Splinters

I have friends and relatives who have young children. They tell me that the worst thing about looking after them is that they just don't listen. No matter how many times they are told that they're wrong and that they really shouldn't do something, they go ahead and do it, again and again. They just don't listen. Reading Michael Ignatieff's opinion piece in the New York Times makes me appreciate how frustrating it must be dealing with one's own. (Ignatieff is still remembered over here as a presenter of a now-defunct daily arts magazine. The also now-defunct band Fatima Mansions once called him "Reggie Gurdjieff, most intelligent man in the UK". He's now in the US as an academic. Perhaps Graham Norton will be encouraged to follow).

He says a year ago he was a "relucant yet convinced" supporter of the invasion of Iraq because "[h]aving been to Halabja in 1992, and having talked to survivors of the chemical attack that killed 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in March 1988, I believed that while there could be doubt about Hussein's capabilities, there could be none about the malignancy of his intentions." Back home, he was appalled "when people said, 'I know he's a dictator, but ..' the 'but' seemed like a moral evasion. And when people said, 'He was a genocidal killer, but that was yesterday,' I thought, Since when do crimes against humanity have a statute of limitations?"

He's absolutely right of course. The perpetrators of those genocidal acts, and all those who materially supported them, are beyond the pale and should never regain freedom, let alone power. As Ignatieff concedes, well before 1988 the US government supplied biological weapons to Saddam, and continued to aid his murderous ways well after 1988. Ignatieff prefers only to say there should be more "acknowledgment" by the US government of such "mistakes". In other words: "but that was yesterday".