The Year of Living Dangerously:NYTimes

[jbfam4]

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March 14, 2004 http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/magazine/14WWLN.html?pagewanted=all&position=
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
The Year of Living Dangerously
By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

A year ago, I was a reluctant yet convinced supporter of the war in Iraq. A year later, the weapons of mass destruction haven't turned up, Iraqis are being blown up on their way to the mosque, democracy is postponed till next year and my friends are all asking me if I have second thoughts. Who wouldn't have?

My second thoughts begin with the debate last year. We thought we were arguing about Iraq, but what might be best for 25 million Iraqis didn't figure very much in the argument. As usual we were talking about ourselves: what America is and how to use its frightening power in the world. The debate turned into a contest of ideologies masquerading as histories. Conservative Republicans gave us America the liberator, while the liberal left gave us America the devious, propping up villainous leaders and toppling democratically elected ones. Neither history was false: the Marshall Plan did show that America could get something right, while the overthrow of President Allende in Chile and support for death squads in Latin America showed that America could do serious wrong. Either way, however, the precedents and the ideologies were irrelevant, for Iraq was Iraq. And, it turned out, nobody actually knew very much about Iraq.

A year later, Iraq is no longer a pretext or an abstraction. It is a place where Americans are dying and Iraqis, too, in ever greater numbers. What makes these deaths especially haunting is that no one can honestly say -- at least not yet -- whether they will be redeemed by the emergence of a free Iraq or squandered by a descent into civil war.

I supported war as the least bad of the available options. Containment -- keeping Saddam Hussein in a box -- might have made war unnecessary, but the box had sprung a series of leaks. Hussein was evading sanctions, getting rich through illegal oil sales and, so I thought at the time, beginning to reconstitute the weapons programs that had been destroyed by United Nations inspectors. If he were acquiring weapons, he could be deterred from using them himself, but he might be able to transfer lethal technologies to undeterrable suicide bombers. Such a possibility might have been remote, but after 9/11 it seemed unwise to trifle with it. Still, I thought, force had to be a last resort. If Hussein had complied with the inspectors, I would not have supported an invasion, but the evidence, at least till March 2003, was that he was playing the same old games. Getting Hussein to stop these games depended on a credible threat of force, and the French, Russians and Chinese weren't ready to authorize military options. So that left disarmament through regime change. Where I live -- in liberal Massachusetts -- this was not a popular view.


Critics of the war said all of this was irrelevant. The real issue was oil. But they got the relevance of oil backward. If all America cared about was oil, it would have cozied up to Hussein, as it had done in the past. Oil was an issue in the war precisely because its revenues distinguished Hussein from the run of other malignant dictators. It was the critical factor that would allow him, sooner or later, to acquire the weapons that would enable him to go after the Kurds again, complete the destruction of the Shiites, threaten Saudi Arabia and continue to support Palestinian suicide bombers and, just possibly, Al Qaeda as well.

[pollock]

1. I'm just amazed anyone takes him seriously.

The Times loves putting out pseudo-liberals mouthing the conservative ideology. As if his view represented something important other than his own conservative politics.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. He doesn't get it

we went to war for oil because we wanted to control it.

[PATRICK]

3. so, a failed journalist?

If he needs a year of slaughter to learn his job then fire him.
he still doesn't get it and is adopting the pose of "lessons learned" when the facts were pretty bald and the consequences to come too.

The fake balance of conservative/liberal viewpoints is a hoot. Both right- except that the Right was a lie to promote just the horrors the left warned about. World conquest is not the same thing as the Marshall Plan.

What a maroon. He should do the honorable thing regarding the lives lost in HIS support of the war and resign. It would be a good example. The rest of the world did not seem to have the same problem, but then they were not craven adjuncts to their conniving leaders' lust for oil.

[Martin Eden]

4. Ignatieff is WORSE than a neoconservative

Ignatieff tries to entice the reader with "liberal" values and arguments that seem balanced and reasonable on the surface, then reshuffles the same bogus justifications for the war.

He claims if it was about oil we'd be cozying up to Saddam rather than invading him, but this ignores Iraq's switch from petrodollars to euros -- a trend that cannot be permitted by the oily-garchy.

He coughs up the rationale about the 1988 gassing of the Kurds -- which the U.S. turned a blind eye to at the time and which occurred before the first Gulf war and 15 years before the 2nd war.

Then he says he doesn't "believe that American or British leaders misrepresented Hussein's intentions or lied about the weapons they believed he possessed." ... Sorry Mr. Ignatieff, but anyone who says this is either stupid, uninformed, or a LIAR.

Finally, he uncorks this gem:
"What tipped me in favor of taking these risks was the belief that Hussein ran an especially odious regime and that war offered the only real chance of overthrowing him. This was a somewhat opportunistic case for war, since I knew that the administration did not see freeing Iraq from tyranny as anything but a secondary objective. So supporting the war meant supporting an administration whose motives I did not fully trust for the sake of consequences I believed in".

So he expects us to swallow the notion that a "secondary objective" will be met when the stated motives are highly questionable.

Of course, we know the real objective was never stated, and that it fundamentally conflicts with Ignatieff's supposed objective.

The only thing he wrote that made much sense was this:
"Hope got in the way of straight thinking, but so did fantasy: that the Shiites, whom George H.W. Bush told to rise up in 1991, only to stand by and watch them be massacred, would greet their erstwhile betrayers as liberators; that a privileged Sunni minority would enthusiastically adapt to permanent minority status in a Shiite Iraq. When fantasy drives planning, chaos results.

The administration assumed that it was taking over a functioning state and realized, after the looters stripped the offices and the Baathist officials went into hiding, that America had inherited its very own failed state. The administration went into Iraq assuming that its challenge was humanitarian. It woke to discover that its challenge was armed resistance. All interventions entail some element of illusion, but if intervening requires this quantity of illusion for an administration to be willing to risk it, we should be doing less intervening in the future"

To understand this delusionsal aspect of the invading/occuppying power and to still be in favor of such an ill-conceived undertaking fraught with so much violence and uncertainty is WORSE than being a neoconservative. People like Ignatieff are every bit the war criminal as those who actually order young men and women to die for a LIE.

[Skittles]

5. this writer is one stupid SOB

a prime example of the pathetic shit that passes for "journalism" thise days. What a whore.

[pollock]

6. and a Harvard professor.

[rfkrocks]

7. So we decide who gets what government? WTF!!!!

This is reasoned analysis?-the reason why war is the last result is that ,things most of the time, things do not work out as you plan-unintended consequences are the rule in war. Do we give the Iraqis people a civil war and leave (have a nice day!) Also morally, who are we to decide what civilian dies on their way to the new Iraq-would some civilians have lived without our intervention-hell yes-not to mention our fallen troops and the horror of war inflicted on them and their families. The problem with this writer is war was so easy for him to contemplate. It was gone into with so little discussion that my blood boils today-that and my tears fall-where is this great Harvard writer on day 6 troops died for a frigging esoteric idea of war. Who knows what we unleashed by this war? We took Afghanistan from the soviets and gave them the sand people from star wars as rulers-the taliban who couldn't wait to destroy that country's' cultural heritage. I agree wit you all-this guy is the equal journalistically to zell Miller in politics.