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It's a quicksand world of shifting loyalties, betrayal, revenge and sometimes tawdry theatre that Michael Ignatieff has discovered in 18 months of political life – a world of vituperative attacks that is more often coloured by failure than by success.

“The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people, whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to avoid,” the onetime Harvard political scientist and now deputy leader of the federal Liberal Party tells an American audience in this The New York Times Magazine this Sunday.

“The question of loyalty arises daily: Who will betray and who will stay true? Having good judgment in these matters, having a sound sense of reality, requires trusting some very unscientific intuitions about people. In practical politics, there is no science of decision-making.”

It's a rare exercise in self-scrutiny and an awakening awareness of living in the world of politics by a senior Canadian politician.

In the article he declares flat out that he was wrong to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq by a U.S.-led military coalition, a position that brought widespread criticism from the U.S. academic community and travelled with him – like the black cloud over the head of Al Capp's legendary cartoon character Joe Btfsplk – when he left Harvard and returned to Canada to run for Parliament in Toronto's Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding for a party that opposed the invasion.

Asked in an interview this week if his comments about betrayal and loyalty were references to Bob Rae, who for years was his closest friend until they fell out over their respective campaigns for last year's Liberal Party leadership, Mr. Ignatieff jokingly replied: “I wrote it for no other purpose. The only thing.”

Then he said, seriously: “I really, genuinely, don't think that – looking you in the eye – I don't think that was the deal. You mustn't read those passages as if I'm suppressing some volcanic set of rages at named individuals.

“You have to see the piece [The New York Times article] in the right frame – what's different about the judgments you make in the safety of academic life from the judgments you make in politics.

“You have to remember I spent five years getting up every Tuesday and Thursday morning, teaching political science to bright people, and what's funny about it, looking back on it, is that I would teach it totally differently now. That's what I think the piece is saying.”

If there is ambiguity to his meaning about loyalty and betrayal, there is none in another passage of the article where he suggests that he has had to learn not to take political attacks personally because to do so would display vulnerability and because so many of the attacks are theatrical.

“The pretend aspects are very hard to grasp because some of those attacks appear so personal. But it's a game and you have to learn that,” he said in the interview.

He writes in his article: “This ... hypocrisy of public life is not available in private life. There we play for keeps. But among friends and family, we also cut one another some slack. We fill in one another's sentences. What we mean matters more than what we say.

“No such mercies occur in politics. In public life language is a weapon of war. … All that matters is what you said, not what you meant. The political realm is a world of lunatic literalism. The slightest crack in your armour – between what you meant and what you said – can be pried open and the knife driven home.”

Mr. Ignatieff felt the knife last summer, at the outset of the Liberal leadership campaign, as the news media, opposition politicians and some of Mr. Ignatieff's fellow Liberals jabbed repeatedly at his jugular over clumsily worded comments he made about the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict.

In the interview conducted in his downtown Toronto condo, Mr. Ignatieff said his article grew out of a lecture he was invited to give on political judgment this year at the University of Oxford.

He said he wanted to write about how his own political judgment had altered in his transformation from academic to politician – “because I'm a writer in politics, so when I do things, I not only do them, I think about why I'm doing them, how I'm doing them, and I write about them. I've done that all my life.”

He said he chose to use Iraq as a leitmotif for his essay, “as a kind of example of how you can get things right and can get them wrong.”

And he said he chose to write for The New York Times Magazine because it had published “all of the serious stuff I wrote [earlier] about Iraq,” specifically three articles in 2003 and 2004 in which he set down his reasons for supporting the invasion, but also stated his serious reservations with the course the administration of President George W. Bush was following.

In the earlier articles, he wrote he had become convinced that the need to halt Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's “malignant intentions” in the region outweighed the grievous flaws in the Bush administration's invasion project.

His mistake, he writes and says now, was in failing to accurately calculate the costs to the Iraqi people of freeing them from Mr. Hussein's prison only to dump them into a nightmarish sectarian bloodbath – a calculation the Bush administration also failed to make.

What he would teach his political science students now, he said, is that whereas academics and other public intellectuals are responsible in the final analysis only to themselves for their ideas and their judgments, politicians have a deeper responsibility.

They have a responsibility for the consequences of their actions; a responsibility to see and understand the world as it is, not as they would wish it to be; a responsibility to be prudent, to listen to the voices of their opponents before they act, to recognize and learn from their mistakes, and to not let emotions be the primary determinant of their actions.

His New York Times article, he said, is “a culmination of a long period of rethinking [Iraq]. It's not epiphany time. It's just about taking responsibility … you have to take responsibility for consequences even if you can't foretell them.

“Even as an intellectual, if you think ‘Let's commit to the use of force,' you have to learn that this takes you into a set of circumstances that will not be fatal to you – that's the other point of this: I don't pay any consequences other than the political consequences you pay as an individual – but thousands and thousands and thousands of Iraqis are dead as a result of this set of choices that lots of us made.”

David Bercuson, director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, said he found it a courageous essay.

Michael Byers, Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia, said he's long admired Mr. Ignatieff for his willingness to struggle publicly with difficult ideas, but he faulted him for not taking the opportunity with this essay to examine the implications for future military interventions and the doctrine of responsibility to protect.