Bite the bullet.(BackTalk)(Book Review)

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror By Michael Ignatieff Princeton University Press, 160 pages, $22.95

Since September 11, 2001, the Western democracies have had difficulty understanding the political, religious, and psychological components of Islamic terrorism, and have struggled with the question of how best to meet its deadly challenge.

In this ambitious, thoughtful, and ultimately optimistic new book, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, Michael Ignatieff, a human rights researcher at Harvard University, notes that, "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, deception, secrecy, and violation of rights."

Thus, he asks: "How can democracies resort to those means without destroying the values for which they stand? How can they resort to the lesser evil, without succumbing to the greater?"

Those are not academic questions, but grave problems fraught with risk of error. If we as a society answer them wrong and make an inadequate response to terrorism, the survival of many of our citizens could be affected.

Ignatieff holds that terrorism is a greater evil, justifying a less evil response, because the former unleashes "violence as a first resort, in order to make peaceful politics impossible," and targets "unarmed civilians ... punishing them for their allegiance or their ethnicity. This is to condemn them to death not for what they do, but for who they are and what they believe."

Finally, Ignatieff condemns terrorism because it "is an offense not only against the lives and liberties of its specific victims, but against politics itself, against the practice of deliberation, compromise, and the search for nonviolent and reasonable solutions. Terrorism is a form of politics that aims at the death of politics itself."