Ignatieff: Ideology, Intelligence, Inspiration

It's a bit late in the day, but as I've taken my blog title from David Rees' post I thought I'd say a few words of my own on Ignatieff's Mea Culpa. Lots of people have pointed out that his essay is pretentious and self-serving. I think that it is also worth pointing out that whenever Ignatieff attempts to exonerate himself or point to mitigating factors he invariably shows up the shallowness of his judgement. So:

We might test judgment by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

So, Ignatieff concedes, I was wrong, but so in a sense were many of those who opposed the war because they did so for the wrong reasons. Quite apart from the gracelessness of this objection - they were, after all right and Ignatieff was wrong, this is devastatingly hypocritical. Ignatieff indulged in ideology as much as the Socialist Worker's Party did. The ideology in question was one of liberal interventionism, born out of the failure of the west in Bosnia and Rwanda, a dream in which democracy, human rights and the free market would be defended and extended by western power. 'Empire Lite' to cite the title of one of Ignatieff's books. It all seems rather remote now, but that was the oft trumpted claim and how hollow it now sounds.

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, 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. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.

If one is going to invade and occupy a country shouldn't one take steps to acquire this knowledge? It was hardly a well guarded secret that there were both Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq and that these two groups don't exactly see eye to eye on stuff. Nor did one have to be Talleyrand to work out that the claims about Massive Weapons of Destruction were bogus. It's well known that for various complicated reasons the Middle East is not a part of the world one naturally associates with democracy. All one really needed was not to get caught up in the euphoria of the moment.

I made some of these mistakes and then a few of my own. The lesson I draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my emotions.

One would have to have a heart of stone not to sympathise with Iraqi exiles, but it is well known that exiles are hardly the surest guide as to what is going on in the mother country. Kanan Makiya is said to have told an audience that if there was a one in ten chance of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and replacing him with a democracy it should be taken. One in ten. Effectively Makiya was claiming that the west had a moral duty of going to war even if the chances of failure were ninety percent. This is risible. One can hardly blame Makiya for desperation. It is difficult to imagine what it must be like to have ones country ruled by a murderous sadist. But, desperate though things were one really needs decent odds of achieving ones aims before going to war.

No amount of sprinkling quotations around, no special pleading about how others were only right because of ideology, no whinging about being misled by Iraqi exiles, or lack of information about the country can really obscure the fact that Ignatieff got the question of the Iraq war horribly wrong. Through vanity and naivety his 'exercising judgement' counted for less than the 'ideology' of an undergraduate with a set of vulgar Marxist prejudices and the editorials of Socialist Worker as a guide.