In the Times, former Harvard professor turned Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff—whose early pro-war writings were highly influential— admits that, well, he was wrong.

I like and admire Michael; he is an honorable man. But I am underwhelmed by his mea culpa, two-thirds of which is an abstract disquisition on the nature of truth in politics. (Or some such thing.) Dry and (ironically) bloodless, it reads more like a political apologia than the words of a man whose arguments, on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, have contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

The bottom line is two paragraphs tucked quietly into the piece near its end.

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.

I made some of these mistakes and then a few of my own. The lesson I draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my emotions. I went to northern Iraq in 1992. I saw what Saddam Hussein did to the Kurds. From that moment forward, I believed he had to go. My convictions had all the authority of personal experience, but for that very reason, I let emotion carry me past the hard questions, like: Can Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites hold together in peace what Saddam Hussein held together by terror? I should have known that emotions in politics, as in life, tend to be self-justifying and in matters of ultimate political judgment, nothing, not even your own feelings, should be held immune from the burden of justification through cross-examination and argument.

It seems to me that Ignatieiff has this exactly wrong. He was emotional in his arguments for war, he says. (Yes, true—though he cloaked his emotion in the guise of tough-talking liberalism.)

And now, as a result of that experience, he will not be emotional in his admission of error.

It seems to me that one should be tough-minded in arguing for war, rather than emotion-driven.

But how could you not be emotional, passionate, in admitting that you got it so very wrong? Does an apology delivered without feeling count for very much?

Another thought: Here is a magazine article, or a thesis, for someone who has more time than I. Some of the most ardent and influential supporters of the war in Iraq were people who had witnessed the human rights atrocities of Saddam Hussein. Ignatieff, Judith Miller, and so on. Their emotions were understandable—but it would be interesting and, I think, important, to study the impact of those well-meaning journalists and human rights activists on the public debate surrounding the war, and the ways in which those pro-human rights, pro-war liberals got it wrong.