Michael Ignatieff has written a long-awaited mea culpa for his support of the US invasion of Iraq in the New York Time Magazine here.
Mea culpa is an admission of fault, and there is much to be faulted for. The invasion of Iraq stands for two great tragedies. The first is gaunt in its scale, stark in its inhumanity: the 600 000 lives which may have been saved had the war not occurred. The number stands as a humble reminder that piled high enough, snuffed out lives, ruined families, and destroyed homes becomes, in their repetition, only a statistic. Yet there can be no denying that these lives are a sizeable remainder in the arithmetic which ‘good political judgment’ required.
The second tragedy was borne out before the first bomb even fell on Baghdad. It is the tragedy of hopelessness against the very logic of force and arrogance. Contra the realists, from Morgenthau to Kissinger, the logic of brutality and greed are not the sole shape that relations between states can take. The invasion of Iraq confirmed a view of a world where disputes are settled with violence, where power decides against argument. In short, it represented the victory of unilateralism over something more democratic. Increases in terrorism and fundamentalism since the invasion are only a corollary to that logic.
Ignatieff has no compunction about the logic of force. In a stunning display in the NYT of his turn from soft liberalism to stark neoconservatism, American Empire (Get Used to It)[1], he had this to say on the invasion of Iraq:
“The choice is one between two evils, between containing and leaving a tyrant in place and the targeted use of force, which will kill people but free a nation from the tyrant’s grip.”
Such a statement discounts not only the lives lost, but the alternatives hidden between unchallenged tyranny and unilateral force.
Getting Iraq Wrong revisits the hubris supported so vehemently in the 2003 piece, but lacks the thrilled tone Ignatieff had for American resolve in January of 2003. The tone is softened with good reason. In the four and a half years since Ignatieff came out swinging, he has entered political life in Canada, only to see his leadership hopes haunted by the ghosts of his position on Iraq invasion. Some believe that the so-called admission of wrong-doing in the NYT may yet provide him with the clean slate needed to present himself in case an embattled Stéphane Dion cannot find firm footing in time for the next election, and is forced to resign.
Is he really cleaning slate? Here is what Ignatieff says he has learned from the transition to political life.
“An intellectual’s responsiblity 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.”
Which is an attempt to cleave the intellectual from the political and vice versa; a bit of parlour magic he would certainly like to perform on his own public life. Yet drawing such a divide seems disingenuous, and more, dangerous. During the Vietnam War, Kissinger counseled a policy of unremitting violence according to a logic of force he believed to be true; yet he also promoted a result in Vietnam, and Cambodia, that followed that logic. Ignatieff also promoted such a result.
Ignatieff was no ivory tower academic, no pince-nez prognosticator, before he entered political life. He was then, as he is now, a public figure. His opinion in January of 2003 was not only ‘theory’, tossed haphazardly into the intellectual fray to be debated further, but counsel to the people of a country already on the cusp of invasion, to march to the drum of war already beating from the White House.
Again, that march to war was not inevitable. Ignatieff knew he was providing counsel, which is why he then relied on the threat of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to bolster his claims, and now claims that it was only his own ‘self-justifying’ emotions, inspired by ire over what Hussein had done to Kurds, that truly spurred him to his decision. He knew his position, his words would contribute to the final decision to invade.
As a mea culpa, then, the piece falls short: errors may be intellectual but wrongs have consequences. Admitting one has been wrong is not the same as admitting one has done wrong. And dividing so starkly the public role of the intellectual from the public role of a politician means that Ignatieff dismisses the damage that he did while claiming that others – with charmed lives – helped him learn a lesson, without admitting that the lesson was learned at a cost he too must bear: 600 000 lives, and a world slightly more beholden to the power of the most expensive army.
Ignatieff suggests that having been given more power, he can now be trusted to make wiser decisions. The implication is that, given the leadership of the country, he can’t possibly get it wrong. What he has not done is what would take true resolve: seek forgiveness.
[1] There is a copy here, though its reliability is dubious.
Quite right Mr. McHugh-Russell.
Mr. Ignatieff hasn’t asked for forgiveness: he says merely that he was wrong, and not ‘I’ve done wrong,” he just forgives himself. When you have wronged someone, helping to cause a war that could have been prevented for example, you don’t just say ‘that was not right’. One must say “I have wronged you, please find it in your heart to forgive me.” Not realizing this difference is not sound judgment, and as it is from someone who has a history, as his article admits, of poor judgment, it is revealing.
The problem is, as you say, we cannot afford judgment so wrong, so often, to have great responsibility in our government.
He was not just beating the drums with Fox News and Dick Cheney, to drive the Americans to war on Iraq. The problem most specific with his herald of deadly folly is that he did so in a manner that blunted the only possible place an effective opposition to Bush’s Iraq War could have come from, liberal America.
Here in Canada we can “not participate” as Mr. Chretien declared to our universal relief, and we can protest in the street, but only Americans, who have, not just a right to democracy, but a responsibility to democracy, could have mounted an unpopular, but necessary, campaign against Bush’s deadly devastating hubris.
Because he wrote his most prominent call to war, in the ‘liberal’ New York Times Sunday Magazine, and as its cover story, and as a ‘reputed liberal’ – he sowed doubt among people who thought he was a fellow liberal thinker, a trusted member of the educated active (American) liberal community.
His arguments weighed on people who should have known better. Copies of this issue, this magazine were distributed in the corridors of Washington, people who could have stuck to their principles got convinced by his dry, muddled and obscuring polemic. America was not well served by his error in judgment, nor were the Iraqis, nor were , as he admits in this reflection his supposed clients, the Iraqi Kurds.
Why does someone who, despite overheated free front page support from the local press, can draw attention to himself, as he did in the last election, only through his errors; his lack of emotion for the refugee dead and then surprisingly his declaration mere days later of Israel’s “War crimes”, all for the same failed Lebanon war, why does he want to put himself where he will make more rash, deadly judgments.
Arrogance.
Thank you for putting his arrogant attempt to obscure his record in high relief, I assume as you say that he is attempting to make another try to take the Liberal Party of Canada leadership once the long knives have removed Mr. Dion. And then a short run to being a ‘trusted liberal’ Prime Minister.
In the last leadership convention, we were not surprised that there was not an inch of growth in his support on the floor during the convention. Contender after contender fell, and Mr. Ignatieff grew not at all. I hope this means liberal activists have recognized the Shakespearean flaws in this man. But we do well to be reminded now and not in a future contest when the stakes are higher.
Thank you for your timely essay.