Just for Fun

Oh, to be an intellectual! I am an imaginary intellectual - I can only imagine having my ideas taken seriously by large groups of people. So I used my imagination after reading some excerpts from and comments about Micheal Ignatieff's essay "I Got it Wrong on Iraq, But Not As Wrong as People Say", took some of the exerpts and followed the ideas therein wherever they might lead me.

Yes, Mistakes Were Made

An intellectual is in the ideas business. Without ideas, he may as well be a bus driver. Now, as a former denizen of the realms of higher academia who has sometimes used public transport out of a sense of morbid curiosity, I’ve learned that bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what's what than Nobel Prize winners. Nevetheless, an intellectual’s responsibility is to follow his ideas wherever they may lead. In the case of one of my late colleagues , this responsibility took him over the edge of a cliff. His idea was that he could drive a stolen bus over dangerous terrain at night with no headlights. A true bus driver would never make such a mistake. However, my point here is that in life, as in other things, sometimes even the most sensitive and intelligent among us make mistakes. And so it is that I now find myself having to explain my support for an unpopular war, while denying responsibility for its consequences.

Since ideas are his bread and butter, the intellectual is bound to put ideas out there, and to support ideas that politicians may or may not wish to act upon. Translating ideas into reality is the job of politicians. To properly translate the intellectual’s ideas into reality, the politician needs a strong sense of reality. A sense of reality is not just a sense of the world as it is, but as it might be. Like great artists, great politicians see possibilities others cannot and then seek to turn them into realities. They do this using the noblest ideas of the best and brightest intellectuals.

In the case of this war, the noble idea was that we should remove all tyrants and other oppressors of the world’s peoples by force, and impose liberal democratic values on those peoples, thus ensuring that all people would be liberal democrats and therefore not a threat to anyone’s security.

Sometimes, however, things go wrong. Reality turns out to be not quite as we imagined it. The weapons of mass destruction that justified the invasion turn out to be non-existent. The grateful natives turn ungrateful on their liberators. However, the important thing in assigning responsibility for consequences is this: if the idea behind the action is good and noble, but the action has gone horribly wrong, it follows that the politicians must have screwed up somewhere. It turns out, in other words, that they didn’t have such a strong sense of reality after all. And the intellectual is guilty only of inspiring and supporting the wrong politicians.

In this case, the application of the idea was in fact a partial success. We overthrew the tyrant. Where things went wrong was in the imposition of liberal democratic values on the natives. The question of how to impose freedom on people has always been a tricky one, due to its somewhat paradoxical nature. It is a question that intellectuals and politicians alike will need to carefully consider in the light of what has transpired in Iraq.

Let those who opposed the war resist the temptation to gloat, however. They should first ask themselves whether their opposition to the war was based on ideas as noble as the ones supporting it. Sadly, the answer is almost always no. They were generally motivated by the belief that everything the Americans ever do in the world is always wrong. Obviously this is a ridiculous idea, as was therefore their opposition to the war. The fact that the war turned out to be a mistake is neither here nor there. Well, in a sense it is there on the ground (and six feet under it, it must be admitted). And the fact that the war’s opponents use the suffering caused by the war to score political advantage over those who supported it is a disgrace. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.

It is often said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the war critics have denied the U.S. government even its good intentions, assuming that its motives must be pernicious and that it must have intentionally lied to the world. I mean, really. Why all this cynicism? Just because a country routinely attacks other countries all over the world to protect its interests (such as liberal democracy, in which it has a 51% controlling interest) is no reason to routinely ascribe ulterior motives to its actions.

In any case, what are lies in the political arena, and what is truth? Politics is theater. It is part of the job to pretend to have emotions that you do not actually feel. People want leadership, and even when a leader is nonplussed by events, he must still remember to give the people the reassurance they deserve. Part of good judgment consists of knowing when to keep up appearances. In other words, a leader must give the appearance of knowing what he is doing even when he doesn’t. And people need to believe that he knows what he is doing until it is proved otherwise. Otherwise, people might come to lose faith in their ability of their leaders to save them from danger, and then we would have chaos, or anarchy.

President Bush was good at appearing to know what he was doing, and his administration was good at making it appear that it had an airtight case establishing the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I was convinced, and if a discerning intellectual such as myself could be convinced, the act was convincing. Yes, there were naysayers, but as I mentioned before, they were inspired by knee-jerk anti-Americanism. And so it was that many thoughtful people like myself supported this war, which turned out to be run by leaders who didn’t know what they were doing, acting on intelligence that proved to be faulty. An unfortunate turn of events of course, but as Tony Blair said, “I really did mean well.”

And so we are left with a series of “what if’s”. What if the invasion had been carried out by competent people? What if Saddam Hussein had really had weapons of mass destruction? Or what if he could have proved their non-existance beyond a shadow of a doubt? What if people were more malleable and less stubborn, and thus more prepared to accept the gifts that we give them? Then, I suppose, I wouldn’t be writing this.