The Nutty Professor
I’m not sure I like the sound of the following: Mr. Michael Ignatieff, a learned Harvard Professor and Canadian expatriate runs as Liberal candidate in the Ontario riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore. I’ve taken a week to consider the implications of the above statement and I have come to some conclusions. Mainly, I discovered that it’s not his candidacy that irks me, but rather it’s the implication of his winning the seat that is really problematic.
Before I explain myself, let’s make two assumptions about Mr. Ignatieff’s situation for the sake of argument. First, let’s assume he is really concerned about the people of Etobicoke-Lakeshore (not a cabinet seat, or any other accolades that may follow him into the House of Commons). Second, let’s assume that Mr. Ignatieff indeed wins his seat and becomes the new Liberal member for Etobicoke-Lakeshore.
With these two assumptions on the table, I am prepared to say the following: Michael Ignatieff is the wrong person to represent Etobicoke-Lakeshore. I’m hoping the good people of Etobicoke-Lakeshore will all vote NDP and I won’t have to defend these statements, but just in case I do, I’ll make the case right now.
First, a clarification for any of my potential detractors: I have no problem with Michael Ignatieff because he is a parachute candidate. The Liberal Party is entitled to drop in any able-bodied, heterosexual, white male over fifty whom they want to run under their banner. Go get ‘em Tiger. That the Liberal party has entitled itself to choose its own candidates is OK by me. Without this prerogative, federal party candidatures could be subject to take-over by interest groups. Well-organized lobby/interest groups, say for instance the anti-abortion lobby, could sign up sufficient new party members from their ranks, run a candidate in the nomination race, and win.
Sure, the party leader could simply refuse to sign the candidate’s papers. I accept that fact. But that could be messy and the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) already makes enough of a mess out of riding nominations. Ask Sheila Copps, or now Ron Chyczij.
Jean Chretien sold the idea of the parachute candidate to his convention floor as an opportunity to put more women and ethnic minorities in the House of Commons. This bit of political mastery invested ever-more power in the upper ranks of the LPC to shape the party’s electoral image, but in doing so it also endeared the party to potential ethnic and women voters. However, as the saying goes: with great power, comes great responsibility. And still fewer than 25% of the members of parliament are women (65 of 308 MPs, 34 of 135 Liberals); statistics based on ethnicity are harder to come by, but safe to say there are too few visible minorities amidst the ranks. I would love to hear stats conveying how many visibly ethnic or female sitting members from the 38th Parliament were introduced to their ridings as parachute candidates. Ruby Dhalla comes to mind, but I have no idea who else. I digress.
Why is Ignatieff the wrong person for the job? It’s not because he’s white, or because he’s a man, it’s mainly because he’s politically inept.
Etobicoke-Lakeshore is heralded as a Liberal safe-seat. The incumbent, Jean Augustine (ironically a parachute candidate herself), won the seat in 1993, 1997, 2000, & 2004. She held the riding by close to 10 000 votes each time – a sizeable proportion. The seat was a sure win for any Liberal candidate, provided that candidate did their homework and played to the interests of the riding. Mr. Ignatieff had no idea. He didn’t bother to find out about the riding association politics. He didn’t bother to seek the support of any local constituent groups. He didn’t do a good job diffusing the controversy that followed his nomination. He didn’t even buy a house in the riding. Mr. Ignatieff chooses the more palatial surroundings of a Yorkville condo. How will he handle the affairs of his constituents?
Mr. Ignatieff insults the people he represents by fluttering down from a Harvard ivory tower and buying a house in the riding next door. He barely gets his hands dirty in the nomination. What kind of personal, hands-on service can they expect from Mr. Ignatieff in the future? Best intentions aside, this is a real problem. Not even the Prime Minister’s office supports this guy.
Still, Mr. Ignatieff gives speeches; he cries when 12 supporters show up to clap. He really doesn’t seem to understand what his ascension represents. If he wins solely on the power of the Liberal brand, the LPC brain trust can breathe a collective sigh of relief, but the rest of us should be very worried. It means that voters and parties are completely out of touch, neither understands the other and neither really cares.
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This article was written by alevo
December 9th, 2005 at 9:41 am
Ignatieff’s ascension says a lot about the Liberal Party’s, ahem, hidden agenda.
They insist that they’re different from the Conservatives, but then scoop up the only pro-war, pro-torture “liberal” this side of The New Republic. Ph.D. notwithstanding, ivy league tenure notwithstanding, he’s nothing but a mouthpiece for the empire.
Who knows? Maybe he forms his own opinions. Maybe he, um, tortures himself over his convictions and grapples with uncertainty and indecision.
Somehow I doubt it. Having ingratiated himself entirely into the corridors of power, he has become a willing adjunct of that power, like an academic Bob Woodward.
He’s a professor of human rights policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and clearly he’s more concerned with the realpolitik that attaches to people who actually govern than with the principles of justice that make governance more difficult than it would otherwise be.
His support for torture or, in his words, “permissable duress” flows directly from his support for the Iraq invasion. By advocating an immoral and illegal war, he committed himself to accepting and then justifying the predictable cascading atrocities, including torture, detainment without charge or trial, war crimes, assassinations, and the abandonment of due process in general.
“To defeat evil,” he writes, “we may have to traffic in evils.” He calls this the “lesser evil”.
Is it any wonder he feels perfectly at home in the Liberal Party?
December 10th, 2005 at 1:15 pm
I don’t really know much about Ignatieff. The torture issue, though, is an interesting one. One stance I’ve heard taken by many who are anti-torture is that torture shouldn’t be used because it doesn’t work. I’m going to preface this next comment by saying I am absolutely opposed to it – but I do think it works.
The standard reasoning for why torture isn’t supposed to work is that when people who are innocent – or at least, don’t have the information interrogators are seeking – they lie, they make up stuff, they agree with interrogators to avoid the pain. Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi, harshly interrogated, made up a link between Iraq and al Qaeda that was used by the Bush administration as justification for invasion of that country.
Clearly, this is one pitfall among many. However, when someone does indeed have the information sought, I think torture can wrest it from them.
Instead of arguing that torture shouldn’t be used because it doesn’t work, I think we should be focusing on the fact it shouldn’t be used because it’s wrong, and because of what it does to us as well as what it does to “them”.
The problem with agreeing that torture works, however, is that it opens up the hypothetical “imminent terrorist attack with one plotter captured” situation, which seeks to justify torture to save hundreds or thousands of lives. This is an extreme case, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
Perhaps this vulnerability is something we must accept, as hard as that may be, because of the society we wish to be. After all, pervasive state surveillance, curfews and road blocks are a deterrent against crime, but that’s not something we’re willing to accept either.
December 11th, 2005 at 11:24 am
Ade,
Torture may work, but there’s no way of distinguishing between authentic confessions and false “make it stop” confessions elicited by torture.
The only way to assess the merits of information gleaned via torture is by testing it against information gathered via old-fashioned intelligence gathering, which defeats the point of torture since it adds little or no value to the stock of intelligence.
In the run-up to the war in Iraq, for example, I was able to establish by some time in 2002 that Iraq was effectively disarmed of its WMD. I managed this despite having no secret sources of information, no global network of agents, and a research budget of approximately $0.
I used the radical method of reading published reports by internationally recognized experts on WMD – the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspectors, and the two UN coordinators for Iraq (Hans von Sponeck and Dennis Halliday), both of whom resigned in disgust when the Security Council refused to lift the devastating sanctions that killed half a million children over the 1990s.
The experts agreed that aside from a few unaccounted dregs that would not in themselves constitute a real threat, Iraq was widely considered to be disarmed by 1998.
The US government, determined to convince the US public that it was justified invading Iraq, disregarded these exhaustively researched, extensively documented, publicly available reports and listened instead to bogus intelligence provided by interested parties like Ahmed Chalabi, who later turned out to be a double agent for Iran, and to the testimonies of “enemy combatants” who had been sugjected to interrogation methods that used to be called “torture” when the Soviet Union used them.
Torture provides the answers you want to hear. It consists of inflicting extremes of discomfort, pain, and distress on detainees and then drilling them with leading questions until they agree – anything, anything, just let me sleep/sit down/eat/warm up/stop degrading myself in front of this female guard!
When lawyers ask leading questions during court cases – for example, “Did you see the red car?” as opposed to, “Did you see a red car?”, their opponents can justly object, and decent judges sustain the objection. This is because they recognize that people are remarkably likely to tell you what you want to hear, even if they aren’t being tortured.
So-called “push-polls”, administered by partisans for the purpose of influencing public opinion, accomplish the same thing. If it’s unethical and misleading to do this, how much worse is it to torture people first and then ask leading questions?
If the purpose of detainment and questioning is to obtain information (a very big if), then torture is a poor tool because it does not provide reliable, verifiable information.
However, if the purpose of detainment and questioning is to humiliate, demoralize, and terrorize a group of people, then torture is a very effective tool.
The military wunderkinder behind the “War on Terror” understand this principle well, and apply it with remarkable sophistication.
December 11th, 2005 at 12:01 pm
The New Republic, which can usually be counted upon to apologize for atrocities committed in the name of liberty, published an excellent essay on why the United States must resist the lure of torture:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20051219&s=sullivan121905
(I believe you need a free registration to view the article. Try http://www.bugmenot.com/ to see if they have an existing login.)
Here’s an excerpt:
December 11th, 2005 at 2:13 pm
Interesting article. That http://www.bugmenot.com site is excellent, I wish I had known about it sooner!
I agree with what you’ve said. It fits in with what I was saying – that even though torture can work, it shouldn’t be used anyway. I found his addressing of the “ticking bomb” scenario, which I called the “imminent terrorist attack with one plotter captured” scenario, interesting.
If anyone else wants to read the article, this login information worked for me:
dumpstadiva51
bagladie
December 12th, 2005 at 9:38 am
You are a bag lady Ade.