A Highly Deficient Sense of (Political) Reality?

Michael Ignatieff - former Harvard faculty member, current Candian parliamentarian - has strung together a series of quotations, anecdotes and cliches in The New York Times Magazine this week under the title "Getting Iraq Wrong." The essay basically is an effort to immunize himself (and other pro-war liberals) from responsibility for the ongoing disaster in Iraq. Why not just come out and say "we were terribly, terribly wrong and there is no excuse" or "we allowed ourselves to be misled by lying ideologues in the Bush administration and were insufficiently critical of they and their motives." Either would be would be honest.

Instead Ignatieff seeks to caricature intellectuals who opposed the war as not really in touch with reality, as in many instances driven by ideology (as though that were not true of war supporters), as generally egg-headed types preoccupied with the merely "interesting," and as unworthy successors to Weber's ethic of responsibility. He is especially derisive toward political science, which happens to be my home discipline. Now, there are few times where I feel compelled to defend political scientists as a group, but this is surely one.

The problem is that Ignatieff is simply and self-servingly wrong about the early opposition to the war among political scientists. There was a consensus ex ante among students of International Relations and Security Studies that the war was a disaster. That consensus spanned partisanship and ideology. And the consensus was publicized by a group called Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy in an open letter published in The Times. I am sure that Ignatieff and other pro-war liberals would have known about this initiative and that in all likelihood he and they explicitly declined to participate.

I have posted on this endeavor here before. At that time I noted: "You can find some sensible reflections on the more or less complete failure of this enterprise in Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Stuart J. Kaufman. “Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy: A Study in Weberian Activism,” Perspectives on Politics, Volume 5, Issue 01, February 2007, pp 95-103. Full disclosure: I edit this journal and was signatory to the original letter."

It seems that, like his intellectual hero Isaiah Berlin, Ignatieff is more than willing to play hardball with those academics who dare disagree with him.