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True democrats uphold our liberties — not destroy them

Henry Porter

Since the events of 9/11, some former libertarians have advocated levels of repression that no civilised society wants or needs.

IT IS five years since the Twin Towers fell, five years during which we have seen awful sequels to 9/11, some big mistakes made by the West, but also a few triumphs of detection, notably by the British police and intelligence services. It has all gone past in a flash and perhaps the unusual anxiety of the period has prevented us from acknowledging an important fact. The West has been largely unchanged by the menace of Islamist terror and so the aim of the jihad launched from the caves of Afghanistan has, thus far, been largely thwarted.

This is not to ignore the people who lost their lives and limbs, or their families, nor is it to advocate complacency in what is going to be a long campaign. But it is to say that the great democratic project started by John Wilkes in England during the 1760s and a decade later by his admirers in the American colonies will not fall to the suicide bombers, nor even to the fear of the worst that they can do. The energy and resourcefulness of Western capitalism is far from exhausted and the convictions of the liberal democratic systems on which modern capitalism depend are too deep-rooted for that. It is not 410 AD. Alaric and the Visigoth hordes are not at the gates of Rome.

Controversial view

This, oddly, is a controversial view. Hot-heads still abound in all parts of the world declaring that the clash of civilisations is nigh. Not satisfied with the mayhem created in Iraq (where there were 80 people killed in 14 separate incidents in one day last week) and the destruction done in South Lebanon and to Israel's reputation, they feverishly pore over maps of Iran muttering about appeasement.

The pre-emptors are every bit as dangerous as the terrorists because they both react to and feed off each other's fantasies of total victory. We need to grasp the true scale of the threat and understand that it is chronic and yet it is smaller than almost anyone will allow (the number lost to terrorist atrocities in the West since 9/11 is less than a tenth of the toll in Iraq). We also need to appoint leaders who can see that the radicalisation of Muslim populations in the West is so far Osama bin Laden's greatest achievement and that the condition of the Palestinian people is a running sore.

The neocon firebrands are not to be trusted on domestic policy, either. At the same time as insisting that they are defending Western freedom, they declare war on it. They urge us to exchange liberty for security while implying that to do so somehow increases the state's powers to fight terrorism.

One of the modern advocates of removing freedom from the people and donating power to the state is Alan Dershowitz who, until 2001, had seemed a benign, if humourless, liberal. After the 9/11 attacks, Prof. Dershowitz wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times arguing that, in some cases, judges should issue a torture warrant to allow the FBI to gain information.

He said torture would happen anyway in the war on terror — he was certainly right about that — so it should be authorised and thus controlled by law.

Last week, Prof. Dershowitz was trying to get another debate going. The Spectator magazine published an essay by him under the headline "The greatest threat to civil liberties would be another atrocity like 9/11." It is an odd piece that pretends to support the greater interest of liberty while doing the opposite. He says that all true libertarians must forsake some freedom in order to stop a really authoritarian reaction later on. "Those who love liberty must be at the forefront of efforts to prevent terrorism, even if such efforts require some compromises of the maximalist civil liberties paradigm."

This last phrase refers to liberal fundamentalists, although I cannot think of one who believes that all rights are unqualified, that all freedoms are absolute.

Prof. Dershowitz goes on to make some weird points, one of which is a system in which governments have access to all electronic communication and we trust them not to read the stuff that isn't relevant to the detection of terrorists. Prof. Dershowitz wants to retain the glow of his youthful libertarianism at the same time as slyly advocating the removal of freedoms and rights, those which he says are "amenable to compromise," another innocuous sounding phrase which clinches his suspension from the club of true democrats. The points that he fails to make are these. Libertarians are just as interested as he is in hunting down terrorists, but they believe that it should be done within the law as it stands, because to do otherwise is to attack the very values that we are defending. The British police and intelligence services have, it seems, scored a considerable success while operating within these civilised constraints.

Secondly, he does not mention that the U.S. and British Governments have used the threat of Al-Qaeda to extend their powers in areas which have nothing to do with defending their citizens against terrorists.

Thirdly, Prof. Dershowitz does not understand that governments are not naturally inclined towards the interest of the citizen. If they are given powers, they will almost always find a way to abuse them, as demonstrated by his own government in the recent wire-tapping scandal and at Guantanamo.

Freedom and order are inextricably linked. You cannot have freedom without order and good government but, more importantly, you cannot have order and good government without freedom. Freedom is the thing that patrols and constrains government and that is why it is not amenable to compromise and will not suffer such notions as "preventive interrogation." —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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