Michael Ignatieff, “Getting Iraq Wrong”, from the NYT mag,
August 5, 2007. Annotated by Helena Cobban for ‘Just World News’
|
|
|
Ignatieff’s
text
|
HC
comments
|
| 1
|
The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq
has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also
condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as
commentators supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi
exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only
chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in
their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.
|
This para is a fairly weak
introduction. But it already signals what becomes a bigger enigma
about the whole essay: Who or what is it really about? Is
it about the US President, author of what Ignatieff is now prepared to
admit was a very serious error of judgment? Or is it about
Ignatieff himself? Read on…
|
| 2
|
Having left an academic post at Harvard in 2005 and returned
home to
Canada to enter political life, I keep revisiting the Iraq debacle,
trying to understand exactly how the judgments I now have to make in
the political arena need to improve on the ones I used to offer from
the sidelines. I’ve learned
that acquiring good judgment in politics
starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes.
|
This last sentence here makes it
seem, very revealingly, as if Ignatieff only “learned” this lesson
extremely late in life– i.e. in his late fifties; and also, that he
only “learned” it when his life position changed and it suddenly became
politically convenient for him to do so. This does not make him seem
particularly trustworthy, authoritative, or admirable..
|
| 3
|
The philosopher
Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with
academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas
are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas
just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the
luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to
work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even
smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic
life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play
with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and
useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s
responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever
they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those
consequences and prevent them from doing harm.
|
From the context of this first
sentence it is clear that Ignatieff generally agrees with the statement
quoted from Berlin. But why does he have to hide behind Berlin in
this way if he is, as he claims to be, a mature intellectual in his own
right?
Also, substantively, I don’t think it’s true that “academics and
commentators… care more about whether ideas
are interesting than whether they are true.” It may be true of
some of them. But this is nowhere near as globally true a statement as
Ignatieff claims (through the voice of the late Berlin) here.
The rest of this para also portrays a fairly fanciful idea of how most
of the intellectuals I know would define their concerns and
responsibilities. It strikes me Ignatieff is trying to set up
some kind of a defense for his own egregious personal error of judgment
that “I couldn’t help it, m’lud. The Ivory Tower made me do
it.” Not a very convincing defense.
|
| 4
|
I’ve learned that good judgment
in politics looks different from
good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is
about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of
some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not
another
thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way. |
He defines one form of
“judgment” in intellectual life. There are many other
kinds. Such as, a concern with trying to find the most
appropriate models of previous instances of behaviors such as, say,
going to invade a distant country in the post-1945 world; and then
using those models to try to predict the consequences of the US doing
the same thing in 2003.
That was what I did in 2002-2003, regarding the possible consequences
of the US invading Iraq. The best models I came up with were the
US in Vietnam, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, 1982. Based
on those two, and on various other important political and logistical
considerations, I foresaw precisely that the US invasion of Iraq would
be a debacle that would harm everyone concerned.
It is true that, among the MSM commentatoriat I was pretty isolated in
that conclusion and in the methodology I used to reach it. But
many, many people from academe shared the same general approach and the
same conclusion. It was not rocket science. So the “The
Ivory Tower made me do it” defense is still hogwash.
|
| 5
|
The attribute that underpins good judgment in politicians is a
sense
of reality. “What is called wisdom in statesmen,” Berlin wrote,
referring to figures like Roosevelt and Churchill, “is understanding
rather than knowledge — some kind of acquaintance with relevant facts
of such a kind that it enables those who have it to tell what fits with
what; what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot, what
means will work in what situations and how far, without necessarily
being able to explain how they know this or even what they know.”
Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of
their own imaginings. They must not confuse the world as it is with the
world as they wish it to be. They must see Iraq — or anywhere else — as
it is.
|
Notice that here, once again, he
is hiding behind Berlin.
However, regarding the substance of what Berlin said there, I would say
that this attribute of “wisdom in statesmen”, that is, one that is
deeply rooted in a sense of realism, is also an attribute of wisdom in
intellectuals– and most particularly, of intellectuals who have the
chutzpah to claim they have something to say to the public sphere.
|
| 6
|
As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of
reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the
street
virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of
what’s what than Nobel Prize
winners. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to
confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what
works and what doesn’t. Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life
and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out
solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick.
|
Baloney.
|
| 7
|
Having taught
political science myself, I have to say the discipline
promises more than it can deliver. In practical politics, there is no
science of decision-making. The vital judgments a politician makes
every day are about people: whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to
avoid. The question of loyalty arises daily: Who will betray and who
will stay true? Having good judgment in these matters, having a sound
sense of reality, requires trusting some very unscientific intuitions
about people.
|
My God. He taught
political science, and not just philosophy? I pity the students
in those courses.
|
| 8
|
A sense of reality is not just a
sense of the world as it is, but as
it might be. Like great artists, great politicians see possibilities
others cannot and then seek to turn them into realities. To bring the
new into being, a politician needs a sense of timing, of when to leap
and when to remain still. Bismarck famously remarked that political
judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant
hoofbeats of the horse of history. |
|
| 9
|
Few of us hear the horses coming. A British prime minister was
once
asked what made his job so difficult. “Events, dear boy,” he replied
ruefully. In the face of the unexpected event, a virtuoso in politics
must be capable of improvisation and appear as imperturbable as
possible. People do want leadership, and even when a leader is
nonplussed by events, he must still remember to give the people the
reassurance they deserve. Part
of good judgment consists of knowing
when to keep up appearances.
|
I am truly not sure where he has
been going these last few paras, but at this point it does not look
good.
Richard Warnica, in this percipient
recent reflection on Ignatieff’s life and work, commented that “As the
’90s progressed, the main character in more and more of Michael
Ignatieff’s work became Michael Ignatieff.” In late 2005, as we
know, Ignatieff left Harvard to become firstly a Canadian MP and then
in short order the deputy head of the big center-left party there, the
Liberal Party. (He only failed to become party leader by a
hair’s-breadth.) I guess one possible reading of these past few
paras is that he was sort of thinking out loud for himself about how he
can both be the kind of leader who “keeps up appearances” and also
admit to having been wrong.
Not sure you can do it convincingly, Michael.
|
| 10
|
Improvisation may not stave off failure. The game usually ends
in
tears. Political careers often end badly because politicians live the
human situation: making choices among competing goods with only
ordinary instincts and fallible information to go by. Of course, better
information and factual criteria for decision-making can reduce the
margin of uncertainty. Benchmarks
for progress in Iraq can help to
decide how long America should stay there. But in the end, no
one knows
— because no one can know —
what exactly America can still do to create
stability in Iraq.
|
a. “Benchmarks can help”… So
as a pol he is now trying to align himself firmly with the mainstream
of US political life.
b. But “no one can know — what exactly America can still do to create
stability in Iraq.” He doesn’t say why. In my view, as
frequently expressed over the past 30 months, there is nothing the US can do to “create”
stability in Iraq. The best thing it can do, that will optimize
the chances of the Iraqis themselves being able to create their own
stability, is get the heck out of the country in a speedy, orderly, and
total way. He is not saying this.
|
| 11
|
The decision facing
the United States over Iraq is paradigmatic of
political judgment at its most difficult. Staying and leaving each have
huge costs. One thing is
clear: The costs of staying will be borne by
Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis.
That in itself suggests how American leaders are likely to decide the
question.
|
a. Firstly, note the way
he now talks about “the US” in the third person. And just so
recently he was enthusiastically talking about the US as “us”, and “we must do things like this
or that… ” He got into quite a lot of trouble for that when he
swanned into Canadian politics. Rightly, I think. He has
incredible arrogance to think he can just self-identify as a leading
thinker within one country’s citizenry, and then flip a switch and
expect to be lauded as a leading politician within a completely
different country.
Actually, beyond that, I think there’s a big problem with his whole
concept of authorhood and authority that is revealed in the
slipperiness with which he first of all claims authority as insiderness
as a US citizen and then– poof!– sloughs it off.
b. But beyond that, this para is a key one for this whole essay,
primarily because of the arrogance of that judgment about “One thing
is clear.”
(Can someone teach him to count? He actually immediately goes on
to list two quite separate propositions. This is not “one thing”,
but two.)
And actually, neither of the propositions he expresses there is true.
the first of these propositions, as stated, strictly entails that (1)
The costs of the US troops staying in Iraq will not in any way be borne by
Iraqis (or any other non-Americans). And the second of them
entails, or anyway strongly implies, that (2) The consequences of the
US leaving will impose a cost on the Iraqis.
Neither of these propositions has been proven true. The
first of them is most likely false. The second may well turn out
to be false.
But he presents his two propositions as if they are so
irrefutably true (“One thing is clear!”) that he does not even
have to adduce any further evidence to back them up.
|
| 12
|
But they must decide, and soon.
Procrastination is even costlier in
politics than it is in private life. The sign on Truman’s desk — “The
buck stops here!” — reminds us that those who make good judgments in
politics tend to be those who do not shrink from the responsibility of
making them. In the case of
Iraq, deciding what course of action to
pursue next requires first admitting that all courses of action thus
far have failed. |
I imagine at times he must feel
sorry he can no longer refer to the US body politic as “we”.
By the way, don’t hold your breath for anyone in the Bush
administration to admit that “all courses of action thus far have
failed.”
|
| 13
|
In politics, learning from failure matters as much as
exploiting success. Samuel Beckett’s
“Fail again. Fail better” captures the inner obstinacy necessary to the
political art. Churchill and De Gaulle kept faith with their own
judgment when smart opinion believed them to be mistaken. Their
willingness to wait for historical validation, even if far off, looks
now like greatness. In the
current president the same faith that
history will judge him kindly seems like brute stubbornness.
|
This is a true
observation. I find it interesting, though, that because Michael
Ignatieff has now decided– for whatever mix of reasons– that he needs
to do a partial “mea culpa” on Iraq, he now also wants the US president
to do something like the same
|
| 14-22
|
Machiavelli argued that political judgment, to be effective,
must
follow principles more ruthless than those acceptable in ordinary life.
He wrote…
|
(These paras give us a sort of
inchoate musing on the diffrent “values” in public life and family
life. I guess he is still trying to figure out how to be a
Canadian political leader… Mainly, though, these paras seem to
be the kind of padding that enable him to avoid really expressing very
much about just how
he was wrong over Iraq.)
|
| 23
|
We might test judgment by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who
best
anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly
anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by
indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed
the president was only after the oil or because they believed America
is always and in every situation wrong.
|
This is another crucial para in
the essay.
The first sentence is excellently stated. But then he immediately
undoes all the good achieved in that sentence by the broad-brush
dismissal he expresses in the very next sentence, of the “many” of
those who correctly
anticipated catastrophe who, he claims– quite without providing any
evidence– “did so not by exercising judgment but by
indulging in ideology.”
|
| 24
|
a. The people who
truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the
consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the
motives that led to the action.
b. They did not necessarily possess more
knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the
same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured
sectarian history.
c.What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality.
They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed
in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would
believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise
on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose
that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway
country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that
because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo
it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.
|
a. I disagree. The good
judgment was shown by people who– recognizing that being able
correctly to evaluate the motives of other humans is always an impossible task–
nevertheless looked at the many other relevant facts of the matter,
including: the quite understandable and natural nationalist sentiments
of the vast majority of the Iraqi people, the length of the supply
lines the US would need to rely on in its occupation of Iraq, the
considerable strategic advantage Iran has in the region, the quite
understandable unwillingness of the US citizenry to have its sons and
daughters kept in a hostile occupation environment for very long, the
expense of the whole darn project, etc etc etc…. and concluded
that regardless of the
“intentions” of the US President, the project was doomed to
failure.
b. No, we didn’t necessarily all “possess more knowledge” than
you did, Michael– though many of us did have considerably more
knowledge of the relevant
sort (see above) than you appeared to have. And where we
did not have it, we actively sought it out. You, by contrast, didn’t even see that that kind of
knowledge was necessary. The phrase “the unkown unknowns”
somehow comes into my head here.
c. At this point, and still only very indirectly, we start to
get a glimpse of what Michael’s mea culpa really is (or might
be.) It is very indirectly stated– indeed, it is only confirmed
as being part of his mea culpa at the head of the next para. But
even there, he is not confessing to having made all of the mistakes
listed here– only “some” of them.
Slippery? I’ll say!
But based on all this, we can now state that Michael’s mea culpa
includes a recognition that he made “some” of the following mistakes:
- He may have taken wishes for reality.
- He may have supposed, “as President Bush did”, that because
he believed
in the integrity of his own motives everyone else in the region — I
suppose, in the context, that would be the Middle East?– would
believe in it, too.
- He may have supposed that a free state could arise
on the foundations of 35 years of police terror.
- He may have supposed
that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway
country of which most Americans knew little.
- He may have believed that
because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo
it had to be doing so in Iraq…
|
| 25
|
a. I made some of these
mistakes and then a few of my own.
b. The lesson I
draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of
people
I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my
emotions. I went to northern Iraq in 1992. I saw what Saddam Hussein
did to the Kurds. From that moment forward, I believed he had to go. My
convictions had all the authority of personal experience, but for that
very reason, I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can
Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein
held together by terror? I should have known that emotions in politics,
as in life, tend to be self-justifying and in matters of ultimate
political judgment, nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held
immune from the burden of justification through cross-examination and
argument. |
a. Here is the nub of the
mea culpa. Though note the following:
- He is still not being specific about what his own
methodological or other mistakes actually were. (Exactly which of
the mistakes listed in para 24 is he confessing to? And what were
the “few of my own” mistakes that he additionally comitted? Tell
us, Michael!)
- This may be a very partial and indirect mea culpa.
But what it absolutely still is not is an apology— either to the people of Iraq who
have been so grievously harmed by the consequences of the US military
action that he had helped to instigate, or to the people of the United
States who have also been harmed by that military action, one that he
certainly helped to instigate even though, as he now (kind of) tells
us, he was doing so from his position as an “outside agitator.”
Indeed, nowadays he tells Canadians that all that “we” talk he engaged
in within US discourse until very recently was deployed simply in order
to make his arguments seem more persuasive to us US-citizen suckers.
b. The lesson he draws for the future is incredibly self-referential…
and then he almost immediately hauls in his little load of
“exculpatory” claims and arguments.
|
| 26
|
a. Good judgment in
politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical
judge of yourself. It was not merely that the president did not
take
the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take the care to
understand himself.
b. The sense of reality that might have saved him from
catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding
inside, alerting him that he
did not know what he was doing. But then,
it is doubtful that warning bells had ever sounded in him before. He
had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives warning bells do not
sound.
|
a. This is mind-boggling.
Only now is he learning that “good judgment … depends on being a
critical
judge of yourself”? Where was he for the first 60 years of his
life?
And still, he is restricting that proposition to judgment “in
politics”, as though politics is something different from other areas
of life. As though, if he were still a philosophy prof at
Harvard, it would be quite okay not to be critical judge of
himself…
b. Just note down there that it is only Bush who, Michael claims,
needed “some warning bell sounding
inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing.” But
maybe Michael Ignatieff needed (needs) one, too?
|
| 27
|
People with good judgment listen to warning bells within.
Prudent
leaders force themselves to listen equally to advocates and opponents
of the course of action they are thinking of pursuing. They do not
suppose that their own good intentions will guarantee good results.
They do not suppose they know all they need to know. If power corrupts,
it corrupts this sixth sense of personal limitation on which prudence
relies.
|
All good, sound stuff.
Pity he hadn’t learned this a long time ago.
|
| 28
|
A prudent leader will save
democracies from the worst, but prudent
leaders will not inspire a democracy to give its best. Democratic
peoples should always be looking for something more than prudence in a
leader: daring, vision and — what goes with both — a willingness to
risk failure. Daring leaders can be trusted as long as they give some
inkling of knowing what it is to fail. They must be men of sorrow
acquainted with grief, as the prophet Isaiah says, men and women who
have not led charmed lives, who understand us as we really are, who
have never given up hope and who know they are in politics to make
their country better. These are the leaders whose judgment, even if
sometimes wrong, will still prove worthy of trust. |
Whatever the heck all this
means…
|
Helena,
You’ve got to blog this one. It is too good to miss:
The Army Knew Iraq About 60 Years Ago
A War Department handbook published in 1943 stressed that respect for a people and their culture was a key to victory.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20203752/site/newsweek/from/ET/
I read his piece last weekend and had the same reaction. At the end of the day, maybe Ignatieff is just a poor thinker. I also wonder how being a cheerleader for the biggest blunder in US foreign policy gives you the credentials for seeking the Canadian premiership.
Academics got Iraq mostly right. Politicians and MSM journos mostly wrong. Ignatieff blames Harvard for his mistake, with his disingenuous “if only I’d listened to bus drivers and not Nobel laureates.”
Give me a break.
Ignatieff should have had the honesty to blame his own stupidity. It must hurt him to think that by leaving Harvard and going into politics, the IQ of both bodies went up.
I started to read Ignatieff’s piece when it was first published, and could not get through it without needing to run for the vomitorium numerous times.
My initial reaction: Blah, blah, blah, phony intellectualizing meaningless blah, when will be get to the point?
My subsequent reaction: Despite his apparent present understanding that he got it wrong, he STILL doesn’t get it even remotely right.
Another reaction: He is still making Iraqis responsible for the fact that it didn’t work.
Example 1: He thinks that the “experiment” failed because “a free state cannot arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror”, and does not recognize that a free state cannot be imposed by a foreign power aggressively and with massive violence invading, conquering, and occupying a country. And of course he is apparently unable to admit that a free state was not one of the core reasons for the aggression in the first place.
Example 2: He uses as a premise the standard falsehood-become-received-truth that the only thing that held Sunnis, Shi`as, and Kurds together was “Saddam’s iron fist” rather than recognizing that the United States has by basing everything it did on the ignorant assumption that Iraqis are strictly divided into historically incompatible sectarian/ethnic groups, by imposing a political system based on that assumption, and by (inadvertently, I believe) enabling the most extreme and divisive elements, created a situation of conflict that has never before happened in Iraq.
In short, Ignatieff’s “mea culpa” appears dishonest, and makes quite clear that he still gets it wrong.
I will vote for any candidate who promises to show disdain for such pseudo-intellectuals.
Thank you, Helena and commenters, for wading through the essay.
Helena,
Thank you for taking the time to detail your objections to Mr Ignatieff’s avoidances and excuses. When I read the piece last week, I had the same kind of reactions as you and others posting here.
Apart from the overall tenor of his piece I found his specific blaming of the academic mindset to be of great interest (perhaps inspired by criticism received on the stump??). I have no brief for academia in general or Harvard in particular but it should be noted that if he was unable to hear the “warning bells” being sounded in his own mind, he could easily have listened to those ringing aloud from just up the hallway in the office of the venerable Stanley Hoffman.
Far from being a mea culpa, this essay has been written by a man who is clearly unrepentant for peddling his “one size fits all” interventionist philosophy and seems to be resting his case on the possibility that Mr Bush may well be regarded by history as a Churchillian visionary and that any failure will be laid at the feet of the poor people of Iraq.
My advice to the Canadian electorate is to only follow this “leader” if you’re curious.
I read his piece last weekend and had the same reaction. At the end of the day, maybe Ignatieff is just a poor thinker. I also wonder how being a cheerleader for the biggest blunder in US foreign policy gives you the credentials for seeking the Canadian premiership.
It wasn’t a blunder; it was a crime. Cheerleading a blunder is, at the most, a sign of stupidity, but cheerleading a crime is a sign of immorality. By cheerleading a crime, Ignatieff showed his immorality, more than his stupidity.
But whatever the truth about Ignatieff, one thing is certain: stupidity and immorality are by no means impediments for successful political careers.
Waiter! One Blair, please!
It occurs to me this morning that with this “mea culpa, mea not really culpa” Ignatieff joins quite a distinguished crowd of former participants in and cheer leaders for the ongoing crime – or set of crimes – that is the aggression against Iraq.
There are the desperate whining of excuse-making careerists such as the despicable Colin (I was triiiiiiiicked! I was deceeeeeeeeeeived!) Powell (no, he wasn’t tricked or deceived, he knew just exactly what he was doing, and he did it anyway because he valued his career over everything else), and George (it’s really, reaaaaaaally everyone else’s fault, reaaaaaaaally!) Tenet. Those two disgusting sub-humans had the potential in their hands to stop, or at least slow the impending train wreck, and they chose not to, and that makes them more despicable than Bush and all the neocons put together.
There is, of course, the “mea sorta culpa” types like the New York Times.
Ignatieff’s transparent technique of obfuscation by smoking up the view with clouds of phony, meaningless intellectual-sounding claptrap is a new approach though.
Summary of Colin Powell’s “mea culpa”: Waaaaaaah! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!
Summary of Ignatieff’s “mea culpa”: Blahblahblahblahblahblameaninglessintellectualsoundingblah.
May I offer a very cynical point of view.
Perhaps the gentleman’s views on the US invading oil rich states to “protect ” their natural resources might have changed since the Canadians discovered they might have a claim to the Arctic.
Of course things couldn’t be that simple. Could they?
I think it’s useful to distinguish between the two reasons people had to have in order to support the war. They had to believe:
1. it was the right thing to do (by their definition of “right”)
2. it would work.
The first calls into question their moral judgment; the second their capacity to think clearly and knowledgeably.
Not the same.
Those who opposed the war did so because of 1 and/or 2, but not necessarily both. For example, Scowcroft opposed the war because of 2 but couldn’t care less about the moral argument.
What astonishes me about Ignatieff, Ferguson, Lewis, Ajami, etc, is that they actually thought it would work. (I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that they sought the chaos we have now.)
Let’s look at this more closely. For some, to get it wrong so badly was worth it. Take Petraeus for example. There’s a good chance history will remember him as the Westmoreland of Iraq. On the other hand, his job got him two extra stars and huge fame. So, career-wise, it’s a calculated risk.
For Ignatieff and co, it’s different. They’re like surgeons who realize after the operation that they amputated the wrong leg. They’re guilty of intellectual malpractice. As intellectuals, they should not recover from it. But because there’s never any price to pay for erring on the side of war and more war, many will recover.
Look at Ken Pollack. For the distinction of writing the single worst book in the last 10 years, with the highest density of crap per page, he’s being feted all over the media. He’s not an academic, just a former CIA hack, but he’s a “scholar” for the MSM. A highly successful one at that.
I think tort lawyers should leave those poor physicians alone and, instead, sue International Relations “scholars” for malpractice.
While The Hague takes care of the politicians…
Ignatieff’s hawkish views on Iraq are what earned him the support of the right wing Liberal establishment, (his friend and fellow ex-‘socialist’ Bob Rae was the right’s second choice). Both were seen as not only safe, conservative types but, deceptively, had the image of being hip, Trudeauesque etc. Ignatieff lost the leadership, despite an enormous advantage in funds and endorsements, because of his foreign policy. His mea culpa is as much a career move as his support for the war in the first place was.
Ignatieff’s father was an Russian emigre who was a Canadian diplomat. He is said to have drafted the NATO treaty, and was a fervent cold warrior. Among one of Ignatieff’s earliest perches, in that fertile land which lies between academe and government service, was editing the Journal of Labour History. Or so I seem to recall. I think the first time Ignatieff showed the establishment that he was ready to serve was an attack on EP Thompson.
“What astonishes me about Ignatieff, Ferguson, Lewis, Ajami, etc, is that they actually thought it would work.”
Knowing what I know about Lewis and `Ajami and the degree to which they are driven by ideology and egotism, and lack of any real, full-spectrum knowledge, let alone intuition about the Middle East, I do not find that surprising at all. Presumably Ignatieff and Ferguson suffer from the same maladies as they do.
“(I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that they sought the chaos we have now.)”
I don’t either, though I have considered it, and examined it with some care. In the end, it looks very clear to me that they really thought that it would be possible to invade, overthrow the government, put Chalabi or someone similar in charge, and with his cooperation transform Iraq into a dependent, compliant client that would serve as a base for U.S. military, political, and economic operations. I really believe that ever since that plan fell apart they have been improvising – making it up as they go along from one day to the next, and sinking deeper and deeper and deeper into the pit of their own incompetence.
I note that this tortured near mea culpa had the obligatory snear at those who were right at the time for what he sees as “ideological reasons.” Or as Duncan said, the “at least I wasn’t a dirty f***ing hippie” defense.
Does anyone know what Ignatieff’s position on Zionism is?
David G.
Does anyone know what Ignatieff’s position on Zionism is?
Get a life please.
Salah, I’m glad you found something in this thread interesting enough to comment on.
Anyone else have any info on statements Ignatieff may have made on Israel and Zionism?
Ignatieff was just being self serving, wasn’t he? Hardly worth Helena’s braincells I would have thought.
What would be more interesting to have commented upon is this growing sense that the Dem politicans have resigned themselves to long term US military involvement in Iraq. What is causing this? Is it the result of the Party’s focus group polling? Harry Reid has been uncharacteristally silent lately.
Bernard Chazelle: Perhaps you have a too narrow definition of what “working” meant to the architects of the strategy? According to neo con theory part, if not the major, underlying motivation for removing Saddam and the Baath and replacing same with a representative democracy was to blast the gi- normous tectonic plate under the reactionary Sunni middle east which was producing all these salafi/wahhabi terrorist attacks? That it has surely done by tipping the balance of power more (but cleverly not decisively) in the Shiites favour – which makes the reactionary Sunni regimes more dependent on the US and as consequence more conducive to doing what the US wants?. To see the Saudis scrambling to get the State of Palestine up and running, backing the Lebanese govt etc, has been a sight to behold. For this they have been rewarded with a handsome arms deal and one can assume there is more to come. So the jury is still “out” on “working”?
Were I in a similar position, my first resort would be to look to the law for guidance. International law would seem to indicate that the unprovoked Iraq invasion was unlawful and a war crime. Particularly given that so many of our leaders have law degrees, why was the question of law of so little importance?
was unlawful and a war crime
Is it our talk in this field will be worth?
Are those who lied and planed for Iraq war, did not think how they protect themselves from any consequences?
Just reminder, GWB had protecting CIA personal from intrnational court which goes back when Slobodan Milosevic trial.
A Lawyer in Baghdad
Brett H. McGurk
http://www.greenbag.org/McGurk.pdf
In sum, to those who say international
law does not exist, or who say the occupation
of Iraq was somehow extra-legal, I
invite them to scrutinize the legal work of
my former offi ce, where international law
was lived, breathed, and debated, with realworld
consequences, twenty-four hours a
day. Attorneys in Baghdad worked within a
complicated web of international authorities,
and were among the fi rst to gain practical
experience operating within the framework
of traditional occupation law – a framework
that had existed largely as a debating
point, never voluntarily implemented by an
occupying authority. Th e limitations and
defects of that framework became readily
apparent to many of us. For where the
purpose of an occupation is enabling and
transformative, a legal framework that eff ectively
locks-in the laws and institutions of
a repressive, ousted regime does not make
sense, nor does much good, for anyone. Th e
international community, therefore, should
consider updating the Hague Regulations
and the Geneva Convention, to refl ect the
realities of modern military interventions,
and to permit fundamental change where
transformation (from dictatorship to elections,
for example) is a desirable international
objective.
bb
removing Saddam and the Baath
Give me a break bb, So funny Baath party members were 53% of them are Shiites, as for salafi/wahhabi, most of them in Saudis mostly and who are attending Maddrasah that funded by them in Pakistan and other part of poor world, as for Iraq salafi/wahhabi was exists as such the society in Iraq far more open than other ME neighboring countries.
Correction
“as for Iraq salafi/wahhabi was exists as such”
Should be “as for Iraq salafi/wahhabi was not exists as such”
Salah, that is an excellent link you provided there. Thank you so much. It is really important that people be able to read this incredibly self-serving account of the “legal” interventions being made in Iraq in the days of the CPA. Self-serving, both by the author personally (the intro to his piece is hilariously revealing about his self-referentiality), and by the author as representative of a certain, very widespread form of US paternalism.
Where he says this:
where the purpose of an occupation is enabling and transformative, a legal framework that effectively locks-in the laws and institutions of
a repressive, ousted regime does not make sense, nor does much good, for anyone. The international community, therefore, should consider updating the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Convention, to reflect the realities of modern military interventions…
In other words, “Look at our intentions! Because they are so pure (i.e., “enabling and transformative”, whatever the actual content of those words might be), then the whole longstanding body of international law should be changed to accomodate us!”
I am certain that when the Nazis ran their occupation regime in Eastern Europe they sincerely believed they were being “enabling (of something)and transformative”, and that their intentions were pure. That’s why people’s claims about their own intentions should really, at the end of the day, count for very little. That’s why, when the nations of the post-Nazi world convened in 1949 to agree to the text of the Geneva Conventions, especially the one regarding the administration of occupied territory, they paid zero heed to the claims of the occupying power about the purity of its intentions there.
Of course, Brett McGurk’s argument there about the “purity” of the Americans’ intentions in Iraq and the need for the rest of the world to recognize that and to change the whole body of international law as a result, is the argument of the Bush administration in a nutshell. Depressing to see it parroted by someone who makes his living in THE LAW.
producing all these salafi/wahhabi terrorist
During last year’s Ramadan, Sheikh Yaser Nur Al-Din, preacher of the Husayni Mosque, opened a kuttab (religious school, pl. katatib) to teach young boys how to pray and read the Qur’an. He also inspired them to join the self-flagellation parades to Najaf and Karbala and to join other Shi’ite religious practices encouraged by politicians. In such practices, Abbas’ father found – without knowing – what he had been searching for and so he started educating his son to value the everlasting life in heaven. Abbas joined the circle of Sheikh Nur Al-Din and started learning how to pray and read the Quran with fewer and fewer mistakes. His father started seeing his son among the mournful people chanting and urging them to self-flagellation during Ashura. Abbas then started to spend long hours outside his home when he went with his friends to Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad to practice the rituals.
http://www.niqash.org/content.php?contentTypeID=98&id=1970
As a longtime Canadian Liberal Party supporter, I can only add that most of my co-partisans were mystified when Michael Ignatieff popped out of nowhere (average Canadians had never even heard of him) to become a leading contender for the leadership of the Party. I can understand an aging, panicked political elite grasping at straws, but Ignatieff’s record of windy intellectualism completely divorced from reality should have been a warning to some people that Liberal voters (who expect pragmatism along with noble social democratic ideals) would not be fooled for too long.
Thank you, Ms. Cobban, for the work you’ve done here. I personally would like to see Michael Ignatieff disappear from Canadian politics altogether and I hope the voters of Etobicoke-Lakeshore can be persuaded to find another candidate.
Thakns Helena.
Fortunately for Canadians he was not in a position to commit Canada to the War Crime that the Iraq invasion is. This is not a chosen ideology, it is international law according to the Geneva Convention to which both the US and Canada are signators. Same goes for the murder and torture that took place before his re-awakening.
This article does not absolve him of the neo-con aura he proudly and boldly returned with. You can put lipstick on a pig but it is still a pig.