeane in the virtual flesh.

Who is Jeane? Anyone who knew her well knows her abiding characteristics: First, seriousness of purpose. Second, clarity of expression. Third, no shyness whatsoever in asserting herself. Every page in this book bristles with those traits.

Let's begin with seriousness. This book is serious. It is dedicated, as Jeane was, to scholarship, because scholarship is serious, pillared on careful documentation and all the evidence that can be brought to bear. Jeane had a lot of book offers after she left government service. They were for megabucks, but she abhorred the idea of doing a "kiss-and-tell" book. At heart, she saw herself as a political scientist and as a person, in her words, driven by a "deep, deep desire to understand political, social, cultural, problems." She wished to write only in that vein. Her belief that life had to be taken seriously stemmed from an innate awareness of how easily things can go awry. Thus, she often said, we have to plan to expect the unexpected and to grapple with the hard intellectual tasks of setting priorities among competing demands.

Secondly, as all of those who knew her can testify, clarity was her lodestar. In an early interview after assuming the job as UN ambassador, she said, "I have a habit of frankness and I have not broken the habit. Ever. I express myself very clearly, getting directly to the point. I suppose, yes, I am not in an arena of people who do that. I am not tactless. But I do not leave important things unsaid." Certainly, she did not leave things unsaid in this book.

And, of course, Jeane never shied away from being assertive. You can begin by looking at the cover of the book. The photograph is one I took of her on a Sunday--her last day at the State Department when she was cleaning up her office. Her gaze is fixed directly on you: her eyebrows are perched high and her nostrils dilated, she is fully attentive. She is dressed well. Still, her shirt tail is sticking out somewhat, and her sleeve length is a little off. Her hand is on her hip in an almost reflexive grip, as if on a holster, reflective of her rearing in Oklahoma.

The title of her book was her own choosing, but it can easily be misunderstood. This book is not a brief on making war to keep peace. Quite the contrary, it is a sustained argument against making war to keep peace. Perhaps a more reflective title would have been: On Making War to Keep Peace--an idea that she derides.

Nor is this really a book about the past. It is about the future. And this is especially evident in the poignant dedication and acknowledgments. In her dedication to her grandchildren, she writes, "freedom and democracy are now yours to honor and protect." Indeed, she could have been dedicating that inscription to all of us. Now that she is gone, the mantle of honoring and protecting has fallen on our shoulders. And in the very last part of the acknowledgement, she tells her students, whom she said she had the privilege of teaching and the pleasure of learning so much from, "I encourage you to champion freedom by treasuring democracy. Never waver in your commitment to speak truth."

And speak truth she did, until her dying day, and, as this book is testimony, even beyond. We need, she wrote in her conclusion, to treasure democracy, yet realize "it is a different matter entirely [to commit military resources] to keep peace in such areas [where people are denied the benefits of freedom], where often no peace can be kept, or to build nations in our own image before they are ready for our freedoms--or even want them."

Her personal style is evident from the first page. At the bottom of page two she gets right to the heart of her argument: "Ultimately, a nation's foreign policy flows from the character of its regime, its culture, and the purposes of its political elite." Our current troubles, she opines, stem from our failure to grasp that point. It is little accident that for many years she taught a course at Georgetown titled "Personality and Politics." And so she warns, "We cannot protect ourselves and others from the resurgence of aggressive powers or the reoccurrence of evil unless we face the fact that tyranny [at home] and war [abroad] have the same source--in persons who use force to expand their control of others." In dealing with such persons, appeasement and diplomacy is, she warns, to little avail. Thus, she tells us that "the failure of the League of Nations has often been explained for reasons other than a lack of will to meet aggression with force . . . but, I believe the League failed when major European powers proved unable and/or unwilling to take the decisive action required to constrain the power of violent, aggressive, expansionist leaders and regimes in Russia, Italy, and Germany between 1917 and 1936."

Turning her attention to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, she writes that Hussein was "a man who needed war like fire needs oxygen." Nevertheless, she is equivocal, at best, about the necessity of armed force to topple him, and the manner in which it was accomplished. On Operation Desert Storm, she writes: "Saddam Hussein's invasion of a small country [Kuwait] on the other side of the world [was an event] in which the United States had important, but not vital, interests." Indeed, she contends, that the George H. W. Bush administration's key motivations for Operation Desert Storm were "broader than oil and less tangible," and had more to do with Bush's vision of a new world order based on a reinvigorated United Nations. Thus she points to the fact that the Bush team waited more than four months between the first Security Council resolution condemning Saddam's invasion and the time the United States actually deployed force. During this interim, "Kuwait was devastated, its people were murdered, raped, tortured, and dispersed, its resources plundered and destroyed, the nation sacked. Much of this devastation could have been avoided by more rapid action." She concludes, "Had the consensus road not been taken, the war might have been carried to a more definitive end."

Similarly, a multilateralist instinct--which she deems unprecedented and revolutionary--was responsible, she writes, for our troubles in Somalia, when President Clinton went beyond George H. W. Bush to engage in nation-building and to direct war against one of Somalia's warlords. In this he was egged on by an overly ambitious Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who aggrandized powers never intended for a UN secretary general. It was this "assertive multilateralism," as Madeleine Albright said, that Jeane contends ultimately led to the disaster in Mogadishu, the downing of the Blackhawk helicopters, and the unseemly U.S. retreat.

That same brand of assertive multilateralism took a turn to the absurd in Haiti, where the Clinton administration "appeared to have forgotten that democracy thrives where there is a reasonably good living standard and a substantial middle class, and Haiti had neither." Worse, anyone who understood the deranged and dangerous personality of Aristide hardly would have banked America's prestige and power on seeking his return to office in the face of a largely popular coup.

None of this is to say that Kirkpatrick was against the use of force altogether during the post-Cold War years. Where it was called for was in the prevention of genocide in the heart of Europe. Here, America and the international community faltered and failed the victims. She writes, "The world stood by--the NATO forces idle--while heavily armed Serbs slaughtered civilians in the heart of Europe." Secretary general Boutros-Ghali's response was unfathomable. Despite urgent appeals, he refused to provide UN peacekeepers for Bosnia. As for Secretary Baker, Kirkpatrick notes that he testified before Congress that "[i]t's hard to believe that armed forces will fire artillery and mortars indiscriminately into the heart of a city." But, she adds, "his disbelief never moved him to address the crisis effectively."

Thus, she concludes, "the world's response to Serbian genocide defined its lack of seriousness about a new world order and collective security from aggression." Only later, in Kosovo, did the Clinton team--and especially the chief negotiator for the Balkans, Richard Holbrooke--finally come to the realization of the dangers of wishful thinking, and instead undertake the military action necessary to lead to a negotiated solution.

Finally, with respect to Afghanistan, she lauds George W. Bush for the right decision. In Afghanistan, she writes, "action was required in the name of national security, for threats from the Taliban and al Qaeda had already been carried out and were imminent." By contrast, nothing was that imminent in Iraq, and the purposes for war became muddled. Thus, when asked to head the U.S. delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva at the start of the 2003 Iraq war--a critical assignment at a critical moment--she accepted the responsibility. But she did so only after making clear that she would not advance the White House's justification for the war--the idea that preemptive war was legitimate--but instead would rely on a more traditional justification: Saddam Hussein's material breach of the terms of the UN-sponsored ceasefire that ended the first Iraq war.

And so Jeane, through the power of the written word, has been resurrected. Once again she is our teacher. We are exhorted to "honor and protect freedom and democracy." But also to be mindful that neither freedom nor democracy lends itself to easy application abroad. Thank you, Jeane.