Canada’s Liberals make pro-war Ignatieff their second-in-command

Federal Liberal leader Stéphane Dion named Ignatieff the vice-chairman of a new Priorities and Planning Committee, which mirrors a powerful cabinet committee of the same name, when he unveiled his shadow cabinet January 18. Dion will himself head the new committee.

Ignatieff’s planning committee appointment comes on the heels of his selection as the party’s deputy leader. Dion named Ignatieff deputy leader in mid-December, just days after winning the Liberal leadership at a delegate-convention over Ignatieff, although the latter was supported by the majority of the party establishment.

There are numerous instances in Canadian politics when the number two-finisher in a party-leadership contest has quickly withdrawn from active politics. The titles and responsibilities Dion has awarded Ignatieff make clear that he wants his erstwhile leadership rival to play a pivotal role in the party and a possible future Liberal government for years to come.

Ignatieff has a long record as a liberal advocate of imperialist war and of Bush’s “war on terror.” In the decade prior to his return to Canada in 2005, he lent his credentials as a scholar of the liberal political-philosophical tradition and human rights expert to support imperialist intervention in Yugoslavia, to campaign for revising international law to give the great powers the right to violate national sovereignty in the name of an obligation “to protect,” advanced arguments to justify the Bush administration’s assault on democratic rights, and sought to drum up support for the 2003 illegal US invasion of Iraq. In a May 2004 piece for the New York Times Magazine, he argued, for example, for “indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/jan2007/libs-j29.shtml