The “and yet, and yet” gambit — plausible deniability built in to everything Ignatieff writes, yes? His NYT article came out the same weekend most of the world was also learning about Abu Ghraib — I remember thinking at the time that he deserved the timing.

That’s the real scary part. This is a rationalization that I have heard–sometimes put quite subtly, off and on for the last several years. I cannot believe that it even sounds remotely reasonable to anyone, but certain folks seem to go right along with it. But then again, this comes from the people who coined the phrase “War on Terror,” which always sounded like super-sized insanity to me.

This is an example of what Mariano Aguirre calls the “and yet, and yet” rhetorical trick. It is designed to sneak up the key points on readers. First, he reaffirms everything about “us” that is wonderfully humanitarian, democratic, and liberal. Then he brings in the evil others. And finally, if we want to defend all of the greatness we affirmed about ourselves in the first move, then sometimes one needs to do awful things to the evil others, for a while.

I don’t find that it is any less realpolitik than Soviet communists deciding they had to impose governments, trade with some Western capitalists, and sacrifice certain aspects of the revolution, so as to ensure that the Revolution would survive and go back to its true, good nature.

What Ignatieff does, and no wonder — pardon the common cynicism — that he chose a career in politics, is that he speaks out of both sides of his mouth, to look soft, reasonable, civilized, rational, calm, but just to better lay the ambush, which is about the need to do violence.

Someone once described this kind of character to me in very eerie terms: a man tip-toeing on eggshells, with a 50 caliber machine gun on his back.

I very much dread his coming to power in Canada. What we have now, Stephen Harper, is like a cross between Sarah Palin and John McCain, but I find some left wing Canadians even saying “better the devil we already know,” and not caring if Harper stays in office.

So, for example, the first two quotes here v. the last three:

“An outright ban on torture, rather than an attempt to regulate it, seems the only way a democracy can keep true to its ideal of respecting the dignity even of its enemies. For that is what the rule of law commits us to : to show respect even to those who show no respect for us.”

“There has never been any certainty, moreover, that information extracted by torture is more reliable than information coaxed out of a suspect by persuasive means. Why should we suppose that pain produces truth? And how can we forget what everyone who has ever been tortured always tells us: those who are tortured stay tortured forever. If you want to create terrorists, torture is a pretty sure way to do so.”

“But defeating terror requires violence. It may also require coercion, secrecy, deception, even violation of rights.”

“To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.”

“To paraphrase Cofer Black, the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, we may want to put terrorist heads in boxes, but we need presidents, not C.I.A. operatives or their for-hire hitmen, to decide whose heads we are targeting. There have to be rules, presidential directives controlling the resort to assassination.”

From: Ignatieff, Michael. “Lesser Evils.” New York Times Magazine, May 2, 2004, p. 46.