Michael Ignatieff’s recent essay in the New York TimesMagazine--“Lesser Evils: What It Will Cost Us to Succeed in the War on Terror"--is a useful corrective to much of the conventional wisdom on fighting the war on terrorism. But useful as it is, the essay (I want to suggest) is marred by Ignatieff’s failure to question three recurring and distinctively liberal dogmas on the subject—dogmas for which he offers nothing in the way of argument, and for which, as he must know, satisfactory arguments have rarely if ever been produced.

“ Liberty” versus “Security”

The first of these dogmas is Ignatieff’s dichotomy between “liberty” and “security,” as though it were obvious that liberty and security were two mutually exclusive and incompatible goods rather than complementary aspects of one and the same good. “Abiding disagreement about the trade-off between liberty and security is a permanent characteristic of any free society. The founding fathers designed the Constitution to enable our institutions to adjudicate such fundamental disagreements of principle.” But contrary to Ignatieff, it’s not really clear that the founders thought there was a “disagreement of principle” to adjudicate in the first place. Consider Alexander Hamilton’s discussion of the subject in Federalist #1. It is often forgotten, Hamilton writes,

that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interests can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.

Hamilton clearly doesn’t think of liberty as opposed to security; that’s why he refers to the “security of liberty.” They can’t be separated or traded off against one another, he implies, because they’re two aspects of the same thing.

Hamilton’s approach, I think, is the right one. Think of it this way: Liberty is the condition in which a person can exercise his rights without impediment. Insecurity is the condition in which something consistently threatens the exercise of those rights. Security, then, could reasonably denote the condition in which liberty is protected from persistent threats to it. If we think of things this way, there is no reason to think of liberty and security as being intrinsically opposed to one another, and no reason to think that we face an irreconcilable dilemma (as Ignatieff seems to think) of choosing between them. It may be difficult to know what security measures to take to protect our liberties, but we can know in advance that since any liberty can be threatened, every liberty must be secured; security is not something to be reconciled with liberty as though alien to it, but a necessary condition of its viability.

It would take an essay of its own to explain how the Hamiltonian approach applies in detail to the war on terrorism, but suffice it to say that adopting it might mitigate the burdens of what Ignatieff calls our “permanent disagreements.”

Only “Imminent” Threats Justify Pre-Emption

The second dogma (or set of them) goes to Ignatieff’s account pre-emptive military action. In a puzzling passage on the subject, Ignatieff offers the following criteria for the justifiability of pre-emptive military action:

Pre-emptive war can be justified only when the danger that must be pre-empted is imminent, when peaceful means of averting the danger have been tried and have failed and when democratic institutions ratify the decision to do so.

My concern here is with the first criterion: “imminence.” Ignatieff offers no definition of the term that can be put into military practice; neither, I should add, has anyone else I’ve read on the subject. And a definition is imperative in this context: if imminence is what justifies military action, the line between imminence and non-imminence must be sharp in theory and in practice, and it can be neither without an explicit definition. Nor does Ignatieff address or answer a series of obvious questions about the concept. Imminent threats represent one type of threat, but there are others that, while not imminent, are equally threatening. To say that a threat is not imminent is not to say that it isn’t a threat. Why then should imminent threats be the only ones subject to pre-emptive action?

The issues here are as obvious as they are crucial. If a threat is imminent, it is in some sense proximate in space and/or time. If it is proximate in that sense, it may be too proximate to be averted by any action. Does it then make sense to let a threat become imminent before pre-emptive action is taken with respect to it? Why not pre-empt attacks that have not yet become imminent, so as to avoid the nightmare situation in which one faces an attack which one is powerless to prevent? (Think of the Clinton Administration’s cruise missile attack on the Al Shifa Pharmaceutical Plant in Khartoum, Sudan in August 1998; there was evidence of a bin Laden/Saddam/WMD connection in that case, but no evidence of an “imminent” threat. Does Ignatieff regard the Al Shifa attack as unjustified?) One difficulty here is that it’s not clear that the concept of imminence can consistently be applied before an event as opposed to after it. It is much easier to say that something was imminent than to say that it is—a serious liability for a concept with the strategic importance that “imminence” has now come to acquire. Unfortunately, Ignatieff has nothing to say about these issues; indeed, the rule he promulgates practically “pre-empts” discussion of it.

Unsavory Methods are “Lesser Evils”

The last dogma is Ignatieff’s confident assumption that unsavory methods of dealing with terrorism are “lesser evils” (my emphasis)—that in employing them even to defend ourselves, we are forced to do what is necessary but morally wrong. As Ignatieff asks in his essay, how can free societies “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…But thinking about lesser evils is unavoidable.

This vocabulary and line of thought owe an obvious debt to Michael Walzer’s well-known ruminations on the so-called “problem of dirty hands,” discussed in Walzer’s essay “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands,” (first published in the academic journal Philosophy and Public Affairs [vol. 2:2, Winter 1973], and later reprinted in the book War and Moral Responsibility ([Princeton: 1974], edited by Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon). Though Ignatieff draws on the themes and language of Walzer’s essay, he doesn’t explicitly credit the essay, and so conceals (in effect, not in intention) the controversial assumptions on which Walzer’s claims rest.

According to Walzer, a good politician is occasionally forced to do what is morally wrong; when he does so, his action is politically justified but morally evil. In Walzer’s words,

In modern times the dilemma appears most often as the problem of “dirty hands” and it is typically stated by the Communist leader Hoerderer in Sartre’s play of that name: “I have dirty hands right up to the elbows. I’ve plunged them in filth and blood. Do you think you can govern innocently?” My own answer is no, I don’t I could govern innocently; nor do most of us believe that those who govern are innocent—as I shall argue below—even the best of them. But this does not mean that it isn’t possible to do the right think while governing. It means that a particular act of government (in a political party or in the state) may be exactly the right thing to do in utilitarian terms and yet leave the man who does it guilty of a moral wrong. [War and Moral Responsibility, p. 63.]

As Walzer admits, the formulation is intentionally paradoxical: some political theorists accept the paradox at face value, while others equally emphatically reject it. (I fall into the latter category.) Clearly, Ignatieff has at least some sympathy for the Walzerian formulation: the war on terrorism, Ignatieff repeatedly suggests, will require “lesser evils” and “dirty hands.”

Ignatieff doesn’t mention the alternative way of looking at things, however. A contrary thesis holds that there is no such bifurcation to be made between “good politicians” and “good persons,” or between “morality” and “politics”—and thus no room for a notion of “lesser evils” or “dirty hands.” The proper function of government is to secure our liberty. If liberty is the end of government, that end (sincerely pursued) really does morally justify whatever means are required to secure liberty. If an act is justified in this way, it cannot accurately be described as “evil,” however bloody or repulsive it might be.

Some examples may help drive the point home. If the Allies were strategically justified in bombing Dresden—as Frederick Taylor suggests in his book Dresden: Tuesday, February 14, 1945—then the bombing of Dresden was not an “evil,” but perfectly moral. If the atom bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only ways of securing victory against Japan (and victory was itself justified), then those bombings were not “lesser evils,” but again, perfectly moral. More recently, as Christopher Hitchens has suggested in a recent essay in Slate, if the Algerian fundamentalists elected in the 1991 Algerian elections were a threat to the liberty of Algeria’s secular citizens, then the tactics used by the Algerian military to squelch them may have been “repulsive” but were “broadly right,” i.e., morally justified. So it is with General Musharraf’s occasionally sharp-elbowed dealings with Pakistan’s fundamentalist parties, or the Israel Defense Forces’ assassinations of Hamas terrorist leaders.

One might quarrel or quibble with this or that example on this list, but what is important is the principle behind each of them: what is genuinely “necessary” to preserving rights is not a necessary or lesser evil; it’s not an evil at all. It is simply what has to be done. In this respect, Barry Goldwater was precisely correct to say that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” It isn’t.

This distinction between the Walzerian and anti-Walzerian views of evil may seem “merely semantic,” but in fact, it’s of the utmost importance. The bifurcation of political and non-political morality implicit in the Walzerian thesis—and the cavalier attitude in Ignatieff’s essay about the necessity of doing “evil”—is both deeply confusing and profoundly demoralizing to a population at war. Contrary to Ignatieff, it’s not clear that anyone can sustain a long-term commitment to policies and principles avowed as “evil,” or to do so in a consistent and clear-headed way. If so, the language of “dirty hands” and “lesser evils” is a liability in the war on terrorism. It doesn’t clarify matters; it confuses them.

If we’re to use the Walzerian language at all, the rationale for doing so ought to be made more explicit than Ignatieff (or for that matter Walzer) manages to make it. But as someone familiar with the “dirty hands” literature in philosophy and political theory, I’m inclined to say that no compelling rationale has ever been produced for using the language of “dirty hands” in the first place. The idea that politics requires “lesser evils” and “dirty hands” is an unargued dogma, characteristically asserted with vigor, but essentially undefended now for decades. It should either be defended more rigorously or abandoned.

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It may seem fanciful to think that our victory or defeat in the war on terrorism could turn on conceptual niceties like the ones I’ve raised. But perhaps it’s worth remembering that this war is as much a military matter as it is an ideological one. We’re less likely to be defeated by force of arms than by our own confusions. That’s why as Ignatieff puts it, to win the war on terrorism, “we need to change the way we think, to step outside the confines of our cozy conservative and liberal boxes.” But as I've suggested here, Ignatieff is perhaps more ensconced in a cozy liberal box than he seems to realize. The unexamined life, Socrates once said, is not worth living. In wartime, as it happens, unexamined dogmas turn out not to be something we can get away with, either.