Obsidian Wings: A Few Teensy Mistakes ...: Exhibit B: Michael Ignatieff's piece in last Sunday's magazine. Lots of Ignatieff's article is just silly, and I could not possibly improve on David Rees' commentary on it. Samples:
My eyes. Stinging. Is it tears, or blood? Can't tell-- all the mirrors are cracked. From my screams.
And, on a quote from Ignatieff:
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."
The possibility alone makes me happy. I guess I'm easy to please.
Anyways, when I strip away the parts of Ignatieff's essay more suited to a series of inspirational posters of the sort sold in those catalogs people read out of desperate boredom on airplanes, I find that he offers the following reasons for his mistake:
First:
In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. 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.
I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing."
Um: really? Michael Ignatieff only just learned that ideas have consequences? -- This actually does seem to be what he is saying. Read it in context and tell me whether you disagree. Then stop and think for a bit about how hard it would be not to learn this lesson before you wrote extensively about invading Iraq.
I mean: it's not as though the world isn't full of people talking about how academics are shut up in their ivory towers, thinking their pointless little thoughts, far removed from actual life. It's not as though phrases like "that's all very well in theory, but it won't work in practice" aren't so common as to be completely banal cliches. (They involve a stupid view of theory, if you ask me -- no one would say, for instance, that the view that things fall up when you drop them is "all very well in theory", but just doesn't work in practice. If a theory doesn't work in practice, then either it's a theory that's not supposed to work in practice -- a theory of how things work at Hogwarts, for instance -- or it's a bad theory. But I digress.)
For an academic not to know that this is a pitfall of theorizing would be impossible in our culture. For an academic to have been aware of this possibility, but not to have taken it seriously while advocating a major war, would be flatly irresponsible. I do not believe that there is a third option that lets anyone who only belatedly learns this lesson off the hook. I mean: here's a further iteration of this alleged lesson: "Politicians cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the inner world of their own imaginings. They must not confuse the world as it is with the world as they wish it to be. They must see Iraq — or anywhere else — as it is." The very idea that someone is only learning this lesson after advocating a war -- or, for that matter, after the onset of puberty -- is truly dumbfounding.
Second:
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. 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?
Here I can speak on the basis of some experience of my own, having seen things that were similar to what Ignatieff apparently saw, only in 1988, during the Anfal campaign, and in Turkey, where refugees were pouring into Iraq. I had believed that Saddam was a monster before that, but that experience gave that belief an urgency it had not had before. But it did not lead me to conclude that "Saddam had to go". Why not? Because while I was quite clear that if, say, God were to remove Saddam Hussein to some alternate universe in which he could torment only himself, that would be a good thing, any other version of "Saddam going" had to be a specific policy that would have specific results, and all the policies I could think of that the US might initiate had very, very serious downsides. Frankly, the only way I can see for someone to move from the belief that Saddam was a monster to the belief that we should remove him is to engage in what I call "benefit analysis".
Cost/benefit analysis involves weighing the costs of some proposed course of action against its benefits, doing the same for your various alternative courses of action, and choosing the one that has the best balance of benefits over costs. Benefit analysis, by contrast, involves thinking that because some proposed course of action has some benefits, it should be adopted. (Similarly, cost analysis involves thinking that because some course of action involves costs, it should not be adopted.) Any attempt to engage in cost/benefit analysis in the case at hand would have required asking what the costs of removing Saddam Hussein were, and whether they outweighed the benefits of removing him. It would not have allowed moving from the thought "he is a monster" to the conclusion "so we should remove him." Only benefit analysis does that.
(Parenthetical note: a general principle of the form: "whenever someone is a brutal dictator, that someone should be removed" would also license that conclusion. But that is a silly principle, and one that neither Michael Ignatieff nor Dick Cheney or anyone else seems to seriously entertain. There are a lot of brutal dictators we have never so much as considered removing, and some, like the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with whom we are on very good terms.)
Again: the idea that neither cost analysis nor benefit analysis is a good way to make decisions is not a revelation that you'd expect someone to have only after advocating for a war. It just isn't. And if Michael Ignatieff had it only recently, then you really have to ask why on earth his opinions are taken seriously.
If we take either Dreher and Ignatieff at their word, then I think we really have to ask: why are people who are, by their own account, not just mistaken but completely clueless among the people who are given platforms to express their opinions? Why does anyone take those opinions seriously? Weren't their cognitive defects clear earlier? How could they not be?
However, I think there's another possibility. Ignatieff still seems to me to be trying to show that while he was wrong, many of the people who opposed the war were wrong too. For instance, he says:
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.
The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.
It's odd that he doesn't identify either group of people. He does, however, say that the first group included "many" of those who opposed the war, while the second might, for all he says, represent some imaginary ideal that went unrealized in the run-up to the war.
This is just wrong. It's not as though no one managed to oppose the war managed to free him- or herself from the idea that "America is always and in every situation wrong." Most people who opposed the war, after all, supported the invasion of Afghanistan, which would be hard to explain if they thought that America was always wrong. Nor can people like Brent Scowcroft, Jim Webb, Wes Clark, and others who opposed the war before it started be dismissed on these grounds by anyone who is not, frankly, delusional. There were plenty of people who managed to believe simultaneously (a) that America is not always wrong, and (b) that it would be wrong to invade Iraq. Many of these people did so because they managed such not-too-difficult tasks as not taking wishes for reality; not supposing that because we think we are good, others will think so too; not thinking that imposing our will on a distant country would be easy, etc.
These are not hard things to do. That Michael Ignatieff is presenting them as hard-won lessons should be flatly astonishing -- as astonishing as hearing a physicist say that what led him to some crucial mistake was not having appreciated the importance of subjecting his theories to empirical testing, or hearing an auto mechanic say that he wouldn't have gotten things so wrong if only he'd appreciated the importance of learning what all those little doohickeys under the hood do.
I suspect that on some level, it's harder for Ignatieff to admit that the people who were right were not just crazy hippies -- the same ones who seem to have unhinged Dreher -- but people who thought a lot more clearly about Iraq than he did, than to think seriously about why he got things wrong. That would explain the almost surreal banality of much of his piece -- the parts that Rees skewers so effectively. It would also explain why, to this day, he finds it easier to admit what look for all the world like astonishing failures, and to present the realization that they were failures as some sort of major achievement, than to admit that the people he wants to think of as crazy hippies unhinged by hatred of America were right. Especially since the idea that Scowcroft, Webb, Clark, and the like are crazy hippies is too bizarre to credit.
Again, I don't mean this to be some sort of "I was right" triumphalism. What interests me is not so much who was right and who was wrong, but this particular version of being wrong -- a version that involves not just error, but errors like "I didn't realize until it was too late that I had to take reality into account", or: "I didn't fully appreciate the fact that making nice speeches isn't all there is to being President." And I'm also interested in why people seem willing to confess these kinds of profound error without any sense of intellectual shame, and why they continue to be given platforms in public life. Because until we find some way to ensure that we hear the opinions of people who know these sorts of things in advance, rather than having to learn them after hundreds of thousands of people have died, we are in deep, deep trouble.