The Lesser Evil Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
| Author | Jennifer M. Welsh |
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/002070200506000122 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
Reviews
inspection process he believed Iraq harboured weapons
of
mass
destruction
and
was hiding
the
evidence.
UNMOVIC
never found a
"smoking gun,"
but
Blix thought it existed. He argues that a policy
of
containment
ofIraq
short
of
war might have worked,
but
admits that
this would have required an ongoing,
and
sizeable,
us
military pres-
ence in the region to have been successful. It would also have required
the
maintenance
of
asanctions regime which was rapidly eroding,
globally unpopular, and provided a wonderful propaganda tool for the
Iraqi government. Blix, like Mohamed ElBaradei, wanted more time
for
the
inspection process in Iraq. He didn't get it,
and
his final
thoughts on the outcome are doleful
and
Scandinavian.
The
legitima-
cy
of
the war, in his view, was fatally undermined; the coalition powers
suffered a grave loss
of
credibility;
and
his beloved UN was brought low.
Whether an intrusive, internationally sanctioned, weapons inspection
process will ever be looked to again as a crisis resolution tool remains
an open question. Let'shope Hans Blixgives some thoughtto its future
in his second retirement.
Wesley
WarklMunk
Centre
for International Studies, University
of
Toronto
THE
LESSER
EVIL
Political Ethics in an Age
ofT
error
Michael Ignatieff
Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2004. xii, 212pp, $22.00 paper
(ISBN
0-14-
301735-7)
In the spring
of2003,
Michael Ignatieffincurred the wrath
of
his lib-
eral colleagues by supporting the
US-led
military campaign to unseat
Saddam Hussein.
What
particularly incensed many liberals, whether
in university departments or non-governmental organizations such as
Human
Rights Watch, was Ignatieff's use
of
human rights
to
justify.his
position-namely,
the rights
of
Kurds
and
Shias who had been slaugh-
tered
under
Saddams brutal dictatorship.
One
could be pro-war, he
insisted, without succumbing
to
the Bush administration's neoconser-
vative
and
imperial agenda.
In his new book,
The
Lesser
Evil:
Political
Ethics
in an
Age
of
Terror,
Ignatieff
once
again affronts a sizeable
portion
of
the
human
rights
INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL
Winter 2004-2005 285
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