'Everything we think about the wars on terror is wrong'

17 May 2006

Philip Bobbitt tells Matthew d’Ancona, we must start from scratch if we are to beat the terrorists

‘I remember when I was a boy going with my father to open up a bank account,’ he says. ‘He took me down and I met the president of the Austin National Bank, who seemed to me a very august and remote figure. He went down with me, and my father deposited $5 in my account, and I got a chequebook.’ Bobbitt recounts this in the distinctive, quiet tones of the Southern gentleman (his mother was Lyndon Johnson’s sister). His conversational technique is that of the erudite anecdotalist: he will quote from an American cartoon strip one moment, and the poet Czeslaw Milosz the next.

‘Now I don’t know who owns the Austin National Bank now,’ Bobbitt continues. ‘It’s not anybody in Austin, it’s not anybody in Texas. I drove by it the other day and I thought: suppose I was in there now and suppose the power went out, what would happen? Well a lot of things would happen. All transfers would stop, I couldn’t use an ATM machine, there’d be no way for me to access my account. I couldn’t even get money out from a teller because she couldn’t or he couldn’t check the funds available. Whereas when I was a boy and I went down there, if the power went out they would actually have just brought out candles. It’s that kind of connectivity that allows a cascading series of vulnerabilities to be exploited. It’s true for pressured gas pipelines, it’s true for the public switched network, over which 90 per cent of our defence communications go – it has made us very rich, it has brought us a considerable amount of wealth and improvement in our living standards, and it is making people in some of the poorest parts of the world much better off than they were before, but it also makes us very vulnerable.’

It is a grave error, he says, to see contemporary Islamic terrorism as mediaeval. ‘Al-Qa’eda is not a consequence of the interface between a globalised secular modernist culture and a more simple, more backward, less literate culture. I don’t think that’s it at all. I think al-Qa’eda is a slick, very modern, very post-modernist, very with-it group, and you see this in the sophistication of their media strategies.’