Yet another article on Ignatieff. I thought Laxer was left wing but this simply ignores a lot of the features of Ignatieff's article. Apparently for Laxer the phony rhetoric about spreading democracy and human rights is OK. He has nothing critical to say on Ignatieff's position on the NATO mission in Kosovo. The articles by Mallick and Salutin are much more critical. Laxer seems to think that Ignatieff is a good guy and will be a great asset to Canadian politics now he has put Iraq behind him. Ugh!
Michael Ignatieff: Putting Iraq Behind Him
Canadian politicians are very mulish when it comes to admitting that they have ever been wrong about anything. That’s why when Michael Ignatieff proclaimed that he had been wrong about the invasion of Iraq, in an article in the New York Times Magazine, it mattered.
In his article, while Ignatieff says much and leaves much unsaid, he is clear in stating that his judgment had been wrong about the Iraq invasion.
Ignatieff attributes US failure in Iraq to the fact that it was a country “of which most Americans knew little”, and that those supporting the invasion were wrong in supposing that “a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror.” He adds that those such as himself who championed the US mission were wrong in believing that “because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq.” He says that people such as himself did not grapple sufficiently with the hard questions like: “Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror?” On the subject of leadership, he says this of George W. Bush: “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. 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.”
Ignatieff dismisses the warnings of those he says predicted catastrophe in Iraq in advance for ideological reasons, those he says are always disposed to think the Americans are in the wrong. It is not surprising that Ignatieff has little time for those who opposed him from the beginning on Iraq. He sees them as having been right, but for the wrong reasons.
What Ignatieff does not tell us in the article is whether he has re-thought his position on the American Empire in light of Iraq. This is no small matter. Ignatieff framed his support for the invasion of Iraq as a telling case in which the American Empire was needed to act on behalf of those who had nowhere else to turn if they desired human rights and the rule of law. “The case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike,” Ignatieff wrote in the New York Times Magazine in January 2003 two months before the invasion, noting that critics “have not factored in what tyranny or chaos can do to vital American interests.”
Has Ignatieff now changed his mind about the utility of empire, empire lite, the American Empire? He doesn’t tell us.
Perhaps we should not make too much of this. At length in the article, Ignatieff discusses the differences between a theorist on the one hand and a practicing politician on the other. He is at pains to tell us that while he was the former in the past, he is now the latter.
Throughout the course of Canadian history, ambiguity on the question of empire has been a hallmark of our most distinguished Liberal prime ministers.
Liberal prime ministers have always been well-disposed to the United States when they have come to office. But they have learned on the job how difficult the Canadian relationship with the empire can be.
Wilfrid Laurier received his education in office in the days when it was the British, not the Americans, who dominated our lives. Leading a country torn between pro-imperialists (mostly Anglo-Canadians) and anti-imperialists (mostly French Canadians), he once proclaimed: “I am neither imperialist, nor anti-imperialist. I am Canadian.”
When Lester Pearson came to office in 1963, he was regarded as a great friend of America, and was welcomed on board by President John F. Kennedy, who had detested Pearson’s Tory predecessor, John Diefenbaker. Pearson learned how short the leash for a Canadian prime minister can be when he was summoned to Camp David by JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was furious because Pearson had called on the White House, in a speech delivered in the US, to order a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam. At their meeting, Johnson seized Pearson by the lapels and pulled him to his feet. After leaving office, Pearson described his meeting with LBJ as “my trip to Berchdesgaden” (a reference to Hitler’s Bavarian retreat).
Today people forget that when Pierre Trudeau came to power, he was notably pro-American, once proclaiming that after he retired he might choose to live in New York. Trudeau abominated nationalism, not just Quebec nationalism, but Canadian nationalism as well. During his days at 24 Sussex Drive, Trudeau dealt with five US presidents, but his views of America were mostly shaped by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. When Nixon proclaimed his New Economic Policy in the summer of 1971, he delivered a severe blow to Canada. Trudeau learned the lesson that Canada ought to care about Canadian ownership of major economic sectors, particularly the energy sector. Nixon helped push Trudeau down the road to the creation of Petro-Canada as a publicly owned corporation, and later to launch the National Energy Program, whose central goal was fifty per cent Canadian ownership of the petroleum industry.
The members of the Reagan administration detested Trudeau, regarding him as an untrustworthy ally, who could not be brought into the loop on matters such as the US occupation of Grenada in 1983. The Reagan White House joined forces with the oil companies and the multinationals in their assault on Trudeau’s economic nationalism. By the time he left office, Trudeau was seen in Washington as an anti-American pinko.
If ambiguity on empire and learning on the job have turned up on the CVs of former Liberal prime ministers, including Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, what are we to make of Michael Ignatieff, who while not the leader is one of his party’s brightest lights?
Ignatieff returned to Canada to pursue the leadership of the Liberal Party with two strikes against him. The first, his decades-long absence from the country, is quickly fading with the passage of time. Ignatieff got himself elected to parliament, made a strong run for the leadership of his party and has performed effectively as the Liberals’ deputy leader. Those who thought he was just a Harvard intello have been proven wrong by Ignatieff’s stellar performance during Question Period. By far the most effective opposition politician in the House, Ignatieff has savaged the Tory front bench, regularly getting the better of Stephen Harper.
The second strike against Ignatieff was that he returned to Canada as an apologist for George W. Bush, and an advocate of empire and the invasion of Iraq. He appeared in the guise of a would-be Tony Blair. While Canadians have bred their own poodles for Reagan, Bush I and Bush II---their names are Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper---Liberal voters are not looking for a poodle.
For Ignatieff to realize his full potential in Canadian politics, he had to put his support for the invasion of Iraq behind him. He has now done that.
And although he voted in the House of Commons to extend the Canadian mission in Afghanistan to February 2009, he has become one of the most effective critics of the shortcomings of the mission.
Ignatieff’s major impact on our politics to date has been to force federal politicians to recognize Quebec as a nation within Canada---a step long overdue.
He has now cleared the debris aside so he can demonstrate just how much political talent he has.
posted by James Laxer
Showing posts with label Iraq war support. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq war support. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Two articles on Ignatieff's "apology" for supporting Iraq war.
I doubt that Ignatieff's essay is worth all this spilled ink but both articles point out the obvious flaws and ludicrous aspects to Ignatieff's sort of taking back his support for the Iraq war, while retaining all the assumptions that led to his "mistake" in the first place.
How Michael Ignatieff put the 'I' in Iraq
On Michael Ignatieff's Times essay
>by Heather Mallick
August 13, 2007
My heart aches, and a nizzy dumbness—um, make that drowsy numbness—pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk ...
What? Sorry, I just read Michael Ignatieff's “Getting Iraq Wrong” thingy that ran in last week's New York Times Magazine, and my brain's as dizzy as Alberto Gonzales' fuzzy thinker in that ball thing on top of his neck. Gonzalez enters a fugue state whenever he testifies before a Senate committee, failing to recollect every meeting he ever attended if in fact he was there. The Onion has suggested that Gonzalez is not in fact the Attorney-General. He is a pool salesman from Tucson, Ariz., and he's got to get back there before the in-ground pool season ends, because that's where you get the big commissions. It's plausible.
That's how disoriented I am. I'm Cabana Al. Ignatieff's essay is so full of egotistical self-regard that I can practically see the buttons coming off his dress shirt as he typed it.
Writing a wrong
It starts with the headline, which I do understand is written not by him but by an editor (same thing happens here), but still. The headline should read “I was wrong about Iraq.” Instead, it is written in a tense almost as passive as the classic “Mistakes were made,” which is the one the Republicans use.
The headline begins with a gerund, “Getting Iraq Wrong,” as in “Leaving Las Vegas.” At least Nicolas Cage did in fact leave Las Vegas, by dying there. But Ignatieff does not really admit that he “got” Iraq wrong. Instead he attacks academics who predicted that the Iraqi invasion would be a disaster. They were right, Ignatieff says, but their rightness was based on ideology. Which is worse that rightness based on nobility, like Ignatieff's.
The really correct people were those who predicted a disaster but realized that George W. Bush had pure motives. “They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq's fissured sectarian history.”
Mike? Everyone I respect thought Bush's famously “sexed-up” case for war was as packed with lies as the Tonkin Gulf Incident that led to an overwhelming vote for a full-out American war in Vietnam.
Not a cakewalk
When Colin Powell started talking about “yellowcake” in Iraq, I laughed out loud. Britain had already had a Cake hoax. In 1997, a terrible new drug called Cake was killing Britain's young people. You could make it in your own kitchen! The deaths of these deluded kids looking for a high were tragic and hideous. One poor girl threw up her own pelvis bone, a roped-in celebrity said on TV as he begged British youngsters to say no to Cake. If people give you Cake, “chuck it back in their face and tell them to F@#K OFF!” brayed comedian Bernard Manning.
As it turned out, satirist Chris Morris had made up the whole thing for his show Brass Eye. There was no such drug. No more bandwagons, please, he was saying. But Ignatieff joined the neocon bandwagon. And he had lived in Britain during the Cake campaign. Then again, he does seem to be entirely without humour.
Now he wants off, but only while mocking liberals for being smart and right from the start. He says their motives were practical, while his motive was admiration for the Iraqi Kurds who had been decimated by Saddam Hussein.
So Mike's a Kurdite. But I'm a Marshist. I yield to no one in my admiration for the Marsh Arabs. This noble isolated people lived in the original Garden of Eden, the marshes between the Tigris and the Euphrates drained and burned by Saddam. (Read Gavin Young's Return to the Marshes, for their history). That said, I still thought the invasion was wrong.
A matter of mistakes
Ignatieff says mistakes only matter to politicians, not academics. But if you backed a disastrously inept politician like Bush, you're still partly responsible for the destruction of the Iraqi nation, the hot new torture wave, a trillion dollars wasted and a massive rotting pile of severed limbs and eyeballs that cartoonishly sums up the grotesquerie of human wishes.
Ignatieff is claiming pure motives. Sure, if naivete is pure, he's pure as hand-churned butter. But I can't figure out how such an intellectual squirmer, pretending to confess to error while defending same, came close to winning the Liberal leadership.
As for the matter of Ignatieff baring his shallow soul in the New York Times rather than a Canadian publication, it is strange how much he still clearly grovels for respect from American power. But all this makes him is Brian Mulroney reborn, a stage struck politician for whom Canada is not really the desired audience.
But my sympathy then disappears. For Ignatieff actually wrote this. “As a former denizen of Harvard, I've had to learn that a sense of reality doesn't always flourish in elite institutions. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what's what than Nobel Prize winners.”
What a patronizing yet groveling Uriah Heep-ish remark. It translates as, “Not everyone at Harvard is as smart as me. Even a prole can figure things out better than my dumb rivals.” The prole and his offspring, of course, are the ones most likely to be sent to fight in Iraq.
He goes on. “The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn.” I think this means he is going to take the bus from now on and learn from the homespun wisdom of the yokel at the wheel. He's going to have to if he ever wants to run Canada. Which is why it won't happen. There was a time when Ignatieff was deeply interested in his fellow humans. You can read it in his earlier, admirable books, which remain in my living room, not exiled to the basement with Amis the Younger and the other mediocre stuff.
But there aren't even many humans quoted in his essay, and no Iraqi place names beyond Abu Ghraib. His nouns are all of the statesmen/wisdom/politician/paradigmatic/benchmarks kind. I can't claim to speak for eyeless orphans in Fallujah or even a criminally undereducated American soldier who now realizes he was sent over as bomb fodder to protect Big Oil. I can't even boast of being right about Iraq from the beginning. It actually depressed the hell out of me. And no opinionated person ever changed a reader's mind.
But I know smug when I see it. Ignatieff's piece is not a retraction. It's a theoretical, hedged amplification of a justification.
And the second article:
Feeling icky about Iggy
>by Rick Salutin
August 10, 2007
For a moment last Sunday, as I opened Michael Ignatieff's alleged mea culpa—Getting Iraq Wrong—in The New York Times Magazine (heralded in advance by The Globe and Mail and lauded by the Times's resident war critic, Frank Rich), I thought he might have learned something. Then I read his piece.
“One thing is clear: The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis.” How obscene. It is Iraq that was shattered. There are two million internal and two million external refugees. Everyone has weapons. No one has dependable power and thus clean water except the occupiers in the increasingly targeted Green Zone. The people of Iraq bore the cost of the U.S. going in and staying, and they will bear the cost when and if it leaves. All U.S. losses are collateral damage.
Or this: The war's opponents “opposed the invasion because they believed ... America is always and in every situation wrong.” Exactly who said that, Michael? Could we have a name? It's a cheap straw man, that's all, to go along with platitudes such as, “Not all good things, after all, can be had together, whether in life or in politics.”
What was the error of the war's backers? That they took “wishes for reality” and supposed, “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.” What motives? To build “a free state” in Iraq, defend “human rights and freedom,” etc.
In other words, he accepts at face value all the rhetoric and propaganda used to justify the invasion. In other other words, there were no lies told. That's the stunning moment in his article. We are to believe that governments do not routinely lie about their motives, yet he himself writes in this very piece: “In public life, language is a weapon of war ... All that matters is what you said, not what you meant.” So we're supposed to believe George Bush did say what he meant? Let me catch my breath.
(There.) I admit I feel a bit icky attacking someone while he's trying to apologize, but I'm forcing myself because I think there's a larger issue here. I consider this article part of an effort to salvage a carefully constructed policy of Western interventionism in much of the world that has recently been sullied by the Iraq fiasco.
The policy itself remains. Tony Blair retires as British PM and morphs into a Mideast peace envoy, as if what that wretched region needs is yet more Western meddling. Gordon Brown takes over from him and prepares to depart Iraq but move even more heavily into Afghanistan, which gets typed as the good war, as opposed to the bad one in Iraq. The U.S. Democratic presidential candidates are all interventionists on this model. Yves Engler has presciently noted Canada's modest role in the pattern by policing Haiti, a tragic land that has suffered two centuries of near constant intervention.
The arguments for this course of action were built up by, among others, Michael Ignatieff, during the 1990s, when anti-communism was no longer available to justify Western foreign policy. The new rationales were human rights, failed states, right to protect, etc.
The showcases were Bosnia and Kosovo (though ethnic cleansing in Kosovo occurred after, and due to, the NATO bombing there), which led to Iraq and Afghanistan. It amounts to the same old world order of power politics, in a new dress. The only nations that claim the right to protect are those with the might to protect. The issue not addressed is whether foreign interventionism itself is a problem, complicit in many problems that “we” must then intervene in order to contain.
These policies have helped bring us to a point where almost everyone in the world is irate, terrified or both. It's time for a big rethink. That involves more than saying Oops about the isolated case of Iraq.
Originally published in The Globe and Mail, Rick Salutin's column appears every Friday
How Michael Ignatieff put the 'I' in Iraq
On Michael Ignatieff's Times essay
>by Heather Mallick
August 13, 2007
My heart aches, and a nizzy dumbness—um, make that drowsy numbness—pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk ...
What? Sorry, I just read Michael Ignatieff's “Getting Iraq Wrong” thingy that ran in last week's New York Times Magazine, and my brain's as dizzy as Alberto Gonzales' fuzzy thinker in that ball thing on top of his neck. Gonzalez enters a fugue state whenever he testifies before a Senate committee, failing to recollect every meeting he ever attended if in fact he was there. The Onion has suggested that Gonzalez is not in fact the Attorney-General. He is a pool salesman from Tucson, Ariz., and he's got to get back there before the in-ground pool season ends, because that's where you get the big commissions. It's plausible.
That's how disoriented I am. I'm Cabana Al. Ignatieff's essay is so full of egotistical self-regard that I can practically see the buttons coming off his dress shirt as he typed it.
Writing a wrong
It starts with the headline, which I do understand is written not by him but by an editor (same thing happens here), but still. The headline should read “I was wrong about Iraq.” Instead, it is written in a tense almost as passive as the classic “Mistakes were made,” which is the one the Republicans use.
The headline begins with a gerund, “Getting Iraq Wrong,” as in “Leaving Las Vegas.” At least Nicolas Cage did in fact leave Las Vegas, by dying there. But Ignatieff does not really admit that he “got” Iraq wrong. Instead he attacks academics who predicted that the Iraqi invasion would be a disaster. They were right, Ignatieff says, but their rightness was based on ideology. Which is worse that rightness based on nobility, like Ignatieff's.
The really correct people were those who predicted a disaster but realized that George W. Bush had pure motives. “They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq's fissured sectarian history.”
Mike? Everyone I respect thought Bush's famously “sexed-up” case for war was as packed with lies as the Tonkin Gulf Incident that led to an overwhelming vote for a full-out American war in Vietnam.
Not a cakewalk
When Colin Powell started talking about “yellowcake” in Iraq, I laughed out loud. Britain had already had a Cake hoax. In 1997, a terrible new drug called Cake was killing Britain's young people. You could make it in your own kitchen! The deaths of these deluded kids looking for a high were tragic and hideous. One poor girl threw up her own pelvis bone, a roped-in celebrity said on TV as he begged British youngsters to say no to Cake. If people give you Cake, “chuck it back in their face and tell them to F@#K OFF!” brayed comedian Bernard Manning.
As it turned out, satirist Chris Morris had made up the whole thing for his show Brass Eye. There was no such drug. No more bandwagons, please, he was saying. But Ignatieff joined the neocon bandwagon. And he had lived in Britain during the Cake campaign. Then again, he does seem to be entirely without humour.
Now he wants off, but only while mocking liberals for being smart and right from the start. He says their motives were practical, while his motive was admiration for the Iraqi Kurds who had been decimated by Saddam Hussein.
So Mike's a Kurdite. But I'm a Marshist. I yield to no one in my admiration for the Marsh Arabs. This noble isolated people lived in the original Garden of Eden, the marshes between the Tigris and the Euphrates drained and burned by Saddam. (Read Gavin Young's Return to the Marshes, for their history). That said, I still thought the invasion was wrong.
A matter of mistakes
Ignatieff says mistakes only matter to politicians, not academics. But if you backed a disastrously inept politician like Bush, you're still partly responsible for the destruction of the Iraqi nation, the hot new torture wave, a trillion dollars wasted and a massive rotting pile of severed limbs and eyeballs that cartoonishly sums up the grotesquerie of human wishes.
Ignatieff is claiming pure motives. Sure, if naivete is pure, he's pure as hand-churned butter. But I can't figure out how such an intellectual squirmer, pretending to confess to error while defending same, came close to winning the Liberal leadership.
As for the matter of Ignatieff baring his shallow soul in the New York Times rather than a Canadian publication, it is strange how much he still clearly grovels for respect from American power. But all this makes him is Brian Mulroney reborn, a stage struck politician for whom Canada is not really the desired audience.
But my sympathy then disappears. For Ignatieff actually wrote this. “As a former denizen of Harvard, I've had to learn that a sense of reality doesn't always flourish in elite institutions. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what's what than Nobel Prize winners.”
What a patronizing yet groveling Uriah Heep-ish remark. It translates as, “Not everyone at Harvard is as smart as me. Even a prole can figure things out better than my dumb rivals.” The prole and his offspring, of course, are the ones most likely to be sent to fight in Iraq.
He goes on. “The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn.” I think this means he is going to take the bus from now on and learn from the homespun wisdom of the yokel at the wheel. He's going to have to if he ever wants to run Canada. Which is why it won't happen. There was a time when Ignatieff was deeply interested in his fellow humans. You can read it in his earlier, admirable books, which remain in my living room, not exiled to the basement with Amis the Younger and the other mediocre stuff.
But there aren't even many humans quoted in his essay, and no Iraqi place names beyond Abu Ghraib. His nouns are all of the statesmen/wisdom/politician/paradigmatic/benchmarks kind. I can't claim to speak for eyeless orphans in Fallujah or even a criminally undereducated American soldier who now realizes he was sent over as bomb fodder to protect Big Oil. I can't even boast of being right about Iraq from the beginning. It actually depressed the hell out of me. And no opinionated person ever changed a reader's mind.
But I know smug when I see it. Ignatieff's piece is not a retraction. It's a theoretical, hedged amplification of a justification.
And the second article:
Feeling icky about Iggy
>by Rick Salutin
August 10, 2007
For a moment last Sunday, as I opened Michael Ignatieff's alleged mea culpa—Getting Iraq Wrong—in The New York Times Magazine (heralded in advance by The Globe and Mail and lauded by the Times's resident war critic, Frank Rich), I thought he might have learned something. Then I read his piece.
“One thing is clear: The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis.” How obscene. It is Iraq that was shattered. There are two million internal and two million external refugees. Everyone has weapons. No one has dependable power and thus clean water except the occupiers in the increasingly targeted Green Zone. The people of Iraq bore the cost of the U.S. going in and staying, and they will bear the cost when and if it leaves. All U.S. losses are collateral damage.
Or this: The war's opponents “opposed the invasion because they believed ... America is always and in every situation wrong.” Exactly who said that, Michael? Could we have a name? It's a cheap straw man, that's all, to go along with platitudes such as, “Not all good things, after all, can be had together, whether in life or in politics.”
What was the error of the war's backers? That they took “wishes for reality” and supposed, “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.” What motives? To build “a free state” in Iraq, defend “human rights and freedom,” etc.
In other words, he accepts at face value all the rhetoric and propaganda used to justify the invasion. In other other words, there were no lies told. That's the stunning moment in his article. We are to believe that governments do not routinely lie about their motives, yet he himself writes in this very piece: “In public life, language is a weapon of war ... All that matters is what you said, not what you meant.” So we're supposed to believe George Bush did say what he meant? Let me catch my breath.
(There.) I admit I feel a bit icky attacking someone while he's trying to apologize, but I'm forcing myself because I think there's a larger issue here. I consider this article part of an effort to salvage a carefully constructed policy of Western interventionism in much of the world that has recently been sullied by the Iraq fiasco.
The policy itself remains. Tony Blair retires as British PM and morphs into a Mideast peace envoy, as if what that wretched region needs is yet more Western meddling. Gordon Brown takes over from him and prepares to depart Iraq but move even more heavily into Afghanistan, which gets typed as the good war, as opposed to the bad one in Iraq. The U.S. Democratic presidential candidates are all interventionists on this model. Yves Engler has presciently noted Canada's modest role in the pattern by policing Haiti, a tragic land that has suffered two centuries of near constant intervention.
The arguments for this course of action were built up by, among others, Michael Ignatieff, during the 1990s, when anti-communism was no longer available to justify Western foreign policy. The new rationales were human rights, failed states, right to protect, etc.
The showcases were Bosnia and Kosovo (though ethnic cleansing in Kosovo occurred after, and due to, the NATO bombing there), which led to Iraq and Afghanistan. It amounts to the same old world order of power politics, in a new dress. The only nations that claim the right to protect are those with the might to protect. The issue not addressed is whether foreign interventionism itself is a problem, complicit in many problems that “we” must then intervene in order to contain.
These policies have helped bring us to a point where almost everyone in the world is irate, terrified or both. It's time for a big rethink. That involves more than saying Oops about the isolated case of Iraq.
Originally published in The Globe and Mail, Rick Salutin's column appears every Friday
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