The trouble with Ignatieff, a pro-imperialist who is socially progressive, is that his outlook on the world is hardly likely to foster political unity among Canadians who are opposed to Stephen Harper, presumably the goal of the Liberals in selecting a new leader.
Ignatieff is a self proclaimed, muscular crusader who is committed to the idea that there is an American Empire and that it has a vital role to play as the last, best hope of people who live in some of the world’s so-called “failed states.” On the American Empire, he has written that “it is an empire…without consciousness of itself as such. But that does not make it any less of an empire, that is, an attempt to permanently order the world of states and markets according to its national interests.” More controversially, in 2003 he declared himself in favour of the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq. Three months before the American assault, Ignatieff wrote in the New York Times Magazine that “the case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.” In his book Empire Lite, also before the invasion, he wrote that “the Iraqi opposition will never overcome tyranny without an American and British military victory, followed by a long occupation.”
When the U.S. and the “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq, the Liberal government of Jean Chretien kept Canada out of the war on the grounds that the invasion did not have the backing of the United Nations. Canada took the position adopted by many American allies in Europe and in other parts of the world that the Bush administration’s doctrine that the United States had the right to invade states it saw as posing a threat to it undermined international law and the system of state sovereignty that has been the theoretical foundation of the global system for over three centuries. In that vitally important debate, Michael Ignatieff was on the side of unilateralism.
Ignatieff’s pro-imperial utterances and his support for the invasion of Iraq have placed him in a very select company, alongside the intellectual hardliners whose signature is their relish for “realism” and their enthusiasm for the use of force. The others on this terrain such as Robert Kagan, William Kristol and Robert Kaplan are dependable neo-conservative stalwarts. This makes Ignatieff that distinct oddity, a liberal who travels with a flock of American eagles.
Coming to the side of George W. Bush when most of humanity was moving in the opposite direction has made Ignatieff a new neo-conservative. This is not as strange as one might imagine. Several decades ago, it was liberals who believed in America’s global mission, who made the journey across the political spectrum to become the original neo-conservatives.
As things have gone wrong for the U.S. in Iraq, splits have developed in the neo-conservative movement. In his recent book, America at the Crossroads, Francis Fukuyama broke with his erstwhile neo-conservative political allies with a fierce denunciation of American foreign policy. He asserted that the Bush administration’s doctrine, on which the invasion of Iraq was based, blurred the crucial distinction between pre-emptive war----the invasion of a country about to launch an assault of its own---and preventive war---the invasion of a country that could constitute a threat at some point in the future (the Iraq case). Fukuyama argued that with its invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration “announced an open-ended doctrine of regime change and preventive war; and it implicitly asserted a principle of American exceptionalism in its self-proclaimed benevolent ordering of the world.”
While Michael Ignatieff is far from happy with how the American intervention in Iraq worked out, he has nowhere said that it was wrong in the first place. He has castigated the Bush administration for “stretching the evidence” on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but he has not repudiated the logic that led him to support the invasion in the first place.
For Canadians, as citizens of a middle power living next door to the world’s only superpower, these questions are of fundamental importance. Canadians have always understood that the well-being of this country rests on multilateralism and the strengthening of international law. When powerful states take unilateral action, outside the boundaries of international law, they make the world a more dangerous place, not a safer one. There are cases where states need to come together under U.N. auspices to intervene in countries such as Rwanda to take collective action against genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. But, such cases should not be confused with that of Iraq whose invasion was neither sanctioned by the U.N., nor justified on the grounds that it was needed to avert a human catastrophe.
While Michael Ignatieff has said that he does not now favour sending Canadian troops to Iraq, the question remains whether he would have joined George W. Bush’s coalition of the willing in 2003 had he been the leader of the Canadian government at the time. Based on everything he has written and said before and since the invasion, there is every reason to believe he would have made that choice. He is now a fervent supporter of the two year extension of the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, a decision of the Canadian government about which a very large number of Canadians are uneasy.
When he launched his leadership campaign, Michael Ignatieff said he believed the Liberal Party should lean to the left politically. Given his pro-imperial views, Ignatieff could end up being a very divisive figure among progressive Canadians, in the way Tony Blair has become exactly that---a millstone around the neck of the centre-left in Britain. Now the most unpopular leader of the Labour Party since the Second World War, Blair has opened the way for what has seemed unthinkable, the return of the lack-lustre Conservatives to office in the next British general election.
Ignatieff was recruited by Liberal insiders who believed that he would be a second Pierre Trudeau. Instead, because his foreign policy views are offensive to so many people in exactly the part of the political spectrum that is crucial to any hope of Liberal success, his choice as Liberal leader could ensure the victory of Stephen Harper in the next election.
No comments:
Post a Comment