Torturer’s Shill

Michael Ignatieff outright condemns torture in his book, “The Lesser Evil.” So why do the rest of his arguments sound like John Yoo?

AT FIRST BLUSH, the mailing of one article, outlining the war of words between unusually lively academics over a book review in an obscure political science journal, is not the stuff of political pranks. That the book in question is Michael Ignatieff’s 2004 “The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in An Age of Terror,” and that some critics have called it an apology for U.S. torture of terrorist suspects, might make the case clearer. Surely, the 300 or so copies of the article, mailed from London to the parliamentary press gallery in Ottawa, were Conservative Party mischief, an attempt to remind Canada’s political elite of the uncomfortable positions Ignatieff, now leader of the opposition, took during the last of his years with an American passport and a Harvard professorship. But political messaging is usually simple and direct, and Ignatieff’s work, however controversial, is notoriously wordy and inscrutable. (Lewis Lapham called his writing “sententious and vacant prose, most of it indistinguishable from the ad copy for an Armani scarf or a Ferragamo shoe.”) And in the book, one of Ignatieff’s few unambiguous pronouncements is that torture is wrong under all circumstances, period. Where’s the beef?

Fear not, political cynics, for here comes Iggy’s signature incoherent reasoning to the rescue. Ronald Steel, in his New York Times review, wrote that Ignatieff "tells us how to do terrible things for a righteous cause and come away feeling good about it." Calling Ignatieff’s writing on terrorism a frivolous mix of “history and propaganda,” Mariano Aguirre wrote that Ignatieff’s argument consisted of a series of ethical lines drawn in the sand, followed each time by some new exception (“...and yet, and yet...”) erring on the side of government action and rendering the last moral certainty meaningless. But the most harsh scrutiny was from Conor Gearty, the LSE law professor and counterparty in the spat profiled in the New Humanist article now floating around Parliament Hill. Gearty slamed “The Lesser Evil,” describing it as a defense of George W. Bush’s disastrous war on terrorism and its author as "probably the most important figure to fall into this category of hand-wringing, apologetic apologists for human rights abuses."

All of these criticisms are true. And, worse for Ignatieff’s credibility, the article that profiled the Gearty-Ignatieff bout made the Liberal leader look vengeful and petty. If the mischievous mailing was an act of political counterintelligence, that is probably the image of him his opponents were gunning for. But Canadian voters should be more worried about the contents of the book itself, and what they show about the would-be prime minister’s muddy logic, compulsive patronizing, and deference to power. Those are all things he would explicitly say, in his superior, irritated tone, that he is “obviously” against. (That word obnoxiously peppers the book.) And yet it’s the few things Ignatieff says explicitly that clarify the purpose of his obtuseness and should make readers suspicious of his motivation for writing the book in the first place.

In “The Lesser Evil,” Ignatieff becomes, in Aguirre’s words, “a Bruce Willis figure”—a war academic. Someone’s gotta do the serious business of outlining how we should defend liberal democracies from fanatical terrorists with nukes. It’s all up to Iggy, and he delivers with a slim 170 pages published after “Mission Accomplished” banners and talk of a permanent Republican majority, but before the photos of tortured and murdered Abu Ghraib inmates and the security meltdown in the rest of Iraq.

Suspicion should start with Ignatieff’s nods to Bush-era anti-terrorist rhetoric. The book culminates in a defense of the doctrine of preemption with the suggestion that preemptive wars and strikes must be waged against both terrorist targets and—he adds without missing a beat—rogue states developing weapons of mass destruction. In true Rumsfeldian form, Ignatieff writes that while international cooperation to defend from terrorism is necessary, a state “cannot cede its right to make final judgments about its national security to any other state or international organization.” He repeats the false dichotomy between diplomacy and war (wherefore criminal prosecution?), arguing that negotiations with Al Qaeda are futile because the only logic it understands is that of the sword. After all, liberal democracies defending against global terror have to get it right every time, but terrorists “only have to succeed once.” (He does not menace the reader with the image of the “smoking gun” in the form of a mushroom cloud.) Ignatieff calls Al Qaeda a new form of evil whose unique nihilistic presence on the world stage justifies a tougher, lesser evil approach to counterterrorism. And on the use of the word ‘evil’ itself, once again the liberal hawk takes up Bush’s clichés. In “The Lesser Evil,” Ignatieff becomes, in Aguirre’s words, “a Bruce Willis figure”—a war academic. Someone’s gotta do the serious business of outlining how we should defend liberal democracies from fanatical terrorists with nukes. It’s all up to Iggy, and he delivers with a slim 170 pages published after “Mission Accomplished” banners and talk of a permanent Republican majority, but before the photos of tortured and murdered Abu Ghraib inmates and the security meltdown in the rest of Iraq.

The book begins with another false dichotomy: On one side, “consequentialists” (he means utilitarians, I think) argue that the safety of untold thousands outweigh the evil in torturing one terrorist suspect for crucial intelligence to stop an imminent attack. On the other side, civil libertarians argue that torture is always wrong, regardless of the lives it might save. Enter Ignatieff, with his alternative third way (page 8):

It maintains that consequences can matter so much, for example, saving thousands of lives from a terrorist attack, that it might be worth subjecting an individual to relentless—though nonphysical—interrogation to elicit critical information. But this style of interrogation, which would push suspects to the limits of their psychological endurance, would remain a violation of their dignity. It would be a lesser evil than allowing thousands of people to die, but its necessity would not prevent it from remaining wrong.

Hence Gearty and Steel’s lines about hand-wringing and feeling good about doing wrong. But there is such incoherence in the argument that follows the above quote that I’m not sure the criticism is on the mark, for there are so many haphazard targets. Four pages later, on page 12, Ignatieff says governments must trade in evil because “we are faced with evil people and stopping them may require us to reply in kind.” So it is no longer a question of the weighing of outcomes or rights or values, but of the ethical nature—evil or not—of the enemy. In Chapter 5, Ignatieff argues that Al Qaeda represents a new form of nihilistic, global and fanatical terrorism that, when wedded to weapons of mass destruction, makes a new form of evil that “challenges the stability of the state order itself,” and thus requires global cooperation and government coercion such as the “regulation of the free market in technologies, technology transfer,and ideas themselves.” Never mind that no such market ever existed for sensitive technologies and scientific information, such as nuclear technology and weapons schematics. Never mind that other threats, such as belligerent rogue states or severe environmental conditions, might also threaten state stability and thus require greater democratic cooperation. Never mind that the nature of evilness of the terrorist enemy is not actually explained, or why such an “evil-doer” is more evil than, say, a dangerous state, dealing with whom might not require lesser evil reasoning.

In fact, the whole concept of evil for Ignatieff is, predictably, a muddle. On one page, a new kind of terrorist represents a new threat of evil, justifying evil in response. On another page—four pages later, on page 16—evil is defined as anything in a liberal democracy that requires any kind of coercion or deception, including—this is not parody—taxation, fines, civil and criminal liability. In that high school libertarian line of thought, literally anything can be construed as evil: Seat belts and speeding tickets are evil, and even laws forcing drivers off of parks and sidewalks, since they are coercion meant to keep even the most fun-loving SUV pilot in their lane. That is a rather big mess surrounding a term that is featured prominently in the book’s title.

Ignatieff suggests the book as a guide for policymakers in their decisions about how to balance security with the core values of democracy. It proposes five tests for all coercive measures in a war on terrorism. Does the coercion violate individual dignity? Does it err on the side of the integrity of existing law? Is it actually useful? Is it the last resort? And is it subject to open adversarial review? Yet Ignatieff does not hold his own ideas to this standard. Ignatieff briefly considers torture’s effectiveness, but never the efficacy of the enhanced interrogation techniques he claims are allowable under a lesser evil rubric. This is despite admitting that such tecnhiques—“forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in lasting harm to mental or physical health, together with disinformation and disorientation (like keeping prisoners in hoods) that would produce stress,” as he describes in 2004 New York Times Magazine piece—might violate the suspect’s dignity. The only line drawn in the sand on interrogation is the ban on physical harm—or is it permanent physical harm, or is it permanent psychological harm?—which is never explained, only asserted. In fact, none of Ignatieff’s policy guidelines are ever considered in any systematic way, but are drawn up in a manner that might lead the reader to believe they are platitudes for liberal critics, not serious policy ideas. His last one-graf memo to policymakers is this gem (page 166):

If a tyrannical state is overthrown [by preemptive action defending a liberal democracy], a democratic regime must be put in its place. If military action is taken, it must not trigger a wider war.

As if it were so simple.

All of which begs the question of why a lesser evil logic—and by extension, Ignatieff—is even relevant. Ignatieff seeks to occupy a meaningless middle ground between Dick Cheney, who continues to assert that torture is necessary because it is effective at producing intelligence to help defend America, and liberals like Glenn Greenwald, who a claim, correctly, that torture (including waterboarding) is both wrong and useless. What good is the proposition that something between regular interrogation and torture is permissible when it is not at all clear that it is useful? In a way, Ignatieff is more in line with Cheney than Greenwald, asserting with no evidence that normal constitutional protections of liberal democracy might actually hinder the fight against terrorism and extremism (from page 10):

It is unrealistic to think that commitment to dignity, coupled with a conservative bias against departing from tried legal standards, will be sufficient to cope with any eventuality in the future. In the wake of another mass casualty terrorist attack, on or above the scale of September 11, most bets—and gloves—would be off.

This is not the reasoning of a pragmatic champion of human rights speaking in courageous defense of liberal democracy. This is the logic of John Yoo, the U.S. justice department attorney who wrote the infamous torture memos on what enhanced interrogation techniques, in his view, were permissible under the law. The first question is, “How far can we go?”; but left unasked is, “Is this even a good idea?”

Is Ignatieff really this incoherent, this vague, this useless? “The Lesser Evil” should make any reader ask that question, as should Ignatieff’s (so far) disastrous foray into politics. But because the answer is unclear, we should consider the second possibility: That the book is not a perfect storm of Bush talking points strung together in the urgency of the height of the post-9/11 terrorism panic, but an attempt to provide a hawkish American administration with the intellectual ammunition that, however blindly conformist and scatter-shot, might sway some of Ignatieff’s liberal followers. The latter will ring true to many of Ignatieff’s Canadian critics, what with the hard line on Afghanistan, the bilingual double-speak on Israel-Palestine, the kow-towing to the oil sands, the carpetbagging, the verbose aimlessness, the political incompetence. For it is those of us who will have to live with his policy decisions who will take a second look at the motivations of Canada’s wannabe next prime minister. End.