If power’s corrupted anything, it’s prudence
The American president has not only grossly misunderstood Iraq but also himself

The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as one of the commentators, supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems!

I’ve learned that good judgement in politics looks different from good judgement in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgement is about generalising and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. The attribute that underpins good judgment in politicians is a sense of reality. They must not confuse the world as it is with the world as they wish it to be. They must seeIraq – or anywhere else – as it is.

I’ve have learnt that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works & what doesn’t. Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick. The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people: whom to trust, whom to believe & whom to avoid. The question of loyalty arises daily: Who will betray & who will stay true? Having a sense of good judgment in these matters & having a sound sense of reality, requires trusting some very unscientific intuition about people.

Bismarck famously remarked that political judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoof beats of the horse of history. In the face of the unexpected event, a virtuoso in politics must be capable of improvisation and appear as imperturbable as possible. People do want leadership, and even when a leader is nonplussed by events, he must still remember to give the people the reassurance they deserve. Part of good judgement consists of knowing when to keep up appearances. Improvisation may not stave off failure. The game usually ends in tears. Political careers oft en end badly because politicians live the human situation: making choices among competing goods with only ordinary instincts and fallible information to go by. Of course, better information and factual criteria for decision-making can reduce the margin of uncertainty. Benchmarks for progress in Iraq can help to decide how long America should stay there. But in the end, no one knows – because no one can know – what exactly America can still do to create stability in Iraq. The decision facing the United States over Iraq is paradigmatic of political judgment at its most difficult. Staying and leaving each have huge costs. One thing is clear: The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis.

But they must decide, and soon. In the case of Iraq, deciding what course of action to pursue next, requires first admitting that all courses of action thus far have failed. In politics, learning from failure matters as much as exploiting success. Samuel Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better’’ captures the inner obstinacy necessary to the political art. Churchill & De Gaulle kept faith with their own judgment when smart opinion believed them to be mistaken. Their willingness to wait for historical validation, even if far off , looks now like greatness. In the current president, the same faith that history will judge him kindly seems like brute stubbornness.

Good judgement in politics is messy. It means balancing policy & politics in imperfect compromises that always leave someone unhappy – oft en yourself. Knowing the difference between a good and a bad compromise is more important in politics than holding onto pure principle at any price. Measuring good judgment in politics is not easy. We might test judgement by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgement but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

The people who truly showed good judgement 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 laboured, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence & 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 & freedom in Bosnia & 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 & 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 & argument. Good judgement in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take the care to understand himself. The sense of reality that might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing. But then, it is doubtful that warning bells had ever sounded in him before. He had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives, warning bells do not sound!

People with good judgment listen to warning bells within. Prudent leaders force themselves to listen equally to advocates & opponents of the course of action they are thinking of pursuing. They do not suppose that their own good intentions will guarantee good results. If power corrupts, it corrupts this sixth sense of personal limitation, on which prudence relies. A prudent leader will save democracies from the worst, but prudent leaders will not inspire a democracy to give its best. Democratic peoples should always be looking for something more than prudence in a leader: daring, vision and – what goes with both – a willingness to risk failure. Daring leaders can be trusted as long as they give some inkling of knowing what it is to fail. They must be men of sorrow acquainted with grief, as the prophet Isaiah says, men and women who have not led charmed lives, who understand us as we really are, who have never given up hope and who know they are in politics to make their country better. These are the leaders whose judgement, even if sometimes wrong, will still prove worthy of trust.

Human bondage & state brutality
The in-human Malaysia laws prevent multi-racial couples from living in peace & harmony

Years back, noted Indian author & journalist Khushwant Singh, writing on the man-woman relationship, had remarked that only death & adultery can end a relationship. Khushwant, may have been right, if the bonds were only dependent on the internal dynamics operating within a relationship. However, there are scores of religious & social pressures, which add malleability to an otherwise strong relationship. This fact is being regularly proved right in Malaysia, where married men & woman belonging to different faiths are being ruthlessly separated to prove the predominance of faith over an individual’s right to lead a life of his/her choice.

Recent reports have revealed that Malaysian authorities adhering to Islamic tenets have declared the marriage between a Muslim girl, (Najeera Farvinli Mohamed Jalali – an ethnic Indian) & a Hindu boy (Magendran Sababathy) as illegitimate & charged them for “illegal cohabitation”. Not only this, before pronouncing the verdict the authorities had imprisoned the girl for four months under gruelling conditions. The archaic Malaysian laws prohibit cross-religious marriages. However, with Najeera denying adhering to Muslim religion, it is arguing that she isn’t obligated to follow the Islamic law. “I don’t think there’s a legal basis for them to do it,” says Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, a human rights lawyer.

The so-called ‘progressive Islamic’ state (which claims to be secular) has three major ethnic communities (Malays, Indians & Chinese). However, the polity is overtly pro-Malay. The constitution guarantees freedom of worship but forces Islam on all ethnic Malays & treats them under the ambit of Sharia law. While Indians & Chinese can seek justice in civil courts, the Malays perforce have to go through the rigours of Sharia courts. And this Malaysia proudly describes as its unique form of pluralism, distinct from the European discourse on multiculturalism. It is this very distorted form of secularism, which has prevented Najeera from conjoining with her husband.

Earlier in May 2007, the country’s apex civil court had denied Lina Joy to remove ‘Islam’ from her identity card. The court had denied her the right to convert to Christianity on the grounds that “You can’t at whim and fancy convert from one religion to another.” All these laws and actions of the Malaysian state are only widening the racial fissures in the society. The government cannot go on endlessly appeasing the cohorts of political Islam and then take refuge under the fact that their definition of Human Rights is different from that of the Europeans.

The defiant Malaysian couples should continue their struggle humming the English poets words – “One who falls in love without taking it to the final conclusion, is like one who goes on a sea voyage only to become sea-sick.”