All eyes on Ignatieff

[a_majoor]

That doesn’t mean that Ignatieff is ‘right’ – I, personally, find him too vague on too many important issues and too busy trying to appeal to the Liberal-left because that is the natural constituency of his main rival: Bob Rae.  Maybe Dion will come up through the middle, between the two front runners.

(No. NO! Not Celine! The other Dion.  <makes cross with fingers, to ward off the undead>)

I think I would rather vote for Celine myself. The opening of Parliament would be worth seeing for the show alone.....

 

[a_majoor]

Since Celine Dione is not available for the opening of Parliament, we have to go back and look at the potential results of the good Dr's plan for Canada (sigh)

How about:

http://www.dustmybroom.com/?p=4483

Opening up a big can of smoke
The Manitoba government has stated they will abide by but also appeal a court ruling that states that anti-smoking laws should apply to First Nations reserves. Confused? Check this:

Meanwhile, the province is appealing the legal basis of the ruling, fearing the idea that everyone must be treated equally under the law could threaten employment equity measures and programs that offer special incentives to aboriginals, farmers or any specific group. (CBC)

It is about time we get everything out on the table.

Ignatieff's plan to recognize every group, province and wannabe as a "nation" (http://dissonanceanddisrespect.blogspot.com/2006/09/iggys-master-plan.html) certainly contradicts the idea of "equality before the law", and by implicitly advocating competing polities in the same geographical jurisdiction, he certainly blurs the very concept of legal jurisdiction. I'm not a Harvard scholar, but it seems pretty clear to me.

 

[TCBF]

It's the liberal/progressive long term plan for The Balkanization of Canada.  Toronto will be a province. All of Ontario north of the riverline Mattawa/French River will become an aboriginally administered area, as will most of Manitoba and Saskatchewan north of the N Sask/Sask Rivers, Alberta North of the N Sask and all of BC east of the continental divide.  Canada will also turn most of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago over to the UN to be administered as a nature preserve for the good of the planet.

Canada will also fund our Kyoto Carbon Credits by allowing Sri Lanka to lease Newfoundland as a colony.

Red China gets to rent Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlottes.

 

[Edward Campbell]

What a difference a year makes.

It has not been quite 14 months since I posted this: http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/27392/post-173379.html#msg173379  His speech did, indeed, electrify the Liberal Convention in March 2005; see: http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/27392/post-177428.html#msg177428 

Now, this: a column by Don Martin in today’s (9 Nov 06) National Post:

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/columnists/story.html?id=409608f7-fdea-436c-9617-7d5f8fd5d609

Ignatieff may be bound for palliative care
Gaffe-plagued campaign seems to be dying a slow death

Don Martin
National Post

Thursday, November 09, 2006

OTTAWA - He was hailed as the second coming of Pierre Elliott Trudeau -- and relished comparisons with the former Liberal prime minister.

When Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff debuted on the Canadian political stage before a euphoric Liberal convention on March 3, 2005, he became an instant contender to fill the next leadership vacancy.

"Academics are supposed to be tremendously smart," he told the crowd. "But one of the things about academics is that they often cruelly and comically lack good political judgment."

It was intended as self-deprecation, but it's cruelly and comically becoming Ignatieff's epitaph.

There comes a moment for gaffe-plagued candidates when their credibility crosses the Rubicon and cannot come back. Ignatieff waded deeper into those one-way waters this week with another two-step around a position he had so recently seized with reckless, unshakeable boldness.

The Quebec "nation" that Ignatieff envisioned so clearly last month, a constitutional kick-start his people pushed hard to bring to the party's convention floor at month's end, is on increasingly shaky ground.

"I am not ready to propose words that have a legal sense," he told a Quebec interviewer. He "can't say" if the resolution he advocated will ever be debated by party delegates. And given translation differences, there's "a possibility of misunderstanding" over the entire mess.

He's scrambled staff to find a way out of the no-win morass he created, even while the teacher who wrote the resolution lobbies for a rewrite to remove any Constitution-dickering references. This could be dismissed as the one-off misstep by a rusty expatriate, one who spent so long analyzing the European or American ivory tower psyche that he didn't understand the weight the "nation" concept carried in Quebec, except that it's an undeniable trend.

By way of review, this is the same Ignatieff who infamously supported the Iraq invasion, if only it had been better organized, and admitted he wasn't "losing sleep" over the 28 casualties of Israel's retaliatory bombing of a Lebanon building, before declaring that very same attack was actually "a war crime."

There have been other hiccups as well. He got his world wars mixed up in justifying his comments in his book on the Ukrainian internments. He apologized for saying "we" and "our nation" in a New York Times article discussing the war on Iraq. And asked if he'd seek re-election if he lost the leadership, Ignatieff shrugged: "Depends who's leader." Gong. Wrong answer for a guy trying to earn his party-leading stripes.

He appears to have morphed from the Liberals' greatest hope into a deadly combination of Paul Martin's dithers spliced with former U.S. presidential hopeful John Kerry's spineless aloofness. That makes him Prime Minister Stephen Harper's dream combatant in the next federal election.

As for comparisons with Liberal icons, well, I've scrummed Pierre Trudeau, I've had my Calgary home's equity wiped out by Trudeau's policies and I've chased a bemused 70-something Trudeau across the Stampede parking lot, gasping for air when he was barely breathing hard. This guy's no Pierre Trudeau, even if his top Quebec supporter is old National Energy Program architect Marc Lalonde.

With old fuddle-duddle, you could only wince and wait for him to act decisively, usually flipping the bird at critics. With Ignatieff, you can only wince when he declares, "I'm somebody who says what I think," knowing that's the cue he's about to change his mind.

It's a disappointment, frankly. I chatted with Ignatieff in late September and felt I was in the presence of a brilliant mind on hyperdrive, bubbling with ideas that seemed somehow fresh yet plausible. He was acutely aware that he faced a formidable foe in Harper and had some interesting ideas on how to attack his Conservative opponent once he claimed the crown.

But he suddenly lost track of his direction, has back-tracked on difficult positions and been derailed by political sensitivities his academic brain never really grasped.

There comes a point where you study his string of controversial comments, look for signs of momentum in his organizational backfield, do the math about his delegate growth potential -- and write him off as a candidate for palliative care on the convention floor.

In a leadership race where winnability against the Conservatives is the prime directive for second-ballot gains, Michael Ignatieff is lurching dangerously close to becoming more party liability than asset.

"I'm proud of a lifetime of careful, thoughtful public commentary," Ignatieff insists.

That suggests his comical lack of good political judgment is laced by a sense of humour.

dmartin@nationalpost.com

© National Post 2006​

So many, including me, had such high hopes for Ignatieff.  For my part I hoped he might, finally, rid his Party of the last vestiges of Pierre Trudeau’s nonsensical, even juvenile forays into foreign and defence policy.  In Jun 05 I opined, using Isaiah Berlin’s fox/hedgehog analogy:

http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/27392/post-233221.html#msg233221

Most good leaders, it seems to me, are foxes, but many not so good leaders are ill-disciplined foxes;  they have a wide range of interests but they are unable (unwilling) to focus on the ones that matter.  In my time St. Laurent, Pearson, Mulroney, Chrétien and Martin were all foxes but only St. Laurent, Mulroney and Chrétien were well disciplined foxes.  Ignatieff is a fox, too, and, on the evidence to date, unlike Trudeau, Ignatieff does have a resumé with real accomplishments in the real, wide world; he may be an interesting challenger.

I guessed wrong when I agreed with John Ibbitson - http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/27392/post-238911.html#msg238911 - that Ignatieff could not make a run at the Liberal leadership.

I was dismayed, but not overly surprised, when, in April of this year, Ignatieff embraced the Liberal’s famous ’centre=left’ wing - http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/27392/post-365319.html#msg365319 .  I was not surprised because the Liberals have a long traditional, intra-Party and nationally of campaigning on the left and then returning, promptly, to the polices of their big banks, big business, big labour and big special interests paymasters.

Anyway, it appears that even those (Martin and I) who liked Ignatieff a year, even six months ago, are tired of his dithering.

 

[PPCLI Guy]

Anyway, it appears that even those (Martin and I) who liked Ignatieff a year, even six months ago, are tired of his dithering.

Not so sure that it is dithering vs learning, rather publically, that intellectual masturbation is a) gratifying b) done in private and c) no one ever asks you to perform on cue.

Politics is the antithesis of all of that - as is governing.

I too am dissapointed, but still hold out hope that he can grow into the job.

Dave

 

[GAP]

With the exception of Ignatif, I see all the others basically...more of the same ol' Liberal stuff. I don't hold Ignatiff as the new Trudeau, but he's got to get a grip.

 

[Journeyman]

Hey, if Michael Ignatieff versus Bob Rae are being weighed as Liberal party leader......can locusts, rivers turning to blood, and death of the firstborn be far off? 

 

[exsemjingo]

Anyway, it appears that even those (Martin and I) who liked Ignatieff a year, even six months ago, are tired of his dithering.

I agree: the more you know about a Liberal, the less you like them.

 

[GAP]

Nik on the Numbers...Quebec as a Nation – A Liberal Albatross
http://www.sesresearch.com/library/polls/POLNAT-F06-T199.pdf

The symbolic recognition of Quebec as a nation has traction only in Quebec. Outside of Quebec – it is quite likely to push voters away from the federal Liberals. The two key battlegrounds for the next election are Ontario and Quebec. Think of the trade-off. On the one hand you have a net negative impact in Ontario (10% more likely to vote Liberal while 54% say they would be less likely to vote Liberal), while there is a potential upside in Quebec (40% more likely to vote Liberal while 12% less likely to vote Liberal) where voters can already opt for the pro-Quebec Bloc. This is dangerous and volatile ground for the Liberals.


  Methodology
Polling between November 5th and November 10th, 2006 (Random Telephone Survey of Canadians, 18 years of age and older). Percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding.


  Canadian Voters (N=1,002, MoE ± 3.1%, 19 times out of 20)
Question: If the Liberal Party of Canada adopted a motion to symbolically recognize Quebec as a nation would you be more likely to vote Liberal, less likely to vote Liberal or would this have no impact on your likelihood to vote Liberal

More likely to vote Liberal (16%) – (40% in Quebec)
Less likely to vote Liberal (40%)
No impact on vote (36%)
Unsure (8%)

Feel free to forward this e-mail. Any use of the poll should identify the source as the “SES Research National Survey.”

 

[GAP]

Nik on the Numbers...Mixed bag for Liberal leadership hopefuls
http://www.sesresearch.com/library/polls/POLNAT-F06-T200.pdf

In order to understand the possible impact of the new Liberal leader, SES has looked at the how Canadians voted in the last election and correlated that against whether Canadians would be more or less likely to vote Liberal under the new leader. Overall, it’s a bit of a mixed bag with no candidate having a clear advantage over the other.

However, of note – Bob Rae has the ability to attract some of those who voted NDP in the last election to the Liberal banner. Stephane Dion is a non-starter among BQ voters in Quebec – not surprising considering his pro-federalist views. Michael Ignatieff generally trades off those he would attract compared to those he would not attract with the exception of NDP voters would be less likely to vote Liberal under an Ignatieff leadership. Gerard Kennedy could hold onto the Liberal vote in the last election but would have difficulty growing Liberal support.




  Methodology
Polling between November 5th and November 10th, 2006 (Random Telephone Survey of Canadians, 18 years of age and older). Percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding.


Canadian Voters (N=1,002, MoE ± 3.1%, 19 times out of 20)
Question: For the last federal election earlier this year, which party did you vote for locally (724 Canadians who provided an answer)

Conservative 37.5%
Liberal 31.0%
NDP 14.9%
BQ 12.5%
Green 4.2%

Because of the complexity of the tables, you should visit our website at www.sesresearch.com to download the stats. Here are the highlights.

Ignatieff as Liberal Leader
More likely to vote Liberal 16% (Among 2004 NDP voters 14%)
Less likely to vote Liberal 20% (Among 2004 NDP voters 29%)
No impact 47%
Unsure 17%

Rae as Liberal Leader
More likely to vote Liberal 20% (Among 2004 NDP voters 30%)
Less likely to vote Liberal 24% (Among 2004 NDP voters 22%)
No impact 42%
Unsure 14%

Dion as Liberal Leader
More likely to vote Liberal 14% (Among 2004 BQ voters 14%)
Less likely to vote Liberal 23% (Among 2004 BQ voters 29%)
No impact 48%
Unsure 15%

Kennedy as Liberal Leader
More likely to vote Liberal 12%
Less likely to vote Liberal 21%
No impact 50%
Unsure 17%

Feel free to forward this e-mail. Any use of the poll should identify the source as the “SES Research National Survey.”

 

[a_majoor]

If the Liberal Party isn't going to be consumed by convulsions and internal dissent (and to make it even mildly attractive to the bulk of Canadian voters) I think electing Stephan Dion as party leader would be the best possible choice. The Saturday National Post had an interesting comparison of Dion to Harper, both men are strategic thinkers and have a very deep understanding of politics. Dion does politics well, and so is the real Liberal weapon that can take on Prime Minister Harper on equal terms.

The fact that he is a principled man is also hard to ignore.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today's Globe and Mail is the complete text of Michael Ignatieff's recent article in the New York Times in which he revises the historical record and explains to political science students the brutal realities of politics and politicians:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070804.wignatieffiraq0805/BNStory/National/home

Canadian Exclusive
Getting Iraq Wrong

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate

August 5, 2007 at 12:01 AM EDT

The Globe and Mail has exclusive Canadian rights to the following article written by Michael Ignatieff for the Sunday New York Times magazine.

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

Having left an academic post at Harvard in 2005 and returned home to Canada to enter political life, 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.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can't afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual's responsibility 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.

I've learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.

The attribute that underpins good judgment in politicians is a sense of reality. "What is called wisdom in statesmen," Berlin wrote, referring to figures like Roosevelt and Churchill, "is understanding rather than knowledge — some kind of acquaintance with relevant facts of such a kind that it enables those who have it to tell what fits with what; what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot, what means will work in what situations and how far, without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or even what they know." Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings. They must not confuse the world as it is with the world as they wish it to be. They must see Iraq — or anywhere else — as it is.

As a former denizen of Harvard, I've had to learn that a sense of reality doesn't always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what's what than Nobel Prize winners. 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. Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick.

Having taught political science myself, I have to say the discipline promises more than it can deliver. In practical politics, there is no science of decision-making. The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people: whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to avoid. The question of loyalty arises daily: Who will betray and who will stay true? Having good judgment in these matters, having a sound sense of reality, requires trusting some very unscientific intuitions about people.

A sense of reality is not just a sense of the world as it is, but as it might be. Like great artists, great politicians see possibilities others cannot and then seek to turn them into realities. To bring the new into being, a politician needs a sense of timing, of when to leap and when to remain still. Bismarck famously remarked that political judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.

Few of us hear the horses coming. A British prime minister was once asked what made his job so difficult. "Events, dear boy," he replied ruefully. In the face of the unexpected event, a virtuoso in politics must be capable of improvisation and appear as imperturbable as possible. People do want leadership, and even when a leader is nonplussed by events, he must still remember to give the people the reassurance they deserve. Part of good judgment consists of knowing when to keep up appearances.

Improvisation may not stave off failure. The game usually ends in tears. Political careers often end badly because politicians live the human situation: making choices among competing goods with only ordinary instincts and fallible information to go by. Of course, better information and factual criteria for decision-making can reduce the margin of uncertainty. Benchmarks for progress in Iraq can help to decide how long America should stay there. But in the end, no one knows — because no one can know — what exactly America can still do to create stability in Iraq.

The decision facing the United States over Iraq is paradigmatic of political judgment at its most difficult. Staying and leaving each have huge costs. One thing is clear: The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis. That in itself suggests how American leaders are likely to decide the question.

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. In the case of Iraq, deciding what course of action to pursue next requires first admitting that all courses of action thus far have failed.

In politics, learning from failure matters as much as exploiting success. Samuel Beckett's "Fail again. Fail better" captures the inner obstinacy necessary to the political art. Churchill and De Gaulle kept faith with their own judgment when smart opinion believed them to be mistaken. Their willingness to wait for historical validation, even if far off, looks now like greatness. In the current president the same faith that history will judge him kindly seems like brute stubbornness.

Machiavelli argued that political judgment, to be effective, must follow principles more ruthless than those acceptable in ordinary life. He wrote that "it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity." Roosevelt and Churchill knew how to do wrong, yet they did not demand to be judged by different ethical standards than their fellow citizens did. They accepted that democratic leaders cannot make up their own moral rules, a stricture that applies both at home and abroad — in Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib or anywhere else. They must live and be judged by the same rules as everyone else.

Yet in some areas political and personal judgments are very different. In private life, you take attacks personally and would be a cold fish if you didn't. In politics, if you take attacks personally, you display vulnerability. Politicians have to learn to appear invulnerable without appearing inhuman. Being human, they are bound to revenge insults. But they also have to learn that revenge, as it has been said, is a dish best served cold.

Nothing is personal in politics, because politics is theater. It is part of the job to pretend to have emotions that you do not actually feel. It is a common spectacle in legislatures for representatives to insult one another in the chamber and then retreat for a drink in the bar afterward. This saving hypocrisy of public life is not available in private life. There we play for keeps.

But among friends and family, we also cut one another some slack. We fill in one another's sentences. What we mean matters more than what we say. No such mercies occur in politics. In public life, language is a weapon of war and is deployed in conditions of radical distrust. All that matters is what you said, not what you meant. The political realm is a world of lunatic literalism. The slightest crack in your armor — between what you meant and what you said — can be pried open and the knife driven home.

In private life, we pay the price of our own mistakes. In public life, a politician's mistakes are first paid by others. Good judgment means understanding how to be responsible to those who pay the price of your decisions. Edmund Burke, when first elected to the House of Commons, told the voters of Bristol that he would never sacrifice his judgment to the pressure of their opinion. I'm not sure my constituents would be happy to hear this. Sometimes sacrificing my judgment to theirs is the essence of my job. Provided, of course, that I don't sacrifice my principles.

Fixed principle matters. There are some goods that cannot be traded, some lines that cannot be crossed, some people who must never be betrayed. But fixed ideas of a dogmatic kind are usually the enemy of good judgment. It is an obstacle to clear thinking to believe that America's foreign policy serves God's plan to expand human freedom. Ideological thinking of this sort bends what Kant called "the crooked timber of humanity" to fit an abstract illusion. Politicians with good judgment bend the policy to fit the human timber. Not all good things, after all, can be had together, whether in life or in politics.

In my political-science classes, I used to teach that exercising good judgment meant making good public policy. In the real world, bad public policy can often turn out to be very popular politics indeed. Resisting the popular isn't easy, because resisting the popular isn't always wise. Good judgment in politics is messy. It means balancing policy and politics in imperfect compromises that always leave someone unhappy — often yourself.

Knowing the difference between a good and a bad compromise is more important in politics than holding onto pure principle at any price. A good compromise restores the peace and enables both parties to go about their business with some element of their vital interest satisfied. A bad one surrenders the public interest to compulsion or force.

Measuring good judgment in politics is not easy. Campaigns and primaries test a candidate's charm, stamina, money-raising ability and rhetorical powers but not necessarily judgment in office and under fire.

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.

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.

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.

I went to northern 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 Hussein held together by terror?

I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying and in matters of ultimate political judgment, nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of justification through cross-examination and argument.

Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. 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. But then, it is doubtful that warning bells had ever sounded in him before. He had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives warning bells do not sound.

People with good judgment listen to warning bells within. Prudent leaders force themselves to listen equally to advocates and opponents of the course of action they are thinking of pursuing. They do not suppose that their own good intentions will guarantee good results. They do not suppose they know all they need to know. If power corrupts, it corrupts this sixth sense of personal limitation on which prudence relies.

A prudent leader will save democracies from the worst, but prudent leaders will not inspire a democracy to give its best. Democratic peoples should always be looking for something more than prudence in a leader: daring, vision and — what goes with both — a willingness to risk failure.

Daring leaders can be trusted as long as they give some inkling of knowing what it is to fail. They must be men of sorrow acquainted with grief, as the Prophet Isaiah says, men and women who have not led charmed lives, who understand us as we really are, who have never given up hope and who know they are in politics to make their country better.

These are the leaders whose judgment, even if sometimes wrong, will still prove worthy of trust.

Michael Ignatieff, a former professor at Harvard and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is a member of Canada's Parliament and deputy leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

(c) 2007 Michael Ignatieff
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

This is a pretty thorough repudiation of most of what he's said and written for the past five or six years.  Perhaps it's a return to the Ignatieff of a decade past – the one who wrote the outstanding biography of Isaiah Berlin, who he quotes new the beginning of the article – not to be confused with the prophet he quotes at the end.

Here is the key lesson, I think;

Fixed principle matters. There are some goods that cannot be traded, some lines that cannot be crossed, some people who must never be betrayed. But fixed ideas of a dogmatic kind are usually the enemy of good judgment. It is an obstacle to clear thinking to believe that America's foreign policy serves God's plan to expand human freedom. Ideological thinking of this sort bends what Kant called "the crooked timber of humanity" to fit an abstract illusion. Politicians with good judgment bend the policy to fit the human timber. Not all good things, after all, can be had together, whether in life or in politics.

The mistake too often made, arguably by Bush and Ignatieff and most of us, is to fail to understand that not many ideas, not even many ideals are principles, and especially not principles which ought to be fixed in one's moral star-chart. He might have gone farther and suggested that people with too many principles do not fare too well in politics.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Staying on the topic of revisionism and fixed principles, here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today's Ottawa Citizen is an interesting column by Leonard Stern:

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/opinion/story.html?id=8a20b251-d1c4-4d84-b3be-670764d62459

Stories of brutality make for a feel-good movie
Leonard Stern, Citizen Special

Published: Sunday, August 05, 2007

When there's little of interest on the new releases shelf the best thing to do is rent a classic. So the other week I took home Mississippi Burning, the celebrated film about violence and racism in the American south during the civil rights years. Starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, the 1988 film was nominated for seven Academy Awards.

I saw the movie in the theatre when it was released, but nearly 20 years later, with my post-9/11 eyes, the film has a completely different resonance. I never realized that it presented such a strong endorsement of state-sponsored torture, illegal detention and coercion of terrorists. More, back in 1988 everybody -- including the liberal elites of Hollywood -- seemed just fine with that. The movie takes place in Mississippi in 1964, when Klansmen burned churches, lynched people and generally terrorized the (black) population. Hackman and Dafoe play the good guys, FBI agents investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers. They suspect the young activists were murdered by the Klan, and also that the local sheriff, his racist deputy and other community leaders were in on the killings.

A small southern town like this one is tight-knit, with its own customs and history. Outsiders are not welcome. This Mississippi town is not unlike an Iraqi village or other insular, tribal community. Everyone knows everyone else's business, but good luck getting someone to talk to you. The FBI investigation is stymied.

Gene Hackman's character, Agent Anderson, is from Mississippi, and knows how to extract information from the people. He kidnaps the town mayor (that would be an "extraordinary rendition" in post-9/11 lingo) and takes him to an isolated shack. The mayor (the equivalent of a tribal elder) is threatened with castration and presented with a razor blade and an empty paper cup that, he's told, will hold his amputated scrotum if he doesn't divulge what he knows about the Klan.

Surprise, he talks. The audience has no problem with this, because the mayor, though not a Klan member, is, like all the townsfolk, a backwoods racist bastard. We cheer handsome Special Agent Anderson for taking off the gloves.

Another great scene: The FBI agents want to divide the Klansmen against themselves, to introduce paranoia into their group (or "cell") and make them suspect one another of betrayal. To this end Anderson orchestrates a near-lynching of a Klansman, to get him to give up his friends. The Klansman is so terrified that he defecates in his pants, much to Anderson's amusement. A mock execution? Humiliation? Psychological torture? Whatever. The point of the movie is that war -- and the battle for civil rights is depicted as a kind of war -- is messy. Plus, tobacco-chewing, squirrel-eating rednecks who shoot college kids for the crime of registering black voters don't deserve due process. Mississippi Burning is actually a feel-good movie.

All of the tactics that the FBI use in Mississippi Burning, in their fight against white racism, have been used by real-life security agents in the fight against Islamist extremism. In August 2003, in Iraq, a U.S. military officer named Allen West took a captured insurgent and, drawing a pistol, fired a round or two near the prisoner's head. The mock execution worked: The insurgent told details of an ambush that could have killed Lt.-Col. West and his men.

The U.S. military laid criminal charges against Lt.-Col. West for his irregular counter-insurgency tactics. Mississippi Burning was awarded the Political Film Society's award for human rights. Recent winners of this award include Atom Egoyan's film Ararat, about the Armenian genocide, and Hotel Rwanda. To this day, Mississippi Burning, owing to its depiction of black oppression in the segregated south, is celebrated at human rights film festivals. This is strange because Agent Anderson, in his effort to bring justice and security to the south, employs methods that ought to horrify progressive types who attend these festivals.

If you believe that civilized governments should not be in the business of torture, intimidation and kidnapping, then the principle ought to hold no matter who the bad guys are.

Double standards have always been a problem for professional leftists and rightists. A pox on both, though I'd say that hypocrisy reaches its highest expression in the anti-war left. They call themselves peace activists yet march in rallies with Hezbollah flags. They protest against "collective punishment" such as terrorist profiling, yet can't denounce suicide bombings, the ultimate in collective punishment.

I always remembered Mississippi Burning as a political statement, and boy is it ever.

Leonard Stern is the Citizen's editorial pages editor. E-mail: lstern@thecitizen.canwest.com

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007

We, seemingly, find it easy to compromise what ought to be fixed principles when enough celebrities say x is good and y is bad. In my opinion torture is always unacceptable – that doesn't mean that I, like LTC West, would not resort to it under some circumstances but in so doing I would hope that I would understand that I was breaching an important fixed principle in the pursuit of some other worthy goal.
 

 

[MarkOttawa]

A guest-post at Daimnation!:

Mickey I.'s road to Baghdad
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/009927.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[Edward Campbell]

Here is another rather lengthy piece reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Ottawa Citizen:

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=3b1ec6d4-0898-4dbc-9f1b-7e3ebe5ec5d2

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.
- - -
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

I agree with Sibley that there is a fundamental difference between Fukuyama’s rejection of Bush’s strategy and Ignatieff’s apologia, but I tend to agree with Ferguson’s analysis:* there was nothing wrong with the immediate goal, getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but the administration botched the nation building bit – in large part, as Ferguson mentions, because the US situation in 2005 is markedly different than it was in 1945: the US is now a major debtor nation.

There was a major debate, I guess, within the Bush administration re: why and how to rebuild Iraq.  There certainly was in 1945, in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, as Michael Beschloss points out. It appears that in the Bush administration the proponents of something akin to the Morgenthau Plan won the day – as they did not in 1945.

This brings us back to the idea of R2P (Responsibility to Protect) about which so many Canadians have preached for so long.  President Bush, arguably, practised what Pink Lloyd Axworthy preached.  He went a protected the people of Iraq (and its neighbours) from the depredations of a murderous, barbaric tyrant.  But who decides which people ought to be protected from which tyrant?  Is that really something we want to entrust to the UN?  Shall we have an annual “Name that SOB!” contest in which the UN General Assembly decides which regime needs to be toppled (by the USA) next?  Any guesses on who’s first on the list?  Is Israel really that bad?


-------
* And don’t miss his scathing assessment of Ignatieff’s atonement as a Canadian MP, something Ferguson describes, about half way down, as “a cruel form of penance.”

 

[Blackadder1916]

A sitting politician publicly admitting a mistake... must check the weather channel to see if the temperature has dropped in Hades.  While this is relatively uncommon of late in Canada, many south of the border are doing the same and attempting to distance themselves from the American decision to take military action in Iraq.  Mr. Ignatieff, despite commentary about a lack of political judgement, may be taking a long term approach to changing his image as a "war supporter".  He may be simply positioning himself to take another run at the Liberal Party leadership.

 

[Infanteer]

but I tend to agree with Ferguson’s analysis:* there was nothing wrong with the immediate goal, getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but the administration botched the nation building bit – in large part, as Ferguson mentions, because the US situation in 2005 is markedly different than it was in 1945: the US is now a major debtor nation.

Absolutely.  I believe that Iraq has become a case where defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory.  The fact that a neo-conservative ideological flop and mismanagement of post-invasion Iraq doesn't erase the fact that their was good geopolitical/economic reasons for going in.  Most of the bad things we see arise out of the failure of the Iraq strategy are due to the above mentioned shortcomings of the Bush administration and not the fact that we (the collective "we" of the West, mainly the Anglosphere minus Canada) went into Iraq in the first place.  If anything, we should learn not to dress up our hard realpolitik moves in soft altruistic wrapping, as things can get convoluted fast - as we saw with the piss poor performance of the CPA and L Paul Bremer (go here for a good overview).

Now, back to Ignatieff and his politiking.  His support, along with Fukiyama and co., was the result of an odd pairing of Wilsonian idealists and the neo-conservative movement steering the US administration at the time, which both deep down believed that the spread of democracy was the key to progress in the world (of course for what end, the two differ).

Ignatieff's apologia is merely an example of what many have been doing for the last couple years - jumping off the leaky, sputtering neo-conservative ship as fast as they can to avoid going down with it.  We are seeing this today in US politics with the various repudiations of the Bush Administration (the Congressional elections, headhunting guys like Libby and Wolfowitz, etc, etc).  I see Ignatieff doing this in order to get himself into step with the anti-US core of the Liberal Party and to keep himself fresh in the event of a Dion collapse.  It doesn't change the fact that Ignatieff is Wilsonian in the core and would not hesitate to expand liberalism and democracy on the end of a bayonet.  The failure of his support for the Iraq invasion would not stop him from sending Canadian soldiers to the Sudan, where the same mix of oil and radical Islam means the chance for another Iraq is high.

Don't be fooled by this one folks.

 

[Edward Campbell]

...
Now, back to Ignatieff and his politiking.  His support, along with Fukiyama and co., was the result of an odd pairing of Wilsonian idealists and the neo-conservative movement steering the US administration at the time, which both deep down believed that the spread of democracy was the key to progress in the world (of course for what end, the two differ).
...

Perhaps the Bush administration should have paid more attention to the Jeffersonian view that America ought to be more concerned with safeguarding democracy at home than spreading it abroad.

There is no doubt that all people prefer to make their own political choices but people making choices, even at ballot boxes, is not the same as democracy.  Democracy, liberal or conservative, requires a foundation, a base upon which it can rest.  There needs to be, inter alia a deep, ingrained respect for, indeed belief in the ‘rule of law’ and an equal belief in the inalienable right to equality at and under the law – for all, rich and poor, governed and governors alike.  Until those conditions obtain all the elections in the world do not produce real democracy.  They may produce what Fareed Zakaria called illiberal democracy – the sort of thing which passes as democracy in some of what The Economist* calls ‘full democracies’ and almost all of those it describes as ‘flawed democracies’ and ‘hybrid regimes.’ 

Trying to export democracy to a country or, worse, a whole region that lacks the requisite base is a hopeless quest.

One fully understands – to continue with Mead’s descriptors – the Jacksonian impulse to counter-attack after 9/11, but the belief in Hamiltonian or Wilsonian values was misplaced.

The Islamic Crescent must find and fight its own way out of the morass into which it has sunk over the past 500 years or so.  There is no quick fix.  Democracy – because it will be illiberal democracy - is only a façade, as it is in parts of Europe and Asia, most of Latin America, and almost all of Africa, the Middle East and West and Central Asia.


----------
* I do not agree with The Economist’s methodology.  It, like Freedom House, is so highly biased towards liberal democracy that it doesn’t even consider conservative democracy nor does it recognize that some 'full democracies' are highly illiberal.

 

[observor 69]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/world/asia/12afghan.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Free subscription required to view full article.

August 12, 2007
How the ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan Went Bad
By DAVID ROHDE and DAVID E. SANGER
Two years after the Taliban fell to an American-led coalition, a group of NATO ambassadors landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, to survey what appeared to be a triumph — a fresh start for a country ripped apart by years of war with the Soviets and brutal repression by religious extremists.

With a senior American diplomat, R. Nicholas Burns, leading the way, they thundered around the country in Black Hawk helicopters, with little fear for their safety. They strolled quiet streets in Kandahar and sipped tea with tribal leaders. At a briefing from the United States Central Command, they were told that the Taliban were now a “spent force.”

“Some of us were saying, ‘Not so fast,’ ” Mr. Burns, now the under secretary of state for political affairs, recalled. “While not a strategic threat, a number of us assumed that the Taliban was too enmeshed in Afghan society to just disappear.”

But that skepticism had never taken hold in Washington. Since the 2001 war, American intelligence agencies had reported that the Taliban were so decimated they no longer posed a threat, according to two senior intelligence officials who reviewed the reports.

The American sense of victory had been so robust that the top C.I.A. specialists and elite Special Forces units who had helped liberate Afghanistan had long since moved on to the next war, in Iraq.

Those sweeping miscalculations were part of a pattern of assessments and decisions that helped send what many in the American military call “the good war” off course.

Like Osama bin Laden and his deputies, the Taliban had found refuge in Pakistan and regrouped as the American focus wavered. Taliban fighters seeped back over the border, driving up the suicide attacks and roadside bombings by as much as 25 percent this spring, and forcing NATO and American troops into battles to retake previously liberated villages in southern Afghanistan.

They have scored some successes recently, and since the 2001 invasion, there have been improvements in health care, education and the economy, as well as the quality of life in the cities. But Afghanistan’s embattled president, Hamid Karzai, said in Washington last week that security in his country had “definitely deteriorated.” One former national security official called that “a very diplomatic understatement.”

President Bush’s critics have long contended that the Iraq war has diminished America’s effort in Afghanistan, which the administration has denied, but an examination of how the policy unfolded within the administration reveals a deep divide over how to proceed in Afghanistan and a series of decisions that at times seemed to relegate it to an afterthought as Iraq unraveled.

Statements from the White House, including from the president, in support of Afghanistan were resolute, but behind them was a halting, sometimes reluctant commitment to solving Afghanistan’s myriad problems, according to dozens of interviews in the United States, at NATO headquarters in Brussels and in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

At critical moments in the fight for Afghanistan, the Bush administration diverted scarce intelligence and reconstruction resources to Iraq, including elite C.I.A. teams and Special Forces units involved in the search for terrorists. As sophisticated Predator spy planes rolled off assembly lines in the United States, they were shipped to Iraq, undercutting the search for Taliban and terrorist leaders, according to senior military and intelligence officials.

As defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed credit for toppling the Taliban with light, fast forces. But in a move that foreshadowed America’s trouble in Iraq, he failed to anticipate the need for more forces after the old government was gone, and blocked an early proposal from Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and Mr. Karzai, the administration’s handpicked president, for a large international force. As the situation deteriorated, Mr. Rumsfeld and other administration officials reversed course and cajoled European allies into sending troops.

When it came to reconstruction, big goals were announced, big projects identified. Yet in the year Mr. Bush promised a “Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan, the country received less assistance per capita than did postconflict Bosnia and Kosovo, or even desperately poor Haiti, according to a RAND Corporation study. Washington has spent an average of $3.4 billion a year reconstructing Afghanistan, less than half of what it has spent in Iraq, according to the Congressional Research Service.

            /////////////////////////////////// Break Break

In Washington, officials lament that NATO nations are unwilling to take the kinds of risks and casualties necessary to confront the Taliban. Across Europe, officials complain the United States never focused on reconstruction, and they blame American forces for mounting air attacks on the Taliban that cause large civilian casualties, turning Afghans against the West.

The debate over how the 2001 victory in Afghanistan turned into the current struggle is well under way.

“Destroying the Al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan was an extraordinary strategic accomplishment,” said Robert D. Blackwill, who was in charge of both Afghanistan and Iraq policy at the National Security Council, “but where we find ourselves now may have been close to inevitable, whether the U.S. went into Iraq or not. We were going to face this long war in Afghanistan as long as we and the Afghan government couldn’t bring serious economic reconstruction to the countryside, and eliminate the Taliban’s safe havens in Pakistan.”


But Henry A. Crumpton, a former C.I.A. officer who played a key role in ousting the Taliban and became the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, said winning a war like the one in Afghanistan required American personnel to “get in at a local level and respond to people’s needs so that enemy forces cannot come in and take advantage.”

“These are the fundamentals of counterinsurgency, and somehow we forgot them or never learned them,” he added. He noted that “the United States has 11 carrier battle groups, but we still don’t have expeditionary nonmilitary forces of the kind you need to win this sort of war.”

“We’re living in the past,” he said.

Among some current and former officials, a consensus is emerging that a more consistent, forceful American effort could have helped to keep the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s leadership from regrouping.

Gen. James L. Jones, a retired American officer and a former NATO supreme commander, said Iraq caused the United States to “take its eye off the ball” in Afghanistan. He warned that the consequences of failure “are just as serious in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq.”

“Symbolically, it’s more the epicenter of terrorism than Iraq,” he said. “If we don’t succeed in Afghanistan, you’re sending a very clear message to the terrorist organizations that the U.S., the U.N. and the 37 countries with troops on the ground can be defeated.”
Carlotta Gall contributed reporting.

 

[MarkOttawa]

The NY Times article is typically trying to equate Iraq with Afstan.  Unlike Iraq the situation in Afstan has not gone "bad" in any general sense.  The Taliban resurged in the south and east in 2005 and especially 2006 after having had time to regroup in Pakistan where there was little the US could have done beyond what it did.  It may well be that much greater development/reconstruction/governance/ military training assistance in Afstan from 2002-2004 might have helped the country greatly but probably would not have stopped the Taliban from trying to resurge--and having quite a bit of success.  In any event the international community as a whole dropped that ball at least as much as the US did. 

And can you imagine the international outcry--not to speak of the negative impact in Afstan--if the US had stationed say 30,000 troops there in 2002 without too many people on the ground actually to fight against?  Perhaps training the ANA might have been done quicker, but given the huge factional differences--esp. after the defeat of the Taliban--I have doubts.

While the US certainly short-termed things in Afstan I can't see that being at the root of current problems--unlike the situation in Iraq.  Putting the fragments of the Afghan state and economy firmly together (if it can ever be done) was not going to be done in the three years after the defeat of the Taliban.  The whole Times piece is essentially post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Mark
Ottawa