COMMENT & ANALYSIS
ASSAULT ON AMERICA: Paying for security with liberty: Michael Ignatieff
argues that vulnerability often tempts strong nations to take self-destructive
measures and and actions that lead to injustice
By Michael Ignatieff
(Financial Times, Sep 13, 2001)
As
America awakens to the reality of being at war - and permanently
so - with an enemy that has as yet no face and no name, it must
ask itself what balance it should keep between liberty and security
in the battle with terrorism. The words of Benjamin Franklin, one
of its founding fathers, are worth bearing in mind. In 1759, he
wrote: "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
These are wise words - and they are much cited today as America
comes to terms with its awful vulnerability - but they are easily
brushed aside in the rush to judgment and vengeance. Vulnerability
often tempts strong nations to take self-destructive measures. There
are two dangers: first an inadequately prepared and indiscriminate
attack on foreign targets suspected of harbouring terrorist suspects;
second, indiscriminate arrests or detention of suspects at home
suspected of association with the crimes.
As to the first, President George W.Bush's warning that America
will pursue the terrorists and those states that harbour or give
assistance to these groups leads one to expect strong retaliatory
action against suspect states such as Afghanistan. This forgets
that ill-planned and indiscriminate attacks by the Clinton administration
in Sudan and Afghanistan, far from sending the terrorists a message,
won them friends in the Arab world while encouraging the terrorists
to believe in their own invulnerability. The most effective responses
may not be the instant vengeance of a cruise missile but concerted
international police work that leads to arrest, extradition, trials
and imprisonment of the perpetrators.
Likewise, as every headline in America screams War! it is worth
remembering that when democracies declare war, liberties at home
frequently suffer. Today the analogy with another day of infamy
- the attack on Pearl Harbor - is on everyone's lips but today's
Japanese Americans cannot forget that Pearl Harbor brought with
it the shame and injustice of mass internment. The incarceration
of loyal American citizens, on the orders of a president whom most
Americans remember as a giant, is just the most obvious example
of the follies to which rage, fear and vulnerability can drive a
great democracy.
This is not the only example. After anarchists set off bombs in
eight American cities in 1919, the Palmer raids that followed -
the arrest, detention and deportation of more than 5,000 people
- prepared the climate of opinion that led to an infamous miscarriage
of justice: the arrest and execution of two Italian immigrants,
Sacco and Vanzetti, now posthumously exonerated of all charges.
Other democratic states, faced with terrorism, have sacrificed liberty
for the sake of order and come to regret it. In 1970, an extremist
group in Quebec kidnapped and murdered a prominent politician. In
response, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau ordered the arrest and detention,
without trial, of more than 500 Canadian citizens. Trudeau, like
Roosevelt, is now judged to have been a great leader; yet most Canadians
now see his action in 1970 as excessive and feel that far from reducing
support for Quebec separatism, it increased it.
Britain also had to learn that the only effective weapons against
terrorism are precision tools, not blanket suspensions of civil
liberties. The UK experimented with detention without trial in the
early phases of its response to the Troubles in Northern Ireland,
only to discover that internment, far from stamping out terror,
won adherents to its cause. The best hope for controlling terror
groups is through infiltration and neutralisation by the secret
services. In the 1990s the British security services did a relatively
good job of infiltration, though even here - in the most protracted
campaign against a terror campaign by any democratic state - bombs
still went off. Citizens of Belfast had to grow used to constant
limitations on their freedom of movement.
The question before Americans is whether the financial centres of
New York should come to resemble Belfast. Already a ring of steel
protects the financial centre of the City of London. Those who submit
to the searches and surveillance that accompany any anti-terror
campaign usually do not object to the inconvenience. Following the
catastrophic events in Washington and New York, everyone will have
to get used to much more intrusive surveillance and policing of
our travel. The people who will pay the price of such surveillance,
particularly at borders and frontiers, will be non- citizens, particularly
those from countries or regions that have some notional association
with places that support or harbour acts of terror. People who do
not have passports from western liberal democracies, who have Arabic
or non-white skins, risk being interned or deported without due
process of law.
Benjamin Franklin's words would have us remember that a civilised
society ought to afford due process and basic human fairness, especially
the presumption of innocence, to all peoples, citizens and non-citizens,
sojourners and inhabitants, visitors and strangers. This ideal may
be the one most endangered by the carnage of the past days. The
moral temptation to resist is to consider liberty divisible; that
is, to defend the liberty of citizens by extinguishing the liberties
of all others, especially foreign strangers within our gates. If
we succumb to this temptation, we shall give terror precisely the
victory over liberty that it is seeking.
The writer is Carr professor of human rights policy at the Kennedy
School of Government, Harvard University
(Copyright: The Financial Times Limited)
What
kind of war is it?
Kenneth Anderson article from the Times Literary Supplement.
A
Defining Moment in the Parsing of War
Anne-Marie Slaughter article from The Washington Post Company.
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