Ignatieff Defrocked

Undoubtedly, the south face will prevail as it basks in the bloodlust and prevarications of the New Roman Empire, and the candidate has shown a willingness to be an acolyte to the empire. Canada already has a south facing prime minister, who in a clumsy totally corrupt and round about way has managed to make a 450 million dollar donation to the Republican Party at Canadian tax payers expense, and in spite of a US court ruling that funds -5.3 billion in duties on Canadian softwood lumber- were illegally collected. Ignatieff has also made a significant contribution by sacrificing his academic integrity and critical judgment on the alter of George Bush’s neo-imperialism. Canadians may wonder why a celebrated Harvard professor ensconced near the center of American power, that leaves him in stupefied adoration, would suddenly return to his home and switch to the rigors of a political career? Possibly it is because he has incurred the wrath of his academic peers and like a lot of other cheerleaders for a war that is an utter atrocity he is beating a hasty retreat. There really is a price to be paid for being a cheerleader to the Bush agenda. Part of the price is a vitriolic defrocking by his academic peers. In his article “Faith-Based Analysis,” Edward S. Herman (Professor Emeritus, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), says of Ignatieff: One would have thought it might be problematical for a professor of human rights to vigorously support two wars (Kosovo, Iraq) carried out in violation of the UN Charter and hence “supreme crimes” in the view of the judges at Nuremberg. These two wars of aggression also resulted in serial war crimes, such as the regular bombing of civilian sites and the use of illegal weapons such as cluster bombs, napalm, phosphorus and depleted uranium, that should have been anathema to a devotee of human rights. Herman concludes: "Michael Ignatieff is a skilled trimmer, who has adjusted his principles and thoughts to the demands of the U.S. and Canadian power elite, and advanced accordingly—from academia to preferred commentator on human rights and other political issues in the U.S. mainstream media, and on to becoming a member of the Canadian parliament." And it does appear that Ignatieff is the “official” candidate “the backroom boys” would like to see win. He is touted as the frontrumner but a recent poll shows he is actually in a very tight five-way race. His backers would like to replicate Trudeaumania, but there was, and always will be, only one Pierre Elliot Trudeau. In his book America on the Edge, Henry Giroux, a distinguished US academic now living in Canada and teaching at McMaster University, states: "American support for the invasion of Iraq and the “outsourcing of torture” are now defended at least in principle in the name of righteous causes, even by liberals such as Naill Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff, who like their neoconservative counterparts, revel in the notion that American power can be a force for progress." International political analyst Mariano Aquirre states: "Ignatieff and others of his ilk have become apologists for the neoconservative crusade. Hence they are indifferent to the endless violations of democracy perpetrated both at home and abroad by the United States." Aquirre elaborates further: "Ignatieff chooses to applaud a government that goes to war in defiance of the Security Council, that actively promotes the failure of the United Nations, that refuses to sign international treaties, that opts out of international justice and that ignores human rights in prisons – a government that is violating rather than promoting the Jeffersonian dream. In his militaristic patriotism, Ignatieff is blind and wrong." Michael Neumann, Professor of Philosophy, Trent University, is no less vitriolic in his opinion of Ignatieff: "Michael Ignatieff shares a few things with Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Tony Blair, George Bush, and many others. One is an extraordinary ability to reconcile warm concern with insufferable smugness… Ignatieff's position is a web of foolishness, error and confusion. His confidence in American power is so ludicrously exaggerated, so unsustained by evidence, that it validates what seems to be the wildest of left-wing accusations: his enthusiasms are racist." It is note worthy that Neumann raises the issue of racism. One of the contemptible under currents in this war that is rarely addressed is the ferocious racism. Where there is the disproportionate slaughter of thousands of Iraqi’s, that can only be estimated, there is a meticulous body count on dead and wounded US and coalition troops. 9/11 has been avenged to the point of obscenity! (In a world gone mad a committee of the US Senate has just pronounced there was no connection between Hussein and 9/11.) Neumann’s reference to the redoubtable NYT columnist Thomas L. Friedman is a timely one, like Ignatieff, he too has been one the most vociferous cheerleaders for the ill-fated war on Iraq. In the August 21st 2006 edition of The New Yorker Henrik Hertzberg quotes Friedman. “It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq,” Thomas L. Friedman wrote, in the August 4th edition of the Times. “We are baby-sitting a civil war.” Like so many others who propagated the war Friedman is heading for the hills and distancing himself from it. Hertzberg also comments: Among foreign-policy élites and the broader public alike, it has become the preponderant conviction that George W. Bush’s war of choice in Iraq is a catastrophe. Unfortunately though, for Ignatieff his support for this war also goes to the issue of political judgment. To have supported this war is now proven to be stunningly bad political judgment. Even as a novice MP Ignatieff has committed a number of elementary gaffs a leadership candidate of his stature should never fall victim to. Yet, should he assume the Liberal party leadership he could be prime minister in a matter of months! Still another blemish on Ignatieff’s candidacy is that he has aligned himself with the neoconservative intellectuals (notably Francis Fukuyama who has also recanted his support for the war) who were the driving force behind going to war. Yet Ignatieff, paradoxically, is seeking the leadership of a centrist liberal party. Ignatieff has an authoritative writing style and he is a clever wordsmith but his content collapses like a house of cards. As a public intellectual and scholar he is expected to bring special knowledge and critical insight to issues. Instead he seeks to sanctify tawdry political deceptions that have long been proven false and he plays fast and loose with basic history. To cite an example of Ignatieff’s, “foolishness, error and confusion” one only has to go to the pages of the New York Times in March of 2004: "The discovery that Hussein didn't have weapons after all surprises me, but it doesn't change my view of the essential issue. I never thought the key question was what weapons he actually possessed but rather what intentions he had. Having been to Halabja in 1992, and having talked to survivors of the chemical attack that killed 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in March 1988, I believed that while there could be doubt about Hussein's capabilities, there could be none about the malignancy of his intentions. True, there are a lot of malignant intentions loose in our world, but Hussein had actually used chemical weapons. Looking to the future, once sanctions collapsed, inspectors had been bamboozled and oil revenues began to pick up, he was certain, sooner or later, to match intentions with capabilities." It “surprises” Ignatieff that Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. Yet for anybody that was paying attention it was obvious Hussein had been stripped of his weaponry long before the war started. Months before the war started this writer attended a talk in Vancouver given by one Scott Ritter, formerly with US Army Intelligence under General Norman Shwarzkopf in the Gulf war, a card carrying Republican, and for seven years a weapons inspector for the UN in Iraq. Also, he has authored two books on his Iraq experience. Ritter delivered a detailed and lucid account of the weapons inspection process. At first the Iraqi’s did try to hide their weapons, but due to the persistence and innovative investigative techniques his team used the Iraqi’s eventually capitulated. Far from being “bamboozled,” Ritter was confident 95 % of Iraqi capability had been destroyed. Ritter turned his conclusions into a public crusade but he was outside the loop of those plotting for war and a mainstream North American media that had been co-opted. If Ignatieff did not hear of Ritter, he must surely have heard of US Secretary of State Colin Powell and his sham-show-and-tell at the UN. Powell presented evidence to the UN of Iraq’s weaponry, but even as he did so much of that evidence was discredited. It was reported at the time that Powell, a man of real stature(unlike so many of his colleagues), had serious misgivings about the integrity of this evidence and the need for war. This may well be one of the reasons Powell is no longer Secretary of State. He has quietly slipped away into private life; but if he ever chooses to speak out he might have some very interesting revelations. For Hussein to entertain “intentions” or “capabilities” is a laughable proposition. Once sanctions were imposed the US had him by the throat. It was only a question of when and how he was going to be removed from power. Ignatieff also plays fast and loose with the recent history of Iraq. After the end of the Iran/Iraq war where Hussein was acting as an American proxy (Israel now shares that distinction) Iraq was left with a much depleted military capability and his country was on the verge of bankruptcy. Hussein was desperate for oil revenues and a renewal of his economy. But this was pre-empted by the Gulf War where his obsolete military and beleaguered troops were pulverized by a state of the art military coalition led by the US. This was followed by a decade of brutal UN sanctions that blocked the importation of any strategic goods, the continued selective bombing of targets designated by the US, weapons inspections, and the denial of basic medical supplies that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians- infant mortality went through the roof. Yet, after all this, Ignatieff is trying to tell us Hussein could have “intentions” or “capabilities!” The reality is that when the US attacked Iraq it was a waste land devastated by a decade of sanctions and war. It was attacked not because it was a threat but because it was seen as a walk-over. Hussein’s gas attack on Halabja in 1992 was used as a propaganda tool prior to the war and of course Ignatieff dutifully mentions it in his article. The gas used was most probably American in origin as the US supplied Iraq with just such technology to wage war against Iran. Ignatieff, and others of his ilk, might now want to consider that dating back to the Gulf War, the decade of sanctions and the current conflict the US now rivals Hussein in the killing and torture of Iraqi citizens. And this is called liberation! There is also the little known story that appeared in the New York Times just prior to the war. When Sadaam Hussein realized an attack on his country was imminent he enlisted emissaries to go to Washington and offer capitulation to save his country from further destruction. One such emissary was a Lebanese business man who met with the nefarious neoconservative bagman Richard Perle. New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, recalls the incident in her book, Bushworld: "Many diplomats were shocked to read the Times report that the back-channel attempt of the Iraqis to avert war, with Richard Perle as go-between, was blown off with the CIA message, 'Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad.'" It is somewhat disconcerting that had this petition been accepted Iraq could today actually be on the road to a peaceful democracy! The US was determined to go to war at any price and for all the wrong reasons. Ignatieff, a professor of human rights, has the temerity to lecture readers on “malignant intentions” while he turns a blind eye to a monumental malignancy. He naively supports the notion that the Bush administration wants to spread democracy globally when this is the most pervasive and barefaced lie of the 21st Century. All he has to do is Google: “PNAC” (Project for the New American Century), which is a manifesto for US global domination. He might also check out “Full Spectrum Dominance.” He brashly assumes “once sanctions collapsed, inspectors had been bamboozled and oil revenues began to pick up,” Hussein would match “ intentions and capabilities.” In fact, sanctions and weapons inspections (thanks to the tireless dedication of inspectors like Scott Ritter) served their purpose to great effect. Hussein was not a patriarch in his autumn, but in his winter. The opportunity to finesse him out of power was egregiously passed over in favor of a war that has cost thousands of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars, completely destroyed a country, set in motion serial warfare and gruesome reverberations that will be with us for years to come. He lectures Canadians on the need to give up our “innocence” when he so innocently ignores that the US is shamelessly exploiting the events of 9/11 and the war on terrorism to advance its global ambitions. The “threats” that Ignatieff and cohorts so willingly refer to are to a very large degree exaggerations and fabrications. In league with the Bushites he inflates the threat to suit the agenda, cheerleads for the culture of fear; all the while fomenting even larger and bloodier conflicts that have names like Iran. That he cannot see on the evidence that US intentions are less than altruistic and so blindly supports this agenda with his insidiously clever double-speak and excessively elastic human rights fundamentals leaves him as the innocent coming home from abroad; the prodigy who knows much but understands little. The good professor is out of step with a country he left long ago. He chastises Canadians for what he sees as a virulent strain of “anti-Americanism,” but the term in itself has become a tiresome red herring used to deflect legitimate protest. Here again he appears indifferent to the fact that international polling indicates the US is universally regarded as the single greatest threat to world peace and security. Canada is not only struggling under the onerous demands of The New Roman Empire, it is a country being betrayed by its elites. The Harper conservatives are a unionist party without the intellectual or political courage to declare their true intentions. The Liberal party has a less than exemplary record in defending this country’s sovereignty. It promises renewal, but is this anything more than empty words? There is the old Liberal trick: “Campaign left-govern right. The Ignatieff variation might very well be: Campaign Canadian-govern American. We do not need two parties of national extinction. The carpetbagging messiah, the conflicted Janus, suffering from less than laudatory peer review, arrives from the south. The good professor must reconcile his avid support for the Bush agenda, neoconservative doctrine, a needless war gone horribly wrong and his application for being a Liberal prime minister. Thanks, but no thanks! [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on September 11, 2006]