Michael Valpy's long biographical profile of Michael Ignatieff in the Focus section of today's Globe and Mail is destined to become a valuable resource (and guide to other sources) in future, so go find, save, and read.
I am struggling with my own thoughts about the Ignatieff saga. On the one hand, I think that, for most of us, the principled thing to do is to continue to focus on the man's published historical and political work or, now, his public pronouncements as a candidate for the Liberal leadership. The critic I know who has the best files on Ignatieff's political writings, who never writes an analytical word without attaching it carefully to Ignatieff's own words, is Stephen of No BMD, eh? Stephen takes the high road, and I am always aiming to emulate him in my small way. (I am also clearly aiming to tempt him to comment at length here.)
On the other hand (and you knew there was an other hand coming, didn't you), not only is Ignatieff's biography immensely revealing of several layers of character, but he has himself traded very publicly on his biography. Well: he has traded publicly on the lives of many of those closest to him, apparently in search of an identity for himself:
“Writing about family,” he says in our interview, “it's all about creating the ground under your own feet. It's kind of a process of self-invention, so that you're standing with your feet planted, you know who the hell you are, you know where the hell you came from, you know where the hell you're going.”
Now, a little self-invention might be understandable, even admirable. As Valpy's profile and an earlier, important article in Saturday Night by Sandra Martin suggest, though, Ignatieff's self-invention has sometimes involved pure invention, writing others out of their own stories and inserting himself instead, or swinging the focus of every story back to his morally tormented narrator self:
... as Andrew would tell Sandra Martin for Saturday Night, he came home to Toronto from Peru for a visit, walked into a bookstore and saw the entire story of his family's summer laid out in an article Michael had written for the British literary magazine Granta.Or, almost the entire story: Andrew had been written out of the script. He just didn't appear.
“I just remember standing there and my eyes filling up with tears in the middle of the bookstore,” he said.
Not long afterward, Andrew quit his job in Peru to return to Toronto to care for his parents, while Michael's career continued to flower in England — as a television host, newspaper commentator, author and screenplay-writer.
In early 1989, he came briefly to Toronto to spell Andrew off as caregiver — “‘once or twice a year, it's my turn” — and shortly afterward, Granta published “Deficits,” a deeply moving account of a son looking after his mother, with a forensically detailed description of Alison's deteriorating mental state.
Said Andrew: “I came in one evening and my father was really upset, and I said, ‘What's the matter?' and he said, ‘Michael's written an article about your mother'”
There were family members — for example, Alison's sister, Charity Grant, and her brother, George Grant, and his wife, Sheila — who could never bring themselves to forgive Michael for having publicly exposed his intensely private mother.
There are a lot of lines to read between in Valpy's profile. This fall there will also be Denis Smith's new book on Ignatieff, which seems to have been given an appallingly boring title: Ignatieff's World: A Liberal Leader for the Twenty-first Century. From all I know of Smith, that title must be a disservice to his careful critical intelligence, but I guess we'll see.
My thoughts seethe on, but I think it's probably better that we just open this thread for others now, before I say too much.
Disclosure: I'm a card-carrying Conservative. Take what I write with a grain of salt.
What gets me about the Ignatieff article -- and don't get me wrong, I think that sneers about private schools and elite universities are unfair -- is just how cold he seems.
The things that most people dislike about the man -- his views on foreign policy and human rights, etc., etc. -- I actually like, but this portrait of Professor Ignatieff is extraordinarily unflattering, IMHO, on a personal level...
When Iggy runs against Harper, his slogan can be, "vote for Ignatieff--marginally less mean-spirited than the other guy."
I'm a card-carrying Liberal. I'm trying to like Ignatieff, because I fear he'll become the leader.
I thought the Valpy article was good, revealing, not flattering for Ignatieff. Yes, the coldness of the man comes through. His big intellectual ideas re torture-lite and support for neo-con war on Saddam, all seem to end up on the wrong side of things as they later shape out.
I think I much prefer Stephan Dion, or even Bob Rae, although I used to be horrified by the idea of Rae, but Ignatieff worries me much more. We Liberals are not in a good space right now.
skdadl, you temptress you!
I do wish to comment at some length, and so I've been making notes for a good part of this afternoon, notes towards a longer post I hope to contribute tomorrow, but these notes have to do with Ignatieff's ideas and his analytical approach to world affairs (both of which I find lacking), and not so much to do with the psycho-biography Valpy has given us (and to what end has he done so, I wonder?).
You see, while I was quite interested on a personal level in a number of the biographical details revealed in Valpy's piece, I remain a bit skeptical about the degree to which the essay will contribute to improved democratic discourse in the country, particularly regarding Michael Ignatieff as a potential leader of the Liberal party.
Canadians need to know Ignatieff, to be sure, but not principally his personal traits as they may be real, imagined or marketed (although those are interesting and important, to a degree); much more do they need to be conversant with his ideas, in my view.
And his ideas around foreign and defence policy (allegedly among his fortes) are quite bad, in my view, and would do neither Canada nor the world as a whole any good.
It's that topic I hope to touch on tomorrow, btw, when I try to address some of the ideas/analysis in the last chapter of his book, The Lesser Evil.
Anyway, back to Valpy: Lots of avenues lie open to careful reading, as you suggest, skdadl. These range from low comic speculation about what banal details around Ignatieff's 'sexual initiation' will do for the fantasy lives of his more ardent supporters, to more serious questions about how to reconcile his published calls for serious democratic renewal with his entry into Canadian electoral politics as the anointed choice of backroom Liberal Samuels whose prophetic mantle seems to have covered declaring 'ineligible' 'all possible opponents,' to quote Valpy.
Continuing with Valpy, I'd say that he's somewhat misrepresented 'the moment Michael Ignatieff entered Canadian political life,' because it looks to me like his contrast between 'observer' and 'player' crucially misunderstands the overtly political role Michael Ignatieff was playing before he decided to become involved in Canadian electoral politics.
Though Valpy doesn't say so explicitly, establishment academics/intellectuals like Michael Ignatieff frequently play important political roles in marshalling various sectors of public opinion in favour of actions that serve the ends of the powerful.
Ignatieff's pro-Iraq war writings have been a case in point, as are his books like 'Empire Lite' and 'The Lesser Evil': such efforts serve to legitimate the actions of the powerful, in part by marginalizing dissenters as unrealistic, impractical, misguided or worse.
(Shades of his British tilt toward Thatcher and against the coal miners, no?)
Thus, in my view, Ignatieff's post-war criticism of the thousands of Canadians who marched against the Iraq war he supported, in this interview with Evan Solomon:
Canadians were marching in the streets of Toronto and Ottawa, a million people through the streets of London - what were they marching for? They were marching so that Saddam Hussein would remain in power. Now I thought: that’s not a demonstration I am ever going to join.
The Human Rights Professor's moral sense would not permit him to march in opposition to an illegal war that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians: and all because he had completely adopted as his principal frame of reference the terms dictated by the Bush administration (i.e. 'regime change').
Those opposing the adoption of such a frame of reference Ignatieff portrays as the objective allies of the tyrant Saddam Hussein (surely with levels of unintended irony I can't go into here).
So, despite what Valpy says about his move from 'observer' to 'player,' it would be more correct to say that Ignatieff has shifted from being one kind of 'player' to another.
As a pro-Iraq War academic (aka a 'liberal hawk'), Ignatieff fulfilled an important political role both before the war and after, in mustering support for the illegal war of aggression, and in marginalizing dissenters, including Canadian ones.
Now, as he moves forward with his career in electoral politics, Ignatieff will presumably do more of the same. Indeed, he's already done so on the Afghanistan file, a file on which his conduct has been nothing short of shameful, in my opinion, given both his own previous writings and the current political and military realities (about which more soon, I hope).
In any event, Ignatieff is [b]changing[/b] the mode of his engagement in Canadian politics, not moving from mere observation to actual engagement, as Valpy suggests. That is, in my view, if we're to understand how Canadian (and US) 'politics' actually work, as opposed to the idealized version we're sometimes shown.
And it's with Ignatieff's (bad) ideas and actions like these that Canadian citizens should be most concerned, and less so with his personal interactions with his family members, even though these do carry some interest.
Leaving this long and rambling critique of Valpy's project behind (i.e. tracing Ignatieff's personal development), I'd remind any still remaining readers again that distracting citizens from candidates' positions on issues, to considering real, imagined or manufactured personal qualities of a 'leader,' whether Liberal, Conservative, NDP or Green, is one of the ways in which a depoliticized, demobilized population is created in the first place.
[b]They[/b] want us talking about 'character' and 'personal values': what [b]they[/b] fear most of all is that we'll start talking about ideas and actions and issues.
I leave it to you (until tomorrow) to decide whose ends are served by such a distinction.
From the no one asked, but it won't be published, so boo hoo dept... I sent this letter to the Globe last night:
dru: Nice one. Why am I not surprised that it wasn't published?
Stephen: While I do agree that looking at politicians' ideas is, or should be, more important than looking at their personality, and that ignoring real issues in favour of such window dressing is one of the things that impoverishes politics, there's another side to things. Right wing politicians tend to flat out espouse dramatically wrong ideas, and so you can analyze what they stand for and conclude that they're wrong. But many more 'middle of the road' politicians and indeed some apparently leftish politicians will blithely talk about good ideas, and then once in power systematically betray the ideas they claimed to espouse. As long as the betrayal is in favour of the agenda of the rich, the media will tend to largely ignore it if they can--or rather, they'll describe it as 'pragmatism' or 'maturity' or even, god help us, 'statesmanship'. And this also withers politics--the feeling that it doesn't matter what they say, you get the same old crap.
Now, the most unlikely people can perform such betrayals--the pressures seem to be very strong. But to the extent that you can predict such behaviour, it's going to be based on their personality, on their degree of integrity, stubbornness and so on in their personal life. So for instance, this account of Ignatieff's personal life seems to suggest someone who would be an accomplished backstabber, prone to rewriting events, taking credit that others deserved, saying one thing and doing another. Thus, even if his ideas, or say his campaign speeches, had tons of populist goodness in them, you could have a strong suspicion that his actions in office would bear no necessary resemblance to any prior claims.
This is one of the core limitations IMO of a strongly representative political system with little citizen participation. You can't ultimately stop representatives from saying one thing and doing another; a less concentrated media would help, but only so far. The primacy of representatives and their ability to be unreliable is probably one of the major forces driving discussion away from issues and towards the personalities of potential representatives.
Valpy is going to be taking questions tomorrow on the Globe and Mail website re: Ignatieff.
Be there, or be a tool of fart-catchers like Iggy.
Yes, Iggy is a glorified fart-catcher, IMHO.
Wow. So Iggy was one of those stooges ["Iggy and the Stooges" .. get it???] who said that marching for peace was marching for Saddam?
What a complete, and utter, empty-headed piece of shit.
Hey Iggy!! Did'ja ever think it might be possible for the US to bring "democracy" to Iraq without bombing the country, destroying the government, and allowing it to slide into sectarian/ethnic warfare?
Did'ja ever think that if the US was serious about democratization, it could have leaned on Saddam to institute (in quick time) one democratic reform after another, all leading up to his eventual (peaceful) removal from power?
Or is that beyond a moron such as yourself?
It is certainly beyond you to imagine the US planting the flower of democracy in Egypt or Saudi Arabia first right? Allied countries that the US can already influence? Wouldn't domestic reforms be more possible in these countries rather than in a country bombed, strafed, raped, and plundered by US troops and mercenaries and corporations?
Ignatieff's support for this escapade is so brain-dead that it makes TorStar's fawning over him astounding. That Ignatieff hasn't decided to spend the rest of his life working incognito on a mushroom farm, but instead wants to advertise himself as a national leader, is testimony to the intellectual failure of our overall political system.
We'll still hear about oppression in Cuba, while the countries under direct US tutelage are militaristic, hellish torture-states. We'll still hear about US dreams to democratize the Middle East, about "Evidence" of the perfidy of our official enemies ....
If this is what you get from a Harvard education, I think I'll pass.
dru: Congratulations -- your letter is in the G&M this a.m. And thanks for giving POGGE the scoop. *grin*
I'm still reading -- all the reactions in the Grope and here. I shall return.
I'd hoped that an "anybody but Ignatieff" movement might coalesce, and there's still time, but the problem seems to be that while all of the leading candidates have major problems, Ignatieff's difficulties aren't getting the same attention that the other candidates' are. So he leads a less-than-stellar field by default.
The perception is that Dion and Dryden are relatively principled but overly cerebral wonks, Kennedy is a cipher with good hair, and Rae is saddled (both fairly and not) with his tenure as Ontario premier. Then there's Hall Findlay's campaign, which while admittedly peripheral seems to be the most refreshing aspect of the whole race, but it's not getting a lot of coverage.
Here I'm sort of falling into the trap Stephen describes -- of making this into a contest of personalities. And personality matters, but it's only one factor. All things considered, any one of the above candidates would make a better leader than Ignatieff (although various things about Rae, Dion, Kennedy, and their supporters make me leery of them). And despite my NDP allegiance, I want the Liberals to elect a leader who can both compete against the Tories and be a decent PM in a minority or majority government.
Thanks, skdadl and Stephen. I think some combination of Ignatieff's politics and his persona will eventually be his downfall. I just hope that it'll be sooner rather than later -- that we can stop him on the basis of critiques like yours, rather than you being able to say "I told you so" after we wind up with a disastrous foreign policy under Ignatieff as PM, or with a Tory majority after a disastrous Ignatieff election campaign.
I just finished reading Valpy's Q&A session at the G&M, which you can find over seven pages here.
There are some interesting exchanges there, in particular (to me) the very first, in which Valpy summarizes what he knows of Ignatieff's views on the need for international interventions in "failed states." However, as if to confirm Stephen's concerns above, both questions and replies afterwards run some distance on "bright guys" and "patricians" and the necessary ruthlessness of politicians -- rather more soft lobbing in both directions than I would have liked. And the answers to questions about any kind of vision Ignatieff might have for Canada, internationally or domestic, really don't measure up. The domestic policy may be on the website, but does Valpy really equate Ignatieff's opportunistic claims of a "romantic" sense of Canada with Trudeau's fiery pursuit of the Charter? (And I was no Trudeau supporter; I just recognize a difference in substance and style when I see it.)
Instead of working through all the wise and well-put comments above or analysing Valpy any more closely, I'd like to add one further observation that occurred to me as I thought about Ignatieff's twenty-year reflections on "failed states" (and the interesting way that he, like all other men in or aspiring to power, picks and chooses the ones to reflect upon).
It seems to me that Ignatieff simply missed -- or ignored, or pretended to ignore -- the major "public intellectual" success of the late nineties / early C21: the triumph in the U.S. of the PNAC group, the American neo-libs who are now working their will on some very miserable parts of the world, whose deeply anti-democratic philosophy sickens many of us and whose policies appear to much of the world to have been failures in practice, but who continue in power.
The longer I think about it, the odder I find it that Ignatieff has shown no interest at all in addressing directly such immensely powerful people, people whose intentions and plans have been so public for so long and who have further now had several occasions to test those plans in real life, pretty much falling flat on their faces each time, not that they seem to have noticed or at least acknowledged their own failures yet.
It is odd, don't you think? From a self-proclaimed "public intellectual," that he would share so much of their focus, pick just the same foreign states to imagine fiddling with, and yet never acknowledge the presence of the very people with whom he has been so quietly in step for so long? I find that odd.
Did he just miss the boat? Is he still simply falling for the cynical public marketing of confessed cynical liars as he maunders on about "failed states" and fails to notice the strategic plots involving some and not others?
In other words, how trite is that fabled brain, really?
Reading the article, I could easily picture Ignatieff as someone who would have named names during the McCarthy period. Oh, he would have "agonized." But in the end, he would have felt compelled to do so.
The coal miners' strike is even more revealing than Iraq. What repelled Ignatieff? Not the ruthlessnes of Thatcher. Not the effort at union busting. Rather, it was the "attitude" of those who sympathized with the coal miners.
You can be sure he'd be a Bush enabler, in much the same manner as Blair. Oh, he'd "agonize" over it. But in the end, he'd go along.
skdadl wrote
In other words, how trite is that fabled brain, really?
I wonder about that sometimes, too, skdadl, as I also wonder about all the journalists, including Valpy, who are so eager to tell us how brilliant he is.
Valpy tells us his IQ is 'off the Richter scale,' while Don MacPherson once termed him 'scary smart,' smarter asleep than most people are awake.
Ignatieff has doubtless many accomplishments, but I wonder about this awe-inspiring tone some columnists have taken, as though we ordinary mortals are too dumb to understand his great thoughts.
I don't agree, as you'll see below. Sorry for the length, but you did tempt me to comment 'at length.'
(Be careful what you wish for.)
Summarizing Ignatieff’s tenure at the Carr human rights centre, Valpy says he spent some of his time ‘analyzing how the strong use power on behalf of the weak.’ That may be true, but he’s also spent some of his intellectual energy over the last several years on how the strong should use their power against the weak, including defending the principle of ‘pre-emptive military action’ against so-called ‘rogue states,’ the last of the ‘lesser evils’ he considers in the book of that name.
Sometimes called ‘anticipatory self-defence,’ this doctrine challenges the principle of non-intervention that is supposed to govern relations between states under the current international order (obviously, the principle is honored quite often in the breach). Another challenge to the principle has come from a different direction: the ‘responsibility to protect’ or R2P, which some have argued could justify violating the non-intervention norm in cases where a ‘failed state’ refuses to protect its own population from serious harm. Ignatieff has lent his efforts to both challenges.
The second kind of challenge might seem to create the clearer opportunity for ‘using power on behalf of the weak,’ but there are some troubling aspects to Ignatieff’s version of the R2P, and more troubling features still to his thoughts on ‘pre-emptive military action.’
In a March 30 speech at the University of Ottawa, Michael Ignatieff touted his work as part of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS):
"I've always believed that Canada should fight for a world in which force is never used except in a just cause.
I'm proud that Lloyd Axworthy named me to the International Commission on Sovereignty and Intervention. It reported to Kofi Annan on the rules that ought to define when it is right to use force in international affairs. Our report said that countries like Canada have a "responsibility to protect" people when they are faced with genocidal massacre or ethnic cleansing.
Canada can only discharge this responsibility when the cause has the support of the people of Canada; when it has the support of the UN or a coalition of free peoples; and when the cause furthers international and Canadian security."
I realize a political speech is often not the natural home of precision and clarity, but Ignatieff's imprecision and somewhat misleading emphasis here might actually have left his audience with a mistaken impression of his contribution to the development of international law.
First, the imprecision: the ICISS report did not actually lay out rules on when it is right to "use force in international affairs" in general. The report’s scope was much narrower: the question of an international 'responsibility to protect' in instances where a sovereign state fails in its responsibility to protect its own population from serious harm.
Furthermore, Ignatieff's emphasis here on rules governing the use of 'force' to exercise a 'responsibility to protect' runs counter to the report's own explicit statement that 'prevention' (defined in the report as addressing root and immediate causes of conflicts) 'is the single most important dimension of the responsibility to protect.' It is odd that Ignatieff would so strongly emphasize the importance of the report's statements on force, even to the point of suggesting that they applied to 'international affairs' generally, when the report explicitly takes the emphasis off force, even in the narrower range of cases to which it addresses itself (i.e. a state refusing to protect its own population from serious harm). These, however, are relatively minor points, and Ignatieff himself did stress the importance of aid and development elsewhere in that same March 20 speech, so he wasn't being completely one-sided in his overall approach.
That said, a more important question remains the matter of the ‘coalition of free peoples’ he mentions as an alternative to the UN in the report that went to Kofi Annan.
Now, it's quite true that the report Ignatieff helped write found its way to Kofi Annan, but when Ignatieff leaps from his (mis)statements about the report to the claim that Canada can 'discharge' its 'responsibility to protect' 'when it has the support of the UN or a coalition of free peoples,' he rather blandly sets up this 'coalition of free peoples' notion as an alternative to the UN in a way that I'm not sure Kofi Annan would agree with.
2004 saw the release of another report, commissioned by Kofi Annan, of a high-level UN panel charged with addressing current challenges to global security. While that report endorsed the emerging norm of a 'responsibility to protect' (again, emphasizing development and peaceful means far above force), it also explicitly rejected Michael Ignatieff's idea of something like a 'coalition of free peoples' acting independently of UN sanction to use military force against states unwilling or unable to protect their populations from serious harm.
Here's part of what the 2004 high-level panel had to say:
"We address here the circumstances in which effective collective security may require the backing of military force, starting with the rules of international law that must govern any decision to go to war if anarchy is not to prevail. It is necessary to distinguish between situations in which a State claims to act in self-defence; situations in which a State is posing a threat to others outside its borders; and situations in which the threat is primarily internal and the issue is the responsibility to protect a State's own people. In all cases, we believe that the Charter of the United Nations, properly understood and applied, is equal to the task: Article 51 needs neither extension nor restriction of its long-understood scope, and Chapter VII fully empowers the Security Council to deal with every kind of threat that States may confront. The task is not to find alternatives to the Security Council as a source of authority but to make it work better than it has."
As you can tell from this, the 2004 report addressed a far broader set of issues than did the ICISS report (including terrorism, nuclear non-proliferation, etc.), but the report's clear statement that In all cases where the use of military force might be contemplated by states, the UN Security Council, acting in accordance with the Charter, is the sole legitimate avenue, pretty clearly rules out unauthorized actions by self-appointed 'coalitions of free peoples.'
The ICISS report that Ignatieff helped author admits that it would be 'impossible' to find an international consensus condoning humanitarian military interventions executed without UN sanction, but it also says it is ‘unrealistic’ to expect states may not choose other methods such as ad hoc coalitions to respond to ‘conscience-shocking’ situations in cases where the UNSC–-the authors’ much-preferred ‘first port of call’--fails to act appropriately.
Yet as I read this part of the ICISS report, this idea of ‘coalitions’ or ‘regional organizations’ acting in ‘conscience-shocking’ circumstances without UNSC sanction is deployed more as a warning of what could happen if the UNSC does not change its way of functioning than as an endorsement. Indeed, the report warns of the threats to international security, as well as to the credibility of the UN, posed by the actions of such coalitions: it certainly does not present them as an equally acceptable alternative to the UNSC, as Ignatieff himself seems to do in the March 30 speech.
And, in any case, this whole notion of ‘alternatives’ to UN-sanctioned action was completely rejected by the 2004 report, commissioned and commended by the same Kofi Annan of the UN, whose prestige Ignatieff enlists in his March 30 speech.
Not that Ignatieff is known for his deep respect for the UN and multilateralism, of course. In the run-up to the Iraq War, he described the UN this way in his (rather disturbingly titled) essay on American Lite Imperialism, ‘The Burden’:
‘The United Nations lay dozing like a dog before the fire, happy to ignore Saddam, until an American president seized it by the scruff of the neck and made it bark. Multilateral solutions to the world's problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs.’
Thus do the powerful rightly use their power on behalf of the weak, I guess.
It’s easy enough to see why the 2004 UN report would reject the idea of ad hoc coalitions of states acting as alternatives to the UNSC, and Ignatieff’s terming these ‘coalitions of free peoples’ doesn’t do much to make the case more persuasive.
Echoing the term ‘coalition of the willing,’ the group of states that carried out the illegal war Ignatieff favoured, ‘coalition of free peoples’ sounds like a piece of White House rhetoric, and is a pretty dubious concept for at least a couple of reasons I can think of. First, what counts as ‘free peoples’ and who gets to say? Second, why should the unauthorized use of force by ‘free’ states be any more legitimate than that by ‘unfree’ states? And what’s to stop some ‘coalition of the unfree’ from claiming the same right to follow the precedent set by the ‘coalition of the free,’ intervening in Country X or Y on the grounds of ‘humanitarian intervention’ to fulfil their ‘responsibility to protect,’ thus further increasing the risk of international anarchy?
(IIRC, during the time the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan, Iran massed forces on the border and made noises about invading because the Taliban were killing Shi'ite Hazaras, and had also allegedly killed a number of Iranian diplomats: R2P, anyone?)
Frankly, a concept like ‘coalition of free peoples’ sounds to me like a clumsy attempt at getting around the principle of universality: the principle that the same standards should apply to all, without special exceptions for the self-declared righteous ones. In that way, it reminds me of Tony Blair’s phantom ‘unreasonable veto,’ the kind of security council veto that could theoretically be ignored by the ‘coalition of the willing’ because it would have come from an ‘unreasonable’ country like China or France, whose actions are not based, as those of the US and UK always are when they use their vetoes, on selfless devotion to the principles of peace and justice.
So ‘coalitions of free peoples’ using unauthorized force to exercise a ‘responsibility to protect’ is not a good idea for Canada, or for the wider world, I would say.
The problems of Ignatieff’s support for the other challenge to restrictions on the use of force are, in my opinion, even worse. Moreover, his reasoning about ‘pre-emptive war’ in the last chapter of The Lesser Evil betrays a number of the flaws others posters in this thread have already identified, including his tendency to see the world from the point of view of the powerful.
The ‘rogues’ offered as examples of threats, for instance, are all those so declared by Washington: Libya (an ex-rogue), North Korea, Iran (definitively declared by Ignatieff to be developing a nuclear weapon, on no evidence), and Iraq.
While recognizing that ‘pre-emption’ or ‘anticipatory self-defence’ against such rogues (the other category is, of course, 'reputable states') can ‘shade into aggression’ if the identified threat is not truly imminent and demonstrable, Ignatieff nevertheless comes down on the side of pre-emptive war, though he says certain conditions must be met first if it is to be legitimate self-defence and not ‘aggression.’
There must first be genuine ‘democratic disclosure’ of the evidence, says Ignatieff, for our leaders are under the ‘strictest obligation’ to sustain their case with ‘evidence that would convince free peoples.’
Governments planning acts of ‘anticipatory self-defence’ must be ‘sincere’ in their attempts at finding multilateral support (I’m not sure if seizing the sleepy UN by the scruff the neck and making it bark would count as sincerity or not).
They don’t have to actually convince the other states, let alone the UNSC, because a state cannot of course ‘cede its right to make final judgments about its national security to any other state or international organization.' (Remember George Bush's rejection of the 'global test'?)
'Even if it fails to convince other states that a threat requires pre-emption,' Ignatieff goes on to say, 'it would be justified in going it alone–-but only, of course, if the threat turns out to be real.’ (I’m not making that last part up.)
Governments may act pre-emptively only as a true ‘last resort,’ says Ignatieff, and the final criterion is that ‘preemption must not leave things worse than before the action was contemplated’ (And no, I’m not making that last part up either).
These are Ignatieff’s strict constraints on the ‘lesser evil’ of preemptive war, but frankly they don’t appear very strict at all when you think of what actually and regularly happens in the real world.
Take, for instance the ‘evidence’ that convinced the free Michael Ignatieff that we had to go into Iraq, the man who found we had reached the point of ‘last resort’ by January 2003.
And what of leaders meeting the bar of ‘sincerity’ ? This is mere child’s play, when your efforts (as George Bush’s were) are amplified by the likes of Ignatieff himself, intellectuals nearly reflexively credulous about the professed sincerity of leaders and their officials, often in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Benjamin Ferencz, the former Nuremburg prosecutor, has been in the news lately, bluntly calling the Iraq war what it was: an illegal war of aggression. Ferencz has also been sharply critical of the so-called right to ‘anticipatory self-defence,’ saying this
“If every nation could decide for itself when to attack a presumed enemy and when to engage in total war, the rule of law would be destroyed and the world would be destroyed with it.”
Not an unfair assessment.
Not surprising, then, that arguments in favour of ‘pre-emptive war’ or ‘anticipatory self-defence,’ (whether of the type put forth in Bush’s National Security Strategy or in Ignatieff’s The Lesser Evil) were given short shrift by that same 2004 UN panel I mentioned before.
They said this:
“Article 51 (of the UN Charter) needs neither extension nor restriction of its long-understood scope ... In a world full of perceived potential threats, the risk to the global order and the norm of nonintervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to so act is to allow all.”
The UN Secretary-General’s Report (Kofi Annan again!) of 2005 makes the same point: there is no need to invent new rights to ‘anticipatory self-defence.’
But again, for Ignatieff writing in The Lesser Evil, the conclusion that all states must follow international law is untenable: “any state that feels threatened and contemplates pre-emptive force is not going to hand its right of self-defense over to a committee of other states, no matter how August.” (Well, you have to admit that calling it a ‘committee of states’ is a bit better than describing the UN a sleepy dog needing to be whipped into shape by the Master)
Of course, I think by ‘any state,’ Ignatieff really means ‘any state on our side,’ for I doubt he’d endorse the obvious conclusion that flows from the general language he uses. If ‘any state’ has the right to act pre-emptively without UN authorization when it ‘feels threatened,’ then it follows that those states that ‘feel threatened’ by us have the same right we do to act pre-emptively in their own self-defence.
Ferencz’s scenario then unfolds.
As Kofi Annan makes clear in that 2005 Secretary General’s report, there still remains debate over whether the current rules governing the resort to force ought to be loosened. My own view, fwiw, given the fragile state of the current international order, is that they should not. That would be a backward step on what Ferencz has called “our slow crawl towards civilization.” If anything, we need more restrictions on when states–especially powerful states claiming special rights for themselves--can use force and what sorts of force they can use.
So I end up thinking Michael Ignatieff’s ‘lesser evil’ approach is on the wrong side of the debate Annan describes, an approach suited to carrying out tasks and answering questions that are not the true ones we all face.
If his ideas on the use of force in the ‘war on terror’ were to gain further currency, our slow crawl would grow slower, perhaps even reversing direction.
Writing to the Globe and Mail yesterday, Professor Denis Smith chided its editors for omitting a crucial question mark at the end of his forthcoming book’s title: Ignatieff’s World: A Liberal Leader for the 21st Century?
I haven’t read Smith’s book yet, but having read a fair bit of Ignatieff, my answer to the question would be ‘No.’
What is striking about the Valpy article is the absence of longtime friends coming forward and telling us that the "private" Ignatieff is so different from the "public" Ignatieff. I can understand that former acquaintances were reluctant to say anything bad about the guy who might one day become PM of Canada. But there was no rush of people willing to say anything positive either, other than the "big brain" comments which get very tiresome, very quickly.
If the personal is political then, as a woman, I have to say I was appalled by the picture of Ignatieff drawn by Valpy. He comes off as nothing less than a creep in his treatment of the women in his life, exploiting them in the service of his own career. He is so painfully ordinary in that respect that it is breathtaking. I've known lots of guys like that and if you're a smart, reasonably ambitious woman you steer clear of them because they will destroy you as well as your soul on their march towards "greatness". I'm just guessing here, but I think he may encounter serious, serious problems with women voters. I really don't see anything that he has to offer them.
The other thing that is so stunning is the way that the Ignatieff campaign so forcefully injects the issue of class into the campaign. There has been no serious engagement of issues--the public is not trusted to form its own views. Rather, we are meant to stand back in awe of Ignatieff's dazzling accomplishments and intellectual superiority. That is, no doubt, part of a deliberate campaign strategy. It has certainly been part of his personal style for decades--to assume he understands a complexity that others are not quite bright enough to see.
His campaign strikes me as a series of masks--Ignatieff son of an immigrant (forget that his father was an extremely well-connected aristocrat); Ignatieff, the human rights activist (who advocates military solutions and doesn't lose sleep over civilian deaths); Ignatieff, the Canadian (who hasn't really been engaged with Canada during his adult life and believes in American exceptionalism); Ignatieff, the intellectual (who long ago aligned himself with the establishment and, like a politician, will not to admit to any mistakes).
Strangely, I have remained open minded--one truly inspiring performance might do the trick. But for 9 months I have watched Ignatieff hide who he is and what he thinks. The Valpy profile showed a man always trying to keep up with the Zeitgeist, but never leading it. Sadly, I am ever more convinced that that might be what he is all about.
PLG wrote
But to the extent that you can predict such behaviour, it's going to be based on their personality, on their degree of integrity, stubbornness and so on in their personal life. So for instance, this account of Ignatieff's personal life seems to suggest someone who would be an accomplished backstabber, prone to rewriting events, taking credit that others deserved, saying one thing and doing another. Thus, even if his ideas, or say his campaign speeches, had tons of populist goodness in them, you could have a strong suspicion that his actions in office would bear no necessary resemblance to any prior claims.
So, would you suggest that some of what we saw in Valpy's piece provides us the raw ammunition to undertake what Chomsky's called (in another context) 'intellectual self-defence' when the onslaught of sound-bites and pre-packaged advertising begins?
Also, and here I'm keeping to the particular case of Ignatieff: it seems to me that the 'isolated' persona (if I can call it that) Valpy depicts would exacerbate some of the unfortunate tendencies of our current form of 'representative democracy' as you've identified them: e.g. an excessive focus on this or that extraordinary personality, even to the point of excluding from view the 'ordinary' citizens who enable that person's *work* to take place at all.
Lulu wrote
Rather, we are meant to stand back in awe of Ignatieff's dazzling accomplishments and intellectual superiority. That is, no doubt, part of a deliberate campaign strategy. It has certainly been part of his personal style for decades--to assume he understands a complexity that others are not quite bright enough to see.
Yes, I think that comes across quite clearly both in what Valpy reports and in how he reports it.
So you get a report of a fellow student complaining that "Michael Ignatieff was one of the people who was always implying I was stupid."
And you also get Valpy himself telling you his IQ is 'Off the Richter Scale' and that his 'eloquence shames lesser men.'
I happen to distrust any moral scale that equates worth with eloquence, but then my IQ would do little more than rattle the teacups in your cupboard.
Another long interview with Ignatieff in the Toronto Star today. And as always I am struck by the strange contradictions of his thinking, the vaccuum at the centre. The closest thing to a policy decision in real time was his support for the Iraq War. Here we see an example of "muscular" foreign policy, the hard choices that one has to make "in a heartless world".
Yet his support for the Iraq War is based on the most romantic of considerations, on serendipity. He visited Kurdistan in the 1980s and "saw what Saddam had done" and, like a knight of the Round Table, had vowed to do everything to have Saddam removed. In his accounts, he always skips over the 1990s when, with the help of the U.S. air force, the Kurds won a large degree of autonomy. That WAS a U.S. foreign policy success.
Even more troubling, he completely eschews the language of strategical thinking. He'd taken a tour of Kurdistan...consequences be damned? There is a complete disconnect between his "hardheaded realism" and his romantic quest for revenge on behalf of the Kurds. Does one twenty year old humanitarian crisis justify another? Is a Shiite theocratic government aligned with Iran a "victory"?
Most troubling of all, there is the matter of the intellectual company you keep. Ignatieff distances himself from the Bush administration and the way that the war in Iraq was prosecuted. But, as Skdadl points out above, there is a very loud silence on the Project for a New American Century. One might suppose that he is "too smart" to criticize this gang in public. But, then, you remember that he himself advocated a "coalition of the free", that he himself supported the war in Iraq knowing very well who these people were.
If Iraq represents "a mistake" for Ignatieff, as he hints in the interview, then I wonder what are the lessons he has taken from this. Too few troops? Can't build democracy where there is no civil society? Only multilateral solutions have a chance to work? Twenty year old romantic attachments are not a good reason to go to war? But again, there is nothing but a vaccuum where there should be some honest, hardheaded analysis.
P.S. The "spine of citizenship" is a nice turn of phrase, "empowerment" is good liberal slogan. But, damn, his campaign from start to finish, has been an illustration of the power that the backroom boys wield in the Liberal Party.
Actually, when you think about it, off the Richter scale isn't so great as IQ goes. I've never heard of a quake that went above 8 or maybe 9 on the Richter scale. So, to be comfortably off the Richter scale, the implication is that he has an IQ of what, 15?
:-)
More seriously, I find myself wondering about this vaunted intellect. Certainly, he's not stupid. He has a large vocabulary, and he can deploy it effectively and quickly. He can chat about big ideas convincingly. I get the impression that he's capable of doing research (if equally capable of ignoring it). But gee, a very large proportion of the people here at SFU would answer to that description. Seems to me he owes his success more to a strong work ethic, unsleeping ambition, and political opportunism than to any very unusual degree of brains. Has he actually had any original political or ethical insights? Has he come up with any powerful ideas or exceptional syntheses of previously existing ideas? Doesn't seem like it. He's no John Rawls. This is a very superficial impression, but he reminds me of some of the guys (almost always guys) we used to get in English Lit seminars who would basically use verbal agility to snowjob people. The interpretations they came up with often didn't hold water, but they were good enough at baffling with bullshit that they expected nobody to notice. They used their verbal dexterity to avoid having to actually think deeply enough about the subject matter to come up with anything real to say. He seems kinda like that--a highly accomplished baffler with bullshit. Except at this stage, he's not covering up mental laziness so much as avoiding serious conclusions because they tend to be politically inconvenient. Man, I always yacked too much in those seminars too--but at least I tried to keep it real--I wasn't trying to put one over on the other students.
Re Stephen's response to me: Yes, quite agreed.
Yet his support for the Iraq War is based on the most romantic of considerations, on serendipity. He visited Kurdistan in the 1980s and "saw what Saddam had done" and, like a knight of the Round Table, had vowed to do everything to have Saddam removed. In his accounts, he always skips over the 1990s when, with the help of the U.S. air force, the Kurds won a large degree of autonomy. That WAS a U.S. foreign policy success.
Yeah, except one problem I'm starting to detect with Ignatieff's narrative of support for the Iraq War is that a couple of his most prominent pre-war public statements on the war make no mention of this experience as the decisive reason for his support.
There's this Guardian essay of March 2003, but it makes no specific reference to Kurdish suffering as a reason to go to war.
There's also this NYT Magazine piece, which briefly mentions Saddam's gassing of Kurds (as a way to chide Human Rights Organizations opposed to the war), but which does not at all make their past suffering under Saddam central to his case for Iraqi regime change as an imperial duty in a post-9/11 world.
It seems odd, to say the least, that he would later term 'decisive' a topic he mentioned only in passing in his Jan 2003 defence of the 'operation,' and not at all in his March 2003 piece, written to explain why he felt he had to part ways with certain 'friends' over the war (our Valpyean theme, no?).
Telling Stories and Gaffe of the Week
Stephen, you've pinpointed the vacuum at the centre, the shifting narrative. Ignatieff is a writer and he revels in the slipperiness of the medium. (No, I didn't say that; No, I didn't mean that; No, you haven't understood what I was saying; Read what I wrote.) His writings always have an escape hatch. And he uses his verbal veils artfully, to seduce and deflect our gaze at the same time. (I loved the one about drinking beer and watching the Red Sox as the happiest time of his life...No effete intellectual he.)
Defender of the Kurds is merely another incarnation. If it were the "true" Ignatieff--the "real" reason for supporting the war in Iraq-- then who could possibly want him anywhere near the PMO? What's next, an attack on Russia for the crimes of Stalin? (Putin, after all, has expressed regret over the demise of the Soviet Union.) So what is this new pose? A wink and a nod to the "human rights community" and the anguished liberal left that he still fights the good fight, but now with muscles? A hasty retreat from a disastrous personal decision to lend his liberal credentials to a deluded bunch of right-wing incompetents?
Honestly, I have no sense of what he actually stands for, what he actually believes, and most importantly, what he would actually do as PM. I haven't read the latest issue of McLeans, maybe the answer is there...
Purple Library Guy, I would add two other crucial ingredients of his success as a public intellectual--connections and style. Being the grandson of Count Ignatieff, the son of George Ignatieff, and a Grant opened all sorts of doors for him in Canada, at Harvard in the 1960s, and in the U.K., where many Russian aristocrats settled after 1917 (class system? hah, here's a young count). He was never just another bright young guy in a graduate seminar, just like his father was never just an immigrant. He grew up in certain circles and his entry into politics in Canada owes much to those circles (Upper Canada College, rah! rah! rah!). That's the advantage that he has always had over everybody else with a strong work ethic and drive. He didn't have to fight to be taken seriously, he was always a "somebody".
And then there's style to match. Tall, lanky, patrician. It played well in Rosedale, at the University of Toronto, in Cambridge, at Oxford.
I see nothing inherently "wrong" with exploiting the advantages that life has given him. At a certain level, I greatly respect and admire him for what he has accomplished. But, as political leader, Ignatieff is asking me for the authority to make decisions and policy on my behalf and on behalf of other Canadians. And that's where I have trouble with Michael Ignatieff because I'm having a hard time seeing beyond the handlers and the veils.
Re: his gaffe of the week. Was Ignatieff being "courageously honest" yesterday when he said he might not run for re-election or today, when he said he would?