I don’t understand how there is any burden at all on the “only” claim. Quite the opposite. Once he says it, he has insured himself against the ‘covert sniping against all critics’ accusation by limiting his grumpiness to a certain (perhaps imaginary) fringe. And if one ignores the “only”, it’s not giving him a fair reading. Unless you subscribe to a nasty interpretation of the principle of charity which selectively excludes “what-has-been-said” in favor of “what-we-decide-the-person-really-meant (because-we-know-his-kind-so-well)”.

If there is a burden upon anything, I think we’d agree (in our tongue-in-cheek analysis) that it is upon the word “many”. Does the use of the word “many” indicate that Ignatieff is genuinely disconnected with the left? Does it indicate that he’s overblowing his estimates? How many people really do have such a black-and-white view of national affairs? And of that group, how many can we say are being rhetorical to get a point across? Of course these are decent questions which aren’t even raised in the places that matter. Zealotry of significant leftists is just assumed without being proven.

I won’t comment much on the sort of anti-intellectual fool that would decide that “multiple arguments equals a foregone conclusion”. Except to say that, at least on the basis of the scant comments that Ignatieff made here, we haven’t any reason to think he is this sort of fool. Sure, the “You think America is always wrong” allegation is sometimes used against those who give multiple reasons for a considered conclusion, because it happens to be effective at unfairly shutting up your opponent William-F-Buckley-style. Nevertheless, the one statement cannot be drawn from the other unless more has been said.

I don’t think Ignatieff is saying that all cynical appraisals of America’s motives are false. He’s saying that it is unreasonable to suggest that one person or nation is always wrong. Again, his strategy is to attack a position that is so bold that one would have be braindead (or unserious) to hold it.

So he’s fending against feeble arguments. But it isn’t true that his arguments are obviously against no-one. Activists do not always speak truth to power. By necessity, an activist (like any advertiser) needs to get attention in order for their message to be received. Bold exaggerated statements certainly have a way of getting an audience. For all their boldness, they’re also not always a literal reflection of the activist’s considered opinion. But it’s not entirely the audience’s (i.e., Ignatieff’s) fault if they take the exaggerated statements of the activist literally. It just shows a lack of worldly wisdom on his part.

…or so I presume. But of course he didn’t even bother to mention activists. He just produced his premises and let them dangle.

And of course Ignatieff’s own position is also filtered through values in this sense, so this does not provide a distinction between his position and the one he is attacking.

“The belief that America went to war for the oil is no more ideological than the one that it did it to spread democracy or prevent terrorism.”

I believe the key word was “only”. There’s an obvious difference between statements about facts and values. But it’s equally obvious that values can filter facts. And arguably, bold superlative statements like “it was ONLY about oil” display a filter of that kind. (Even if they were, in some measure, justified, and regardless of whether or not they were rhetorical flights of passion.)

You’re right though that his argument would have been more on-point if it dealt with the actual reasons he believed the war was justified. He only provides one (Saddam). It’s like his article was an introduction to an argument, not an argument in itself.

Why do you believe his remarks suggest anything of the kind?

But “air-filled”? Not really. This, I think, is entirely accurate:

“We might test judgment by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But 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.

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.”

But Ignatieff is not going so far as to say that no one who was against the war was doing anything but ‘solely’ ‘indulging in ideology’. But he is hinting that every justification for the war – every good reason to think it would go badly – was, at some point in the chain, tainted with irrationality. That is, for every good reason for thinking the war would go badly, you can find some false (unwarranted) lemma the brandisher of the reason was guilty of entertaining. Some negative thing they thought about Bush without iron-clad reasons. But this seems to excuse – or extenuate – Ignatieff’s failure to clear the justificatory bar by simply setting it impractically high.

What Ignatieff is trying to do is draw a line and say that, although Iraq war opponents turned out to be right about their factual beliefs about a) the likely outcome of the war, this should not validate the factual beliefs of some of them about b) why the war was undertaken. While it is true that being right about a does not prove b – though it is certainly not evidence against it – and Ignatieff can concede that he was wrong on a while still holding he was right on b, he needs to actually argue this and instead treats us to rhetorical sleight of hand. Nowhere does he give us actual reason to believe that Bush was acting in good faith or that America’s motives were noble. He does not even forthrightly assert these things. He rather attempts to smuggle them in as the definition of “judgment” or a reasonable view and hold the opposite view as by definition dogmatism. But if the rightness of America’s motives can be, indeed must be, taken for granted without being supported, how is that not dogmatic?

The matter is complicated by the spectrum of opinion among war opponents. There were those who agreed with Ignatieff on b but not a, and those are the ones he currently wants to legitimize at the expense of the others. Of those suspicious of America’s motives or honesty, some held these suspicions only for the Bush administration and some more generally. But anyone who wants to say which position follows the dictates of reason has to actually apply reason fairly to the question.

How do we determine whether we should believe the claims of the US government as to why it wants to enter a war and its assertions of fact regarding the situation? With incomplete information, there seems no absolute rule. A common rule of thumb would be to judge on track record. But the government lied us into Vietnam, Grenada, Gulf War I, and Kosovo. Judged by track record, one should be highly skeptical, and this is not limited to Bush or to Republicans (Bush has given additional reason for skepticism, but most of this was just “paranoid” speculation at the onset of the war). Looking further back in American history provides more examples. So the actual historical record of America supports suspicion.

On the other hand, one might look at why wars are generally fought in history. Certainly, there is nothing odd about wars to control a vital resource or appropriate wealth. Wars for humanitarian reasons? Such are claimed all the time; Hitler even called the invasion of Poland a humanitarian intervention. It is clear that most claimed humanitarian inventions were not such, and debatable whether any truly were. For example, one could argue that Kosovo achieved humanitarian ends, but NATO has predictably also gotten a huge and strategic military base out of it; the motives were not purely humanitarian in the best case. And the dominant school of foreign policy political thought in the United States for the last several decades – Realism – is expressly skeptical of idealistic wars.

What Ignatieff is demanding but unwilling to actually argue for is that all commenters on the War must double-down on the very prior that largely led to the error in judgment that he made; accepting at face value the claims made by the US government without requiring independent evidence.

Not seeing it. If you acquire a belief solely from “indulging in ideology” (Ignatieff’s term), then it is not “justified.” Right? What epistemologist says that a belief can be “justified” in such a manner? Ergo, Ignatieff’s point was not that his opponents had a “justified true belief,” but that they had a belief that happens, in retrospect, to have been “correct” (Ignatieff’s word) but that was not justified. Ergo, your interpretation is wrong.

• the US forces might fail militarily (don’t know if anyone actually said this, but I’ll put it in for completeness
• Resistance in Baghdad could be equivalent to a new Stalingrad
• Civilian casualties could be in the tens or hundreds of thousands
• Civil war between Sunni and Shia or between Arabs Kurds could break out
• Saddam could be replaced by an equally bad dictator
• Al Qaeda could gain greatly from hostility to the US

As it’s turned out, some of these things have happened but some have not. My point is that any one of them would be enough to make the war a bad, or at least very dubious idea.

But that’s no fun. That’s not an intervention with guns and stuff. You don’t get to talk to the AEI or the Brookings institute about it. You don’t get to challenge people with your stirring memories of helicoptering down into Kosovo. It is just, like, oh, maintaining a boring number of people, displaced by the unnatural tsuanami of the American occupation, with money. Ho hum. Thus, let’s turn to some more exciting front where intervention means sending in soldiers!

It is amusing to see interveners commit both the sin of commission and the sin of omission as they bounce from one moral fiasco to another, always, however, sure that they have the very biggest hearts… and the very biggest balls.

Not sure whether you intended to be opposing what I said or not. As I said, I don’t buy the argument; I was simply trying to express what he was saying, rather than contorting him into a logical error (as opposed to something unconvincing on other grounds).

So now we have blaming the error of side A on side B. I don’t know what the “word for that”—that being attributing his mistakes to the wrong cause, —but I would tend to say it’s closer to “making lame excuses” than “lying.” To again perform the painful task of stating an argument to which I don’t subscribe, he seems to be saying that academic detachment from reality and more apt processes of judgment would lead them to results which might be right or wrong in outcome, but for the wrong reasons. I think he overstates this, and it’s an insignificant factor in this situation. But to say that “thinking like an academic,” by his own reasoning, “would have lead him to oppose the war” because the overwhelming majority of academics did, is to mistake fundamentally what he’s saying—FWIW, his reasoning would have them follow their models, not arrive at the same place, and I don’t think he’d say boo about any academic who wasn’t focused on politics, IR, or area studies. He may think they scatter, or clump, but he doesn’t seem to be saying that all academics following the academic mode of poor judgment wind up in the same place. Other hawks would argue that the reason academics overwhelmingly opposed the war is because of their ideology—wrongly, I think—but Ig isn’t making an academic cattle argument.

As if to channel Ignatieff, wholly unwillingly: you and many other commentators are right to say that the essay is a POS, but you’ve got the wrong reasons.

As has repeatedly been pointed out in many critiques, academics overwhelmingly opposed the war. Therefore, ‘thinking like an academic’ would have lead him to oppose the war. He’s blaming the errors of side A on side B. He also does this with politicians, crediting them wit a practicality which they noticeably did not display before and during this war.

There’s a word for that; it’s ‘lying’.

But surely it’s not just some arbitrary universal rule pulled out of dsquared’s ass. It’s an uncontroversial, commonly accepted principle and a matter a law. It’s like murder or rape – yes, maybe it’s not above all other considerations, but you’ll certainly have a hard time explaining why “other considerations” should allow you to commit a rape or murder.