My heart aches, and a nizzy dumbness&#0151um, make that drowsy numbness&#0151pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk …

What? Sorry, I just read Michael Ignatieff’s “Getting Iraq Wrong” thingy that ran in last week’s New York Times Magazine, and my brain’s as dizzy as Alberto Gonzales’ fuzzy thinker in that ball thing on top of his neck. Gonzalez enters a fugue state whenever he testifies before a Senate committee, failing to recollect every meeting he ever attended if in fact he was there. The Onion has suggested that Gonzalez is not in fact the Attorney-General. He is a pool salesman from Tucson, Ariz., and he’s got to get back there before the in-ground pool season ends, because that’s where you get the big commissions. It’s plausible.

That’s how disoriented I am. I’m Cabana Al. Ignatieff’s essay is so full of egotistical self-regard that I can practically see the buttons coming off his dress shirt as he typed it.

Writing a wrong

It starts with the headline, which I do understand is written not by him but by an editor (same thing happens here), but still. The headline should read “I was wrong about Iraq.” Instead, it is written in a tense almost as passive as the classic “Mistakes were made,” which is the one the Republicans use.

The headline begins with a gerund, “Getting Iraq Wrong,” as in “Leaving Las Vegas.” At least Nicolas Cage did in fact leave Las Vegas, by dying there. But Ignatieff does not really admit that he “got” Iraq wrong. Instead he attacks academics who predicted that the Iraqi invasion would be a disaster. They were right, Ignatieff says, but their rightness was based on ideology. Which is worse that rightness based on nobility, like Ignatieff’s.

The really correct people were those who predicted a disaster but realized that George W. Bush had pure motives. “They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history.”

Mike? Everyone I respect thought Bush’s famously “sexed-up” case for war was as packed with lies as the Tonkin Gulf Incident that led to an overwhelming vote for a full-out American war in Vietnam.

Not a cakewalk

When Colin Powell started talking about “yellowcake” in Iraq, I laughed out loud. Britain had already had a Cake hoax. In 1997, a terrible new drug called Cake was killing Britain’s young people. You could make it in your own kitchen! The deaths of these deluded kids looking for a high were tragic and hideous. One poor girl threw up her own pelvis bone, a roped-in celebrity said on TV as he begged British youngsters to say no to Cake. If people give you Cake, “chuck it back in their face and tell them to F@#K OFF!” brayed comedian Bernard Manning.

As it turned out, satirist Chris Morris had made up the whole thing for his show Brass Eye. There was no such drug. No more bandwagons, please, he was saying. But Ignatieff joined the neocon bandwagon. And he had lived in Britain during the Cake campaign. Then again, he does seem to be entirely without humour.

Now he wants off, but only while mocking liberals for being smart and right from the start. He says their motives were practical, while his motive was admiration for the Iraqi Kurds who had been decimated by Saddam Hussein.

So Mike’s a Kurdite. But I’m a Marshist. I yield to no one in my admiration for the Marsh Arabs. This noble isolated people lived in the original Garden of Eden, the marshes between the Tigris and the Euphrates drained and burned by Saddam. (Read Gavin Young’s Return to the Marshes, for their history). That said, I still thought the invasion was wrong.

A matter of mistakes

Ignatieff says mistakes only matter to politicians, not academics. But if you backed a disastrously inept politician like Bush, you’re still partly responsible for the destruction of the Iraqi nation, the hot new torture wave, a trillion dollars wasted and a massive rotting pile of severed limbs and eyeballs that cartoonishly sums up the grotesquerie of human wishes.

Ignatieff is claiming pure motives. Sure, if naivete is pure, he’s pure as hand-churned butter. But I can’t figure out how such an intellectual squirmer, pretending to confess to error while defending same, came close to winning the Liberal leadership.

As for the matter of Ignatieff baring his shallow soul in the New York Times rather than a Canadian publication, it is strange how much he still clearly grovels for respect from American power. But all this makes him is Brian Mulroney reborn, a stage struck politician for whom Canada is not really the desired audience.

But my sympathy then disappears. For Ignatieff actually wrote this. “As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners.”

What a patronizing yet groveling Uriah Heep-ish remark. It translates as, “Not everyone at Harvard is as smart as me. Even a prole can figure things out better than my dumb rivals.” The prole and his offspring, of course, are the ones most likely to be sent to fight in Iraq.

He goes on. “The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn.” I think this means he is going to take the bus from now on and learn from the homespun wisdom of the yokel at the wheel.He’s going to have to if he ever wants to run Canada. Which is why it won’t happen. There was a time when Ignatieff was deeply interested in his fellow humans. You can read it in his earlier, admirable books, which remain in my living room, not exiled to the basement with Amis the Younger and the other mediocre stuff.

But there aren’t even many humans quoted in his essay, and no Iraqi place names beyond Abu Ghraib. His nouns are all of the statesmen/wisdom/politician/paradigmatic/benchmarks kind. I can’t claim to speak for eyeless orphans in Fallujah or even a criminally undereducated American soldier who now realizes he was sent over as bomb fodder to protect Big Oil. I can’t even boast of being right about Iraq from the beginning. It actually depressed the hell out of me. And no opinionated person ever changed a reader’s mind.

But I know smug when I see it. Ignatieff’s piece is not a retraction. It’s a theoretical, hedged amplification of a justification.

Take a look at this wonderful blog on the Huffington Post and note that the Americans haven’t fallen for it either.

This Week

I loved Alan Weisman’s new book, The World Without Us, and not just because it’s the first American non-fiction book in 20 years that doesn’t have an explanatory subtitle. Imagine that, ye olde four-word summary. Weisman says there is hope for our planet, with trees, grasses and large animals re-questing for world domination. Unfortunately, it rests on the disappearance of the human race. But you can’t have everything.

Weisman has an Atwood-like talent for describing the terrifying derelict structures we will leave behind and the luxuriant rot, growth, crumbling and burial that will restore a different kind of gorgeousness to the Earth. Pick your favourite restoration/degeneration fantasy. Admit it, there’s something pleasurable in imagining snakes nesting in the U.S. Senate and bears crossing the Channel Tunnel.

Weisman is the Stephen King of zoology and chemistry. But he’s also rational. My only response after finishing the book was “Fair enough.”