Getting Iraq Wrong
Perhaps I’m the one mistaken for assigning too much value to truth. (Truth is overrated) . . .
Politics, advertising, business are areas I see as favoring the good liar.
No, I don't think we can assign too much value to truth, and nor do I think that ultimately lies favor the good businessman or politican. This is especially true in politics (or, for that matter, in your neighborhood bar), where misperception of capabilities or intentions can have deadly results. I view our involvement in Viet Nam and Iraq as an epistomological failure, much more so than a failure of arms or will.
What follows "Getting Iraq Wrong" by a one time apologist of American involvement in Iraq, Michael Ignatieff. Trusting that I'm within the bounds of fair use, here are some of its salient paragraphs of this important essay from Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/magazine/05iraq-t.html
"The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion.
"The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. 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.
"A sense of reality is not just a sense of the world as it is, but as it might be. Like great artists, great politicians see possibilities others cannot and then seek to turn them into realities. To bring the new into being, a politician needs a sense of timing, of when to leap and when to remain still. Bismarck famously remarked that political judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.
"Fixed principle matters. There are some goods that cannot be traded, some lines that cannot be crossed, some people who must never be betrayed. But fixed ideas of a dogmatic kind are usually the enemy of good judgment.
"Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take the care to understand himself. The sense of reality that might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing. But then, it is doubtful that warning bells had ever sounded in him before. He had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives warning bells do not sound.
"People with good judgment listen to warning bells within. Prudent leaders force themselves to listen equally to advocates and opponents of the course of action they are thinking of pursuing. They do not suppose that their own good intentions will guarantee good results. They do not suppose they know all they need to know. If power corrupts, it corrupts this sixth sense of personal limitation on which prudence relies."
Michael Ignatieff (Aug. 5) dismisses many of the early (and prescient) critics of the invasion of Iraq for “indulging in ideology” rather than “exercising judgment.”
It takes extraordinary chutzpah for those like Ignatieff, who were so passionately wrong about Iraq, to accuse the opponents of the war of being ideological, when in reality we were challenging the extremely ideological, indeed messianic, views of the war’s proponents.
The critics were not only right in predicting the disastrous consequences of the invasion but also in judging that those consequences flowed from the motives behind it, which we correctly said were rooted in the geopolitics of energy in the resource-rich Middle East. Ignatieff offers nothing, other than more ideology, to challenge this view.
Anthony Arnove
New York
As a good and friendly neighbor, this Canadian would like to apologize to all those on your side of the border for the lame, windy excuses now emanating from my fellow countrymen who, in light of current tragic realities, are rethinking their support for your president, his incompetent manipulators and their doomed-from-the-start, militaristic foray into Iraq.
Please remember in the future that the main reason those like Ignatieff or the “axis of evil” coiner David Frum are down there messing in your affairs is that we long ago stopped listening to their cloistered ramblings up here.
Wayne Scott
Toronto
Politics, advertising, business are areas I see as favoring the good liar.
No, I don't think we can assign too much value to truth, and nor do I think that ultimately lies favor the good businessman or politican. This is especially true in politics (or, for that matter, in your neighborhood bar), where misperception of capabilities or intentions can have deadly results. I view our involvement in Viet Nam and Iraq as an epistomological failure, much more so than a failure of arms or will.
What follows "Getting Iraq Wrong" by a one time apologist of American involvement in Iraq, Michael Ignatieff. Trusting that I'm within the bounds of fair use, here are some of its salient paragraphs of this important essay from Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/magazine/05iraq-t.html
"The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion.
"The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. 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.
"A sense of reality is not just a sense of the world as it is, but as it might be. Like great artists, great politicians see possibilities others cannot and then seek to turn them into realities. To bring the new into being, a politician needs a sense of timing, of when to leap and when to remain still. Bismarck famously remarked that political judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.
"Fixed principle matters. There are some goods that cannot be traded, some lines that cannot be crossed, some people who must never be betrayed. But fixed ideas of a dogmatic kind are usually the enemy of good judgment.
"Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take the care to understand himself. The sense of reality that might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing. But then, it is doubtful that warning bells had ever sounded in him before. He had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives warning bells do not sound.
"People with good judgment listen to warning bells within. Prudent leaders force themselves to listen equally to advocates and opponents of the course of action they are thinking of pursuing. They do not suppose that their own good intentions will guarantee good results. They do not suppose they know all they need to know. If power corrupts, it corrupts this sixth sense of personal limitation on which prudence relies."
Michael Ignatieff (Aug. 5) dismisses many of the early (and prescient) critics of the invasion of Iraq for “indulging in ideology” rather than “exercising judgment.”
It takes extraordinary chutzpah for those like Ignatieff, who were so passionately wrong about Iraq, to accuse the opponents of the war of being ideological, when in reality we were challenging the extremely ideological, indeed messianic, views of the war’s proponents.
The critics were not only right in predicting the disastrous consequences of the invasion but also in judging that those consequences flowed from the motives behind it, which we correctly said were rooted in the geopolitics of energy in the resource-rich Middle East. Ignatieff offers nothing, other than more ideology, to challenge this view.
Anthony Arnove
New York
As a good and friendly neighbor, this Canadian would like to apologize to all those on your side of the border for the lame, windy excuses now emanating from my fellow countrymen who, in light of current tragic realities, are rethinking their support for your president, his incompetent manipulators and their doomed-from-the-start, militaristic foray into Iraq.
Please remember in the future that the main reason those like Ignatieff or the “axis of evil” coiner David Frum are down there messing in your affairs is that we long ago stopped listening to their cloistered ramblings up here.
Wayne Scott
Toronto
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