From today's
Citizen EditorialSome
of Mr. Ignatieff's mea culpa is insightful. He wisely notes that many
of those who predicted disaster in Iraq - the ones crowing now - did so
not out of judgment but out of ideology. For them, it was about the
appetite for oil and other impulses of the American Empire. Or, as he
puts it more bluntly, the idea "that America is always and in every
situation wrong."
Put differently, many were right on Iraq for
the wrong reasons. There were others in this camp, as well, such as
those who do not believe that anything is ever worth fighting for. This
would be the view of many New Democrats, who want Canada to leave
Afghanistan and avoid anywhere else Canadians may be in harm's way.
They believe only in peacekeeping.
In Andrew Cohen's World, you were either:
1. For the war, for the right reasons.
2. Against the war, for the wrong reasons.
This is a great rhetorical device, as it entirely ignores the people who were against the war for the right reasons.
Many people, inside the US and outside, were against the war for the right reasons. There were no WMD, Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, and overthrowing a stable, if corrupt and tyrannical country in such a reason was far more likely to destabilize the region than bring it any stability.
In his essay, which, admittedly, I've only read excerpts of, he says: "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."
This was his over-riding reason for going to war. So, to paraphrase, Ignatieff believed that "the ends justified the means". It didn't matter what people were making up to get Saddam out. Whatever it was would satisfy Ignatieff as long as Saddam was booted.
This shows such a lack of respect for the opinions of ordinary people, that Ignatieff was perfectly willing to go along with whatever reasons the Bush White House made up that day to achieve the end he desired. No matter that it cost thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. The Butcher of Baghdad was gone, and that was all that mattered to Ignatieff.
I also feel insulted by this column. I have nothing against war in particular, and believe in
fighting when necessary, and actually like America. Don't get me wrong, the Bush White
House is despicable, and Congressmen like Tancredo and Brownback bring
shame to the wonderful institution of the US Congress. But... America
is still one of the most vital, independent-minded, crazy places in the
entire world. I love it there, and there are many Americans I respect
and admire.
But according to Mr. Cohen, the only reason I could have for being opposed to the war was either Anti-Americanism, or some weird lefty pacifism.
Never mind my ideological disdain for the disastrous concept of "Preventive Aggression." The Iraq war, with it's faulty intelligence, has hopefully put that notion to bed.
Or the ridiculous concept that the Saddam regime, a mainly secular, Arabist regime, was supporting Al-Qaeda, a fundamentalist Islam political movement, calling for a Global Caliphate run by Mullahs.
Never mind that the intelligence for WMDs came down to, as Paul Wolfowitz said in an interview, "he must have them, or he wouldn't be hiding anything"
Nope. I'm a pacifist, lefty NDP hippie.