Simon Pole is doing yeoman's work keeping track of Ignatieff's trials. My favourite detail thus far is the revelation that Ignatieff apparently can't spell Ottawa.
I'll try to stop ranting about how much I dislike Ignatieff, but before I do there's an important point to make. Ignatieff's support for the war in Iraq has, like so many war supporters, taken a number of different forms. Like many people, he originally argued in favor of the war because Saddam needed to be disarmed. Of course, the weapons he was sure existed were never found.
Ignatieff's rationale, like that of the Bush administration, has shifted since then. He now embraces the "humanitarian intervention" rationale for war, but should anyone take him seriously? True, Ignatieff unquestionably takes human rights seriously, and his arguments in favour of military action for human rights go back to at least Kosovo, if not further.
(In reality, is doesn't matter which reason Ignatieff actually believes, because he's wrong either way. There were no WMDs, and the human rights situation in Iraq is at least as bad as it was under Saddam.)
If we assume for a moment that his subsequent desire to liberate the Iraqis is genuine, we still have to answer the question of why he supported a war for WMDs. For precision, a quote that sums up Ignatieff's views, courtesy of Greg at Sinister Thoughts:
The U.S. position was that (Saddam) had 13 years to comply with U.N. resolutions. He hadn't done so. The time had come to get enforcement of those resolutions. Are you with us or against us?' And when it came to it, the international community ran down a rat hole.Each and every sentence in this paragraph is wrong. Let's see:
"The U.S. position was that (Saddam) had 13 years to comply with U.N. resolutions." This is only true if we talk about all the UN resolutions that preceded the first Gulf War. If we talk about the actual resolutions about disarmament, it was UNSC 687 of April, 1991 which Saddam was accused of defying. April 1991 - March 2003 (the start of war) = 12 years, not 13. It's gratifying to know that the Liberal Party's star candidate in Toronto fails at basic arithmetic.
Next up: "He hadn't done so." False, as it turned out. Saddam had disarmed, totally. We now know that the US had testimony from Hussein Kamal (head of Iraq's WMD programme) where he said that Iraq had dismantled all of it's chemical and biological programmes.
"The time had come to get enforcement of those resolutions." Actually, the time had come in 1991, when the UN began enforcing those resolutions, and did so with great success. Moreover, the UNMOVIC inspections which resumed in the fall of 2002 had demonstrated that success.
"Are you with us or against us?" Well, this isn't factually incorrect like the rest of this, but I still think it's evidence of wrong thinking. Ignatieff needs to abandon this line of thought.
"And when it came to it, the international community ran down a rat hole." Incredibly, unbelievably wrong. The UN inspectors were in Iraq, trying to prove or disprove the allegations against Iraq until days before the war started. The UN community did exactly what it was supposed to do - resolve the crisis without a war. Unfortunately for Ignatieff and George W. Bush, they were close to succeeding. Therefore, the war had to begin quickly, before the innocence (on these counts) of Iraq could be proven.
I don't know what's more disgusting to me:
a) That Ignatieff can't get a single fact right in that paragraph,
b) That he slanders the UN and the inspectors because they were doing their jobs, and might have denied him the war he so desperately wanted,
c) That, when he wrote the above in November of 2003, he should have known he was full of crap, or
d) That he's a candidate to represent Etobicoke-Lakeshore in the Parliament of Canada.
The idea that we had to go to war to disarm Iraq was always false. The inspections had worked and were working. If Ignatieff was stupid enough to believe otherwise, he shouldn't be allowed in a classroom, much less the Parliament.
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