Michael Ignatieff is back in the running

by: Andrew W Taylor
Michael Ignatieff is back in the running. It didn't require a prophetic mantle to see this one coming as Dion ran an extraordinarily poor federal campaign for the Grits.
Many Liberals anxiously await Ignatieff as their leader, positioning their party in a traditional centrist posture on economic policy, -- confounding Bob Rae's talk of a unite-the-Left Liberalism. But truth be told there is no substantial policy difference between Ignatieff and Rae on this score. The Liberal Party of Canada's relationship to Left policy and theory is like a little boy's relationship to mum's forbidden cookie-jar: he is afraid of it and dances around it when a public may be present to censor his raiding. Sometimes he steals a biscuit but he is unsettled after consumption -- he knows its not really for him, and as often as not it makes him sick.

Another issue -- this time from the policy recent past -- should separate the contenders. Michael Ignatieff wrote and spoke in print and television media in favour of the U.S.invasion of Iraq while he lived and worked in the United States as director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. More, that pro-invasion position was disgracefully and enthusiastically pedaled by Ignatieff and provided small 'l' liberal collaborative support to the Bush-Cheney war. Rightly this was deeply unsettling in the federal Liberal Party at their last leadership convention. Ignatieff has tried to minimise his tub-beating for the Iraq war in an essay for The New York Times where he gives a wash on why he led himself away from his usual moral sagacity.

I would guess that Ignatieff hopes the economic crisis and the gentle forces of fading memory have effaced Canadians' concerns about deeds done in a scoundrel time when an ambitious man of letters and the law played the U.S. media circuit for imperial war. Let Canadians show him that we will not forget his complicity. Some political errors are more than forgivable gaffs on policy, this error entails a trail of blood.