Categorical Aperitif

Our friend Generik points us to a new page of Get Your War On cartoons and reminds us about a hilarious essay by their creator, David Rees, ridiculing pro-war intellectual Michael Ignatieff's recent "mea culpa" in the New York Times Magazine. I, too, read Ignatieff's essay when it came out and found it quite baffling—though it did not occur to me to say, as Rees does, that it "can MAKE LEMONADE IN YOUR MIND," nor were my thoughts on the rest anywhere near as funny as Rees's:

Ignatieff's latest essay is what Latin people call a "mea culpa," which is Greek for "Attention publishers: I am ready to write a book about the huge colossal mistake I made." I imagine the book will be about a man struggling to do the right thing -- a man who thinks with his heart and dares, with a dream in each fist, to reach for the stars. It's about a journey: a journey from idealistic, starry-eyed academic to wizened, war-weary politician. (Ignatieff used to work at Harvard's Kennedy School; now he's Prime Chancellor of Canada's Liberal Delegate or whatever kind of wack-ass, kumbaya government they've got up there.)

In a way, it's a story much like Cormac McCarthy's recent best-selling "The Road." Both follow a hero's long march through thankless environments -- in Ignatieff's case, from the theory-throttled, dusty tower of academia to the burned-out hell-hole of representative politics. Danger lurks. Grime abounds. The narrative tension is: Can the hero be wrong about everything, survive, and still convince people he's smarter than everyone in Moveon.org?

I was excited when I first saw this new essay: At last, Ignatieff was going to come clean about his super-duper-double-dipper errors. I expected a no-holds barred, personal excoriation. In fact, I assumed the first, last, and only sentence of the essay would be: "Please, for the love of God, don't ever listen to me again."

HOWEVER. . .

The first nine-tenths of Ignatieff's essay, far from being an honest self-examination, is a collection of vague aphorisms and bong-poster koans. It hums with the comforting murmur of lobotomy. I refuse to believe this section was actually written by a member of the Canadian government, because that would mean Canada is even more "fuxxor3d" than America. (A little hacker-speak, that. There will be more; I finally bought the B3rlitz tapes.)

Rees may be "only" a wise-ass cartoonist, but I swear, his description of the bulk of big-shot liberal intellectual Ignatieff's essay as "a collection of vague aphorisms and bong-poster koans" is spot-on. I really was shocked when I read Ignatieff's piece at how vanishingly little he actually says about the mistakes he made that led him to support the Iraq War. He starts promisingly, with an introduction that hints of hard cogitations upon the difficulties of good judgment, only to swerve off immediately into paragraph after paragraph of vague blatherings about politics, then swerving sort of back toward the topic of Iraq, only to end with more vague meanderings about prudence, vision, democracy, etc.—with nary a piece of insight into Ignatieff's Iraq-related errors to be found. Structurally speaking, the whole thing winds up looking something like a question mark:

I've been thinking about how I went wrong on Iraq.

Isaiah Berlin blah blah
intellectuals vs. politicians blah
blah understanding vs. knowledge
reality blah history blah blah
personal vs. political blah blah
blah dogmatism vs. flexibility blah blah

some were right on Iraq
but for the wrong reasons
prudence and democracy
blah

Honestly, Ignatieff's essay is the first thing I've read in the New York Times Magazine that reminds me of the Austin Lounge Lizards song "Old Blevins" (lyrics here, MP3 here), wherein the singer retreats to a bar after a fight with his wife, makes the acquaintance of an old man whose demeanor promises enlightenment about matters of the heart, and listens intently as the elder begins to share his wisdom—only to find that it all sounds like this:

He said "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
In Tijuana, blah blah blah, back in 1963
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
You should have been there blah blah blah"
Is what Old Blevins said to me

I only wish I was joking. Here is Ignatieff's introduction:

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. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.

Having left an academic post at Harvard in 2005 and returned home to Canada to enter political life, I keep revisiting the Iraq debacle, trying to understand exactly how the judgments I now have to make in the political arena need to improve on the ones I used to offer from the sidelines. I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with knowing when to admit your mistakes.

Great! the reader thinks: a smart, scholarly guy is going to share his ruminations on his mistaken support for the Iraq debacle. Perhaps, from his mistakes, we can learn something that will help us avoid making such costly mistakes in the future. Alas, within the next four words, Isaiah Berlin's name is dropped and we're off to the races. I counted: no less than 1753 words pass before we finally return to the topic of Iraq—and while the words are often not without elegance and intelligence, they come nowhere near fulfilling the promise of the introduction, making Rees's characterization of them as "vague aphorisms and bong-poster koans" ultimately quite just. And look what we get when Ignatieff finally does swerve back to the topic of Iraq:

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.

Oh, bull-f*cking-shit. We opposed it because it seemed, at best, unnecessary (to address whatever threat Saddam and his ghost WMDs posed), at worst, immoral (given that it involved the invasion of a country that had not attacked us), and, quite frankly, insane (as a response to 9/11, it was rather like invading Equador to avenge Pearl Harbor). You know, 1753 words is an awfully long way to go to find only a pathetic Straw Man waiting at the end of the journey. But it gets worse:

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.

Look at how short that "they didn't take wishes for reality" line is, and look how it's tucked away in the middle of the paragraph, almost like Ignatieff hopes no one will notice it in the midst of all the surrounding bloviation. And you can see why: frankly, it's the most critically damning thing he says about his side. He seems to be suggesting, albeit in a backhanded, evasive sort of way, that proponents of the war (some, at least) did commit the fundamental epistemological sin of mistaking their wishes for reality. That would be a quite profound admission—so perhaps it's not hard to see why Ignatieff camouflages it by phrasing it in the negative, in a sentence about war opponents, and then buries it in a paragraph that blathers instead about "motives." And for God's sake: after all that we've seen the Bush Administration do, how can Ignatieff use the words "President Bush" and "integrity" in the same sentence without laughing? Could it be that Ignatieff is still mistaking wishes for reality? He still seems to take the Bush Administration's lofty words about "democracy," "freedom," etc. at face value. Well, here's a bit of real wisdom for him: By their fruits ye shall know them. After Iraq, Katrina, the Plame outing, the FISA violations, the US attorneys scandal, etc. etc. etc., a lot of us have given up on wishful thinking when it comes to this administration's "motives." I respectfully suggest that Ignatieff's deepest problem is that, for all his erudition and bloviation, he apparently cannot wrap his head around the simple thought that maybe, just maybe, the people whose war he championed act in fact from motives other than those they publicly proclaim. But wait: Ignatieff continues on the theme of "mistakes." Let's see if he goes anywhere worth going:

I made some of these mistakes and then a few of my own. 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? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying and in matters of ultimate political judgment, nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of justification through cross-examination and argument.

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.

Nope. There's the big lesson Ignatieff learned from his agonizing ruminations: "to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire—Iraqi exiles, for example—and to be less swayed by my emotions." So we've come all this way only to be offered an obvious lesson that could have been summed up by saying In matters of life and death, one must not let emotion trump reason. Mind you, Ignatieff's essay would have been far more critically valuable if he had, say, discussed some specific examples of how reason and emotion had conflicted in his case. Reason and emotion are in conflict in all of us, after all, and we might learn something had Ignatieff shared instead how his emotions managed to lead him toward decisions that he now regrets—rather than wasting 2000 words on "vague aphorisms and bong-poster koans." And jeez, he can't even develop this would-be-valuable theme much at the end of his essay; instead, he swerves instead to talking about Bush: his problem, you see, is that "he did not take the care to understand himself." Ye gods, what drivel. What Bush's lack of self-understanding has to do with Ignatieff's mistakes in supporting the Iraq invasion we are left to guess, as what follows is a couple of vague paragraphs on "prudence" and "democracy" before the essay mercifully dozes off before it becomes any more incoherent. We have gotten as close as we are ever going to get, I fear, to a fulfillment of Ignatieff's promising I've-been-thinking-about-how-I-went-wrong-on-Iraq thesis.

I've read my share of student essays, and to be honest, in most student essays that wander about and fail to develop a coherent thesis as badly as Ignatieff's, there are so many sentence-level errors—misspellings, misused punctuation, ungrammatical constructions, etc.—that the things are multiply impenetrable. By contrast, Ignatieff's erudite essay makes for a beautiful read—if only it weren't so ultimately empty. It's like a big soap bubble: pretty, shimmering, blobular, but with nothing inside. Reading it again, I found myself thinking that Rees's witty, wide-ranging takedown is actually more gentle with it than it deserves. And I found myself reminded even more of "Old Blevins":

I sat there and I listened to his words
As they flapped around my head like little birds
Had he gone plumb 'round the bend, or could I just not comprehend
His lips were writing lines I could not read
When suddenly, it all came clear to me

As he said "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
Them crazy hippies blah blah blah blah no effect on me
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
The Great Depression blah blah blah"
And he would not leave me be

Oh, well: he's Canada's problem now.