As for Canada, there’s no real alternative to trying to shore up the UN as a counterbalance to Empire Lite. “A small power has to leverage alliance memberships,” Ignatieff says. He cites the creation of the International Criminal Court and the treaty banning landmines as examples of Canadian priorities that got wide international support, although not from the U.S. But to his critics, Ignatieff’s avowal that UN-based action still holds promise rings hollow. Lloyd Axworthy, the former foreign affairs minister who now heads the University of British Columbia’s Liu Institute for Global Issues, charges that in arguing for U.S. force in Iraq, Ignatieff gave up far too easily on the chance of UN weapons inspections working. Axworthy says Ignatieff’s “new liberal imperialism” takes a genuine concern for human rights in a dangerous direction. “He has drawn the wrong conclusions, frankly,” he told Maclean’s.
Axworthy holds that humanitarian convictions of the sort that underpinned Ignatieff’s support for the war “cannot be used as a licence for the U.S. to do what it likes.” As for the other big justification for the invasion — Saddam’s supposed drive to get weapons of mass destruction — Axworthy joins Bush’s many critics in pointing to the U.S. failure so far to find caches of forbidden weapons in Iraq as leaving that key part of the case for the war in tatters.
But Ignatieff isn’t shaken. No matter what turns up, or doesn’t, he says Washington’s sense of urgency over chemical, biological or nuclear weapons was genuine. “It is ideological claptrap to suppose that the Bush administration made up the risk. Saddam has been a security threat in the Gulf for 20 years. His desire to acquire these weapons was unquestionable; there isn’t a serious analyst who doesn’t think he’d wanted to have them.” And in the post-Sept. 11 era, Ignatieff argues, it was too much to ask the Americans to live indefinitely with even a slight risk that Iraq’s illicit arsenal might be made available to terrorists.
Axworthy and a lot of other Canadians are not going to buy into Ignatieff’s point of view any time soon. But that doesn’t necessarily mean his influence in Canada has been seriously damaged by his pro-war position. For one thing, he is far from alone. Andrew Cohen, a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa and author of the current best-seller While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World, shares many of Ignatieff’s worries — along with the view that the Iraq war was justified under the banner of humanitarian intervention. “We made a fetish of the United Nations,” Cohen says of the decision by Jean Chrétien’s government to sit this one out. And while Cohen says he too would have felt more at ease had this been “Al Gore’s war,” the Liberals appeared willing to part company with the U.S. over little more than “the assumption that anything a Republican president does is bad.”
Margaret MacMillan, author of another book now riding the best-seller lists — Paris 1919, a history of the peace negotiations after World War I — also laments what she sees as the loss of a clear sense of Canada’s mission in the world. MacMillan, a history professor at the University of Toronto, points to the long preoccupation with Quebec’s place in Canada as one reason. “A lot of our best minds were turned inward,” she says. As well, as the Cold War dragged on, the superpower polarity often made it seem futile for a small player to try to have a big impact. “We concluded that there wasn’t much we could do one way or another.” Now, though, she thinks Canadians — with the Cold War over and separatist sentiment in Quebec at low ebb — show signs of being ready to re-engage with the world.
Could Ignatieff be part of a revival of the outward-looking spirit of his father’s day? His unpopular support for the Iraq war may well dull his appeal for many Canadians. “On this one, I was apparently on the far right of Canadian opinion,” he admits. “So I didn’t like it.” And he is worried about leaving any impression that he is sniping from afar. “Don’t present my views as giving Canada lectures,” he says. “It’s up to Canadians to make some choices.”
But if Ignatieff is taking pains to be respectful, he is too passionate to ever be truly reticent. Early this month, he was in Ottawa, privately briefing top officials on the way he sees the world unfolding. So, as usual, insiders are listening. And the release of his latest book this fall will keep his opinions in the air for everyone else who cares to pay attention. Even for Canadians who felt betrayed by his position on the Iraq war, the chance to keep on seeing the world through Ignatieff’s eyes may prove to be an experience too vivid to give up.
