Mickey I.'s road to Baghdad

Margaret Wente of the Globe and Mail examines the conversion of the Liberal who would be philosopher king:

The torture of being Iggy

I was for the invasion of Iraq, once upon a time. I thought it was a good idea, on humanitarian grounds, to knock out one of the worst bad guys in the world. Then I got mugged by reality.

Today, battered, bruised and wiser, I am keenly interested in what my fellow liberal interventionists have to say now. After all, it was they - not the ideologues in the White House - who made the most compelling case for war on wider moral grounds. So you can imagine how eagerly I devoured Michael Ignatieff's piece in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It was called Getting Iraq Wrong.

Too bad it was all about him.

In it, Iggy reveals his great discovery, which I now share with you. There's a big difference between being a politician and a philosopher! Intellectuals, he says, don't have to worry about the real-world consequences of their ideas, while politicians do. This discovery has been a chastening, yet enlightening, experience. It has made him humbler, yet wiser, and even more qualified to be a leader. What a great prime minister he'd be!

Okay, so I added that last sentence myself...

[...]

Iggy gives the impression that what he really aspires to be is a philosopher king...

...He ends on this extraordinary note: "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 ... who know they are in politics to make their country better."

Michael Ignatieff as Jesus Christ? Yikes. The guy is more ambitious than I thought.

As Ms Wente notes, Mickey I. in his mea culpa distinguishes the responsibility of politicians for the real world impact of their actions from the work of academics who have no such practical burden. But as a politician he has not held executive office and has not had responsibility for either devising or implementing any policy in reality. So the whole underpinning of his argument is based on a false presentation of his experience: he is writing about something of which he has no personal knowledge. Intellectual sleight of hand, I would say. No shame this man, just a politician of the worst sort trying to get himself right with his party and voters.

Joey Slinger, whom I usually consider to be amongst the most moronic of Toronto Star columnists (and that's saying something) points out another falsity in Mickey I.'s argument: what academics write and say can matter in the real world and they thus have at least a moral responsibility for their actions:

All he manages to do in the Times is prove that he completely misses the point.

It wasn't that he thought the war was necessary, it was that he thought it so loudly (publishing much of it in the same Times pages during the run-up to and the early years of the war). And thinking it this loudly made him one of the war's enablers. One of the foremost enablers. A "denizen of Harvard," a vaunted expert in international human rights, just about the most famous public theorist on the ghastliness of modern warfare.

If Bush and his cronies were cheesy, Ignatieff was pure gold, and they used him for all he was worth, dressing their deeds in his words.

It doesn't matter that he was wrong about invading Iraq. What matters is that he helped them do it.

They had the guns, he gave them the intellectual bullets...

Bang! Bang! You're intellectually dead.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at August 9, 2007 12:34 PM