Michael Ignatieff's infamous NYT magazine cover story... | Yogthos

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Michael Ignatieff's infamous NYT magazine cover story from January 2003 (Ignatieff was founding director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights)

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/magazine/the-american-empire-the-burden.html

America's empire is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden. We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known. It is the imperialism of a people who remember that their country secured its independence by revolt against an empire, and who like to think of themselves as the friend of freedom everywhere. It is an empire without consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any less of an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears ''the ark of the liberties of the world."

Like 21 Mar 2023 at 17:21 | Open on mas.to

6 comments

Yogthos

New Yorker editor David Remnick's "case" for invasion, 26 January 2003 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/03/making-a-case

The United States has been wrong, politically and morally, about Iraq more than once in the past; Washington has supported Saddam against Iran and overlooked some of his bloodiest adventures. The price of being wrong yet again could be incalculable. History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them.

Saddam's abdication, or a military coup, would be a godsend; his sudden conversion to the wisdom of disarmament almost as good. It is a fine thing to dream. But, assuming such dreams are not realized, a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all.

21 Mar 2023 at 17:22 | Open on mas.to

Yogthos

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, "The I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club," 8 February 2003
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/opinion/the-i-can-t-believe-i-m-a-hawk-club.html

We reluctant hawks may disagree among ourselves about the most compelling logic for war -- protecting America, relieving oppressed Iragis or reforming the Middle East -- but we generally agree that the logic for standing pat does not hold. Much as we might wish the administration had orchestrated events so the inspectors had a year instead of three months, much as we deplore the arrogance and binary moralism, much as we worry about all the things that could go wrong, we are hard pressed to see an alternative that is not built on wishful thinking.

21 Mar 2023 at 17:22 | Open on mas.to

Yogthos

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, 3 March 2003 https://newrepublic.com/article/66773/iraq-liberal-bush-imperial

So can a liberal support this president in this war? I do not see why not. The United States, its needs and its duties, is larger than any of its leaders. The war against Saddam Hussein is just, and it is truly a last resort. (Saddam Hussein has been in violation of the Security Council for twelve years. It is his unrestrained contempt for the United Nations, and not the Bush administration's restrained contempt for the United Nations, that may destroy the institution.) There were some Republicans who despised Bill Clinton as much as some Democrats despise George W. Bush, but they supported the American interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and thereby they rose above politics to history, above sectarianism to Americanism. I cannot imagine any strenuous construction of liberalism that does not include the injunction to fight terror and to fight genocide. Liberalism is not a philosophy of innocence; and it should make tyrants quake, not smile.

21 Mar 2023 at 17:23 | Open on mas.to

Yogthos

Lawrence F. Kaplan, New Republic senior editor, 3 March 2003 https://newrepublic.com/article/66763/bush-middle-east-conservative-woodrow-wilson-liberalism

Lawrence F. Kaplan / March 3, 2003

Regime Change

Bush, closet liberal.

"Ideas have consequences," the conservative intellectual Richard Weaver wrote half a century ago. The truism comes to mind as another group of conservative intellectuals, this one guiding foreign policy inside the Bush administration, prepares to launch a war in the Middle East--not for oil or geopolitical advantage but on behalf of an idea. The idea is liberalism. According to President Bush, "Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause," and, as such, he routinely casts the impending war as an effort to bring democracy to a land that has known only dictatorship. Nor, in Bush's telling, will America's duty be discharged when Iraq subsequently has a decent government. Instead, he suggests the war will be the beginning of a campaign that will "bring the hope of democracy ... to every corner of the world." If this sounds familiar, it's because it almost exactly echoes Woodrow Wilson's pledge to "make the world safe for democracy." Which stands to reason: In word, if not yet in deed, Bush is becoming the most Wilsonian president since Wilson himself. True, Bush has fallen short of his moralistic rhetoric in postwar Afghanistan, and many in his administration are Kissingerian devotees of realpolitik.

21 Mar 2023 at 17:24 | Open on mas.to

@yogthos So how is history judging you now, David Remnick?

21 Mar 2023 at 18:00 | Open on mastodon.scot

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@yogthos Ah, yes, the golden age of "The Sensible Liberal"(TM).

22 Mar 2023 at 15:50 | Open on wandering.shop