Sure I supported the war, just not the war that's actually happening.

Cerberus, in comments:

You know, I think Canada did the right thing in going to war against Hitler's Germany and Toto's [sic] Japan, as well as against the Chinese backed North Koreans. Does that mean I support the war crimes that occurred? No, that's a ridiculous assertion. Especially if I said expressly I did not.

So in that vein, how do you with a straight face say that Ignatieff who has condemned the US for Abu Ghraib, Guantanomo, attacks on civilians, etc. is supporting war crimes?

The comparison to WWII or Korea is so farcical at this point it doesn't really even deserve a response, but here goes: Roosevelt and Truman - not to mention Eisenhower and his commanders - fetishized competence above all else. These men happily promoted political rivals if it meant the job got done, and dismissed them when they fucked up. (See MacArthur, Douglas.) Does any of that apply to the Bush Administration? Was there ever any indication it applied to the Bush Administration?

As for human rights abuses, it really depends on whether or not the human rights abuses, or war crimes, are the exception or the rule. It also - crucially - depends on the leadership that is committing the war crimes. Roosevelt and Truman did their damndest (with admitted failures and lapses*) to control the brutality that was inevitably released in Europe and the Pacific, something Hitler and Tojo manifestly did not.

(PS - Tojo was Prime Minister of Japan, Toto was Dorothy's dog. Of the two, Toto was easily the more loveable.)

If you can honestly say after all we've learned that Donald Rumsfeld is concerned about humanitarian abuses under his command, then we need to take some remedial courses on the laws of war.

To turn Cerberus' question around, at what point did it become absurd for the Japanese to say "well I support our troops and I think we need to win the war, but Bataan was such a black mark on our record"? If you prefer an American example, at what point did it become absurd to say "I support our war against the Japanese, but not the aerial bombardment of civilian targets?" When the war is run through with war crimes, it becomes insane to claim you support one without the other.

Moreover, it's absurd to claim, 650,000 corpses deep, that anyone's been liberated. In another context, Ignatieff has argued that protecting the lives of people endangered by terrorism or death is the duty of the state, and that we may even have to risk being "the lesser evil" in order to protect our civil liberties and our lives.

The lives part is really crucial, because whatever happens to them, the dead have little concern for civil rights. There are, according to the best estimate human inquiry has provided so far, 650,000 people who have been irrevocably stripped of any liberties they might have had because of Michael Ignatieff's war. Since he continues to support this war, he needs to explain how the dead have benefited from his stated policy preference. In short, he needs to explain why they had to die.

It's juvenile and pathetic that the only refuge the war supporters have left is to claim that they support the war of their fevered imaginations, but not the war that actually occurred. It's the cry of the child, having hit their younger sibling, that "they didn't know it would hurt them so much." A child can be excused from violence early in their lives so long as they learn why it's wrong. Michael Ignatieff shows no sign of learning.

Michael Ignatieff knew, or should have known, several things when he began supporting Bush's drive to invade Iraq in 2003:

1) Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had made no secret of their hostility to international law, including human rights law.

2) The war in Afghanistan had already shown that the same men had no care for humanitarian issues, state-building, or the proper troop levels required for military missions.

3) These men had lied - baldly and repeatedly - about the presence of WMDs, about the potential for democracy in Iraq, and about the connections to 9/11 and Al Qaeda.

Most importantly of all, Ignatieff knew that Bush was and would still be President when the war in Iraq was prosecuted. And he chose to support Bush.

Ignatieff supporters, get this through your heads: There is no other war happening in Iraq except for the one George W. Bush started, in defiance of international law. Supporting the war in Iraq means supporting Bush, period. There was no President Gore, Kerry, or Clinton poised to invade Iraq in March of 2003. Ignatieff knowingly supported incompetent leaders, but now wants to claim that he couldn't have known better.

Ignatieff wants to claim that he supports the war to liberate the Iraqis. Guess what - so do I. But that was never the war we were going to get, and some of us saw that clearly. The war we got - the war Ignatieff supported - was the war to destroy the Iraqi state, install a Shia theocracy, start a civil war, and cause the largest humanitarian disaster of the 21st century.

Of course, Michael Ignatieff and the 21st century have one thing in common - they're just getting started.

*"failures and lapses" in preventing war crimes in Europe and the Pacific is in no way meant to be glib, or to minimize the real abuses that happened on our side as well as our adversaries'. It is nevertheless true that far from having different efforts to control their armies, the Axis had one understanding of human rights, and the western Allies (minus Russia) had a totally different one.

Similarly, before Iraq it was clear that there were two sides to world opinion and the state of international law. Ignatieff chose his side, and he and his supporters should stop pretending otherwise.