"Liberal" Hawk/Imperialist Scolds Bushists for Lying, Lacking Clarity

[BurtWorm]

From Why Are We In Iraq? (And Liberia? And Afghanistan?)
By MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

in the NY Times Sunday Magazine


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/magazine/07INTERVENTION.html?pagewanted=3

The Bush administration, as no administration before it, has embraced ''pre-emption.'' It's a strategy of sorts, but hardly a doctrine. Where is the definition of when pre-emption might actually be justified? The angry postwar debate about whether the American public (and the British public, too) were duped into the Iraq war is about much more than whether intelligence estimates were ''sexed up'' to make the threat from Hussein seem more compelling. It is about what level of threat warrants pre-emptive use of force. Almost 20 years ago, George P. Shultz, as Reagan's secretary of state, gave a speech warning that America would have to make pre-emptive Last year, intervention against terrorist threats on the basis of evidence that would be less than clear. Since Shultz, no one has clarified how intervention decisions are to be made when intelligence is, as it is bound to be, uncertain. As Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush administration's deputy secretary of defense, has candidly acknowledged, the intelligence evidence used to justify force in Iraq was ''murky.'' If so, the American people should have been told just that. Instead, they were told that intervention was necessary to meet a real and imminent threat. Now the line seems to be that the war wasn't much of an act of pre-emption at all, but rather a crusade to get rid of an odious regime. But this then makes it a war of choice -- and the Bush administration came to power vowing not to fight those. At the moment, the United States is fighting wars in two countries with no clear policy of intervention, no clear end in sight and no clear understanding among Americans of what their nation has gotten itself into.



Last year, Ignatieff wrote a lengthy, influential article in praise of intervention in Iraq and the use of force to advance American Empire. Kind of a weird twist, this latest article, isn't it? How do these hawks, liberal or not, live with themselves? It seems to me that the highest priority for American foreign policy last year was not invading Iraq but getting clear on when the use of force is acceptible or desirable. Ignatieff, in my opinion, didn't help.

[gratuitous]

1. The irony is so thick you can cut it with a knife

Why, oh why, didn't somebody (anybody!) warn Ignatieff that a pre-emptive war and a policy of pre-emption might have a few bugs in it? Oh, if only some people had, I don't know, taken to the streets by the millions to warn poor Mr. Ignatieff back before Lil George launched his invasions to kill Afghanistan and Iraq! Then we wouldn't be in this fix! It must be the libruls' fault! That's it!

Luke 16:27-31

[BurtWorm]

2. Ignatieff was too pleased with the sound of his own voice

that he didn't hear the millions of voices on the streets.