No more Mr Nice Guy: Laurie Taylor on Michael Ignatieff
Once a liberal pin-up and intellectual leader of the global human rights movement, Michael Ignatieff has now fallen out with some of his closest friends. Laurie Taylor tracks an acrimonious battle
Everyone knows Michael Ignatieff. Some first encountered him during the late 70s when his painstaking historical analyses of the evolution of the British penal system provided a valuable empirical complement (some would say antidote) to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. Others will have come to respect him for his novels, family memoirs, or his outstanding biography of his great hero, Isaiah Berlin. Many more will remember the suave, querulous, intellectual contributions he made to BBC 2's culture-based talking shop, The Late Show. By the time that programme stuttered to a close in the mid-90s news of his fame had even made it back to his country of birth. In 1997 MacLean's magazine included him in its 'Top Ten Canadian Who's Who' and four years later exultantly promoted him to Canada's 'Sexiest Cerebral Man' because of "his made-for TV looks and effortless eloquence". What so endeared Ignatieff to the thinking classes was his cosmopolitan liberalism. His Russian family background, North American childhood and easy mastery of several languages seemed to qualify him as a citizen of the world. It was not too surprising, therefore, when he set off for what he described as "the landscapes of modern ethnic war" - Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, and Afghanistan - in search of an answer to a classic liberal question: why do we in the west feel that we have a moral obligation to become embroiled in the internal conflicts of distant lands? His answer helped to transform him into a leading figure in the human rights movement. We could, he argued, only overcome the ethnic particularism that lay behind so many of today's conflicts by treating others -whatever their religion, class, gender, race - as rights-bearing equals rather than as members of a group. Such whole-hearted advocacy of human rights meant that he was a natural choice for the prestigious post as Carr Professor of the Practice of Human Rights in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Yet this success story, of a liberal intellectual coming into his own, is rapidly turning very sour. Instead of being regarded as a champion of human rights, Ignatieff is now being seen, in the words of one senior academic, as 'a virus in the human rights movement'. Until recently this might have been written off as an intellectual spat. But recent events look likely to precipitate a full scale divorce between Ignatieff and his former colleagues.
It all began with an article on torture by Conor Gearty, Professor of Human Rights Law at the LSE, in the February 2005 edition of the Index on Censorship. Gearty's concern was to show the process by which a number of well-meaning liberal intellectuals and human rights lawyers had handed Donald Rumsfeld "the intellectual tools with which to justify his government's expansionism". He was particularly exercised by the manner in which such people had created a climate in which even torture could be condoned. One of the well-meaning liberals cited by Gearty in this context was Michael Ignatieff.
Ignatieff's response was as violent as it was unexpected. The harm done to his reputation by the article, he insisted, was so great that it could not even be remedied by the chance to rebut. He had no alternative but to resign immediately from the editorial and advisory board of the magazine and request that any syndication of Gearty's piece be withheld. This was "an issue of principle".What was the background to this outburst? Why exactly was Ignatieff so offended by an academic article? What does his response say about his present standing within the human rights movement?
Let us first examine the magazine. Index on Censorship was founded in 1972 by a group of writers, journalists and artists committed to chronicling free expression abuses wherever they occur. Michael Ignatieff is himself a member of its high profile editorial and advisory board, and its long list of distinguished contributors includes Vaclav Havel, Salman Rushdie, Doris Lessing, Noam Chomsky and the late Ken Saro-Wiwa.
For the magazine's first edition this year, the editor-in-chief, Ursula Owen, invited Stan Cohen, Professor of Sociology at the LSE, to guest edit a special section on torture. Its cover featured a disturbing image of half-naked blindfolded and shackled victims and the legend 'TORTURE: A USER'S MANUAL'. Stan Cohen himself wrote on the 'slippery slope that leads from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib', while Conor Gearty's essay was headlined: 'With a little help from our friends. Torture is wrong and ineffective. So why is it making a comeback?'
Gearty began by considering the social and cultural ingredients that might allow a liberal democracy to forgo its traditional commitment to human rights to an extent that led it finally to condone torture. First into the mix was a category of persons he described as 'Rumsfeldians', individuals "distinguished by their determination to permit, indeed to encourage, the holding of suspected 'terrorists' or 'unlawful combatants'
in conditions which make torture, and inhuman and degrading treatment well-nigh situationally inevitable."
But Rumsfeldians could not transform liberal discourse on their own. They needed a great trauma like 11 September 2001 on which to feed and, crucially, they also needed some ideological support from apologist intellectuals and lawyers which would help to explain why there is no conflict between torture and our liberal code of laws.
It is at this point that Gearty rounds on Michael Ignatieff, who he describes as "probably the most important figure to fall into this category of hand-wringing, apologetic apologists for human rights abuses." What exactly had Harvard's Professor of Human Rights done to deserve such censure?
For the answer, we need to go back to the arguments that Ignatieff, following his tour of conflict zones, began to develop about the need for western humanitarian interventions in failed or terrorist-dominated states. He was far from alone in adopting this interventionist stance. Many other intellectuals and human rights activists found it possible to agree that there were circumstances under which an imperialism carried out in the name of human rights in such areas of conflict as Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan was not only defensible but positively to be welcomed.
But many such allies felt far less comfortable when Ignatieff went on to use the same argument to justify the second invasion of Iraq in March 2003. To go along with Ignatieff now meant bypassing the United Nations, ignoring the entreaties of former close European allies, and overlooking the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction. As the death toll mounted in Iraq, it also became necessary to argue that such extreme sacrifices were worth making if they contributed to the end of 'terrorism'.
Ignatieff confronted such moral reservations in 2004 with The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror. His preface outlined the key questions he would be addressing: "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. 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?"
Even before the publication of The Lesser Evil, Ignatieff had attracted some powerful, if predictable, enemies. His justifications for the Iraq war had incensed many radicals. Michael Neumann, Professor of Philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, described the imperialist thesis as developed in Ignatieff's Empire Lite (2003) as "a web of foolishness, error and confusion". The argument that America was still the world's best hope for the spread of liberal democratic ideas was "built on sand" and his proposals for nation-building when stripped of "claptrap" were deeply flawed. They amounted, Neumann wrote, to this: "The US should, having first consulted its own interest, occupy 'failed states' and suppress disorder. Then, over what Ignatieff repeatedly emphasises is a long period of time, Americans are to teach these little folks abut judicial procedure, democracy and human rights. Then Americans will help their apt pupils to create sustainably democratic institutions."
But with the publication of The Lesser Evil in 2004, and a series of articles which expanded on aspects of the book's arguments in the New York Times, he also began to incur the wrath of liberals and, perhaps more significantly, former colleagues in the human rights movement. The critics began to line up. In a 2005 article called 'Exporting Democracy, Revising Torture: The Complex Missions of Michael Ignatieff', Mariano Aguirre concentrated particularly upon the seven pages in The Lesser Evil which dealt with the question of torture.
In this brief section, Ignatieff turns to the so-called 'ticking-bomb cases' where torture might be the only way to extract information from terrorists which could save human lives. He cites Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who had contended that "whatever we might think about torture in the abstract, the pressure to use it in cases of urgent necessity might be overwhelming. The issue then becomes not whether torture can be prevented but whether it can be regulated."
Ignatieff rejects this argument - "as an exercise in the lesser evil it seems likely to lead to the greater" - along with other justifications for the use of torture by democratic societies. Nonetheless - and this is critical to the argument that was to develop - he does go so far as to suggest forms of duress that might be permissible. These include "forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in harm to mental or physical health, and disinformation that causes stress."
Aguirre describes this style of argument as 'and yet and yet'. Ignatieff is "absolutely in favour of the principles and the defence of human rights, and yet, and yet, if a terrorist has valuable information about a biological weapon that is going to explode in New York, then maybe the security forces could use some level of force on him. Thus, the director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University becomes a sort of Bruce Willis figure."
This 'and yet and yet' approach, suggests Aguirre, is just what the US government needs as a justification for its current breaches of human rights. "Ignatieff considers himself a liberal, so sometimes he criticises the Bush administration. And he is an intellectual, so he has doubts about almost everything and airs them with the liberal readers of the New York Times. But in the end he shares the US government's vision of the violent and compulsory promotion of democracy, the war against terrorism and the use of instruments, for example torture, which are apparently in need of revisionist treatment." In these ways, "he has established a sort of rational framework for democratisation by force and also for the revision of our understanding of human rights."
But how is that revision managed? Gearty in his Index essay suggests that it depends upon a simple verbal shift: "The trick
is to take the 'human' out of 'human rights'. This is done by stressing the unprecedented nature of the threat that is currently posed by Islamic terrorism, by insisting that it is 'a kind of violence that not only kills but would destroy our human rights culture as well if it had a chance'. In these extraordinary circumstances, 'who can blame even the human rights advocate for taking his or her eye off each individual's puny plight, for allowing just a little brutality, a beating-up perhaps, or a touch of sensory deprivation?'. But once intellectuals do open this door then scores of Rumsfeldians pour past shouting 'me too' and (to the intellectual's plaintive cries of protest) 'what do you know about national security - go back to your class work and the New York Review of Books'."
Ignatieff is the best exemplar of this type of intellectual because of his apparently total commitment to the idea that we are now faced with 'evil' people and that unless we fight evil with evil we will succumb. It is precisely because we are democratic and special that, in Ignatieff's words "necessity may require us to take actions in defence of democracy which will stray from democracy's own foundational commitments to dignity." So occasional lapses in human rights can be excused as lesser evils. Gearty suggests that this is already providing an escape clause for those who torture. "If Abu Ghraib was wrong then that wrongness consisted not in stepping across the line into evil behaviour but rather allowing a 'necessary evil' (as framed by the squeamish intellectuals) to stray into 'unnecessary evil' (as practised by the not-so-squeamish Rumsfeldians)."
At no point does Gearty suggest that Ignatieff condones or favours torture. Indeed, for him to do so would be to destroy his entire argument: that intellectuals like Ignatieff are providing a moral framework for such practices by introducing concepts of 'good' and 'evil' into a previously secularised domain of discourse. Once this shift has been made, Gearty argues, we can say goodbye to the notion of universal human rights. After all, why should we extend the same rights to those who are good as those who are evil? "The wonder is not that we good guys abuse their human rights, but that we continue to use such language in relation to them at all, recognise that they have any residual human rights worth noticing."
Gearty and Aguirre are by no means alone in their concern about the manner in which Ignatieff's argument in The Lesser Evil provides a framework within which torture might be contemplated by liberals. A particularly hostile review in the New York Times in July 2004 by international relations professor, Ronald Steel, began with this acerbic summary of Ignatieff's thesis: "Michael Ignatieff tells us how to do terrible things for a righteous cause and come away feeling good about it." Ignatieff may tell us that the lesser-evil position lies in never losing sight of the "morally problematic character of necessary measures," argues Steel, "but is it really true that an evil act becomes lesser simply because it is problematic? Does suffering a twinge of bad conscience justify what we do in a righteous cause? It is comforting to think so, but saying 'this hurts me as much as it does you' is neither true nor considered an excuse."
What most of these critiques of The Lesser Evil have in common is the uneasy sense that Ignatieff, despite his constant cautionary remarks and reluctant asides ('and yet and yet') is in the dangerous business of providing rationalisations which only need to be stretched a further inch or two before they become 'permissions' for those who feel that human rights are contingent or expendable in the war against terrorism.
But none of this explains how Ignatieff could have interpreted Gearty's Index on Censorship essay as an assertion that he was in favour of torture, nor the intemperance of his email to Ursula Owen, a friend of long standing. Gearty, he insisted, in spite of the clear textual evidence to the contrary, had not read what he, Ignatieff, had written. By suggesting that he was in favour of torture he had delivered a blow to his reputation of such severity that he must now ask for his name to be removed from the editorial board of the magazine. He went on to ask Owen to ensure that the piece would not be syndicated elsewhere because it is 'factually false'. If it had already been sold then she must send a copy of this present letter to the editors concerned in the hope that this will help "to undo the damage you have already done to my reputation".
