New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

McNALLY: Imperial Narcissism 101
policies one advocates? What can it mean for Ignatieff to pronounce,
long after his disquisitions on ethics, “Now I realize intentions do shape
consequences”? 52 Now? How can it possibly be a revelation to anyone
who has read and thought about ethics that intentions matter? Yet, even
if confused about intentions, a glance at the historical record ought to
have deterred Ignatieff from lining up with U.S. imperial militarism and
its practices of torture. And assuming he is now shocked and distressed
by recent revelations, we might also expect a more real and honest
accounting. Instead, Ignatieff ’s responses to the evidence of abuse and
torture have been evasive at best. At first, he tried to suggest that tactics
involving “nothing worse than sleep deprivation, permanent light or
permanent darkness, disorienting noise, and isolation” would merely
constitute “coercion, rather than torture, and there might be a lesser evil
justification for it.” 53 Interestingly, this is precisely the sort of distinction
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld deployed in his claims that what
occurred at Abu Ghraib constituted “abuse,” not “torture.” 54 The key
issue here appeared to be whether physical pain was inflicted. 55 The fact
that this distinction is not accepted in international conventions on
torture seemed not to trouble Ignatieff (or Rumsfeld). For instance,
the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or
Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), an agreement to which the
U.S.A. is a signatory, defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or
suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person
for such purpose as obtaining from him or a third person information or
a confession” (my emphasis). Perhaps this too is now irrelevant.
Once the evidence of physical and psychological torture at Abu
Ghraib had become overwhelming and incontrovertible, Ignatieff tried
out new strategies. The first involved ritual hand-wringing combined
with Reagan-like American triumphalism. His most anguished article on
the revelations from Abu Ghraib, for example, manages nevertheless to
end on a note of imperial hubris. Commenting on public adulation of
Ronald Reagan, following the former president’s death, he opines, “It is
good that America has wanted to be better than it is. It is good that the
death of a president gave it a week to revive belief in itself.” 56 Poor
America, shaken by the revelations from Abu Ghraib, has now recovered
the fortitude to do good thanks to its collective mourning of a dead
president. Nowhere is Reagan’s record in El Salvador or Honduras, to
take but two examples, so much as hinted at. Death squads, illegal arms