DRM
... ... ...
Michael Ignatieff Apostle of He-manitarianism
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
Michael Ignatieff shares a few things with Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Tony Blair, George Bush, and many others. One is an extraordinary ability to reconcile warm concern with insufferable smugness. Another is a plan. America is going to kick some terrorist butt and assure its security by teaching freedom and democracy to the inhabitants of 'failed states'. This will be in everyone's interest.
Ignatieff's plan and its justification are pretty much those of the US government's. What separates Ignatieff from the others is largely his aura of masculine realism. In substance, he distinguishes himself, not by what he defends, but by what he concedes. He tries for engaging frankness, admitting that
a) The US will act in humanitarian causes only when and where those causes coincide with its interests, strategic or material;
b) US policy is often hypocritical;
c) US occupations will usually be more concerned to maintain control over an nation than to build democracy and freedom there;
d) US efforts can get nowhere unless it addresses fundamental regional problems, for example, in the Middle East, the Israel/Palestine conflict.
e) US power is not unlimited and will come to grief if employed with arrogant ignorance. Like other colonial powers, the US frequently doesn't deliver on its promise of spreading freedom, and this is politically dangerous.
But, says Ignatieff, the US is still our best bet, and its mixed motives don't discredit its humanitarian ideals (Empire Lite p.23, henceforth EL): "...imperialism doesn't stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect."(EL 106) The new imperialism is not a pure power grab; it is not designed to control territory. Despite America's impure intentions and its mistakes, the fact remains that there are "many peoples who owe their freedom to an exercise of American military power." The very title of one his pieces tells us to cut the moralistic crap: "The American Empire (Get Used to It.)", New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003.
Ignatieff's message hits a nerve. He is right to reject the labored horror with which leftists discover that American sometimes has more or less legitimate policy objectives which call for force. He is also right to reject the endless harping on bad American intentions. If the actions have good outcomes, why is it so important that the intentions behind them are bad?
Yet Ignatieff's position is built on sand, or maybe slime. When he argues that America's imperial designs are not immoral, he misses the point. The problem is not that those designs might or might not be immoral. The problem is that they are silly. They presuppose a strength and competence America quite obviously doesn't have, as well as intentions it couldn't have.
[...]
full at -
http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann12082003.html