Michael Ignatieff is the latest to "come clean" about his conflicted emotions regarding the fiasco he supported in Iraq. Writing in this Sunday's NYT Magazine, http://www.nytimes.com/... Ignatieff presents yet another of what have become tiresome, soul-searching masturbatory rites of passage for the war's enablers.
"Getting Iraq Wrong" begins paragraphs with such tripe as "As a former denizen of Harvard..." and describes what Ignatieff envisions as the difference between judgment as exercised by politicians and as exercised by academics. The article meanders around aimlessly for nearly one-third its length, then somehow manages to include the obligatory potshot against the left:
"...Many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did not do so by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the President because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong."
(more over the fold)
Frankly, this is scurrilous horseshit. It doesn't take an ideological position to recognize you're being lied to. All it takes it a little common sense, common knowledge and applied reasoning.
Yet, for Ignatieff, apparently, opposition to the war based on the logical deduction that its rationale ultimately lay in the desire to control Iraq's oil is a matter of "ideology." Nor does he provide any proof or evidence (they never do, do they?) that the millions of people who initially opposed the fiasco believed America to be "always and in every situation wrong." Those people are a useful invention in your mind, Mr. Ignatieff. They do not exist.
No, Mr. Ignatieff, it's not a matter of ideology. It's a matter of common sense, a.k.a, good judgment. It's a matter of integrity. It's a matter of acutely observing that the other possible rationales for the war are deliberate, and utterly implausible, fictions.
"Good judgment in politics, depends on being a critical judge of yourself."
You sure got that right, Michael. Because in your case it wasn't poor judgment. It wasn't that you "labored...with the same faulty intelligece and lack of knowledge of Iraq's fissured sectarian history." As "a former denizen of Harvard," you knew the history. You knew you were being lied to by the Administration. You knew that the war was unnecessary. The real question is why you went along with it. And that's what makes me just a little bit sick. That's what makes me queasy when I read these apologia by the so-called misled. I don't think you were misled at all. I think deep down you just kind of liked the idea of bloodshed when you found the ends appropriate, and you didn't care whether the means was based on lies. I think you kind of got off on all the recklessness and malice of it all, and you thought that no one would be here to collect the bill from you. And now that you blew it for all to see, it galls you to admit it. Rather, it becomes an intellectual exercise of "trying to understand":
"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."
It took you a botched war to come to the realization that good judgment is "knowing when to admit your mistakes?" Somehow you missed this concept growing up as a child? They didn't cover this at Harvard?
I think that what you really can't bear is not that someone can question your judgment, but that someone can honestly conclude that you just didn't care whether the means justified the ends. Because ultimately, Michael, you're too smart for your own argument to apply.