Sulayman’s Stories

For class I was given the book The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in the Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff. It’s a very good book, perhaps the best thing I learned during the entire class while discussing the delicate balance between freedom and government power, civil liberties versus security and counter terrorism. While I had initially braced myself to disagree with him on such a dicey topic, I found his arguments astoundingly well-written. The author understands that democracies around the world were fighting terrorism long before 9/11. He knows his stuff, going into detail about the history of governments that faced internal and external threats, from Weimar Germany to Israel to America during the Civil War and second World War; and the threats they faced and their solutions and outcomes to curtailing rights. He gives numerous case studies and shows what democracies can learn from their examples; he reasons that German and Italian police succeeded in their campaign against the Baader Meinhof gang in the 1970s while their counterparts in Spain failed during the same years to eradicate the cells of Basque terrorists. Turning attention to Al Qaeda, it lays out a good detailed strategy for confronting them and others, while not destroying the democracy in the process.

The sheer diversity of his case studies enables Ignatieff to discredit any simple-minded approach to terrorism. He expounds on the history of civil liberties curtailment, and proposes solutions that don’t go too far towards one end at the exclusion of the other (e.g. allowing searches with warrants and putting expiration dates on laws such as the Patriot Act). His thesis should calm any reader; America is not under its worst threat of its lifetime; the rules haven’t changed all that much, etc.

Reading him is a bit like having a conversation with an eminently reasonable but convinced and powerfully convincing man.”–Anthony Lewis, New York Review of Books

Ignatieff is apparently no stranger to discussions on civil liberties and political ethics and terrorism. He’s Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and has written much on the subject before it. The book is 232 pages, but it flows quickly and is well-annotated. He draws a middle course of action between freedom and security. A good portion of his book concerns hypothetical situations, on a scale of increasing threats, from whether it’s OK to torture a suspect if there’s a ticking bomb hidden somewhere, to whether its OK to suspend rights if there’s a threat of nuclear terrorism, to why democracies can only be ethical if they act civilized. He’s so well-informed and willing to consider the implications of each side in his proposals, something Bush never seems to do. He warns democracies not to fall into the trap of “turning into nihilists in order to fight nihilistic enemies.” He argues quite well on the need for liberal democracies to have a moral response to terrorism, not to sink to their level. He’s quite opposed to Alan Dershowitz’s advocation of torture, and even cites the Israeli Supreme Court’s rejection of it in his argument.

I think it’s the sheer level-headedness of his ideas that impressed me. He admits it’s tempting to suspend civil rights under the sense of a crisis, but at the same time points out that the terrorists never have won in history; governments fell from within or due to other reasons. Perhaps it IS a good thing to have sneak-and-peak warrants, but only if there is judicial oversight, or allowing detentions, as long as there’s a system of review, sunset clauses in laws (ie expiration dates), and the ability to challenge things in court. In the end, he struck a balance between liberty and security. He actually convinced me to reconsider, moderating my opinions. If you are a politics major, or find the domestic “war on terror” to be a vital issue, you have to read this book. If I were President, I’d put him in charge of homeland security. It’s that good of a book.

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