The torture of being Iggy
The torture of being Iggy
By MARGARET WENTE
Thursday, August 9, 2007 – Page A17
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. The piece is obviously crafted for at least two audiences. At home, it's designed to get the millstone of Iraq off his neck for good. He was wrong, he's sorry, now let's move on. Internationally, it's designed to remind people that Michael Ignatieff the public intellectual is still alive, even if he has unaccountably moved to some backwater to dabble in local politics.
Some people are criticizing Iggy for publishing his climbdown in The New York Times. Personally, I think it's smart PR, on account of the Lorne Greene effect. That is, you get 10 times more attention for anything you do in the U.S. than anything you do in Canada.
Iggy gives the impression that what he really aspires to be is a philosopher king - a big thinker who also knows his way around the dark alleys of Kosovo and Kurdish Iraq. He likes reminding us that the world's a tough place where good men must make hard choices. He likes to agonize over these choices out loud. He also wants to make certain that you don't confuse his Iraq mistake with George Bush's Iraq mistake. His mistake flowed from his emotions ("I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds"), while Mr. Bush's was the product of his God-struck ideology. "It is an obstacle to clear thinking to believe that America's foreign policy serves God's plan to expand human freedom," he writes.
In fact, the politician that Iggy most resembles is Tony Blair, the greatest liberal interventionist of them all. Mr. Blair's mistake, as Roy Jenkins pointed out, wasn't that he was amoral. It was that he was too moral. He thought it was wicked to stand by while Saddam's sadists drilled nail guns through people, and he believed that the suffering Iraqis, given half a chance, would embrace freedom and democracy and generally behave just like us. That was an obstacle to clear thinking, too. But Iggy doesn't mention Tony Blair. Nor does he discuss the wider foreign policy lessons to be drawn from this error, or how they might apply to the West's nation-building efforts in Afghanistan.
Iggy implies that he has sacrificed a lot to go into politics, because politics is not much fun. It's awfully mean and phony. You have to watch your every word. You have to pretend to have emotions you don't have. Charm, stamina and money usually count for more than good ideas. People stab you in the back. But it's a price that men of vision must be prepared to pay. 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.
By MARGARET WENTE
Thursday, August 9, 2007 – Page A17
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. The piece is obviously crafted for at least two audiences. At home, it's designed to get the millstone of Iraq off his neck for good. He was wrong, he's sorry, now let's move on. Internationally, it's designed to remind people that Michael Ignatieff the public intellectual is still alive, even if he has unaccountably moved to some backwater to dabble in local politics.
Some people are criticizing Iggy for publishing his climbdown in The New York Times. Personally, I think it's smart PR, on account of the Lorne Greene effect. That is, you get 10 times more attention for anything you do in the U.S. than anything you do in Canada.
Iggy gives the impression that what he really aspires to be is a philosopher king - a big thinker who also knows his way around the dark alleys of Kosovo and Kurdish Iraq. He likes reminding us that the world's a tough place where good men must make hard choices. He likes to agonize over these choices out loud. He also wants to make certain that you don't confuse his Iraq mistake with George Bush's Iraq mistake. His mistake flowed from his emotions ("I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds"), while Mr. Bush's was the product of his God-struck ideology. "It is an obstacle to clear thinking to believe that America's foreign policy serves God's plan to expand human freedom," he writes.
In fact, the politician that Iggy most resembles is Tony Blair, the greatest liberal interventionist of them all. Mr. Blair's mistake, as Roy Jenkins pointed out, wasn't that he was amoral. It was that he was too moral. He thought it was wicked to stand by while Saddam's sadists drilled nail guns through people, and he believed that the suffering Iraqis, given half a chance, would embrace freedom and democracy and generally behave just like us. That was an obstacle to clear thinking, too. But Iggy doesn't mention Tony Blair. Nor does he discuss the wider foreign policy lessons to be drawn from this error, or how they might apply to the West's nation-building efforts in Afghanistan.
Iggy implies that he has sacrificed a lot to go into politics, because politics is not much fun. It's awfully mean and phony. You have to watch your every word. You have to pretend to have emotions you don't have. Charm, stamina and money usually count for more than good ideas. People stab you in the back. But it's a price that men of vision must be prepared to pay. 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.
posted by PDO at
6:12 PM
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