Time and Our Side

contentions ^ | 8.6.2007 | Peter Wehner

[Contentions]

contentions would like to welcome our latest blogger, Peter Wehner. Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, formerly served as the deputy assistant to the President and as the Director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives.

Michael Ignatieff, formerly of Harvard and now deputy leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, has written a piece in the New York Times Magazine that is both a reflection on political leadership and an honest, self-condemning explanation of why he supported the war in Iraq. Ignatieff’s essay, “Getting Iraq Wrong: What The War Has Taught Me About Political Judgment,” places him in a long list of commentators who have bared their souls and asked for forgiveness—or at least understanding—for supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

A few points about the essay. It appears just six days after the climate-changing column by Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution (”A War We Might Just Win”). Ignatieff is penning his confessional at precisely the moment when the security situation is improving, at a faster rate than almost anyone could have imagined just seven months ago.

[caveat emptor]

Is there some significance to this blog entry and to the tying of it to the praising-with-faint-damning NYT article?

It's hard to imagine Ignatieff, a Canadian politician, having to write a mea culpa about his mea culpa on Iraq, unless he's planning to get parachuted into the U.S. Presidential election.

[caveat emptor]

Is there some significance to this blog entry and to the tying of it to the praising-with-faint-damning NYT article?

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