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

Matthew d'Ancona

17 May 2006

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

Next, we must accept that the global centre of Islamic terror ‘is in Europe, not in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. The most important cell for 9/11 wasn’t in Jeddah, it was in Hamburg. And I think this will only increase.’

He insists, most pointedly, that we speak in the plural of the ‘wars on terror’, and create a new constitutional order – global and national – capable of withstanding these many threats, some of them as yet unknown.

‘You have to be able to defend yourself when you don’t know who is hitting you, or you can get hit again. At one point I was going to call my book A Plague Treatise for the 21st Century; as you know, plague treatises were written in the 13th and 14th centuries by physicians and clerics and they talked about a phenomenon that they by and large didn’t understand. They didn’t have germ theory. I don’t think we really understand the operation of terror in the 21st century. But this much I think we do understand: that we have to build up our immune systems. We cannot simply win this fight by going after our adversaries, and attacking them and killing them.’

Systematic intellectual and cultural preparation is of the essence, Bobbitt argues. The alternative is complacency, followed by disaster, followed by mindless authoritarianism. ‘I think when you go to weapons of mass destruction you’re talking about just a completely different level of horror and disruption. And I think that these debates now, although I’m perplexed sometimes by the course they take, are really very, very important. We must come, as societies, to some understanding of what we’re facing, and in these times of tranquillity organise ourselves and debate what we will do if a catastrophe should come to pass. We should stockpile laws for such an eventuality, just as we stockpile vaccines. Then I think we have an excellent chance of getting through these attacks with systems of consent in place.’