Iggy May Takes His Marbles and Go Home

...if he doesn't win the Lib Leadership, according to this T.O Star front page piece:

"Depends who's leader," Ignatieff said yesterday when asked at a meeting with the Toronto Star editorial board if he would run for the party in the next election if he loses the leadership vote in early December.

No lowly spear carrier role for Iggy! No, goddamn it, Iggy wants to be King! When asked again whether he would run in Etobicoke-Lakeshore, he replied:

I'd like to serve my constituents well, but you're asking me an anticipatory hypothetical about the situation that prevails on the 3rd or 4th of December.

So don't ask Iggy no ridiculous anticipatory hypotheticals!

Iggy also discussed his support of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq:

He reiterated that he supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 because of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's treatment of the Kurds and litany of human rights abuses. He added, however, he doesn't "have any trouble admitting" he seriously underestimated how much the United States would mismanage the war.

"Did I anticipate correctly what would happen? No, I did not."

It is almost too easy to pick this stuff apart. For one thing, Iggy has also stated, here for example, that he supported the invasion because Saddam would not disarm before U.N. inspectors. He has also reiterated the "but everybody thought they had WMDs" line that the Whitehouse has employed on innumerable occasions.

But I think the criticism that applies most cogently to this particular quote is: how could you possess the Hubris to think that the war you supported would be run according to your personal high standards? Indeed, Iggy's claim is bizarre on the face of it, given that he spends the whole of Empire Lite complaining, with regards to Afghanistan, Kosovo and so forth, of exactly the same kind of mismanagement (nation building "on the cheap", he calls it) that has afflicted the U.S. occupation of Iraq.