Ignatieff's about-face
Robert Sibley, The Ottawa Citizen[/b]
Published: Sunday, August 12, 2007
Michael Ignatieff wrote a high-profile admission in The New York Times Magazine last week that he was wrong to support the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Citizen writer Robert Sibley examines the deputy Liberal leader's mea culpa and concludes it demonstrates a lack of the political judgment Mr. Ignatieff now claims to have acquired since he entered the political arena
Politics takes courage. Those who enter the public arena cannot help but reveal who they really are, good and bad, to the judgment of strangers. This exposure comes at a cost, psychological, moral and even physical. Political leaders literally age before your eyes during their time in office -- think of Tony Blair and George W. Bush, or Brian Mulroney and Paul Martin -- as the demands of politics drain their vitality.
Nevertheless, there's no need to feel sorry for politicians. The perks of office -- power, glory, recognition and, sometimes, historical immortality -- provide compensation. Besides, they entered the arena of their own free will. There's always the kitchen door if they can't take the heat.
Perhaps it is this double-edged dimension of politics that makes Michael Ignatieff's recent admission that he was wrong to support the American-led invasion of Iraq both laudable and, at the same time, disturbing. The deputy Liberal leader last week explained his mea culpa with an essay in The New York Times Magazine titled "Getting Iraq Wrong: What the War has Taught Me About Political Judgment." Politicians are loath to admit mistakes, so it was a courageous act on Mr. Ignatieff's part. Not only does he risk criticism from those who, recalling his previous support for the war, will question the motives for his confession, but he also opens himself to the mockery of those (Liberal party members, perchance) who'll say, sorry, too little, too late.
Moreover, after parsing the essay, it's hard not to conclude that maybe the former Liberal leadership candidate is ill-suited to politics (or politics is ill-suited to him), and perhaps he should return to academe and journalism.
"The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq condemned the political judgment of a president," Mr. Ignatieff writes. "But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. ... 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 have to assume Mr. Ignatieff is sincere in his soul-searching, so I won't speculate about any connection between the mea culpa and his political ambitions. Of greater concern is Mr. Ignatieff's assertion that the situation in Iraq is a "debacle," and that he would not have supported the invasion if he'd known then what he knows now.
The statement is problematic, both intellectually and morally. Admittedly, the situation in Iraq is not good, but to describe it as a "debacle" is questionable for the simple reason that Iraq's future is still undecided. Someone of Mr. Ignatieff's intellectual acumen and experience knows better (or should) than to pronounce it's all over before it's all over, particularly when he offers no evidence or argument to justify his claim.
And that, of course, raises the notion that Mr. Ignatieff's mea culpa demonstrates the opposite of what he claims to have acquired since entering the political arena -- political judgment.
Mr. Ignatieff's retraction adds him to the lengthening list of intellectuals, commentators and analysts -- including, among others, Richard Perle, David Frum, Kenneth Adelman, Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin and Ralph Peters -- who have withdrawn or qualified their support for the Bush administration and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Perhaps the best-known member of this group is Francis Fukuyama, author of the famous 1989 essay "The End of History?" which claimed that with the collapse of communism the liberal democracies of the West had achieved mankind's final political development. Mr. Fukuyama was a staunch advocate of military intervention in Iraq before 2003. But in 2006, he publicly declared the invasion a foolish mistake. He said his retraction was not "a cowardly retreat or an apologia, but a realistic, intellectually honest willingness to face the new facts of the situation."
At the same time, though, Mr. Fukuyama insisted "no one should be required to apologize for having supported intervention in Iraq before the war" when most every intelligence agency was convinced Saddam Hussein had or was developing weapons of mass destruction. There was also the moral argument for war: Mr. Saddam was killing his own people and, as the United Nations declared in 1999, other nations "are complicit in human rights abuses if they don't use their power to correct injustices."
Mr. Fukuyama thus concludes: "The debate over the war should not have been whether it was morally right to topple Hussein (which it clearly was), but whether it was prudent to do so given the possible costs and potential consequences of intervention and whether it was legitimate for the U.S. to invade in the unilateral way it did."
Whether you agree or not with Mr. Fukuyama's argument, he at least offers one. Mr. Ignatieff shows no such willingness. He never actually says in any detail why he thinks the Iraq invasion was a mistake, beyond accusing President George W. Bush of not knowing what he was doing.
Indeed, Mr. Ignatieff is more concerned that he, Michael Ignatieff, got it wrong. Where Mr. Fukuyama offers substantive arguments to explain his withdrawal of support for the war, Mr. Ignatieff invites the reader to feel his pain at being wrong, and to share his sense of closure, as it were, at having learned a hard lesson. In short, it's all about him.
Consider these statements: "I've learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes," or "I've learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life."
Elsewhere, he alternates between complaining about how hurtful politics can be -- "The slightest crack in your armour ... can be pried open and the knife driven home" -- and reworking Machiavelli -- "Politicians have to learn to appear invulnerable without appearing inhuman."
Mr. Ignatieff spent much of his academic and journalistic career writing about politics. He demonstrated considerable courage travelling to war zones to see first-hand what happens when politics fails. Yet he frets about a rhetorical knife in the ribs?
This is strange stuff from a man of Mr. Ignatieff's experience. Some statements -- "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," for example -- are little more than sophomoric homilies, and surprisingly naïve.
But Mr. Ignatieff's most disturbing statement -- and one of the few directly related to his claim that Iraq is a "debacle" -- is his explanation that he was effectively lured into supporting the war because of his first-hand knowledge of Mr. Saddam's murderous regime. "I went to 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 had held together in terror?"
Political judgment, Mr. Ignatieff says, requires that personal experience and emotion be tested against reasoned cross-examination and rational argument in making decisions that affect the lives of others. True enough, but does he realize the implications of stripping personal experience and emotions from political decision-making, of subordinating political judgment to some supposedly rational cost-benefit analysis? If ridding the world of Saddam Hussein by force of arms was wrong (and not just a case of bungling by the Bush administration), does Mr. Ignatieff now think it would have been morally acceptable to have left the Kurds and the Shiites and, who knows, maybe the Kuwaitis and the Saudis, to Mr. Saddam's dictates? If "humanitarian imperialism" has proven too costly in Iraq, then maybe it's better to stay out of Darfur, Rwanda and Zimbabwe since intervening in those places could prove costly. Does Mr. Ignatieff the politician now advocate inaction as prudent foreign policy?
That would be a far cry from what Mr. Ignatieff the academic advocated in The New York Times Magazine in March 2003, only a short time before the war began. "I still think the president (George Bush) is right when he says that Iraq and the world will be better off with Saddam disarmed, even, if necessary, through force."
Mr. Ignatieff's newly acquired political judgment appears to have prompted him to abandon principles he once thought worth the fight.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson has written scathingly about the fair-weather warriors who have "lost heart" about Iraq. Those who retract their support for the war do so not because they genuinely think the war was wrong in principle, he argues, but for the selfish reason that it hasn't gone as they hoped and, well, it's intellectually embarrassing to be wrong.
However, Mr. Hanson points out that some of the war's staunchest critics now acknowledge the military situation in Iraq has improved in recent months. He cites Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, two widely respected Middle East authorities with the Brookings Institution. "We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms," they wrote recently in The New York Times. "As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily 'victory' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with."
They are not alone in this view. In mid-July, the United States Congress received an intelligence assessment that suggests the American military is starting to gain the upper hand on the terrorists thanks to the troop surge, better strategic thinking and improvements in the Iraqi army's capacities. Even The New York Times, which has long opposed the war, acknowledges the surge has "markedly improved security in Iraq."
"Americans' problem with the war is not that it is not moral, but that it has been deemed too costly for the perceived benefits that might accrue," Mr. Hanson concludes. "Many of those who now most shrilly condemn the war had in fact years ago rattled their sabres for 'moral' wars to eliminate dictators."
Mr. Ignatieff was one of those sabre rattlers, arguing in the Times not only in favour of invading Iraq, but for "humanitarian imperialism" -- empire-lite, as he called it -- as the best means for the West to deal with failed states.
In January 2003, for example, Mr. Ignatieff, who was then Carr professor of human rights at Harvard University, published a morally persuasive argument for invading Iraq, criticizing leftists and human-rights groups for failing to back their principles with action. "Certainly the British and the American governments maintained a complicit and dishonourable silence when Saddam gassed the Kurds in 1988. Yet now that the two governments are taking decisive action, human-rights groups seem more outraged by the prospect of action than they are by the abuses they once denounced ...
"The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions -- and Iraq may be one of them -- when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror. This does not mean the choice is morally unproblematic. 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.
"The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike."
Mr. Ignatieff concluded that the United States had to be prepared for a multi-generational occupation of Iraq. "If America takes on Iraq, it takes on the reordering of the whole region. It will have to stick at it through many successive administrations."
Four years later, it seems Mr. Ignatieff no longer abides by his own reasoned judgment.
And that raises the key question that Mr. Ignatieff's mea culpa doesn't raise: If it was wrong to support a military invasion to rid Iraq of a brutal tyrant, what would have been the right thing to do? The closest approach Mr. Ignatieff makes to this question is a comment that the Americans will soon have to decide whether to stay in or leave Iraq.
"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."
Perhaps so, but what does Mr. Ignatieff think should be done? As an academic, he did not shrink from confronting such questions. But now, while he might claim that those with political judgment don't shy away from making decisions, Mr. Ignatieff the politician judges it prudent to pass the buck.
Mr. Ignatieff says he wrote the essay to explain his makeover from intellectual to politician. "Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea," he says. "In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way."
This is a puzzling claim for someone who spent years teaching political philosophy. Certainly intellectuals can be unrealistic about the world. But a politician who forsakes theoretical considerations in his decision-making reduces politics to little more than a power play. Politics has to be informed by theory lest it become willful self-assertion.
Thus, Mr. Ignatieff's theory-gets-in-the-way attitude ignores reality. It was the theories of a handful of intellectuals that shaped and defined the Bush administration's decision to go to war. As political scientist Andrew Flibbert observes, "The war occurred because powerful actors were persuaded by the logic of a specific set of ideas, which deemed war a necessary and appropriate response to the attacks of Sept. 11." Contrary to Mr. Ignatieff's newfound political wisdom, theory shows the way (for good or ill).
Mr. Ignatieff might think he's acquired greater political judgment since leaving the academic world, but he seems to have forsaken some philosophic wisdom along the way, particularly Aristotle's teaching in the Nicomachean Ethics that practical judgment -- phronesis, or prudence, in the Greek -- refers to the capacity to judge and make worthy decisions even in the absence of principles, practices or doctrines that can help you find the right answer.
In a speech in June 2005, after he'd announced his intentions to enter Canadian politics, Mr. Ignatieff took a defiant tone toward those who would challenge him. "Politics is not just about making friends, it is also about defeating enemies. We measure our greatness in politicians not just by the number of their friends, but by the quality of their enemies, by the types of interests they are prepared to buck, in the name of the public interest." Judging by Mr. Ignatieff's missive last week, he's no longer interested in defeating enemies, much less confronting tough questions.
If that's what he has learned about political judgment, then a remark by political philosopher Leon Craig when Mr. Ignatieff returned to Canada to enter politics has proven prescient: "The great danger for him is becoming what he despises."
Robert Sibley is a senior writer for the Citizen.
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Books and articles consulted for this essay include:
Andrew Flibbert, "The Road to Baghdad: Ideas and Intellectuals in Explanations of the Iraq War," Security Studies, July 26, 2006.
Francis Fukuyama, "Surely it's OK to change my mind," The Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2006.
Michael Ignatieff, "Getting Iraq Wrong: What the War has Taught Me About Political Judgment," The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 5, 2007. Other essays by Mr. Ignatieff that have appeared in the magazine include: "Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom is Theirs to Spread?," June 26, 2005; "The Uncommitted," Jan. 30, 2005; "Why Are We in Iraq? (And Liberia? And Afghanistan?)," Sept. 7, 2003; "I am Iraq," March 23, 2003; "The American Empire: The Burden," Jan. 5, 2003.
Victor Davis Hanson, "Surging Politics: Winners take all. Do antiwar politicians frequently proclaim our defeat in Iraq -- or instead worry that the war might be won?" National Review, Aug. 9, 2007, and "The assumptions of a forgetful chattering class are badly off the mark," National Review, Nov. 8, 2006.
Tony Keller, "Liberalism's fresh face," National Post, April 5, 2005.
David Rose, "Neo Culpa," Vanity Fair, Nov. 3, 2006. This article contains excerpts from various commentators explaining their withdrawal of support for the Bush administration.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007