Blaming The Ivory Tower

I found Michael Ignatieff's reflective essay on getting things wrong about Iraq to be somehow pleasantly soothing. But then someone pointed out to me that the whole thing is founded on the absurd premise that his errors in judgment have something to do with the mindset of academia versus the mindset of practical politics.

This is, when you think about it, totally wrong. Academics in the field of Middle East studies were overwhelmingly opposed to the war. Similarly, international relations scholars opposed the war by a very large margin. The war's foci of intellectual support were in the institutions of the conservative movement, and in the DC think tanks and the punditocracy where the war had a lot of non-conservative support. People with relevant academic expertise -- notably people who weren't really on the left politically -- were massively opposed to the war. To imply the reverse is to substantially obscure one of the main lessons of the war, namely that we should pay more attention to what regional experts think and give substantially less credence to the idea that think tankers are really "independent" of political machinations.

Comments

The right wing's attitude towards the academy is sort of a version of the Jonah Goldberg's titanic two-step of triviality: the academy is powerless and meaningless, an irrelevant band of radicals, when they advocate a position the conservatives don't like; the academy is a destabilizing, misinforming dangerous band of radicals, when they can be made responsible for consequences conservatives don't like.

Posted by Freddie | August 6, 2007 12:02 PM

Bless you for making that point, because I had been stunned that such an obvious, and simple, rejoinder was not instantly made by everybody.

And if you read the article carefully, he tried to parlay the 'academic' outlook as the *impractical* one, and the political outlook as the *practical* one.

His own view he regrets as having been too convinced by what he *wished* would happen as opposed to what likely would happen.

Which part of that is "academic"? By "academic" is he thinking of the routines and trappings of professorships and university life?

Because he's certainly not thinking of the "academic" I experienced, in which you actually had to find evidence and evaluable arguments to support your assertions.

The fervor to invade & occupy Iraq was anti-academic to the core. It was against empirical evidence. It held that the insistence upon public evidence be scuttled in favor of supposedly 'secret' information possessed only by our betters in government. It shouted down anyone who cautioned that turning Iraq into a warlord chaos hell was likely to follow an invasion by the actual U.S. leaders.

And it was a public commitment to fantasy: we weren't going to war with the leaders and institutions we actually had -- no, that was for us cowards, traitors, pro-terrorists, and Saddam's boot-lickers to assert.

We were going to go to war with every liberal hawks fantasy roster of favorite or imagined leaders and institutions.

Yes, sure, the U.S. has been dominated by venal and anti-government politicians and rhetoric for the last roughly 30 years, but when it comes time to occupy Iraq, suddenly George W. Bush Jr. would begin to channel F.D.R., Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and of course Sgt Rock.

Reminds me of how in Reagan's 1980's bloodletting throughout Central America the academics who overwhelmingly opposed the imperial slaughter were derided by that day's liberal hawks as being foolish in the face of Soviet expansionism.

Ignatieff can take his bullsh*t excuses for puffing up terrible arguments in any direction, but he sure as hell isn't going to blame it on him being TOO academic, unless in his mind the term "academic" has nothing to do with the old traditions of learned investigation which I somehow acquired.

Posted by El Cid | August 6, 2007 12:03 PM

Academics are largely independent thinkers, whereas the think-tankers are corporate-funded, and for the corporations the war has been a success, as they knew it would be. Wartime annual profits have increased dramatically in four years from their previous levels (2002 to 2006): Top five US banks, up 109%; top five armaments, up 139%; top three oil, up 490%.

Money talks and . . .

Posted by Don Bacon | August 6, 2007 12:09 PM

Matt, good catch on a pudding of an article. After quoting everybody he could think of from his handy Bartlett's, Ignatieff's conclusions about what went wrong are almost astonishingly wrongheaded. It has all been the Iraqis fault. Of course, the overbuttered prose tends to disguise the point, but the point is, the only way to keep Iraq together is to rule it with terror a la Saddam.

How insane is that? How insane is it to write an article about the 'practical' case against the war and not notice that before the invasion, Glen Hubbard was reproached for saying the war would cost 200 billion dollars (and Wolfowitz could happily say it would cost 10 billion dollars without anybody even blinking) and General Shinseki was mocked for saying that it would take 400,000 troops just to have a chance by the warmongers - who thus showed zero ability to envision the project they were promoting? Of course, if the real war had been advocated, the one that actually had an adequate force of 400,000 soldiers, we would have had to contemplate a cost of about 20 billion per month. But Ignatieff's article blithely bypasses that issue. Too 'practical' I guess. From the start to this day, the pro-war people have clung to one very malign and dangerous idea: that the U.S. can stage major wars without really paying any price. Thus the continuing appetite for intervention by the Igantieff and Daalder crowd. The theory is cynical and sinister: as long as the war only selects its American victims from a volunteer army isolated from society as a whole anyway, and as long as the costs of it aren't too closely examined, the populace will let the executive branch - properly propped, of course, by the right thinktanking intellectuals - get away with using the army as it sees fit. It is a regression to the monarchical theory of the military.

Among other things, the Iraq war was supposed to roll out this wonderful new model of war. However, the war without cost idea has now officially crashed, so, naturally, war supporters like Ignatieff blame - the Iraqis! If they had been patient while the U.S. stripped the society of all security, if the 60 percent unemployed had only been patient while the U.S. privatized the place and fired another 10 percent, why, everything would have been hunky dory! Who knew that they'd get all impatient and shit. And in places like Karbala today, which hasn't had electricity in the past week and in which the sewage is now running in the streets, one has more evidence for the essentially save nature of the Iraqis - many of them get violent about the situation! Surely, this means that they are inherently factional, and can only be united by terror.

You can't forgive humanitarians that are inhuman jackasses. Ignatieff is, and will always be, a dishonorable son of a bitch.

Posted by roger | August 6, 2007 12:28 PM

Ignatieff is viewed by political philosophers (maybe not by political theorists- I don't really know) as something of a light-weight. This article certainly fits with that. I notice that he's not backed off of his (somewhat tepid but still real) support for torture, either. The article shows not only a profound lack of awareness of what happened (perfectly predictably) in Iraq but also of self awareness. Let's hope Canadians keep being smart enough to not let him become prime minister.

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | August 6, 2007 12:31 PM

I would also note that American academics who questioned the Iraq war were heavily attacked and threatened by NeoCon supporters like David Horowitz. Remember Horowitz's "list" -- The "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" ?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz#Academic_Bill_of_Rights

Note that the Neocons attacked not only the "Anti-Semites" but also the "Self-Hating Jews".

Posted by Don Williams | August 6, 2007 12:47 PM

First Ignatieff writes: "The attribute that underpins good judgment in politicians is a sense of reality" and then he says "politics is theater".

I think the second observation explains his fanciful first observation.

Posted by Don Bacon | August 6, 2007 12:52 PM

The real distinction here is between pragmatism and ideology. The position Ignatieff identifies with politics is pragmatism, the position of the academy is ideology. In between he staggers from quotation to quotation as a drunk man uses lamp posts, for support rather than illumination.

Politicians are usually pragmatists. Ideologues tend to be weeded out by the course of events as their one size fits all approach inevitably fails sooner rather than later.

Academics are certainly prone to engage in wishful thinking, grand theories etc with respect to their own specialities. What Ignatieff misses is that they tend to be ruthlessly pragmatic when assesing the value of others projects.

What Matthew misses here is that within the field of neo-con studies there was unanimity on the need to invade Iraq. The objections came from people the neo-cons regarded as 'outside the field'. Juan Cole is a professor of literature, would Churchill have consulted an expert on Goethe in the war against Germany?

Academia does have some terrible habbits which is why sensible politicians learn to filter the conclusions and proscriptions of academics. The neo-cons are not sensible politicians. In particular many academics are wildly insecure when it comes to their core expertise. Comment on what they feel is their field, their perogative and they get very nasty.

Posted by PHB | August 6, 2007 12:52 PM

Ignatieff is now a politician, and he encompasses all the bad things we've come to think about politicians. He is disingenuous, mendacious, glib, slick, and manipulative. I don't think he actually has any core beliefs, and that is the sense of most Canadians.

He had painted himself into a corner with his position on the war - given the overwhelming rejection of the war by most Canadians, and he is delicately trying to extricate himself from that - not for any intellectual pursuit or reevaluation, but simply as a political calculation.

Do not believe what this man says.

Posted by 3pointshooter | August 6, 2007 12:55 PM

Matt,

Academic thinkers? I'm too lazy to do the research but I am certain there were plenty of people in academia who were right about the war.
We just didn't hear from them or when we did, it was only to call them traitors and Pro-Saddam enablers. See, for me, apologizing for being mistaken about the war doesn't go far enough. The country was not given the right information to make an informed choice. We were spoon-fed data that supported the case for going to war. Anyone who had questions was either ignored or demonized. Questions like what will the occupation look like, or how we proposed to bring the various Sunni/Shia/Kurd factions together when there would obviously be forces from outside Iraq eager to stir up trouble between these factions, were not part of the debate. Those that supported this war were never challenged to explain or defend their positions about what would come after the fall of Saddam. When those questions did come up, the usual wingnut enablers quickly questioned your patriotism. Corporate media picked up the ball and ran with it. Those who asked uncomfortable questions were not "serious" or were "radical leftists" and their opinions could be safely ignored. Mr. Ignatieff, who seems to pride himself on his academic background, didn't behave like an academic when it came to Iraq. If he had, he would have encouraged debate about the occupation.
Instead, he choose to either stay silent or actively participate in the bon fires that were set upon anyone who dared challenge the so called "Bush Doctrine". Mr. Ignatieff's confession is alot like many others I have seen in the last two years. They admit they were wrong but usually cast about for someone to blame for their failure to see what was obvious to many others. Why didn't they see? Because they didn't want to look. I haven't seen anyone apologize for that.

Posted by ny nick | August 6, 2007 1:19 PM

Ignatieff's essay is a pile of vague, patronizing ,worthless bullshit.

I'm surprised that he didn't get around to informing us that one can sometimes find loose change under seat cushions and that beer should be stored in a cool place.

But Ignatieff probably would have regarded such advice as skirting too dangerously close to the edge of actually saying something.

Posted by Don Williams | August 6, 2007 1:20 PM

PHB Juan Cole is a professor of literature, would Churchill have consulted an expert on Goethe in the war against Germany?

Juan Cole is a professor of Middle Eastern History.

Are you arguing that Churchill considered historical study irrelevant to policy choices?

Posted by Alan de Bristol | August 6, 2007 1:58 PM

"People with relevant academic expertise -- notably people who weren't really on the left politically"

Did you really just write that with a straight face? MESA is not political?

Posted by Dave | August 6, 2007 2:01 PM

"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."

Who's the ideolog here? "You may have been right about the war, but only because you are so wrong."

What a facist. Down is up, black is white. This "essay" is a self-serving, college-freshman- level piece of propaganda.

"Take heart, righties, we're still Serious, they're still Pussies we can dominate with our crushing corporate might, as evidenced by the fact that this essay that my dog helped me write has been published in this national media outlet."

LIBERALS STAND UP AND FIGHT!!

jesus this pisses me off.

Posted by cindy | August 6, 2007 2:39 PM

Hypothetical: would Ignatieff be saying these things if he'd won the contest to lead the federal Liberals in Canada?

That's to say, would Ignatieff be as concerned in arguing the distinction between the consequences of 'academic ideas' and 'political ideas' if he hadn't suffered the personal consequences of being considered an opportunistic arriviste who'd drunk the neo-con koolaid and was far too eager to include the US and UK under the pronoun 'we'?

I think there's a certain amount of projection going on here: Ignatieff is creating a general distinction to justify both his own errors of judgement and his own rejection by the Liberal membership.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | August 6, 2007 2:47 PM

and on top of all that he's a crappy writer, at least in this article, which might be due to his muddled thoughts and disingenuous argument, or not

discuss

Posted by novakant | August 6, 2007 2:54 PM

Cindy, so harsh! "This "essay" is a self-serving, college-freshman- level piece of propaganda."

Self serving? Just because Ignatieff portrays himself as wrong about the war because he's ... such a ... a good, good ultragood person? He has a heart a million miles long. He'd been to Northern Iraq. He'd talked to an Iraqi exile. And being pretty much as holy as Jesus Christ himself, except with better table manners, he knew that you couldn't really do more to help the poor Iraqis (who turned out to be savages!) than to bomb them and occupy them. Whereas - let's face it - the antiwar crowd was so callous that they didn't want to bomb a single Iraqi, or raze a single Iraqi city to the ground, or nothing. Sometimes, to be kind to a person, you have to kill him, cripple his kids with bombs and white phosphorus, kill all his friends or torture them in desert prisons, and make sure his neighborhood is looted by hoodlums before it is ethnically cleansed. It is the old saying: sometimes, you have to be cruel to be kind.

The 'I'm too good for this world' excuse has to burn Beinart. Why didn't he think of that?

Posted by roger | August 6, 2007 4:30 PM

I was struck by the tone of self-pity in Ignatieff's piece. His entire article could be summed up thus: "When I was an academic, I could think about ideas and talk about them and discuss policy from a safe distance, and it was all kind of fun. But now that I'm in politics, I have to think more carefully about what I say, and that's not so much fun. Because words matter, and cool ideas have to give way to meaningful policy, and policy has real effects in the real world, which is kind of scary. Even worse, people listen really carefully to what I say and they can be mean, not like in academia. So it's been real hard. So all in all, I've learned that the world is complicated and messy, and you need to care more about what's likely to work than about what sounds cool or fun."

Sorry, Michael, but many of us knew all this long ago, without the benefit of either a teaching gig at Harvard or a seat in the Canadian House of Commons.

Posted by DNS | August 6, 2007 5:45 PM

I thought the article was pretty good and, of course, Matt and his acolyte of pajama-wearing know nothings will criticize it. It stands against your very sense of self.

Posted by ILP | August 6, 2007 5:53 PM

I should add a correction: My snarky summary was of only the first third or so of his article. I didn't read through to the end.

Another thought: I believe Ignatieff's mistake in taking a public position on Iraq was one that a lot of smart, articulate and publicly successful commentator/s writers have made recently: they have strayed beyond the subject area in which they earned their intellectual stripes and where their opinions are (perhaps) still respected and valued by their peers, in order to make public statements about sexier topics like national election campaigns or foreign policy. I'm sure we can all think of such people: Hitchens, for example; perhaps even some of the neo-cons. They started out smart and they did some good work, and so they become the celebrated guest at a few too many cocktail parties, but they took this adulation as a sign that their opinions would carry equal weight on whatever subject they chose to tackle. And since foreign policy is the most testosterone-soaked realm of policy (where else do you get to advocate so much penetration, explosion, and death?), they'll get to feel all manly and strong when they transgress the boundaries of our affluent urban pacificsm and call for muscular action. Their rivals' wives will practically crawl under the white table cloths to provide immediate satisfaction.

As for whether Ignatieff has anything insightful to say about academia being somehow more theoretical (read, effete, impotent, sterile, castrated) in its discussion of Iraq, I'd say he's just plain wrong. As others have noted, IR types and area specialists were aghast at Bush's plans. As for hard-headed practicality, the profs I learned from in my 2 MAs (international relations and political theory) were overwhelmingly committed to empiricism and` scepticism; idealism was given short shrift, but any argument backed by evidence and historical fact was listened to.

So what exactly has Ignatieff given us that's worth thinking about? Beats me. Unless it's his observation that politics is hard, and that people in politics can be mean. Well duh.

Posted by DNS | August 6, 2007 6:09 PM

Actually, Ignatieff should beware of God's sense of humor and occasional mean streak.

Due to global warming , the Northwest Passage north of Canada is opening up. This could cut shipping distance between China/Japan and the EU by roughly thousands of miles (Suez route) and roughly 12000 miles if you go around south of Africa.

Canada claims the passage. The US government doesn't recognize the claim and occasionally sends US subs across the passage to reinforce that
stance. Canada recently stated that it would "protect its sovereignty" -- which provoked gales of laughter in the Pentagon.

Plus Russia just planted this flag in the Arctic Ocean to demonstrate its claim to the oil deposits.

Ignatieff may develop a sudden understanding for the Iragis in the near future.

Posted by Don Williams | August 6, 2007 6:31 PM

Alan,

Of course Churchill was all for studying history, and of course Juan Cole is saying rather more of importance on Iraq than any number of think tankers.

The point I was trying to get to here was that if like Ignatieff you were looking for confirmation of your prejudices then yes, the academy would look pro-war because the only academics you would be looking for would be the pro-war faction. Ignatieff missed the fact that the vast majority of academics were opposed to the war because their views did not count.

In Ignatieff's view the views of a Juan Cole who has actually been to the region, speaks many of the languages spoken in the region, understands much of its history, culture and politics count for 0. On the other hand a 25 year old know-nothing PhD candidate in neo-con studies at some D.C. crank-tank is to be considered an expert.

It takes a huge amount of effort to be as baddly informed as the pro-war camp was. Basically they had to devalue any and all contrary views. So anyone who pointed out that the neo-con group looked suspiciously like a Likud party supporters club was atacked as being anti-semitic. Anyone who pointed out that the military plan was bogus was attacked for being unpatriotic and so on.

The Euston Manifesto group opperated in the same way. The idea there was to paint anyone who disagreed with their ideas as obsolete 'old left' dinosaurs.

What Ignatieff really means here is that the war was highly regarded amongst a clique of otherwise liberal types who hold radical views of the form 'the middle east is a dangerous place, Israel is threatened, the invasion of Iraq looks like a costless way for the US to guarantee the security of Israel'. Or maybe thats being too kind to them.

The criticism that Ignatieff makes could equally well apply to his Zionism. Perhaps if they could react to critics without accusing them all of being anti-semitic they would not have such a gaping hole in their moral compass that they can give a pass to projects such as the invasion of Iraq, the torture at Abu Ghraib etc.

As far as failed utopias go, Israel is pretty much par for the course. Looks great if you can only ignore the 'need' to hold two million Palestinians at gun point and the inherent contradition between equality before the law and the conception of a 'Jewish' state.

Posted by PHB | August 6, 2007 6:35 PM

OK, I don't think I read your argument closely enough. If anything, the fact that Juan Cole is a historian and not a literary expert rather strengthens the point you are making.

Posted by Alan Morgan | August 6, 2007 6:48 PM

By offering the academic/politician distinction, Ignatieff managed to obscure what he actually was as the war got started: a writer with regular access to the N. Y. Times magazine.

Posted by L. Hyde | August 6, 2007 10:37 PM

The criticism that PHB makes could equally well apply to his pro-Palestinianism. Perhaps if they could react to critics without accusing them all of being anti-Muslim they would not have such a gaping hole in their moral compass that they can give a pass to projects such as support of Hamas, Hezbollah, suicide bombers, etc..

As far as failed utopias go, "Palestine" is pretty much par for the course. Looks great if you can only ignore the 'need' to throw 5 million Jews into the Sea and the inherent contradition between equality before the law and the conception of a 23rd Muslim state.

Posted by ILP | August 7, 2007 4:33 PM

These comments - and Matt's original post - are too parsimonious...

The essay is much better than you realize. It's one of the most accessible distillations of 2400 years of philosophical reflection on statecraft that I've read. There is a mysterious human capacity Greek philosophers called "phronesis" that manifests talent for discovering the
best course of action in any particular set of circumstances. ...In politics, It's the analog to aesthetic creativity in Art. (as aesthetic creativity manifests artistic talent). Phronesis is rational creativity (or 'reasoning creatively') that manifests talent for deliberation. The closest terms we have for it are 'good judgment' or 'prudence' - but those terms don't quite say it. This essay does (and I think it does so very well).

Incidentally, I've noticed that phronesis is something that many well-educated people - especially in the social sciences - don't regard. I speculate that one reason might that it's not teachable (merely coach-able or emulate-able) - and schooling might have the effect of rendering them somewhat insensitive to it.

In short, I think that all of you who've reacted so strongly against this piece have embarrassed yourselves. I seems like a clear case of translating something you don't understand into terms that you do understand - and reacting against the mistranslation. Help me, I can't find anything wrong with anything he says in it....

Posted by Sean | August 7, 2007 5:51 PM

Yes, well, the problem always was that Iggy is not and NEVER WAS and academic. A glorified public "thinker", maybe, a l'estile Bernard Henri Levy, but a political scientist? Please. The Kennedy School is by and large scoffed at by the academic political science community precisely because it usually hires individuals who like to "talk about politics" rather than conduct serious social science or other rigorous academic work. Iggy, like so many other public "intellectuals" (rare exceptions like Krugman notwithstanding), are successful with the public precisely because their ideas are usually trite and simplistic. I can't understand for the life of me why they are given so much attention and credibility.

Posted by Nick | August 7, 2007 7:04 PM

Oh, and as a final thought: good advice for any social scientists - if an argument begins with a reference to the Greeks, or anything before the Scottish Enlightenment, it is more likely than not to involve self-congratulatory "intellectualism" rather than anything empirical or substantive.

Posted by Nick | August 7, 2007 7:08 PM

That's great advice Nick... we don't have to bother about the pedigree of the concepts we use for science - we're sure our empiricism is conceptually keyed to reality because we only use the rigorous, countable concepts! ...especially in political science.

Posted by Sean | August 8, 2007 1:04 AM

Thanks Matt for shooting down Ignatieff's phoney argument about the mindset of academia. Paul Wells of Canada's Maclean's magazine wrote an equally effective takedown of Iggie's argument about the mindset of practical politics, at this address:
http://forums.macleans.ca/advansis/?mod=for&act=dis&eid=43&so=&ps=&sb=

Excerpt:
It's nutty-nutbar to perceive some culture of practical politics whose dictates would have led a Minister Ignatieff to conclude something different in 2003 from what Professor Ignatieff decided. In 2003, most practical politicians also thought the war was swell. It's hard to know where to stop counting them: Bill Clinton for sure, Hillary Clinton probably, Brian Mulroney, and never even mind Stephen Harper -- the pro-war camp also included rank-and-file Liberal MPs like Albina Guarnieri and David Pratt, Harperphobic Tories like Joe Clark, and those advisers around Paul Martin who voiced an opinion at the time. Along with quite literally every prominent English-language newspaper editorial board in Canada except the Toronto Star's (...)

I believe that when Ignatieff contrasts "academia" with "practical politics," what he means to be doing is to puzzle out the distinction between the multinational In Crowd, as Ignatieff thought he had identified it -- had worked hard to identify it -- in 2003, and the bumpkin (Prime Minister Jean Chrétien) who made the call. I'm reminded of a published chapter from the Australian politician Bob Carr's unpublished novel Titanic Forces, in which a sophisticated and college-educated young candidate tries to take out a rustic old showboater at a nomination meeting and is astonished when the old guy cleans his clock.

In the summer of 2001 I was one of a few dozen guests of Conrad Black at the annual meeting of the Hollinger Advisory Board in Washington, D.C., two blocks from the White House. This was the annual shindig at which George Will and Henry Kissinger and William Buckley and Zbig Brezienski and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and the gang would get together to discuss the state of the world (...)

This is two months before 9/11, and all anyone could talk about was Saddam Hussein. No surprise -- it'd have been surprising if anyone had predicted an Islamist attack against American targets -- but the main topic at lunch, where the guest speaker was Donald Rumsfeld, was what to do about Saddam and how to take out Saddam and how to respond if Saddam developed, in Conrad's words, "a deliverable nuclear capability."

At lunch, Conrad took me aside for a minute to continue berating me good-naturedly for my insufficiently-harsh criticism of Chrétien in the pages of the National Post. "C'mon, Paul," he said. "Look at this room. Can you imagine Jean Chrétien holding his own with this lot?"

He had a point. I couldn't. Will, Buckley, Kissinger, Volcker, Black? Chrétien wouldn't have made it past the doorman. Michael Ignatieff, on the other hand, would have fit right in.

Which is, still today, his problem.

Posted by erasma | August 8, 2007 4:26 AM

Matt,

What is absurd about the claim that different roles have different duties, dictating different mindsets, affecting different conclusions? Doesn't the philosophical tradition say the same in the distinction between theoretical vs Practical reason: the academic's duty is to think well about the nature of things - to discover why the world is the way it is... the practitioner's duty is to think well about how and why we should act in order to change things for the better.

A couple points:
1) There is nothing necessarily necessarily keeping an academic from good practical judgment. 2) Ignat..(sp?) is merely claiming that the academic mindset reduced *his* practical judgment... claiming that it had an influence on him. The degree of influence would seem to be an idiosyncratic thing, I would think.

A couple questions:
1) What kind of expertise do the experts you cited as being against the war have? Assuming it is indeed relevant expertise - Of course, it's possible that they're able to intermediate theory and practice perfectly, and they did and they simply got it right...
2) The assessment that the majority were against --- is this an impression you had or is there some poll of the relevant experts you were referencing? My sense - and granted my memory isn't perfect - was that a lot of people were hedging their bets back then. There were very few people who came out definitively against the invasion (for practical and not principled reasons), they merely registered concerns. I hope we're not conflating expressed concerns with considered opposition.
3) Don't we want to allow room for the position that the invasion could have been a success (loosely defined as a net improvement of Iraqi well being over a reasonably short period of time) if it weren't for incompetent handling by the Bush Administration (DOD's bureaucratic coup over State dept post-invasion planning), Bremer's blithe de-institutionalization of all institutions conducive to stability, et al... In other words, don't we want to leave room to criticize Bush for all the bungling done after he made the decision to invade?

Overall, I think the different mindsets are a plausible factor...nothing absurd about it, as you claim.

Posted by Sean | August 8, 2007 7:03 AM

Iggy went to visit the Kurds and "felt their pain" and then made an emotional decision - the wrong one.
During his run for the Liberal Leadership he went to Quebec and talked to some Quebec-nationalists and soon felt their pain as well. Then he threw a "bomb" into Canadian politics by supporting a stupid nationalist slogan. As the damage quickly spread beyond the Liberals and re-ignited an old, suicidal debate about Canada's future, Iggy looked aghast until a smarter politician (our right wing PM) usurped the issue to his own (short-term) advantage and put it back to bed (with perhaps worse consequences down the road).
This issue demonstrated Iggy's status as an outsider (25 years away from Canada while supporting various UK/US neo-cons) and unfitness to lead. He led on the first three ballots, Liberals defeated him on the fourth and final ballot.

Whew, dodged a real bullet that time.

Posted by Ron | August 8, 2007 7:59 AM

Disingenuous really is the best way to describe this man. All of his essays and books use the black is white, up is down arguement to dis/prove their theses. His support at convention was mostly there based of very few local youth votes that were bought, who control 1/3 of the votes at convention. The vast majority of thinking adult Liberals rejected him. His arguements are always simplistic, pompous and self serving. His appeal to the Candadian electorate would have been substantially lower than to Liberal delegates, without a doubt. Even conservative voters here would have rejected him because the are overwhelmingly rural and would like his style even less than city slicker Liberals. The refrain, "Read my books" would not have gone over well.

Posted by s.b. | August 8, 2007 8:47 AM

Having read the posts about this article I suggest that Matt, Nick and others that are so concerned about political science pedigree and whether Iggy is a true "intellectual" worry less about the size of their penis compared to Iggy and actually take the time to read and consider the article. Unlike your analysis on the war the article is actually an insightful look at the differences between the idealism and freedom of academia and the practical realities of political power. Canada would be much better off if Stephen Harper spent 5 minutes thinking about the responsibility of governing rather then what he can say at the next bar-b-que to get his illusive majority.

Posted by westcoastjim | August 9, 2007 11:02 AM

Having read the posts about this article I suggest that Matt, Nick and others that are so concerned about political science pedigree and whether Iggy is a true "intellectual" worry less about the size of their penis compared to Iggy and actually take the time to read and consider the article. Unlike your analysis on the war the article is actually an insightful look at the differences between the idealism and freedom of academia and the practical realities of political power. Canada would be much better off if Stephen Harper spent 5 minutes thinking about the responsibility of governing rather then what he can say at the next bar-b-que to get his ellusive majority.

Posted by westcoastjim | August 9, 2007 11:03 AM

westcoast - you have to understand thatfor those who do not do - for those who like to watch - all they can to is sit around and compare then lengths of their various intellects. Those who can do - those who can't smoke dope and criticize others.

Posted by Robert Crawfton King | August 9, 2007 9:58 PM