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Ignatieff On Thin Ice

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Conduct Unbecoming a Public Intellectual and Leadership Candidate

By Robert Billyard

By all accounts, the value of public intellectuals is that they bring to bear knowledge, insight and critical analysis to a given issue. Liberal leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff is one such. As a distinguished professor of human rights at Harvard University he took a very public position on the war against Iraq and that position has comeback to haunt him.

We expect a public intellectual to have a reasonable data base from which to form his insights and conclusions, but it would seem Ignatieff’s was somewhat flawed.

The war on Iraq was unique in that it was a proven fraud before it even began. Claims of mobile nerve gas trucks, uranium from Niger and aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges were quickly debunked. When US Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared before the UN with his sham Show and Tell his credibility fell like a stone.

In spite of the obvious treachery in trying to justify the war many bought into the big lie. Ignatieff was just one of many who did and should have known better. The evidence and mere common sense deflated the justification for war.

Long before the war, Scott Ritter, a former UN chief weapons inspector in Iraq for seven was stating publicly and vociferously that there were no WMD. This writer attended a speech by Ritter six months before the war in Vancouver. Ritter gave a compelling and lucid account of the weapons inspection process, its challenges, and its ultimate success.

The problem for Ritter though, a card carrying Republican, and a former US Army intelligence officer in the Gulf war was that the mainstream media was ignoring him, and his peers in Washington were too busy cooking the intelligence to justify war.

Common sense is a much maligned quality but in this instance it is very pertinent.

Going back to the time of the Iran-Iraq war Saddam Hussein really was a military threat in the Middle East. But most of this military capability was spent with the invidious support of the US in an eight year war against Iran. The US wanted to punish Iran and Hussein’s Iraq was the handy instrument for doing so. Non other than Donald Rumsfeld met with Hussein at that time to egg him on.

Hussein came out of that war with his military shattered, his country on the verge of bankruptcy and his hold on power shaken.

Two years later he attacked Kuwait claiming it was historically an integral part of Iraq. The attack was in part prompted by a diplomatic gaffe by the US Ambassador to Iraq at that time, April Glaspie, when she assured Hussein “the US had no interest in Arab-Arab issues” (what exactly was said is a matter of dispute and three different versions exist).

This of course, resulted in the Gulf War. Prior to the war Western analysts portrayed Iraq as being a daunting military power. What they forgot to add was that his military was forty years out of date and most of his troops were poorly trained conscripts- No match for a state of the art US led armada.

The Gulf War was more accurately a rout. Iraqi casualties were in the tens of thousands where as coalition forces suffered less than two hundred dead.

This was followed by ten years of brutal sanctions and the denial of any strategic goods that could have military applications. The US and British air forces imposed a no fly zone and randomly attacked targets at will. This was also the time Scott Ritter was there as a weapons inspector. Iraqi civil society suffered tremendously during this period.

The Bush II administration then made the claim once again that Saddam is a daunting threat with weapons of mass destruction.

Fool me once, but not twice. Common sense alone indicated that by this time Hussein was a spent dictator, stripped of his weaponry and leading a ravaged country.

On the eve of war there was a nicely ignored story in the New York Times. As war appeared inevitable Saddam Hussein enlisted peace emissaries, one of which was a Lebanese businessman who met with the Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle, a Bush national security advisor. When informed that Hussein offered complete capitulation to save his country from being destroyed Perle’s reply was “Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad.”

James Risen, a NYT reporter, recounted in his book, State of War-The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, how an innovative CIA agent enlisted family members of key Iraqi officials living in the US to travel to Iraq and gather intelligence. The sister (a naturalized American citizen) of Iraq’s top nuclear scientist went to Iraq with a memorized list of questions provided by the CIA to ask her brother. He told her out right that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, nuclear or otherwise; thus confirming Ritter’s claims.

The sister returned to the US and was debriefed by the CIA. They chose not to believe her. In a cruel piece of irony her brother was to learn via CNN, in his already bomb damaged home, his sister had not been believed.

Also on the eve of war the world saw the largest anti-war demonstrations ever held. Ritter participated in a London demonstration attended by a million people. In spite of the complete vilification of Hussein on both sides of the Atlantic people around the world were appalled and sensed something was amiss.

Before the war on Iraq ever began there was ample evidence for anybody paying attention there was treachery afoot. Even so Michael Ignatieff arrives back in Canada claiming to have some second thoughts for supporting the war, and that he was a naïve academic. But this does not wash. He was at the very hub of the storm. As an academic and public intellectual he was in a perfect position to see what was going on, gather the data, and exercise his academic scrutiny. Yet he bought into subterfuge of the Bush administration.

Another Canadian born Harvard professor, economist, John Kenneth Galbraith once stated “The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”

For Ignatieff, who is touted as one of the great thinkers of our time, to so blindly adopt the “conventional view” does not inspire confidence as he aspires to become a future prime minister. That he has done so indicates his support for the war was probably simply ideological hawkishness at the expense of a more rigorous and objective evaluation of the issues and facts to be expected from a person of his standing.

In August of 2002 US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sent George W. Bush his infamous memo advising him that in the treatment of terrorists the US was not bound by international law, specifically the Geneva conventions.

In 2004 Ignatieff wrote in one of his books, “Defeating terror requires violence. It may also require coercion deception, even violation of rights.” Ignatieff appears to support Gonzales in his flouting of international law and the ensuing torture, human rights abuses, and domestic spying scandals that have rocked the Bush administration.

Both Gonzales and Ignatieff might be asked whatever happened to good old fashioned police work? Do we not disgrace ourselves by so willingly and casually abrogating rights, freedoms and legal protections?

Ignatieff also seems insensible to the fact that the war on terror has been vastly over inflated to justify the ruthless political agenda of Washington’s neo-imperialist neo-conservatives.

As a leadership candidate he has proposed that the Liberal party occupy the “centre-left”, but it would seem his politics tilt to the right. Could it be he is trying the old Liberal trick of campaigning left and leading right?

As Ignatieff arrives back in Canada after a thirty year absence he is skating awkwardly on very thin ice, with his candidacy tainted by support for an illegal and inhumane war and appearing to condone torture, the undermining of civil liberties and the rule of law.

Robert Billyard is a writer and artist residing in the bucolic hinterlands of Langley BC. He has an abiding interest in politics and social issues and reads extensively on these subjects. Accused of being a nationalist, a small “l” liberal, a socialist and a boat rocker-as well as a boat builder- he might nod in agreement.

@ April 22, 2006