Re: [A-List] No More Mr. Nice Guy [sic]

["Jim Yarker" <sjy_estrien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

i have no sub nor was I prompted to register, but anyway:

Aug. 28, 2005. 12:36 PM


BERNARD WEIL / TORONTO STAR
A gift from heaven? Michael Ignatieff?s good looks and intellectual heft
have giddy Liberals comparing him to Pierre Trudeau.

Laurie Taylor
Laurie Taylor is a well-known British broadcaster and professor of sociology
at the University of London. He is also an editor and diarist for New
Humanist magazine in London, England. This piece will appear in the
September-October issue of the New Humanist which hits the newsstands Sept.5




No more Mr. Nice Guy
Once a liberal pin-up and intellectual leader of the global human rights
movement, Michael Ignatieff has fallen out badly with some of his best
friends and colleagues. Either he has broken with them philosophically, says
one British journalist, or he is looking to run for election in Canada


LAURIE TAYLOR
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Everyone knows Michael Ignatieff. Some first encountered him during the late
1970s when his painstaking historical analyses of the evolution of the
British penal system provided a valuable empirical complement (some would
say antidote) to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Others will have
come to respect him for his novels, family memoirs, or his outstanding
biography of his great hero, Isaiah Berlin.

In 1997, Maclean's included him in its "Top Ten Canadian Who's Who" and six
years later exultantly promoted him to Canada's "Sexiest Cerebral Man"
because of "his made-for-TV looks and effortless eloquence."

And now he is coming home, returning to Canada after three decades abroad to
become the Chancellor Jackman visiting professor in human rights policy at
the University of Toronto and a fellow at the university's Munk Centre for
International Studies. In doing so, he abandons his equally prestigious role
as Carr Professor of the Practice of Human Rights in the John F. Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University.

What so endeared Ignatieff to the thinking classes was his cosmopolitan
liberalism. His Russian family background, North American childhood and easy
mastery of several languages seemed to qualify him as a citizen of the
world.

It was not too surprising, therefore, when he set off for what he described
as "the landscapes of modern ethnic war" ? Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Rwanda,
Burundi, Angola and Afghanistan ? in search of an answer to a classic
liberal question: Why do we in the West feel that we have a moral obligation
to become embroiled in the internal conflicts of distant lands?

His answer helped to transform him into a leading figure in the human rights
movement. We could, he argued, only overcome the ethnic particularism that
lay behind so many of today's conflicts by treating others ? whatever their
religion, class, gender, race ? as rights-bearing equals rather than as
members of a group. Such whole-hearted advocacy of human rights made him a
natural choice for his Harvard appointment.

Yet this success story, of a liberal intellectual coming into his own, is
rapidly turning very sour. Instead of being regarded as a champion of human
rights, Ignatieff is now being seen, in the words of one senior academic, as
"a virus in the human rights movement."

Until recently, this might have been written off as an intellectual falling
out. But recent events look likely to precipitate a full-scale divorce
between Ignatieff and his former colleagues.

It all began with an article on torture by Conor Gearty, a professor of
human rights law at the London School of Economics (LSE) in this year's
first issue of the quarterly Index on Censorship. Gearty's concern was to
show the process by which a number of well-meaning liberal intellectuals and
human rights lawyers had handed U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
"the intellectual tools with which to justify his government's
expansionism." He was particularly exercised by the manner in which such
people had created a climate in which even torture could be condoned. One of
the liberals cited by Gearty in this context was Ignatieff.

Ignatieff's response was as violent as it was unexpected. The harm done to
his reputation by the article, he insisted, was so great that it could not
even be remedied by an apology. He had no alternative but to resign
immediately from the editorial and advisory board of the magazine and
request that any serialization of Gearty's piece be withheld. This was "an
issue of principle."

What was the background to this outburst? Why exactly was Ignatieff so
offended by an academic article? And what does his response say about his
standing within the human rights movement?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Let us first examine the magazine. Index on Censorship was founded in 1972
by a group of writers, journalists and artists committed to chronicling
free-expression abuses wherever they occur. Ignatieff is a member of its
high-profile editorial and advisory board, and its long list of
distinguished contributors includes Vaclav Havel, Salman Rushdie, Doris
Lessing and Ken Saro-Wiwa.

For the magazine's first edition this year, the editor-in-chief, Ursula
Owen, invited Stan Cohen, professor of sociology at the LSE, to guest edit a
special section on torture. Its cover featured a disturbing image of
half-naked, blindfolded and shackled victims and the legend "Torture ? A
User's Manual."

Cohen himself wrote on the "slippery slope that leads from Guantanamo to Abu
Ghraib," while Gearty's essay was titled, "With a little help from my
friends: The case for a little gentle torture acquires new supporters."

Gearty began his piece by considering the social and cultural ingredients
that might allow a liberal democracy to forgo its traditional commitment to
human rights to an extent that led it finally to condone torture. First into
the mix was a category of persons he described as "Rumsfeldians" ?
individuals "distinguished by their determination to permit, indeed to
encourage, the holding of suspected `terrorists' or `unlawful combatants'
... in conditions which make torture, inhuman and degrading treatment
well-nigh situationally inevitable."

But Rumsfeldians could not transform liberal discourse on their own. They
needed a great trauma like Sept. 11 on which to feed and, crucially, they
also needed some ideological support from apologist intellectuals and
lawyers that would help to explain "why there is no conflict between torture
and our liberal code of laws."

It is at this point that Gearty rounds on Ignatieff, whom he describes as
"probably the most important figure to fall into this category of
hand-wringing, apologetic apologists for human rights abuses."

What exactly had Harvard's Professor of Human Rights done to deserve such
censure?

For the answer, we need to go back to the arguments that Ignatieff,
following his tour of conflict zones, began to develop about the need for
Western humanitarian interventions in failed or terrorist-dominated states.
He was far from alone in adopting this interventionist stance. Many other
intellectuals and human rights activists found it possible to agree that
there were circumstances under which an imperialism carried out in the name
of human rights in such areas of conflict as Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan
was not only defensible but positively to be welcomed.

But many such allies felt far less comfortable when Ignatieff went on to use
the same argument to justify the second invasion of Iraq in March 2003. To
go along with Ignatieff now meant bypassing the United Nations, ignoring the
entreaties of former close European allies, and overlooking the failure to
find any weapons of mass destruction. As the death toll mounted in Iraq, it
also became necessary to argue that such extreme sacrifices were worth
making if they contributed to the end of "terrorism."

Ignatieff confronted such moral reservations in 2004 with The Lesser Evil:
Political Ethics in an Age of Terror. His preface outlined the key questions
he would be addressing: "When democracies fight terrorism, they are
defending the proposition that their political life should be free of
violence. But defeating terror requires violence. It may also require
coercion, deception, secrecy, and violation of rights. How can democracies
resort to these means without destroying the values for which they stand?
How can they resort to the lesser evil without succumbing to the greater?"

Even before the publication of The Lesser Evil, Ignatieff had attracted some
powerful, if predictable, enemies. His justifications for the Iraq war had
incensed many radicals. Michael Neumann, professor of philosophy at Trent
University, described the imperialist thesis as developed in Ignatieff's
2003 book Empire Lite: Nation-building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan as "a
web of foolishness, error and confusion."

With the publication of The Lesser Evil in 2004, and a series of articles
that expanded on aspects of the book's arguments in The New York Times,
Ignatieff also began to incur the wrath of liberals and, perhaps more
significantly, former colleagues in the human rights movement. The critics
began to line up.

In a 2005 article called "Exporting Democracy, Revising Torture: The Complex
Missions of Michael Ignatieff," Mariano Aguirre concentrated particularly
upon the seven pages in The Lesser Evil that dealt with the question of
torture.

In this brief section, Ignatieff turns to the so-called "ticking bomb cases"
where torture might be the only way to extract information from terrorists
that could save human lives. He cites Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz,
who had contended that "whatever we might think about torture in the
abstract, the pressure to use it in cases of urgent necessity might be
overwhelming. The issue then becomes not whether torture can be prevented
but whether it can be regulated."

Ignatieff rejects this argument ? "as an exercise in the lesser evil it
seems likely to lead to the greater" ? along with other justifications for
the use of torture by democratic societies.

Nonetheless ? and this is critical to the argument that was to develop ? he
does suggest forms of duress that might be permissible. These include "forms
of sleep deprivation that do not result in harm to mental or physical
health, and disinformation that causes stress."

Aguirre describes this style of argument as "and yet and yet." Ignatieff is
"absolutely in favour of the principles and the defence of human rights, and
yet, and yet, if a terrorist has valuable information about a biological
weapon that is going to explode in New York, then maybe the security forces
could use some level of force on him. Thus, the director of the Carr Centre
for Human Rights Policy... becomes a sort of Bruce Willis figure."

This "and yet and yet" approach, suggests Aguirre, is just what the U.S.
government needs as a justification for its current breaches of human
rights. "Ignatieff considers himself a liberal, so sometimes he criticizes
the Bush administration. And he is an intellectual, so he has doubts about
almost everything and airs them with the liberal readers of The New York
Times. But in the end he shares the U.S. government's vision of the violent
and compulsory promotion of democracy, the war against terrorism and the use
of instruments, for example torture, which are apparently in need of
revisionist treatment."

In these ways, "he has established a sort of rational framework for
democratization by force and also for the revision of our understanding of
human rights."

But how is that revision managed? Gearty in his Index essay suggests that it
depends upon a simple verbal shift: "The trick... is to take the `human' out
of `human rights.' This is done by stressing the unprecedented nature of the
threat that is currently posed by Islamic terrorism, by insisting that it is
`a kind of violence that not only kills but would destroy our human-rights
culture as well if it had a chance.' In these extraordinary circumstances,
`who can blame even the human rights advocate for taking his or her eye off
each individual's puny plight, for allowing just a little brutality, a
beating-up perhaps, or a touch of sensory deprivation?'"

But once intellectuals do open this door, then "scores of Rumsfeldians pour
past shouting `me too' and (to the intellectual's plaintive cries of
protest) `what do you know about national security ? go back to your class
work and The New York Review of Books.'"

Ignatieff is the best exemplar of this type of intellectual because of his
commitment to the idea that we are now faced with "evil" people and that
unless we fight evil with evil we will succumb. It is precisely because we
are democratic and special that, in Ignatieff's words, "necessity may
require us to take actions in defence of democracy which will stray from
democracy's own foundational commitments to dignity." So occasional lapses
in human rights can be excused as lesser evils.

Gearty suggests that this is already providing an escape clause for those
who torture. "If Abu Ghraib was wrong then that wrongness consisted not in
stepping across the line into evil behaviour but rather allowing a
`necessary evil' (as framed by the squeamish intellectuals) to stray into
`unnecessary evil' (as practised by the not-so-squeamish Rumsfeldians)."

At no point does Gearty suggest that Ignatieff condones or favours torture.
Indeed, for him to do so would be to destroy his entire argument: that
intellectuals like Ignatieff are providing a moral framework for such
practices by introducing concepts of "good" and "evil" into a previously
secularized domain of discourse.

Once this shift has been made, Gearty argues, we can say goodbye to the
notion of universal human rights. After all, why should we extend the same
rights to those who are good as those who are evil?

"The wonder is not that we good guys abuse their human rights but that we
continue to use such language in relation to them at all, recognize that
they have any residual human rights worth noticing," wrote Gearty.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gearty and Aguirre are not alone in their concern about the manner in which
Ignatieff's argument in The Lesser Evil provides a framework within which
torture might be contemplated by liberals.

A particularly hostile review in The New York Times in July 2004 by
international relations professor Ronald Steel began with this summary of
Ignatieff's thesis: "Michael Ignatieff tells us how to do terrible things
for a righteous cause and come away feeling good about it."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`Michael Ignatieff tells us how to do terrible things for a righteous cause
and come away feeling good about it'

Ronald Steel

New York Times book critic

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Ignatieff may tell us that the lesser-evil position lies in never losing
sight of the "morally problematic character of necessary measures," argues
Steel, "but is it really true that an evil act becomes lesser simply because
it is problematic? Does suffering a twinge of bad conscience justify what we
do in a righteous cause? It is comforting to think so, but saying `this
hurts me as much as it does you' is neither true nor considered an excuse."

What most of these critiques of The Lesser Evil have in common is the uneasy
sense that Ignatieff, despite his constant cautionary remarks and reluctant
asides ("and yet and yet") is in the dangerous business of providing
rationalizations that only need to be stretched a further inch or two before
they become "permissions" for those who feel that human rights are
contingent or expendable in the war against terrorism.

But none of this explains how Ignatieff could have interpreted Gearty's
Index on Censorship essay as an assertion that he was in favour of torture,
nor the intemperance of his email to Ursula Owen, a friend of long-standing.

Gearty, he insisted in the email, in spite of the clear textual evidence to
the contrary, had not read what he, Ignatieff, had written. By suggesting
that he was in favour of torture, he had delivered a blow to his reputation
of such severity that he must now ask for his name to be removed from the
editorial board of the magazine.

He went on to ask Owen to ensure that the piece would not be serialized
elsewhere because it is "factually false." If it had already been sold then
she must send a copy of this present letter to the editors concerned in the
hope that this will help "to undo the damage you have already done to my
reputation."

Ignatieff does admit that as a friend of the magazine he cannot expect any
"immunity from criticism" but surely any "person, friend or not, whose views
and moral reputation are attacked in this form is entitled to elementary
exercises of editorial due diligence. If your editorial staff had spent five
minutes checking Mr. Gearty's insinuations against the text of my book, they
could have spared me this insult to my reputation and might have protected
your editorial reputation as well."

Owen replied to Ignatieff regretting that Gearty's piece had caused him so
much distress. She had realized that he might like to respond to the article
but never expected him to be so outraged and insulted as to reject this
standard form of academic response. Gearty had not accused him of supporting
torture: on the contrary, he specifically stated of Ignatieff, "He does not
approve of the use of torture." All he had said was that Ignatieff's
position provided a moral framework for others to do so. "It seems to him
that to hold such a position is to render less than definitive the
accompanying rejection of torture," Owen wrote.

She concluded by hoping that Ignatieff would change his mind and reply to
Gearty in the next edition of the magazine.

Gearty liked her response. "I think your summary is exactly right.... The
piece... is not about the torturers per se but about liberals whose position
leaves room for others, more brutal than them to act." But he was clearly
stung by the severity of Ignatieff's attack. "I think you should be a bit
more specific about what exactly in the text so misrepresents his position,
in particular where it is `factually false.' This is a very serious
allegation to make against me... On its face it is defamatory."

Owen's response failed to have a calming effect. "The moral framework claim
is not an argument but an insinuation that proceeds to link me with others,
as you say, `more brutal' than myself," Ignatieff replied. "This is what is
called guilt by association, and if you cannot see that this is how you and
he are arguing, I cannot argue with you."

The feeling that further argument was fast becoming pointless was not
confined to Ignatieff. If he was unable to tell or to accept the difference
between an opinion and an insinuation then there seemed nowhere for the
debate to go. As Gearty himself put it in a further email to the editor: "As
for answering him, well he has said nothing yet. Perhaps he will treat my
opinion seriously, in which case I will have a chance to reply. But I can't
reply to mere vulgar abuse of which there has been a great deal, so far
anyway."

Neither could Ignatieff obtain satisfaction elsewhere. After the first
response from the editor he turned to the guest editor of the torture
edition, Stan Cohen, another long-standing friend, and expressed the hope
that he at least had not aligned himself with those on the magazine who
wished to harm his reputation.

Cohen wrote back, gently averring that he regarded Ignatieff's reputation as
too intact to require any such protection. Neither could he agree that the
article had been "a vindictive attack on your moral character, nor evidence
of editorial negligence, nor a factual distortion. I am sure you are wrong
in refusing to publish a response to the article. I very much hope you will
change your mind."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is one word that resonates throughout this episode ? "reputation."

Ignatieff uses it four times in his original letter of complaint and then
returns to the subject again in his correspondence with the guest editor.

To some, this concern about reputation is best explained by an unexpected
development in Ignatieff's career path: his apparent new interest in
pursuing federal political office in his home country of Canada.

When this rumour first began to circulate, there was widespread skepticism.
But this was soon swept aside by the proliferation of newspaper articles on
Ignatieff's ambitions.

"If the political supporters of Michael Ignatieff have their way," wrote the
Boston Globe on July 19, "the human rights scholar and journalist may soon
abandon his post as director of Harvard's Carr Centre for Human Rights
Policy and enter the political fray."

Neither would Ignatieff confine himself to running for parliament in the
next federal election. "Power brokers have recruited Toronto-born Ignatieff
to return to Canada ... with the intention of grooming him to succeed Prime
Minister Paul Martin," the Globe reported.

The Star reported last week that in May Ignatieff met with prominent
Liberals in Quebec and Nova Scotia. And a group of prominent Toronto
Liberals ? who once supported leadership hopeful John Manley ? have
surrounded Ignatieff. That group has encouraged him to become more involved
in the party, which has no obvious heir apparent to take over when Prime
Minister Paul Martin steps down as leader.

Sources in the Liberal Party have hailed Ignatieff, with his looks, charm
and intelligence, as a gift from heaven: another Pierre Trudeau.

Ignatieff has denied the rumours in the past, but last week the Star quoted
an anonymous friend as saying, "I think that he is increasingly interested
in the public and political debate in Canada, so I think all of these things
have led him to make a decision that now is a good time ... The issue for
Michael Ignatieff will be how best for him to make a contribution to public
and political debate. That will be a question he asks himself."

So could political ambition, the desire to have a clean public image, be an
adequate explanation for Ignatieff's over-dramatic reaction to Gearty's
carefully reasoned, if provocative, article in the Index?

After all, he had not reacted half as aggressively to harsher evaluations of
his writing on torture in other more widely circulated publications.

It's true that his original letter of complaint spoke of the "uniquely
painful shock" of being called "one of torture's new best friends" in a
magazine in which he was listed on the editorial and advisory board.

But his association with the magazine might have equally well inclined him
to accept what Gearty had to say in good faith and encouraged him to sit
down and compose an adequate response to the alleged misrepresentations.

Why the dramatic resignations and the sweeping attacks on Gearty as a
purveyor of the "factually false?"

There is a more subtle explanation for the outburst. Ignatieff has used
Freudian insights to good effect in the past. In The Warrior's Honour (1998)
he employs what Freud called "the narcissism of small differences" to
explain some of the irrationality that has characterized recent ethnic
conflicts.

Perhaps it's appropriate to suggest there might be some sign of "reaction
formation" in his most recent fulminations. He'd been quite prepared to
accept the dirt dished by the left over his support for the Iraq war but now
he found himself being attacked by those who had always constituted his
principal reference group: liberal academic human rights practitioners. He
was in danger of losing that which he had once loved.

What better emotional defence against such a loss than the realization that
these former friends and colleagues published falsehoods, lacked "editorial
due diligence," and were incapable of understanding rational argument? Who
would want to associate any longer with such a tarnished coterie? Time for
Prince Hal to shrug off such early flawed associates and prepare for office
in Canada.

There is one other possible explanation for Ignatieff's swinging attack upon
the Index. For years he managed to present himself as an apostle of
universal liberalism. His record in this respect earned him some tolerance
when he first came out in support of the second Iraq war.

But even this tolerance started to wear thin when he embarked upon a series
of articles for The New York Times Magazine that were even more stridently
pro-war and pro-Bush.

On May 2, 2004, he argued in those pages for new forms of coercive
interrogation. "Permissible duress might include forms of sleep deprivation
that do not result in lasting harm to mental health or physical health,
together with disinformation and disorientation (like keeping prisoners in
hoods) that would produce stress."

It was unfortunate, to say the least, that this article was on its way to
the distributors when the first pictures came through from Abu Ghraib
prison, one of which showed a hooded Iraqi standing on a box.

America's historic role was now defined, with reference to Jefferson, as
bringing democracy and freedom to the world and anyone who refused to go
along with that project could be written off as backsliders.

All this might have been meat and drink to the neo-conservatives and
military officers with whom Ignatieff enjoyed conversations at Harvard. But
it was a step too far for his former human rights colleagues. Ignatieff was
no longer merely a supporter of a war to get rid of Hussein: he was now an
active proselytizer on behalf of all American interventionism.

The new U.S. empire's "grace notes," he declared, "are free markets, human
rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world
has ever known."

His outraged response to the Index article was perhaps an acknowledgement
that he could no longer keep his former colleagues on board. The circle
could no longer be squared.

Meanwhile, the editors at the Index are still waiting for Ignatieff to reply
to their request for a written response to Gearty.

So far, there is only silence.



> From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
> Reply-To: The A-List <a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: The A-List <a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [A-List] No More Mr. Nice Guy [sic]
> Date: Thu, 01 Sep 2005 15:52:53 -0400
>
> You have to register to read this. Any chance of copying it and sending it
> to the list?
>
> At 03:30 PM 9/1/2005, you wrote:
> > "Once a liberal pin-up and intellectual leader of the global human rights
> > movement, Michael Ignatieff has fallen out badly with some of his best
> > friends and colleagues. Either he has broken with them philosophically,
> > says one British journalist, or he is looking to run for election in
> > Canada."
> >
> >
> > full:
> > http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1125138450212
>
>
> --
>
> www.marxmail.org