In the year before March 2003 when he was publicly egging on the Bushites’ rush to invade Iraq, Michael Ignatieff was still a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Then, and for quite a while after March 2003, he would write enthusiastically about “we” Americans, and “our dilemmas”, etc etc…
Sometime in 2004, he became a little bit less enthusiastic about the US presence in Iraq. Not necessarily about the fact of the invasion and subsequent occupation, but more about the way it had been done.
I should note that in all his lengthy, very self-referential, and no doubt handsomely paid-for articles, in the NYT magazine and elsewhere, Ignatieff still referred wholeheartedly to “our” dilemmas as US citizens.
Then in late 2005, something happened. He quit Harvard, returned to his birth-country, Canada, and ran for and won a seat in the Canadian parliament. When asked by Canadians about all that US “we” talk, he said he had just been using it to try to make his arguments in our US public discourse more convincing.
Thanks a lot, Michael.
Now, he is deputy leader of Canada’s venerable Liberal Party, and apparently trying to think himself into the position of a national leader. As what seems like another step in his lengthy saga of self-reinvention, last Sunday he published this essay in the NYT mag, under the title “Getting Iraq Wrong.”
Well, he still is, as you’ll see if you read the piece carefully. Which I have just found time to do, this afternoon. So I am happy to give you, after the jump here– the annotated “Ignatieff Getting Iraq Wrong”
Just before we go there, though, I’d like to note that this lengthy discussion on ‘liberal hawks’, from JWN in mid-May of this year, is also quite relevant to M. Ignatieff.
Anyway, now you can go and read the annotated text.