While Michael Ignatieff was no doubt motivated to write this book by the civil and human rights abuses justified by the Patriot Act and the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the framing question of it is decidedly more abstract: How can liberal democracies defend themselves against terrorism without violating their most sacred principles? The book is to be commended for the forthright way it confronts the uncomfortable moral dilemmas posed by democracy's encounter with terrorism, but Ignatieff is less successful in his attempt to articulate a coherent “lesser evil” approach to these encounters. More disconcerting, however, is the way the formal qualities of his argument potentially silence the kind of self-reflection and historical scrutiny that ought also to play a vital role in any democratic state's—much less a superpower's—response to terrorism.

Ignatieff sets up his argument by contrasting the two foundational assumptions of liberal democracy. The first is specific, premised on the right of a people to exist and to govern themselves. The second is universal, centered on a basic adherence to a set of immutable human (or citizen) rights. In a terrorist emergency, the gap between these principles opens, as the “consequentialist,” who desires to preserve the political community by any means necessary, comes into conflict with civil libertarian beliefs that certain means like torture violate rights to such a degree that the political community is no longer recognizable. The book is at its best when it dwells in this basic tension, when the author is most agonized over the moral trouble created by the clash between these assumptions.

But The Lesser Evil is not meant to tarry with the conjectural. Rather, Ignatieff's goal is to fashion the kind of “political ethics” necessary to guide our approach to terrorism, a “third way” between civil libertarian and consequentialist arguments. He does this by carefully distinguishing between different categories of terrorism, forms of intervention, kinds of human rights, and military and political responses in order to provide us with “principles to guide public policy” (p. 146). The hope is that, when faced with the “factual uncertainty” (p. 19) that inevitably characterizes terrorist events, policymakers can draw upon these distinctions and learn to uphold state security in a manner that accepts some violations of human rights as inescapable but strives to keep these “lesser evils” to a minimum.

For the most part, however, there does not seem to be much relationship between Ignatieff's distinctions and the “guiding principles” he develops. At its most benign, this disconnect is merely confusing. For instance, despite his careful treatment of the relationship between democracy and torture and his discussion of the difference between torture and “lawful killing” during wartime (p. 137), it is ultimately unclear why torture limited to “sleep deprivation, permanent light or permanent darkness, disorienting noise, and isolation” is acceptable for the author and violations of “bodily integrity” are not (pp. 138, 47). More troubling, however, is the clear sense one gets that some of Ignatieff's distinctions serve no real diagnostic purpose but are merely smoke and mirrors behind which lurks his ideological agenda. Thus, while he expends enormous effort distinguishing between types of terrorism and insists that we understand these differences in order to develop policy responses, throughout the book he chooses to employ the Bush administration's term “war on terror,” rather than terrorism. As a basic human emotion, terror is ineradicable and, therefore, a war on terror requires no fixed date of cessation so long as those we determine to be “evildoers” (a word Ignatieff also uses once or twice without acknowledging its ties to White House speech writers) are loose in the world. In the end, the analytical clarity that he hoped to evoke with his typology of terrorism is vitiated by his use of the utterly mobile signifier “terror,” which can be filled, in perpetuity, with the politically despised of the moment (recently, Mexican immigrants).

Perhaps more disturbingly, the author's insistence on the “need to learn from history” (p. 57) serves to occlude the essentially ahistorical premise of the book. Because we get detailed accounts of some history (e.g., of Japanese internment, the development of Russian nihilism), the book lures the reader into assuming that it is historically astute throughout. In fact, Ignatieff is virtually silent when it comes to twentieth-century American foreign policy. On only two occasions does he suggest that U.S. backing of undemocratic regimes in the Middle East might have some bearing on how the American state should now respond to terrorism (pp. 100, 156). But even then, his characterization of these relationships make it appear as though the United States were merely one hapless liberal democracy among many that had made some bad choices in friends. In fact, the United States is a superpower—what, in other writings such as his Empire Lite in 2003, Ignatieff is only too happy to call an “empire”—that actively sought to shape politics in the region by overthrowing a democratically elected government in Iran and arming dictators like Saddam Hussein. By subverting democracy elsewhere, the United States rendered its own foreign policy inconsistent with the kind of liberal democratic politics that Ignatieff values so dearly. Rather than dwelling in the implications of this tension, however, he chooses to ignore it and the results are discouraging. Where he could have combined his “lesser evil” approach to terrorism with a call for critical self-reflection by a democratic citizenry that has allowed an undemocratic foreign policy to be carried out in its name, he empties the American state of history and ends the book with platitudes. “Societies under the endless trial of self justification,” Ignatieff concludes, “are apt to feel guilty about their success. But our success is not a fact to feel guilty about, and the failure of other societies is not our fault” (p. 168). In this instant, he transforms his own call to think critically about the relationship between terrorism and democracy into precisely the kind of ideological, even nationalist, rhetoric that the book's careful articulation of a “lesser evil” approach is meant to avoid.