Liberal Hawks: What went wrong?

Michael Ignatieff has another mea culpa for his support of W’s Iraqi adventure. His previous apology back in March (no link, behind a pay-per-view wall) I recall only hazily. It showed up during a bit of a barrage of clumsy apologies, who can keep them straight? At any rate, I’ll read this one shortly and share my thoughts here, since I’m blogging about it before I’ve read it. My particular interest here is that I take Ignatieff rather more seriously than most liberal hawks, even though his justification for his Iraq hawkery didn’t really stand out. This is in part because he’s a political theorist, and we all know they need to be taken seriously at all times. Actually, because he’s written well and seriously on human rights in a way that shows that he has strong commitments to a form of liberal internationalism, but in a form that doesn’t appear to lead directly to political naivete and strong universalism–two things that generally bug me about liberal internationalists, even when I want to agree with them.

In other words, I’ve seen evidence that Ignatieff is a bit more politically smart than many who defend similar positions in political theory. So I’m particularly interested in what he has to say now about his obvious mistake.

So is Brad DeLong. He quotes the following passage:

Someone like me who supported the war on human rights grounds has nowhere to hide: we didn’t suppose the administration was particularly nice, but we did assume it would be competent. There isn’t much excuse for its incompetence, but equally, there isn’t much excuse for our naivete either

To which he responds with the following question:

Ignatieff needs to tell us what chain of thought could possibly have led him to the assumption that the Bush administration was competent

To which Kevin Drum responds:

This is a recurring theme, and one I really hate to see. There are lots of “liberal hawks” (and even a few conservative hawks) who are having public second thoughts about having supported the war, and we should warmly embrace them. They are excellent candidates to become opinion leaders who will help persuade other people to see things our way.

However, it sometimes seems as though a mere public reconsideration is not enough: we instead demand an abject, groveling apology and a confession that those who opposed the war were right about every last thing.

I’ve got to side with Brad DeLong here. Kevin Drum is wrong to think this is about the tone and strength of the apology. It’s not grovelling we want; I don’t care how many verys the liberal hawks place before their ‘sorry’. What we want is an explanation–how could you think this? is a legitimate question. I want to know what went wrong with an otherwise astute political observer. It’s not that the liberal hawks were wrong, it’s that they were so obviously going to wrong all along, to me and many others. In real time, they served to marginalize the anti-war left as politically naive and immature, but I don’t really care about that any more. Now, I want to know what the flaw in their reasoning was.

As an analogy, if I hand my math professor a first year calculus problem, and she gives me an incorrect answer, an apology isn’t really that interesting, no matter how heartfelt and serious. I want to know how someone in her position could fail so abjectly at something they should be able to figure out without much trouble.

I’ll welcome them back to our side without such an explanation, but until they figure out what went wrong with their reasoning process and try to figure out how to correct for it in the future, their judgement ought to be held in rather significantly lower esteem.

UPDATE: Digby’s got more. He’s less charitable than I; his suggestion is that Ignatieff et al had war fever. This may have been the case. At any rate, if the liberal hawks have a better explanation for their error, it’s incumbent upon them to lay it out for us.