There's a piece by Michael Ignatieff in the New York Times Magazine. Taking off from his support for the Iraq war and why (as he now thinks) he got that wrong, he makes a distinction between academic and political judgement. Following a remark of Isaiah Berlin's, Ignatieff writes that academics 'care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true', whereas politicians need a greater sense of reality, practicality and specificity for their judgement to be any good. I'll leave aside whether it is as generally the case as Ignatieff claims it to be that academics care less about the truth of ideas than they do about the interest of them. But it strikes me that, in the form he here sets out the distinction between academic and political judgement, it is doubtfully applicable to the decisions people made over whether or not to support the Iraq war. Does he really mean to say that those who supported the war did so because the idea of supporting it was interesting - rather than because they thought there were urgent (humanitarian or other) reasons for regime change in Iraq? Ignatieff writes of his own support for the war:
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.Must he not have thought, at the time, that this was true, rather than that it was merely interesting? I would suggest he did think so.
On a second and quite separate matter, to do with US policy towards Iraq now, Ignatieff writes:
The decision facing the United States over Iraq is paradigmatic of political judgment at its most difficult. Staying and leaving each have huge costs. One thing is clear: The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis. That in itself suggests how American leaders are likely to decide the question.I don't reject the truth of this, though I would prefer to think it wasn't altogether true. But to the extent that it is, it's surely worrying. It is understandable that the debate over whether to stay in or to withdraw from Iraq should hinge on the assessment of the consequences, overall, of doing either. But if it depends rather only on minimizing the costs to the intervening countries, more or less irrespective of the consequences to Iraqis, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that wars of intervention for humanitarian or regime-change reasons must never be undertaken except where the cost to the intervening country is certain to be small. For otherwise the risk is of starting something and then abandoning it regardless of the human consequences in the country or countries affected. (Via Memeorandum.)