The Year of Living Dangerously

Here are some excerpts from an extremely brave column appearing in the New York Times magazine by Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard:

"The discovery that Hussein didn't have weapons after all surprises me, but it doesn't change my view of the essential issue. I never thought the key question was what weapons he actually possessed but rather what intentions he had. Having been to Halabja in 1992, and having talked to survivors of the chemical attack that killed 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in March 1988, I believed that while there could be doubt about Hussein's capabilities, there could be none about the malignancy of his intentions. True, there are a lot of malignant intentions loose in our world, but Hussein had actually used chemical weapons. Looking to the future, once sanctions collapsed, inspectors had been bamboozled and oil revenues began to pick up, he was certain, sooner or later, to match intentions with capabilities."

And more:

"Critics of the war said all of this was irrelevant. The real issue was oil. But they got the relevance of oil backward. If all America cared about was oil, it would have cozied up to Hussein, as it had done in the past. Oil was an issue in the war precisely because its revenues distinguished Hussein from the run of other malignant dictators. It was the critical factor that would allow him, sooner or later, to acquire the weapons that would enable him to go after the Kurds again, complete the destruction of the Shiites, threaten Saudi Arabia and continue to support Palestinian suicide bombers and, just possibly, Al Qaeda as well.

I still do not believe that American or British leaders misrepresented Hussein's intentions or lied about the weapons they believed he possessed. In his new memoirs, Hans Blix makes it clear that he and his fellow U.N. inspectors thought Hussein was hiding something, and every intelligence service they consulted thought so too."

And even better and more:

"What I found harder to respect was how indifferent my antiwar friends seemed to be to the costs of allowing Hussein to remain in power. The costs -- of doing what they saw as the right, prudent, nonviolent thing -- would be borne by the Iraqis alone. It was Iraqis who would remain locked inside a police state. What this meant was no abstraction to anyone who had actually been in the country. So when people said, ''I know he's a dictator, but . . . ,'' the ''but'' seemed like a moral evasion. And when people said, ''He was a genocidal killer, but that was yesterday,'' I thought, Since when do crimes against humanity have a statute of limitations? And when people said, finally, ''There are a lot of dictators, and the U.S. supports most of them,'' this sounded to me like a suave alibi for doing nothing. Now, a year later, I hear the same people tell me they're glad Hussein is gone, but. . . ."

And he concludes, rightly:

"Interventions amount to a promise: we promise that we will leave the country better than we found it; we promise that those who died to get there did not die in vain. Never have these promises been harder to keep than in Iraq. The liberal internationalism I supported throughout the 1990's -- interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor -- seems like child's play in comparison. Those actions were a gamble, but the gamble came with a guarantee of impunity: if we didn't succeed, the costs of failure were not punitive. Now in Iraq the game is in earnest. There is no impunity anymore. Good people are dying, and no president, Democrat or Republican, can afford to betray that sacrifice."