The Island of Doubt

As a Canadian, it's long been a bit of an embarrassment for me that Michael Ignatieff is considered one of Canada's leading intellectuals. Worse now that he's also a sitting member of Parliament. But Sunday's quasi-apology in the New York Times for supporting the invasion of Iraq is perhaps the strangest thing he's written yet. As Mike the Mad Biologist and Matthew Iglesias have already pointed out, academia by and large was not in favor of Bush's blunder. So where does Iggy get the idea that it was?

Everybody seems to have their favorite most-absurd excerpt from the essay, which attempts to explore why it is that so many otherwise intelligent people thought invading Iraq was a good idea. Ignatieff offers no evidence that any more than a handful of academics and Chris Hitchens were on Bush's side, but here's the section that really puzzles me.

... 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.

Could he be any more insulting? I don't know anyone who opposed the war on ideological grounds or because American is always wrong. They opposed the war because the chances of it actually making Iraq a better place, and the world safer from terrorism, were close to zero.

Oh, and by the way: the president was after the oil.

Ignatieff then redeems himself a bit by praising those few who did oppose the war for good reason.

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.

It's nice of him to say that we didn't take wishes for reality, but what's this about Bush's belief in his own integrity? It sounds to me like Ignatieff still can't bring himself to admit that the war was not an honest mistake, but a disastrous betrayal of the rule of law. It's not hubris from which Bush, Cheney et al. suffer, but an excess of greed. I don't believe for a second that they sincerely thought the invasion would be a slam dunk. They knew what they were getting us into and they didn't care.

There real reason why so many academics, from the hard sciences and the social field, opposed the war is it was a stupid idea, one that could only serve to strengthen the enemies of democracy and reason. It's the same thing when it comes to scientific issues like climate change, or evolution or stem cells, or abstinence-only sex education. The Bush administration isn't populated by complete idiots. The administration knows full well where the science stands on global warming and evolution, that embryonic stem cells offer enormous potential to reduce suffering and that abstinence-only programs don't work. It's just that they care more about making certain special interests happy and rich today than they do about making good policy for the long term.

If Ignatieff can't figure that out, then he really needs to take some undergraduate poli sci courses.