In Defense of Being Wrong . . . Posted by Michael Cohen

There's been a great deal of debate on this site and others over the past week about the responsibility of those in the Foreign Policy Community for the war in Iraq. I'm not about to re-fight those battles, but I think a little perspective is important.

Michael Ignatieff is one of my favorite public intellectuals. The article he did a few years ago in the NYT Magazine about Lesser Evils in fighting terrorism was thought-provoking and brilliant. I only regret that I haven't had time to read his book on the same subject.

A week or so ago he wrote what I can best describe as a soul-wrenching mea culpa regarding his support for the war in Iraq. It's never easy for people to admit a mistake, especially when it's a several thousand word article in the New York Times magazine, and I think Ignatieff deserves enormous credit for coming clean and admitting he was wrong. I wish others (like the President for example) would do the same. His article provides fascinating insight into how such decisions, which look so incorrect in retrospect, could have been made at the time. One graf in particular really jumped out at me:

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.

Ignatieff like many Americans was wrong about Iraq, but while his judgment was wrong, his intentions were pure. He believed that advocacy for the war in Iraq was in the best interests of the Iraqi people and furthered important national interests. Clearly these views clouded him from seeing reality. He was not alone.

Tom Friedman is another public figure who has taken significant abuse for his support of the war. I would argue deservedly so. His judgment that invasion and occupation would spur democracy in the Middle East was misguided and fanciful. His later assertion that he didn't know the Bush Administration would screw up the war so badly, is frankly stunning. Should his future statements be taken with a grain of salt because of his mistakes? That certainly seems fair to me. But does that make him a bad person? Of course not. Does it mean he loves his country any less then someone like me who passionately opposed the war? Most certainly not. Same goes for Hillary Clinton. But forgive me if I have more faith in Barack Obama's foreign policy judgment.

To go further back in history, Lyndon Johnson probably did more than any other American President to ensure the full application of basic civil rights to all Americans. At the same time, he prosecuted a terrible and misguided war in Vietnam that took the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers and millions of more Vietnamese. How could a President be so right about the former and yet so wrong about the latter? I don't have an easy answer to that question, but certainly the former makes it very difficult to judge him in the harshest possible terms for the latter. Unlike those who would follow him in the Oval Office, I'm quite sure that Johnson believed what he was doing was best for America. He was wrong.

In the run-up to the war in Iraq many on the left were rightfully exorcised about attacks on their patriotism by the Bush Administration and others. That those attacks continue today is a sad statement on our coarsened political discourse. But, yet it would be a terrible irony indeed if those who opposed the war then, were to attack those who supported it with similar blanket statements.   

We must remember that more than half of all Americans ended up supporting the war in Iraq. Certainly, many of them were manipulated by Administration propoganda about WMD and mythical Al Qaeda connections, but millions of other assessed this pertinent information and drew their own conclusions. I, for one, am willing to give the American people a bit more credit than to assert they were merely sheep being led to the slaughter.

The fact is, many well-intentioned Americans supported the war in Iraq - some were friends of mine, some were even related to me. Surely some did so for nefarious reasons, but I would imagine that most did so because they believed it was best for either America or the Iraqi people.  Moreover, there are certainly those Americans who supported getting rid of Saddam, but they didn't necessarily suppport this war or the manner in which it has been incompently conducted. Being pro-war or anti-war is not a cut and dry proposition.

There were some anti-war folks who simply don't believe that war is ever appropriate. There were some like me who have supported the use of military force, such as the first Gulf War or our intervention in Afghanistan, but thought this particular conflict was misguided, wrong and not justified.

There were some on the pro-war side who completely believed the President's reasoning, there were others like Friedman and Ignatieff who had their own political agenda for war in Iraq. And there are those who were broadly sympathetic with the notion of toppling Saddam, but felt that the Administration went about it in the wrong manner. Indeed, I'm quite sure that there are many in the Very Serious Foreign Policy Community who are being attacked today for supporting this war even though if they had their way, they would have gone about in an altogether different manner. To paraphrase Rummy sometimes people go to war with the war we have, not the war we want.

In short, pro-war and anti-war are terms that don't necessarily do real justice to the true measure of intellectual ferment around this conflict.

In the end, those who opposed the war in Iraq have been proven correct. Four and a half years later it is difficult to draw any other rational conclusion. Certainly, those who supported it merit some criticism, particularly if they continue to support it today. We should not hesitiate to remind them of the error of their ways.

But let's also remember that to err is indeed human - and that well-meaning people, like Michael Ignatieff, Thomas Friedman and Hillary Clinton can be wrong about something as terrible as war and still not be morally invalidated for their mistakes. 

Comments

[Don Bacon]

Ignatieff, a Canadian, writes (dishonestly) as if he were an American. Everything is in the first person plural: we felt, our, etc. What does he know about American culture? I don't need to learn how Americans feel about terrorism by reading a Canadian. Now Friedman will be writing about how Canadians feel, I suppose.

These soul-searching mea culpas are standard fare from intellectuals. We're seeing a lot of them. Crocodile tears.

War, elective war, is now a hot topic in America. Like a girl on her first date, should we or shouldn't we. It gives the intellectuals something to debate, and many of them will be in support of war, some for personal financial reasons. Where you stand depends on wher you sit, for some.

The Gulf War was a good war because it saved the Kuwait dynastic kingdom, and everyone loves Afghanistan. Except the ones affected by these wars, of course. All that collateral damage. Pity.

This isn't rocket science. Elective war is legally and morally wrong, and impacts negatively on little children and other living beings. War proponents ought to be "morally invalidated". Advocating a crime isn't an error, it's a crime of conspiracy. But there's a lot of money in war, and so the input of the intellectuals like Ignatieff in justifying them is invaluable.

[hilzoy]

Personally, I have no reason to question Michael Ignatieff's intentions and their purity. But I have a very, very hard time understanding why we should take seriously someone whose two main reasons for his mistake, by his own account, were: (a) a failure to realize that in life, unlike academia, ideas have consequences, and (b) the fact that emotion prevented him from asking the tough questions about Iraq.

These are not minor errors. They are intellectually disqualifying, all the more so if they were made in perfectly good faith.

[Dan Kervick]

I found nothing heart-wrenching in Ignatieff’s cloying dramatic performance. I do not find myself moved by Ignatieff's ostentatious declamations and self-pitying, lachrymose pose. Even the self-pity is inauthentic and reeks of greasepaint. One almost expects to hear him cry out “I’m ready for my close-up now Mr. DeMille!”

It’s still all about Ignatieff, and the drama – the “mythic narrative” I suppose we say now - of his own life. With his unconquerable vanity, this prima donna imagines that even in failure his readers will be captivated by the tedious and unoriginal twists and turns of the Ignatieff intellectual pathways. “What lessons has Michael I. learned? Inquiring New York Times readers want to know!”

These lessons turn out to be a lumpy, inarticulate mass of resentful blame shifting, weakly concealed under the designer sackcloth of insincere, ritualistic shame. And yet even before getting to those supposed lessons, we are treated to a repetitive, tedious and inappropriately prolix essay on the nature of political judgment. Time for one more turn upon the intellectual stage before St. Michael takes his bow. The surface tone is sorrowful and wistful. But we can see his ambition sweating through the pages: “Ah yes, a classic mea culpa! This will be anthologized down through the ages. I can see it now: “On the Nature of Political Judgment” … by Michael Ignatieff! It will be fitted into those immortal volumes of essays, perhaps somewhere between “Concerning Fate” by Plutarch, and Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond”.

Yet this purported mea culpa seems distinctly lacking in culpa. Ultimately, Ignatieff still hopes to impress us with the tragic grandness of his lost illusions. The message one continues to hear from Ignatieff and many of the other liberal interventionists goes something like this: We were wrong. But we were nobly, tragically, romantically wrong. We succumbed to error, but only because we were blinded by the radiant brilliance of our beautiful ideals. The war's opponents were right, but they were coldly, pragmatically and cynically right. They were saved from our noble errors only on account of the sluggish darkness of their cowardly and selfish hearts.

Then what are the Great Lessons of the Ignatieff semi-apology – the mea not so culpa? With a quick verbal back of the hand, he dismisses one group of critics:

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.

Ah yes, those monotonous Blame America Firsters. No need even to consider their critique of American imperialism and their contentions about the convenient consilience of economic, military and moral-political motives working on the Middle Eastern ruminations of America’s strategic class. These critics are just so gosh-darn unpatriotic that they don’t even merit a refutation.

Then Ignatieff goes on to dismiss many of the rest of his critics:

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.

So it is still intellectually intolerable to Ignatieff that many of the war’s critics simply knew more than he did. After all, how could they have more actual knowledge than great philosophical wizards like Ignatieff! It might seem that these critics had simply read more; it might seem that they were better able to see through government cant and misinformation and disinformation because they had a surer foundation of background knowledge. It might seem that instead of wasting valuable time writing pompous war poetry and clarion calls to arms, they were actually reading a variety of reports and estimates about Iraqi capabilities and intentions, about the history and current politics of Iraq and its region, about the vast differences and animosities between modernist, secularizing dictators like Saddam Hussein, and the anti-modernist, reactionary religious fanatics populating the ranks of the Salafist jihadists. It might seem that they knew more from the study of history and human society about the nature and causal impact of human violence, and were less in the grip of adolescent literary illusions about war. In short, it might seem that they more accurately predicted the results of the invasion because they knew more about the actual circumstances in Iraq, and the likely causal consequences of an invasion.

No, affirms Ignatieff, they didn’t know more than he did. How could they?

Or did they? Because he then seems to take part of that assertion back:

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

And so here’s what it all comes down to for Ignatieff: The lesson Iraq teaches is the lesson of a tragically naïve failure of the morally beautiful and clean of heart to account for the turpitude, corruption, sickness and incompetence of others.

“Our motives were pure!” he says, “But those damn cynical Iraqi savages didn’t know it!”

“And we didn’t account for the incompetence of the American government and the ignorance of the American people, and anticipate how they would bungle our spectacularly lovely plans for moral transformation.”

“And we didn’t account for the social trauma inflicted by Saddam, and how that would leave Iraqis too degenerate and morally impaired to receive the sacred Liberal sacraments.”

So for Ignatieff and his school the error of the Party of Virtue was only an error of miscalculation. There was nothing at all wrong with their motives. Not a thing. It's a mere case of political misjudgment by people whose hearts were pure and holy, and “in the right place”.

Perhaps this is a memorable mea culpa after all. Because rarely has a writer so shrewdly combined the outer semblances of a confession of fault with such towering moral arrogance and self-ascribed purity.

I do not believe that Ignatieff’s heart was “in the right place”. I do not accept that this Iraq was all just a case of a tragic human failure by well-meaning people. I believe Ignatieff is a moral fraud and egotistical villain whose heart was quite definitely in the wrong place. And I believe Iraq is no mere error of misjudgment by a basically good country, but rather a symptom of a deep sickness at the heart of our culture; a sign of a fanatical megalomania and lust for domination that manifests itself in economic, military and moral forms. Iraq was simply the latest example of savagery from a society with a long track record of unfathomably absurd violence.

Ignatieff represents the corrupt and noxious tradition of moral imperialism. There is nothing either noble or tragic about it. Throughout the course of American empire, just as with the empires that preceded it and will probably succeed it, these moral imperialists have been the enablers and helpmates of the more crass and materialistic type of imperialist. Wherever there was a sugar industry to be cornered, a fruit plantation to be annexed, a native population to be moved out, an oil field to be accessed and exploited, a strategically placed peninsula to be militarized, a community of local women to be made into a brothel to serve sailors, a popular local leader who won’t play ball with the imperial commercial interests, these fine moral fellows have floated in on the same warships with their plans to convert the heathens to Christianity or Democracy or Liberalism. They were there in South America, dishing out last rights to converted Inca souls, as the latter were exterminated. They were there in the old west, civilizing the Red Man as he was pushed into the ground or off the edge of the continent. They were in Hawaii and the Philippines and Cuba and Puerto Rico and Nicaragua, saving red socialist souls for the god of capitalism. And they were in Iraq, writing western Liberal constitutions and intellectually underwriting the butchery that got their reforming feet in the door.

I don't want to hear about how much these fellows love their country. That doesn't do it for me. The United States is drowning in an absolute flood of "country-love", and gagging on the junk food of patriotism. Before I am willing to give these Liberal moralists the time of day, I want an indication that they have some clue about the many things that are wrong with this country, and that they have some disposition to change those things. I want to see some signs that they are capable of emerging from the mass stupidity that witnesses one barbarous episode after another, only to throw them all down the memory hole and put manufactured memories, movie images and preposterous political speeches in their place. But the moral imperialists never get around to that kind of honest critique of their own societies. Their dreamy moralistic visages are always and only pointed in one direction: outward.

The moral imperialists are in love with the American Way, and want to spread it. Well I am not in love with the American Way. I reject much of that Way. I reject empire. I reject the cult of the nation. I reject the brutality of the American economic system. I reject the savagery of the westward expansion, and the genocide of the Native Americans. I reject the culture of guns, gouging and brawling and rumbling. I reject the record of continual, aggressive, warlike conquest. I reject the shallow kinetic culture of greed, acquisition and ceaseless interpersonal competition. I reject the fatalistic acceptance of a grotesquely imbalanced and undemocratic world of economic winners and losers. I reject the revolting commodification of sexuality. I reject the ongoing rape of the environment, and the prevalent love of replacing sublime natural beauty with shoddy human ugliness. But I do believe a better world is possible.

I’m done. Ignatieff? Heart-wrenching? The man is an ass.

[Don Bacon]

At dusk on Saturday, December 21, 2002, I and about a hundred others, maybe less, gathered in Balboa Park, San Diego, lit the candles we each carried, and marched less than a mile to an open field. Many of us spoke briefly against the oncoming war, the war we knew was coming. Finally our leader had us form into a peace symbol, with our lighted candles, in an open field so that we might be seen by the jetliners passing overhead in a landing pattern. What a weak, pathetic exhibition that was. But what else could we do? We saw no basis for "intellectual ferment". We ordinary people knew that a great wrong was going to be committed. We knew that there were people, really smart people, like Ignatieff, who were going to get a lot of people killed. And we knew that there were less reputable people who have risen from the American slime regularly to do their evil deeds. People like George Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz, and Michael Ledeen: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." And we knew that the Congress, both sides, had recently voted for war.

Well we were right and they were wrong. It's as simple as that, some say. Next question?

[Lupin]

I see that you are defending yet another Julius Streicher who, in a more just world, would be hanging at the end of a noose, or in jail, with the other Iraq War propagandists.

Let me put it this way: Stalin was a worse monster than Saddam. Yet anti-communism was never a justification to collaborate with the Nazis. Stalin's crimes did not justify Hitler's crimes.

Everyone complicit with the genocidal campaign launched by the US against Iraq is, to various degrees, a war criminal.

I would take Ignatieff's repentance more seriously if he actually DID something, like donate his wealth to the Red Cross or something.

[Autumn Harvest]

Michael Cohen, I'm struck by the absence of the words "defensible" and "reasonable" in your post. Choosing your words more carefully?

Don Bacon, I haven't been hearing a lot of these soul-searching mea culpas from war supporters. I wish I was. The more standard "mea culpa," if you can even call it that, is "I supported the war, and it still seems like a good idea, but who could have known that Bush would screw it up so badly?" Which I find rather pathetic. Ignatieff said that he was wrong to support the war, and wrong in his reasoning behind it. That's a significant admission, and I think, praiseworthy.

[Tim]

So was the premise of the war, that the US had the right to attack a country that had not attacked first and to do so without UN approval, still justified? Not should we attack, but do we have the right to do so? The reason so many people are pissed off is that Mr. Ignatieff and Mr. Cohen himself, still seem to answer yes. People like them then choose to qualify and try to add "we do have the right, but Iraq was the wrong war," or "Bush screwed it up and for that I'm sorry," or "yes it was completely justified to attack Iraq, the intelligence about WMD just accidentally turned out to be wrong; it's no ones fault about that," or dozens of other excuses.
These are the reasons the anti-war left was seen as unreasonable and anti-American: we claimed that the US did not have the right to attack Iraq; we claimed the WMD evidence was thin at best and if it didn't convince the nations of the world it wasn't good enough; we claimed that Iraq was going to be a quagmire and that Bush had no plan; we even claimed that it would divert attention away from Afghanistan; in addition to many other obvious points made by the anti-war movement.
"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."
I'll easily concede that a small chunk of anti-war activists made stupid arguments, like that if the US wants to do something we should do the opposite. Just like a small chunk of war supporters said we had to invade Iraq in order to hasten the Second Coming. I'd submit that the anti-war activists had far better arguments than he would like to admit, and that originally his intention to remove Saddam blocked his hearing of those arguments, and now foolish pride similarly limits his ability to admit that the arguments on the other side of the debate, at the time of the debate, were right, and he was wrong.
Mr. Ignatieff likes to imagine a kind of parity whereby no matter what judgments one reached, it is only by the process of one's reasoning that we can evaluate if you acted well. Yeah, he's an academic alright. Reason and logic > Empirical results ?
We were right, Mr. Ignatieff was wrong. He, and people like him, need to admit that before they should ever be taken seriously again. He got halfway there with this piece. Mr Cohen has been wrong to ignore the first question of the debate: do we (the USA) even have the right?

[Volney]

Very nice comment by Dan Kervick, who presents my view perfectly. There is,however, no evidence whatever that an empire generated by any other culture might behave otherwise.

[masaccio]

You mention that the administration called anti-war people traitors and cowards. What you are missing is the unwillingness of non-administration war-supporters, those who hold themselves out as serious foreign policy experts, even to engage the arguments of those of us who recognized that it would be a disaster. The huge numbers who took to the streets were ignored. The arguments of dissenters had no play in the press. Instead, all of the people who were right were simply dismissed with sneering hand-waving by the Friedmans of the world.

If you hold yourself out as an intellectual, a person who has studied an issue and purports to know enough to lead, you have to be willing to engage those who disagree with you in public and with argument. Friedman and Ignatieff were so sure of themselves that they didn't even bother to deal honestly with contra argument. They may not be bad people, but they are bad public intellectuals, worthy of being ignored, along with Wolfowitz, Feith, and the rest of the warmongers.

[Michael]

The problem you still fail to understand is that they weren't wrong because the NBC weapons weren't there.

This was simply an intellectual exercise for them. They thought up a theory and thought it would be ok to use real peoples' lives to test it.

And they did so while self-righteously denigrating their critics without listening to their counsel at all.

[lambert strether]

The hills are alive...

With the sound of wanking...

This site is funded, right? Why on earth?

[dave™©]

But let's also remember that to err is indeed huma--

Oh, blow it out your ass, Howard...

[Nanorich]

You know what would be really classy and would show a lot a grace?

To just admit you were wrong, say you are sorry, and stop these endless excuses which continue to insult the intelligence of those who knew all along how the Vichy Democrats were collaborating with an administration leading us into disaster.

There is no excuse, no argument, no nothing which will make up for what the "liberal" hawks did...and how they have removed themselves from the being "taken seriously department."

[Dan Kervick]

I do think it is only fair to point out that Ignatieff did engage before and just after the war with some critics of the war. He participated in a couple of LA Times sponsored forums, for example, in which Christopher Hitchens and Ignatieff took the pro-war side and Mark Danner and Robert Scheer took the antiwar position.

However, I do not think that now he is seriously engaging now with the left critique of the war, and of US foreign policy more generally. My main issue with Ignatieff is with his general political position, and with the foreign policy principles that he continues to endorse, and the way in which that position influences the "lessons" he has taken from the Iraq war. Given the nature of these lessons as he has described them, there is every reason to believe that once the Bush administration has been replaced by a less bungling Democratic administration, the liberal moral imperialists will be right back at it, arguing for new wars and new interventions. That's why it is so important to continue to challenge them, and not drift into a lazy "all is forgiven" complacency.

[joejoejoe]

Normally I wear protection, but then I thought, "When am I gonna make it back to Haiti?"

I was worried about invading and occupying Iraq and endorsing preemptive war but then I thought, "What could go wrong?"

BAD IDEA JEANS - order yours today*!

*internally displaced Iraqis (all 1.1 million of you) allow an extra 6 months for shipping

[Scott E.]

"To paraphrase Rummy sometimes people go to war with the war we have, not the war we want."

This is absurd. Iraq was a war of choice. It didn't *have* to be waged. So if you can't have the war you want, why go to war at all? *No war* is better than a poorly planned, poorly executed war, whose major architects show no interest in humanitarian causes beyond thimble-deep happy-democracy sloganeering. At least for wars of choice, if you can't go to war with the war you want, then *don't go to war.*

[Chet Scoville]

while his judgment was wrong, his intentions were pure

Oh, who cares? Even if that's true, his judgment enabled the needless deaths of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of the very people he so purely intended to help. There's no excuse for that, none.

[Paul M]

"It's never easy for people to admit a mistake, especially when it's a several thousand word article in the New York Times magazine..."

Yeah, tough duty. What a trouper.

[Nix]

"The fact is, many well-intentioned Americans supported the war in Iraq"
I can do this too...
The fact is, many well-intentioned Americans have yellow ribbon magnets on their SUVs and yet the troops are fed rotting food.
The fact is, many well-intentioned Americans support the idea of "the troops" but won't join up because they are coward rightwing college GOPers.
The fact is, many well-intentioned Americans say they were a war critic, but were and still are a war cheerleader such as yourself and John McCain.
The fact is, many well-intentioned Americans hate Bush and the war and you hate us for it...........

[jcasey]

Purity of motives is of little comfort to the thousands of dead, displaced and maimed. Ignorance may constant an excuse for crime, but purity of motives almost never does.

[Carl from L.A.]

After Mr. Kervick's great comment above, there isn't much more to say.

I'd just like an opportunity to say it in a shorter way: Every bit of evidence was there in 2003 to know that the aggression against Iraq was an impending disaster based on endless lies. Anyone who had bothered to read a couple of books about the modern Arab world, or who made any effort at all to find out whether Colin Powell's infamous U.N. speech had any shred of truth to it at all, would have known what was coming.

These "intellectuals" ignored all of that, and close to a million people are dead. Those deaths mean nothing to the pundits, when balanced against one more chance to salvage their dead reputations.

Bush is about to trot out the next chapter in his history of serial, murderous lying, the bogus September report. Let's see if these malicious people have developed the minimal moral decency to place other people's lives above their own status in the pecking order. I doubt it.

[rootless2]

I read the Ignatieff piece. It's shallow, ill-informed, counter-factual, and fundamentally evil. The "I'm a rational expert finding the balance between extremes" pose could be straight out of Hannah Arendt. One one extreme are people who have moral objections to torture, on the other people who enjoy it, and in the middle a gray little bureaucrat who calls himself a public intellectual and finds it eminently usable as a tool of public policy if kept in the right hands. The counter-factual assertion that limits in intelligence gathering lead to 9/11 don't stand up to even minimal fact-checking. The fact is that the US had plenty of intelligence, but a lazy, dishonest and incompetent President who dismissed a CIA briefer with "now you've covered your ass". Shoving the heads of any number of randomly chosen victims under water would not have compensated for this catastrophic failure of judgement. To blame the Church reforms for this feckless moron and the facilitators he installed in power is to cooperate in the largest exercise of PR disaster management in the history of the world. That you find this immoral and dishonest hackery to be brilliant is a sad but definitive revelation.

[jayackroyd]

First you need to fix the typo. While it's true many people may felt they were symbolically 'exorcised' by being called traitors, I think you meant that they were 'exercised.'

And I have to say that this is all a lot of swill.

It was absolutely clear in March of 2003 that none of the pretexts for this war were true. The UN inspectors reported back that there was no nuclear program, that they had found no weapons of mass destruction in any of the places the US had said they would be found. There was no link to al qaeda or Sept 11. Iraq was no threat to the US or to the region. The no fly zones had ended Saddam Hussein's murderous ways in the south and the north. The regime was contained, and complying with the weapons inspections regime.

Any really serious analyst, like Hans Blix or most of the Security Council, recognized that the pretexts had all been disproven. Moreover, the administration demonstrated, by its actions, that it realized that the pretexts had all been exposed. First, they pulled a war resolution off the Security Council table--despite Bush's saying that there would be a vote regardless of the "whip count." Second, the invasion went forward with a quarter of the planned force not available because NATO ally Turkey refused to allow the US forces to go through that country.

Given that their busted flush had been exposed, the administration apparently believed they had to proceed with the invasion as soon as possible. A month or two lost to reposition the forces in the north would have permitted much too much discussion of the vacuity of their case.

And where was Tom Friedman? Where was Kenneth Pollack? Pollack, March 2002:

What should the United States do about Iraq? Hawks are wrong to think the problem is desperately urgent or connected to terrorism, but right to see the prospect of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein as so worrisome that it requires drastic action. Doves are right about Iraq's not being a good candidate for an Afghan-style war, but wrong to think that inspections and deterrence alone can contain Saddam. The United States has no choice left but to invade Iraq itself and eliminate the current regime.

had proven to be exactly, entirely and utterly wrong. BEFORE the invasion and occupation.

What a real scholar does in such a situation is immediately and publicly correct himself. It was absolutely clear in March 2003 that deterrence and inspections had contained Saddam. So the reason that people are angry with Pollack and his ilk is that they continued to say things that were not longer consistent with the evidence. And Pollack, and his ilk, continue to command positions of credibility in the traditional media event though they were completely, demonstrably wrong before the war began. We really have no idea why these guys supported this war, but it cannot be because they really believed that Saddam had not been contained. The evidence provided by the inspectors was irrefutable.

[Mark O.]

There were some anti-war folks who simply don't believe that war is ever appropriate.

Sigh. What a bunch of garbage. These "anti-war" folks aren't suggesting that countries shouldn't defend themselves from attack.

They were and are suggesting that invading other countries for "strategic" reasons is immoral because it directly leads to the death of innocent people and doesn't make the United States safer.

Again: the data shows those "anti-war" folks are correct and the "foreign policy analysts" like Friedman are wrong. Friedman needs to be slapped in his face until his lips bleed. How often does that happen to the multi-millionaires who dominate public discourse? Not often enough.

[James E. Powell]

I would respectfully point out that LBJ and McNamara had the decency, or the sense of shame, to leave office. They did not spend the rest of their lives crowing about how they were right all along. And the corporate press/media did not continue to feature them as Serious Foreign Policy Experts that we should all listen to and respect.

People like Ignatieff and Friedman should resign, or at least never try to speak on foreign policy matters again. They weren't just wrong, they were irresponsible. Does it make them bad people? That's too much. It should have destroyed their credibility on foreign policy. For many, it did. For the corporate press/media, and the Beltway foreign policy community, it didn't. No matter how wrong or dishonest you are, you cannot get fired from the foreign policy community unless you argue against the use of military power.

[doggril]

Shorter Iggatieff: I love 'merica; so who cares if I was wrong? The DFH hate 'merica; so who cares if they were right?

[Don Bacon]

Autumn Harvest, feast on these:

mea culpa: a formal acknowledgment of personal fault or error

George Bush: “It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As president I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. . . "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me."

Andrew Sullivan: "In retrospect, neoconservatives (and I fully include myself) made three huge errors. . . We got cocky. We should have known better."

Bill O'Reilly: “Well, my analysis [of Iraq WMD] was wrong and I'm sorry. I am much more skeptical of the Bush administration now than I was at the time”

Al Neuharth (USA Today): "A year ago I criticized Hillary Clinton for saying "this (Bush) administration will go down in history as one of the worst. She's wrong," I wrote. "I was wrong. This is my mea culpa. Not only has Bush cracked that list, but he is planted firmly at the top. The Iraq war, of course, has become Bush's albatross."

TNR: "The New Republic deeply regrets its early support for this war."

Peter Beinart (TNR): "Why, exactly, did you support this war?" asked my wife the other day. A fitting question for my last TRB, since people have been asking it of me and this magazine since we made that disastrous decision more than four years ago. For myself, perhaps the most honest reply is this: because Kanan Makiya did."

John Derbyshire (TNR): "So why am I eating crow? Because I think it was foolish of me to suppose that the administration would act with the punitive ruthlessness I hoped to see."[!!]

Leonard Downie (ExEd, WaPo): "We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."

The New York Times: "We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged - or failed to emerge. . . Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all."

[pseudonymous in nc]

If Ignatieff had managed to win the Liberal leadership election last year, you wouldn't be hearing anything like a mea culpa from him. And that piece wasn't even a mea culpa: it was a verbiose piece of ass-coverage.

[jayackroyd]

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.

And this one really, really ticks me off.

The notion that there could be a democratic state in Iraq that would also be an American ally, and a place for placing military bases is absolutely ridiculous. There is no way that a government could be freely elected in Iraq that would support US foreign policy in the Middle East. There is no way that a freely elected government in Iraq would provide support to a pro-Israel, anti-Iran military force.

No way.

And, on this one, there can be no claim of being mistaken or misled. No airy waving away the "flawed intelligence." What this means is that these people flat out lied about this--that the plan was to install a puppet (idiotically, it seems that the administration really believed that Chalabi would be that puppet). There is no way that Kenneth Pollack or Michael Ignatieff could possibly have believed in a freely elected, anti-Palestine, anti-Iran Iraqi government.

And this is what honks me off most of all. They don't tell the truth about these things because the hoi polloi won't deal with the truth. Just as, today, right now, they are not telling the truth about the permanent occupation that is the ultimate goal. Nobody. Nobody is saying out loud that the plan is for 50-75,000 soldiers to stay in place in Iraq, indefinitely. There is no debate about how to maintain the pretense of Iraqi sovereignty while the US maintains a military force in Iraq. It is taken for granted that this is what will happen--even though this would be a very unpopular policy. We have democratic candidates dancing around these plans, leaving wiggle room for their ultimate decision to remain in Iraq indefinitely as an imperial power.

Where is the Serious Discussion about what this will mean? Where's the Foreign Affairs article describing how this occupation will work? Where are the polling questions that ask how long the US should plan to occupy Iraq? Who is discussing the fact that Iraq is not a functioning state, does not have a defense force, and is surrounded by mutually hostile neighbors?

We got in this disastrous mess largely because there was no honest policy discussion about the war and the subsequent occupation. Fearmongering by the president and a cowardly unwillingness to stand up by the Serious People took the place of policy discussion.

And this cowardly unwillingness to confront the situation today--continuing to claim that something will turn up to make Iraq not a failed state if US soldiers continue to go on patrols and get blown up or kill people who might be trying to blow them up--is more of the same. This is what kept the US in Vietnam for six years after it was clear that the war was lost, both in fact and in the hearts and minds of the American people.

So what we really need is for the Serious People to start leveling with their readerships and their constituents. What is the plan for ending this while limiting the damage as much as possible? I haven't heard one yet.

[ice weasel]

He didn't write it for me but nonetheless, thank you Mr. Kervick for so eloquently putting things in perspective.

Mr. Cohen would do well to remember what the road to hell is paved with and while we do all err, some errors are not easily forgotten or forgiven. Supporting the war is one of them.

[masaccio]

Dan Bacon, love the list. But it isn't enough to apologize for something. The test is whether the failure learns a lesson and works to avoid the fatal error in the future. I see no sign of that in the willingness of the New York Times to print the dispatches from the administration filed by Michael Gordon (Judith Miller's accomplice) on its front page. I don't see it on the front page of the Washington Post, which prints in all seriousness the silly press handouts from the new public relations team for the Army on the wondrous success of the surge. I don't see anyone getting fired for stupid acceptance of the fear-mongering of the administration on FISA.

Confession of sin (the source of the term "mea culpa") requires penance. I haven't heard any of these serious people reciting so much as a "Glory be", let alone the Opus Dei flagellation they so richly deserve.

[rootless2]

Jayckroyd points out that the protestations of "pure intentions" to spread democracy are most likely lies. Nobody has ever made a case that a "democratic" Iraq would be pro-israel and anti-Iran and in favor of allowing US bases on its soil because such a case would expose its own ridiculousness. Instead, the "pure intentions" crowd uses "democracy" as a code word for "client".

[Ed Sanders]

Mr. Cohen, I regret that I couldn't finish reading your blog post. The idiocy was just too much for me to take and from just the small portion I was able to get through, (I stopped when you stated your admiration for Friedman) I doubt you could make a bigger fool of yourself if you wet your pants at a state dinner.

[Steve Muhlberger]

What I want to know as a Canadian is precisely why Ignatieff routinely addresses these questions as if he were an American. Who is he a front man for? Or is he up for sale or rent to the highest bidder?

[Matt]

"In Defense of Being Wrong": one need look no further than the title to know that the premise of this post is insanely wrong.

'Wrong' here is no small, fixable mistake. It's an error that has cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, not to mention our country's valuable reputation. Those who were wrong--in the face of intelligent criticism they glibly dismissed--deserve no 'A for effort' or gentleman's C, as Cohen seems to be arguing for. They should see the disastrous consequences of their words and efforts and step out of their 'expert' chairs. It's time to make room for those who would not have led our country down this perilous path.

[the dryyyyyyy cracker]

Oh, for Pete's sake. Nobody cares if they're "good people" or not. My stepdad's a great guy, but if he were to opine publically about foreign affairs, he would merit a category 5 smackdown, because his thoughts on the subject are detestable.

Hey, I just realized--O'Hanlon, Pollack and Friedman should hang out with my mom. She'll put 'em to work at the animal shelter and keep 'em away from credulous politicians, and she can give 'em some golf tips. Everybody wins!

Well, everybody but my mom.

[jcasey]

Dear Don Bacon,

Good list. I'm curious about the mea culpas of some of the liberal blogger types--didn't Yglesias and Ezra Klein (as well as other prospect people) support the war? They're both pretty hard on people who continue to support the war, so I'm interested in reading their explanations and how that relates to their current projects. If I'm wrong about their support for then please inform. Thanks.

[DrBB]

I thought Ignatieff's mea culpa was one of the most diffuse, meandering and truism-laden pieces I've ever read in a prestigious publication. I guess he apologized in there somewhere, and so that's nice for him. But apologies are beside the point. Mouthing apologies and then going about your business in the same way you did before and walking wide-eyed into the same snake pit is useless. And that's what I see in the media-punditocracy complex. All the same people are doing all the same things all over again. Some examples:

-That ridiculous propagandistic trickery of Pollack and O'Hanlon deliberately passing themselves off as "anti war liberals" so that they're latest in a series of pro-war utterances is universally presented as some kind of conversion narrative. They deserve all the grief they're getting from blogistan and more. No one should be listening to these people--their credibility is blown.

-The media, with one exception, allowing themselves to be sucked in by their trickery. The one exception being John Stewart, f'r cripesakes. Isn't it shameful that ONLY a comedy news program gets this stuff consistently right?

-Michael Gordon, who has taken Judy Miller's place in the same old shell game of uncritically repeating Cheneyite propaganda in the NYTimes, which then gets cited by Cheney himself to back up his view of the war. Pretty much the same goes for Pollack & O'Hanlon, matter of fact.

-The same skullduggering around to gin up support for an attack on Iran, which now lots of "serious" guys are saying "Yeah, we were wrong on Iraq, but Iran really is a country we should blow up!"

-As always, the pundit shows, which in spite of everything we've seen in the last six years are still going to the same patsies they've had on all that time and still seem to be enforcing the embargo against commentators who criticize the whole strategy of the war as opposed to this that or t'other detail of Bush's prosecution of it. Remember how they pilloried Howard Dean for saying Saddam's capture wasn't going to make us any safer? I still don't see them pointing out that he was right and they were wrong on it. And anyone who voices criticisms of the current Great Idea of attacking Iran seems to get equally dismissive treatment.

When the farthest "left" position continues to be represented by "nukes are on the table" Joke Line, we have made zero progress toward averting the next Cheneyite catastrophe, no matter how many mea culpas are out there on the op-ed pages. I don't CARE if Friedman or Ignatieff had good intentions. I'll happily concede that they did. SO WHAT. The problem is that we're heading down the same tubes again and all these guys are out there pouring grease on the skids the same way they did the first time around as if they'd learned absolutely nothing. Mea culpas notwithstanding.

[Poster]

Johnson honestly believed he was doing what was best for the country? Have your read any history? Jesus H Christ - Johnson is on tape acknowledging that the war was lost, but he couldn't pull out because of how bad it would look.

[commie atheist]

Michael Ignatieff is one of my favorite public intellectuals.

An alternate view:

Ignatieff's latest essay is what Latin people call a "mea culpa," which is Greek for "Attention publishers: I am ready to write a book about the huge colossal mistake I made." I imagine the book will be about a man struggling to do the right thing-- a man who thinks with his heart and dares, with a dream in each fist, to reach for the stars. It's about a journey: a journey from idealistic, starry-eyed academic to wizened, war-weary politician. (Ignatieff used to work at Harvard's Kennedy School; now he's Prime Chancellor of Canada's Liberal Delegate or whatever kind of wack-ass, kumbaya government they've got up there.)

In a way, it's a story much like Cormac McCarthy's recent best-selling "The Road." Both follow a hero's long march through thankless environments-- in Ignatieff's case, from the theory-throttled, dusty tower of academia to the burned-out hell-hole of representative politics. Danger lurks. Grime abounds. The narrative tension is: Can the hero be wrong about everything, survive, and still convince people he's smarter than everyone in Moveon.org?

I was excited when I first saw this new essay: At last, Ignatieff was going to come clean about his super-duper-double-dipper errors. I expected a no-holds barred, personal excoriation. In fact, I assumed the first, last, and only sentence of the essay would be: "Please, for the love of God, don't ever listen to me again."

HOWEVER. . .

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-rees/cormac-ignatieffs-the-r_b_59363.html

Read, as they say, the whole thing. You'll be glad you did.

[A Guy in Jersey]

Please continue in further columns and tell us about the good intentions of Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Don Rumsfelf, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Judy Miller, Scooter Libby, Charles Krauthammer, Karl Rove, James Woolsey, Ari Fleischer, Dan Senor, David Addington, Stephen Cambone, Eric Edelman, Alberto Gonzales, Condi Rice, Dan Bartlett, et al., et al.

[Dan Kervick]

Dr BB,

Exactly right. When the bombs start falling on Iran, I wonder how many of the apologizing pundits, who now claim to have learned all sorts of magnificent lessons from Iraq, will be out there again defending the latest aggression.

It is extraordinary how willing people are to repeat the very same patterns of self-destructive behavior which so recently got them into so much trouble. I am still waiting to see a single major media report, for example, on the exact state of information regarding Iran's nuclear program, a report that draws in detail from all of the global sources of information on this issue, and does more than simply repeat the assertions of an administration whose pattern of deception has been repeadtedly demonstrated.

[Jay B.]

You don't get it and never will. I shudder to think that you have worked in an expert capacity with Chris Dodd. It's because of Democrats like you -- confusing idiotic machismo with 'foreign policy', conflating "good intentions" with "war" as if the former is part of the latter, spinelessly bending over for spying, ignorant of the simplest facts that exist outside your Beltway Circus -- that make me weep for the country's future.

There are some good, sensible Democrats. Unfortunately, far, far too few. Please, leave the party. Go into exile. Find a nice quiet place where you can read books. Get out of that city and let people who haven't yet fucked up our government and this world do the talking. You are at some 'non-partisan' think tank? Leave. You are thinking the same old regurgitated rank swill that's gotten us where we are now. Find peace in the woods. Leave us the hell alone while some non-experts try and clean up your bretheren's ruins.

That or discover why we're angry. Why listening to little tommy friedman was wrong from the start. That there was NO good way to go into this war. There were academic reasons, rancid reasons, fake reasons, trumped reasons, fearful reasons, but NOT A SINGLE GOOD REASON. Seriously. Shut up for a minute. Ask yourself a simple question: How could all of these non-experts be so right while the people you know, read, converse with and live among can be SO FUCKING WRONG. Until you ponder that Michael, until you can figure out the answer, please, for the party, for the country and for the rest of the world, shut the fuck up.

[Doctor Biobrain]

Frankly, I fail to understand how "oops" really takes care of anything. Especially not when they (and you) continue to insist that they were wrong for the right reasons. They weren't. They were always wrong. War is always a damn risky thing and these people were always fools for not recognizing that. There is no excuse for the mistakes they made. I was making that point before the war started, and I'm still a nobody blogger that continues to be ignored; while they are praised by people like you for their "soul-wrenching mea culpas" and are given a free-pass to screw things up again.

I have no problem with accepting apologies from these people, but it has to be full apologies, and not this "wrong for the right reasons" BS. It still appears that they have no clue as to why they were wrong, and think it was only hindsight which proved them wrong. It wasn't. They were always wrong from the start. Hindsight just made it too obvious for them to deny our points any longer. But they were always wrong. Yet they're considered to be serious experts, while we continue to be ignored. How have you not understood that basic point?

BTW: How many people insist that all of these people had bad intentions? I addressed that the last time I was here, yet it still is your main focus. I don't care if they had good intentions. They still insist that their only mistake was "doing the right thing" and that means they haven't learned anything and should be ignored and ridiculed.

[Roberto]

To commenter Dan Kervick: wow! I had to read your comment in full and outloud. That was fantastic!

[Junius Brutus]

More lame analysis from non-responsive liberal hawk apologist Michael Cohen. We were all distinctly unimpressed with your recent efforts at libhawk apologia, Michael, and even less impressed with your unwillingness to honestly debate your critics. We are less impressed still with this latest installment.

Far better analysis of Ignatieff is provided by David Rees:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-rees/cormac-ignatieffs-the-r_b_59363.html?view=print

Ignatieff's latest essay is what Latin people call a "mea culpa," which is Greek for "Attention publishers: I am ready to write a book about the huge colossal mistake I made." I imagine the book will be about a man struggling to do the right thing-- a man who thinks with his heart and dares, with a dream in each fist, to reach for the stars. It's about a journey: a journey from idealistic, starry-eyed academic to wizened, war-weary politician. (Ignatieff used to work at Harvard's Kennedy School; now he's Prime Chancellor of Canada's Liberal Delegate or whatever kind of wack-ass, kumbaya government they've got up there.)

In a way, it's a story much like Cormac McCarthy's recent best-selling "The Road." Both follow a hero's long march through thankless environments-- in Ignatieff's case, from the theory-throttled, dusty tower of academia to the burned-out hell-hole of representative politics. Danger lurks. Grime abounds. The narrative tension is: Can the hero be wrong about everything, survive, and still convince people he's smarter than everyone in Moveon.org?

I was excited when I first saw this new essay: At last, Ignatieff was going to come clean about his super-duper-double-dipper errors. I expected a no-holds barred, personal excoriation. In fact, I assumed the first, last, and only sentence of the essay would be: "Please, for the love of God, don't ever listen to me again."

HOWEVER. . .

The first nine-tenths of Ignatieff's essay, far from being an honest self-examination, is a collection of vague aphorisms and bong-poster koans. It hums with the comforting murmur of lobotomy. I refuse to believe this section was actually written by a member of the Canadian government, because that would mean Canada is even more "fuxxor3d" than America. (A little hacker-speak, that. There will be more; I finally bought the B3rlitz tapes.)

Below, a smorgasbord of Ignatieff's musings, with commentary:

"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. . . ."
Right off the bat, he's saying: "It was right for me to support the Iraq war when I was an academic, because academics live in outer space on Planet Zinfandel, and play with ideas all day. But now, as a politician in a country that opposed the war, I'll admit I screwed up, because politicians must deign to harness the wild mares of whimsy to the ox-cart of cold, calculated reality." So, although his judgments were objectively wrong, they were contextually appropriate. Sweet! You've been totally 0wn3d by Michael Ignatieff! And so have all those dead Iraqis.

Immediately, I could tell: THIS ESSAY WASN'T GOING TO BE FRUSTRATING AT ALL.

"Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings. . . ."

Why do I hear Geddy Lee singing this phrase over a 6/13 time signature? All that's missing is the phrase "telescopic zodiac / whispering secrets into my cerebellum" and you've got a killer Rush lyric!

"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. . . ."

Given the title of my previous post about Ignatieff, I was especially taken with this paragraph. Two questions:

1. Is Michael Ignatieff sending me secret messages, like Christopher Hitchens did Paul Wolfowitz? If so, let me state for the record: Michael Ignatieff, I am ready to wage war on whomever you want! You had me at "Invade."

2. Don't bus drivers ever get tired of the "Regular schmoes are smarter than us academics/politicians/journalists" gag? Raise your hand if you think Ignatieff appointed any bus drivers to the Kennedy School faculty. I mean, if Ignatieff really thinks bus drivers are shrewder than academics, why didn't he quit Harvard and go drive a bus? After all, even if he turned out to be the worst bus driver ever, and ran over pedestrians every five seconds, he probably wouldn't kill as many people as his Iraq war did! (Joke.)

"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. . ."

Winston Churchill is Leonardo daVinci. George W. Bush is Thomas Kinkade. Michael Ignatieff basically helped us buy a half-trillion dollars' worth of Thomas Kinkade paintings. Thanks.

"To bring the new into being, a politician needs a sense of timing, of when to leap and when to remain still. . . ."

Come, now: If you're gonna steal from Kenny Rogers, you at least gotta grow the beard.

"Few of us hear the horses coming. . . ."

"Ma! Circle the wagons! The horses are coming!"
"But Pa, I can't circle the wagons without the horses! The horses pull the wagons!"
"Oh, no! We're totally gonna get trampled by horses!"

Seriously, let's repeat this quote: "Few of us hear the horses coming." We are really getting into Cormac McCarthy territory here:

"They saw the WMDs over the hill, staggering under the weight of their own nonexistence like some funereal assemblage of bent-backed phantoms. Ignatieff crouched in the mulberry copse, glassed his target, cursed the Chomskian dust that risked his weapons ruin, then raised The Ultimate Task of Thomas Jeffersons Dream and sent its buckshot tearing into Iraq-- tatterdemalion, sanction-wracked-- and the rocks behind were splatter-stained with a crimson decoupage like some chromatic inversion of all that is holy and lawful. I kindly reckon we just shot the shit out of Iraq, Ignatieff said. And Friedman said, Lets move in to get a better look at her. And they tried hailing a cab with an anecdotaholic driver but they couldnt find one because they were stranded in a featureless semantic apocalypse, meaning-raped and apostropheless like some joy-smudged, italicized parody of Cormac McCarthy. And on the crest of the hill they heard Kanan Makiya weeping soundlessly like the very enabler of evil itself."

Coen Brothers, I am ready to ROCK!!!

"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. . . ."

I think it was at about this point I started weeping quietly. "When will this essay end," I remember thinking, "and what will be left of my dignity? Is there a leader out there, steadfast and un-nonplussed, who can give me the reassurance I deserve?"

"Improvisation may not stave off failure. The game usually ends in tears. . . ."

You know what would have pushed this essay into the realm of literary greatness? If Ignatieff had ended this paragraph with: "The game usually ends in tears-- the tears. . . of a clown." I don't know why, but that would have made me really happy. I guess because I love that song? Do you think there's a chance Ignatieff actually did consider ending with ". . . the tears of a clown," but then deleted it, saying, "They wouldn't understand. . . they're not ready yet"? Let's call the Geek Squad and pay them to steal his hard drive! Then we can "hack it."

"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. . . ."

Bingo! Our first tautology. You spend enough time in the vague-o-sphere, you're bound to bump into one.

"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. . . ."

My eyes. Stinging. Is it tears, or blood? Can't tell-- all the mirrors are cracked. From my screams.

"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. . . . This saving hypocrisy of public life is not available in private life. There we play for keeps. . . ."

I panicked when I read this, because I couldn't figure out where "we play for keeps": In private life, or in public life? I don't care if we play for keeps in public life-- I never leave my house, so I don't have a public life. But if we play for keeps in private life, I'm doomed. Because I spend 90% of my waking hours in private. On the internet. And I don't want that to be "for keeps." Believe me, that must not be "for keeps."

"Good judgment means understanding how to be responsible to those who pay the price of your decisions. . . . Sometimes sacrificing my judgment to (my consituents') is the essence of my job. Provided, of course, that I don't sacrifice my principles. . . ."

Attention, Michael Ignatieff's constituents: HE THINKS YOU'RE DUMB. Also, there's something suspicious about that "Provided, of course. . ." It's only five syllables, but it seems to mask a conga line of condescension. It makes me think Ignatieff assumes his readers are dumb, too. But I'm not dumb-- I predicted the Iraq war would be a disaster. And that means I'm as smart as a bus driver.

"Politicians with good judgment bend the policy to fit the human timber. . . ."

Who was that poet who lived in the woods back in Civil War days? Ralph Waldo Emerson? Walt Whitman? Anyway, I'm sure he talked like this all the time: "I ain't payin' your confounded taxes-- they don't fit my human timber! Because ye didn't bend 'em correctly! By the way, you're standin' on my sasparilla patch! Did they invent electricity yet?"

"Resisting the popular isn't easy, because resisting the popular isn't always wise. . . ."

Michael Ignatieff is the Chuck Klosterman of political science.

"(Bush) had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives warning bells do not sound. . . . People with good judgment listen to warning bells within. . . ."

Ding-dong! There's my warning bell within! What are you saying, warning bell? Ding-dong! Don't keep reading this essay! Your HMO won't cover the neurological damage! Ding-aling-dong!

"A prudent leader will save democracies from the worst, but prudent leaders will not inspire a democracy to give its best. . . ."

This reminds me of something I had stitched on the back of my denim jacket once: "An eagle with a broken wing may fly high enough to avoid the quicksand, but it cannot soar above possibility's treetops at the dawn of a new day." Boy, did everyone in town hate that denim jacket!

"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. . . ."

I think it's reaching to call Isiah Thomas a "prophet," though the New York Knicks are definitely "men of sorrow acquainted with grief." Surely Ignatieff doesn't think America would be better off if the New York Knicks were president? How would that even work? Also, he misspelled "Isiah." In conclusion, this part of Ignatieff's essay should have been called "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten-- But It Didn't Actually Sink in Until Thousands and Thousands of Iraqis Went to Heaven."

Now, let's move on to the other part of the essay! Are you still with me? Let's DO THIS! I still have some water in my canteen; I'll share it with you. No, don't be silly, there's plenty of light left-- sunset's at least an hour away. . .

Next is the part of Ignatieff's essay that I initially thought would be the whole essay: The part where Ignatieff admits he made a boo-boo.

"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."

"Always and in every situation wrong?" Come on, we all like it when America wins at the Olympics, right? I bet even Ward Churchill had a crush on Mary Lou Retton, back in the day. Good thing they didn't make a baby together, though! Wow! That would have been an intense baby-- unlimited negative energy vs. unlimited positive energy and all that! For real, though: You anti-war people have got to admit, Ignatieff has you nailed. You dumb-asses who were right about everything for the wrong reasons, instead of wrong about everything for the right reasons. You lose.

"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."

Yeah, you're right, they did. Do you know why? Because they're not retarded.

"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. . . ."

And here, finally, is where my skull cracked open, my heart combusted, and a murder of crows flew out of my ass. Michael Ignatieff is drawing lessons for the future. Michael Ignatieff has a future in public policy. Sure, it's CANADIAN public policy, so it doesn't really count, but still-- it's like the guy can't be stopped. You know why? Because he's at that level where you literally can't make a big enough mistake to be fired, shunned, or indicted. I'd like to visit that level someday. First thing I'd do is get rip-roarin' drunk and rob a bank using Richard Perle's face as a weapon. (JOKE!)

Then again, I guess it's for the best-- because if people like Michael Ignatieff were ignored, how would we know what to think about the world?

Oh, wait: We could ask the bus drivers.

But now that I think about it, why ask bus drivers when we could ask RACE CAR DRIVERS? Race car drivers are smarter than bus drivers, right? After all, they make more money, are held in higher esteem, and have sexier wives!

RACE CAR DRIVERS ARE #1!

THE END.

[Castaway]

The "soul wrenching mea culpas" of war supporters like Ignatieff and Friedman remind me of those of Sir Launcelot, wedding guest extrordinaire from Monty Python's Holy Grail. I only wish the results of their senseless and intellectually dishonest pre-war rantings weren't infinitely worse than Launcelot would have been capable of imagining.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jO1EOhGkY0

[rootless2]

A whole ecosystem of deluded "experts" congratulating each other on their perspicacity.

[peorgie tirebiter]

Best... comment section.... Ever!

[Deadeye Dick Cheney]

LBJ had this to say about Viet Nam: "It is always a strain when people are being killed. I don't think anyone has held this job who hasn't felt personally responsible for those being killed."

Of course, he said that before George W. Bush became President. Speaking of remorseless, unrepentant jackasses, I haven't seen any remorse from Tom Friedman, either. It's one thing to screw up. It's one thing to unthinkingly follow a screw-up. Even that can be forgiven. But to unremorsefully continue to follow a known screw up like Dubya is worse than stupid. It's absolutely negligent and it ought to be criminal.

[IM]

So you have sympathy with the devil.
I can understand that, really. I like Hamsun and Satre and Feuchtwanger and Brecht and Kipling. I even think Wilhelm II was a misunderstood man with good intentions.

Still, I beg a favour of you:
Could you read or reread "the Heart of Darkness" and think seriously about the question, if perhaps, just perhaps some of your friends and idols have some fleeting similarity with Mr. Kurtz?

Because sometimes it is a short way from the "International Society for the Supression of Savage Customs" to "Exterminate all the brutes!".

[jdw]

It's rather telling that the *comments* section contains a far better essay on Michael Ignatieff's piece by Dan Kervick than what Cohen wrote.

[Jennifer]

A few points: first, when you observe that over half of the American people eventually supported the war, you should note that this was shortly after the invasion occured, and quite a few of those number would have been in the "cross your fingers and hope for the best" camp, given that on the eve of the invasion, fully 62% of Americans were opposed to war with Iraq in the way the president intended to(and subsequently did) wage it.

Second, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say. I personally do not accept that "good intentions" with the known side effect of the death of innocent people are acceptable, particularly when those "good intentions" blind the holder to the obvious truth that their position of support can only be maintained through subscribing to a series of quite obvious lies. Thinking individuals witnessed the spectacle of the administration carny-barking the dangers of model airplanes and asked themselves, "is this an Austen Powers movie?" They were similarly unimpressed by cartoon drawings of alleged "mobile weapons labs" or photos taken from two miles in space of large buildings purported to be WMD "storage facilities" but which in fact could have just as easily, judging from the photos themselves, have been the Baghdad Wal-Mart. Those who weren't predisposed to the idea that it would be a GOOD thing to start an unprovoked war didn't fail to notice when Hans Blix and other UN inspectors, visiting those very same "WMD bunkers" in the week following the scary UN demonstration, failed to find anything sinister whatsoever. And last but not least, any and all honest Americans recognized the foul fecal aroma rising from statements such as "we'll be greeted with candy and flowers," since it jibes with the actual life experience of no one who has ever walked the face of the planet.

All thing considered, I would have to say, no, anyone guilty of buying into any of these obviously false premises - and worse yet, of promoting war on the basis of them - deserves forgiveness, because they are arrived at their position through months of willful self-delusion. No one should ever take their opinion on anything seriously again, since they have shown it to be all too malleable in support of what they WANT to believe rather than what common sense alone would tell them is the actual truth.

[buermann]

"We must remember that more than half of all Americans ended up supporting the war in Iraq."

This isn't true at all until the support-the-troops effect turned on after the war had already started:

Take action soon/Give inspectors time/DK: (March 7-9, 2003, CBS) 44/52/4
Invade without UN support (March 14-15, 2003, zogby): support/oppose/DK: 47/49/5

"some anti-war folks who simply don't believe that war is ever appropriate."

I'm not sure what it matters, but the actual number is at most a marginal percentage of the general public, just check any CCFR global views poll where they ask the battery of questions about international norms and the use of force. I've never seen any pollster actually ask "would you fight if your country was under sustained attack" before, but as it is only 4% (ccfr 2004) say a country "should never unilaterally declare war".

When the numbers of identifiable potential pacifists falls within the margin of error - meaning statistically they may not exist at all - I don't think it's technically accurate to say so definitively that "some exist", or more specifically that if any do they're evidently statistically irrelevant.

[SteveB]

But does that make [Thomas Friedman] a bad person? Of course not. Does it mean he loves his country any less then someone like me who passionately opposed the war?

Are you being deliberately obtuse? Find me one person who thinks the main issue is whether Thomas Friedman is a "good person" or whether he "loves his country".

The point, repeated a hundred times before, and so probably pointlessly repeated here, is this: should people like Ignatieff and Friedman have jobs offering up their foreign-policy prognostications and advice, after being so horribly, horribly wrong? Should Friedman have a column in the New York Times? Should Ignatieff be invited on CNN or the News Hour with Jim Lehrer to offer up his "analysis" to the public?

In other fields of work, failure on this scale has consequences. For our nation's chattering classes, there are none. And because there are no professional consequences for people like Friedman or Ignatieff, they will continue to do their part to get us into disasters like Iraq, with horrific consequences for millions of people. This is what enrages the critics of Friedman, Ignatieff and you.

But go ahead, keep pretending that we're debating whether Thomas Friedman is a "good person" who "loves his country." Obviously you've decided that this is the best strategy for avoiding a serious response to your critics.

[hillwomp]

OBL is LHFAO.

[jayackroyd]

Yes, that's true. His original plan failed. He got the retaliation he wanted from the US, but not the quagmire in Afghanistan. But then this administration got themselves into a completely irrelevant quagmire in Iraq, reinforcing all of bin Laden's messages.
.

[flounder]

Here's what I think is a good mea culpa.
If you were wrong about the war, then spent the next four years telling everyone that the pony was right around the next corner, quit your job. Admit that you did a bad job much longer than most people in this country get to screw up at their jobs. Go break rocks or deliver pizza for a while. Practice those "politics of personal responsibility" that you preach.

[The Chimp's Underwear]

"Everyone complicit with the genocidal campaign launched by the US against Iraq is, to various degrees, a war criminal."

Yep.

There really is nothing else or more to say. In fact, anything else said at this point is nothing but sophistry in the service of obfuscation in the service of evasion of moral responsibility.

You understand "moral responsibility," don't you, Mr. Cohen. I believe your own people, from ancient times, talked about it in their sacred texts, from Genesis and Exodus down to the writings of their major and minor prophets.

Are you listening, Mr. Cohen, you "serious" foreign policy expert, you?

[Lupin]

Dear Mr Cohen:

May I suggest that you start by reading the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials and start applying their lessons here?

[Dumbo]

What horse fertilizer...

I remember the gassing of the Kurds. I was not there when it happened (and I doubt that M. Ignatieff was there right when it happened either), but I saw the pictures on Tv and I was mad, too, mad at GHW Bush for not "finishing the job" and taking out Saddam when he had the chance.

BUT THAT WAS 1992.

Fast forward, my friends, to 2002. We had been attacked on 9/11, and the b**tards who did it were (and still) are running free. Why was 2002 the time to get a conscience about Saddam? We had been coexisting with him for ten years like he was a dirty ol' uncle that nobody wants to see cuddling the kids. And in 2002, something changed?

Please spare me; don't say it was 9/11. Osama is still free. We took our eye off the real ball so we could go play Laurence of Arabia in Iraq. And Michael Ignatieff explains this by saying that he was still in shock about something that happened in 1992?

Sorry. This makes no sense. Not unless you play these generalization games where all nasty Arabs are the same, they are all "the enemy" or just "them," so striking at one is striking at them all.

There is no strategy to this kind of mindless drivel. It deserves psycho-analysis more than analysis. Perhaps people like M. Ignatieff can find solace in future years in phrases like "mass insanity" or "mass hypnosis," the way so many Germans must have after 1945. But such comfort found in numbers still doesn't make the results any less catastrophic.

[kuvasz]

Gracious be, the new zenith in intellectual cover your ass journalism. Wankers the lot.

I don't see any way anyone with "pure intentions" could possibly throw reason and caution to the wind and still proclaim with a straight face that their opponents were still wrong but their own heart was in the right place.

The logical extension would be cheerfully to drive off a cliff while imbued with the certainty that the faster they drove the sooner they would get to their destination.

Not only were the supporters of this damned war wrong for the wrong reasons they didn't even use reason as an intellectual tool and any attempt at breaking them from their procession with war was met with gross hostility and ad hominum. For that we are supposed to give them credit?

What type of crap is that, lawyerly lying?

What kind of person other than a fool goes to war needlessly?

[julia]

What an extraordinary thing to say.

You seem to suggest that some of our Public Intellectuals are taking an unfair hit because, although they put their credibility on the line behind supporting the Bush administration in the Bush administration's plans for war as carried out by the Bush administration, they really had their fingers crossed?

So we've got a destabilized region and decimated international relationships and stratospheric - and unaccounted for - sums of money disappearing into contractors' pockets and a civil war and, um, a really lot of dead people because this extremely bad decision was made. Well, insofar as the support of the Public Intellectuals you're talking about here had any influence at all on the decision to go to war, they signed up for all that, and they stuck with their decision every time a rationale turned out to be fairy gold or execution was botched.

I'm a little confused about how you think they'd be less culpable if they signed up for that truly believing that what they were supporting was the wrong plan. OK, your friends didn't believe the administration when they lied us into war (no fools they!), they just told us they did because they had their own reasons they didn't want to talk about. So, insofar as they have any credibility, your friends lied us into war.

Not really a ringing defense.

And why should we ever believe them again?

[SteveB]

Having read through the 63 comments now on this thread, I can't find a single one that defends Mr. Cohen's position.

What are we to conclude from this?

Well, if you're Michael Cohen, you conclude that you're the target of a well-organized astroturf campaign by angry, angry, liberal bloggers. That, and all your friends and supporters concidentally suffered a catastrphic failure of their internet service providers (also, no doubt, the doing of those angry, angry, liberal bloggers).

Any normal person might start to have doubts at this point: "Hmmm... maybe there might be something slightly wrong with what I'm saying, to have provoked such a response?"

But Michael Cohen isn't prey to such doubts. He has the supreme confidence of a full dues-paying member of our nation's foreign policy elite, and is free to dismiss our criticism with a wave of his hand.

I expect this is the last we will hear on this topic from Cohen. He's done his best, but this last outpouring of criticism leaves him no choice but to conclude that we're simply to stupid or angry to understand.

[Junius Brutus]

Here's the key point that should be obvious but apparently isn't. It's not just that these libhawks made the wrong call. Its that they made the wrong call for characteristic reasons. It's because they are 1) too gullible and 2) too afraid. Anyone who didn't suffer from these intellectual vices could easily have made the right call.

[bartkid]

Don Bacon posted:
>Ignatieff, a Canadian, writes (dishonestly) as if he were an American. Everything is in the first person plural: we felt, our, etc. What does he know about American culture? I don't need to learn how Americans feel about terrorism by reading a Canadian. Now Friedman will be writing about how Canadians feel, I suppose.

Mr. Bacon,
Re, Mr. Ignatieff: He spent five years teaching at Harvard. He wrote "Lesser Evils" when he was still living in the States. And, at least 80% of the media any Canadian hears or reads comes from the States.

Re: Mr. Friedman, I take it you did not read "The World is Flat".

[David Shorr]

Maybe you haven't seen much defense for Michael Cohen because most of the above really doesn't leave much room for response.

But let me make one observation. What I find remarkable is that with all the scorn that's heaped on here, I couldn't find any of it that actually connected with Ignatieff's primary motive for supporting the war: Saddam's genocidal campaign against the Kurds. For me, this isn't a convincing point -- you don't intervene on humanitarian grounds years after the fact as retribution. And Ignatieff himself owns up to the dangers of emotional connections with particular groups. Nonetheless, given the body of Ignatieff's work on human rights, it seems only fair to grant the sincerity of that position.

[SteveB]

Maybe you haven't seen much defense for Michael Cohen because most of the above really doesn't leave much room for response.

What the heck does that mean? Have we, the critics of Michael Cohen, selfishly used up all the "room" here in the comment section, leaving "none for response"?

Here, I'll set aside some "room" for the use of Mr. Cohen's defenders:

[insert defense of Michael Cohen here]

Seriously, I would think that the more criticisms there are, the easier it would be for Cohen's supporters to find some weak point (perhaps an attack on Michal Ignatieff for being Canadian?) that they could single out for "response" while ignoring other, more substantive criticisms.

Oh, wait, "bartkid" beat you to it.

[Dan Kervick]

Nonetheless, given the body of Ignatieff's work on human rights, it seems only fair to grant the sincerity of that position.

David, I really don't think think Ignatieff's sincerity or lack of it is particularly germane to the debate about Ignatieff's publicly taken positions, political activity or degree of moral responsibility for bad policies.