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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (41969)	5/3/2004 3:40:31 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793640

Choosing lesser evils to fight terrorism Intel Dump Michael Ignatieff had a brilliant essay in Sunday's New York Times magazine nytimes.com on some of the philosophical and theoretical issues undergirding contemporary debates over security and civil liberties. Essentially, he thinks that we should frame the problem as a choice between "lesser evils" -- the title of his forthcoming book -- and that we should accept some excesses by our government agents in order to avoid the greater evil: the end of American constitutional democracy. It's a very compelling argument, and I recommend the entire thoughtful piece. Here's a brief excerpt: When democracies fight terrorism, they are defending the proposition that their political life should be free of violence. But defeating terror requires violence. It may also require coercion, secrecy, deception, even violation of rights. How can democracies resort to these means without destroying the values for which they stand? How can they resort to the lesser evil without succumbing to the greater? Putting the problem this way is not popular. Civil libertarians don't want to think about lesser evils. Security is as much a right as liberty, but civil libertarians haven't wanted to ask which freedoms we might have to trade in order to keep secure. Some conservative thinkers, like those at the libertarian Cato Institute, come down the same way but for different reasons: for them, the greater evil is big government, and they oppose measures that give the executive branch more power. Other conservatives, like Attorney General John Ashcroft, simply refuse to believe that any step taken to defend the United States can be called an evil at all. But thinking about lesser evils is unavoidable. Sticking too firmly to the rule of law simply allows terrorists too much leeway to exploit our freedoms. Abandoning the rule of law altogether betrays our most valued institutions. To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war. These are evils because each strays from national and international law and because they kill people or deprive them of freedom without due process. They can be justified only because they prevent the greater evil. The question is not whether we should be trafficking in lesser evils but whether we can keep lesser evils under the control of free institutions. If we can't, any victories we gain in the war on terror will be Pyrrhic ones.