Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century
A manual for our times
Philip BobbittAllen Lane, 672pp, £25,
Matthew d'Ancona on the new book by Philip Bobbitt
This book is so important that I hope the publishers have the civic spirit to send a copy to every parliamentarian, decision-maker and opinion-former in the land. For Philip Bobbitt, the legal and constitutional historian best known for The Shield of Achilles, has drawn nothing less than a philosophical route-map for the war on terror and the geopolitical crisis of the early 21st century. The fact that he has done so in the calm, lucid tones of meticulous scholarship, without recourse to ideology or what Martin Amis would call ‘Westernism’, only adds to the book’s appeal.
Bobbitt, who holds a chair at Columbia University and has served in the White House and on the National Security Council, is resolute about the scale of the challenge. Al Qaeda, he warns, is ‘only a herald’ of worse to come. ‘The developments that empower terror are gaining,’ he writes, ‘as markets increase, as weapons technologies diffuse, as clandestine communications become more effective and infrastructures more fragile — at a faster pace than our defenses, our preemptive strategies, and our legal institutions are adapting.’
He is in no doubt that ‘the wars against 21st-century terror are preclusive in nature; that is, they seek to head off a state of affairs that has the potential to disable consensual governance well in advance of imminent aggression.’ And he is unashamed in his insistence that the United States is ‘the one state capable of leading coalitions to defend us’.
But Terror and Consent is emphatically not a neo-con tract — nor could it be, given Bobbitt’s convictions, temperament and ancestry (he is Lyndon Johnson’s nephew). Indeed, that is one of the book’s many strengths. It takes as its premise the alarming contention that ‘almost every widely held idea we currently entertain about 21st- century terrorism and its relationship to the wars against terror is wrong and must be thoroughly rethought.’
The Bush Doctrine, for instance, is intrinsically flawed because its various ends are incompatible. The promotion of democracy, WMD control, the taming of rogue states: all these have their place, argues Bobbitt, but are rarely co-terminous. Look at Iran, he says: ‘The Bush Doctrine is simply irrelevant to the only realistic course available,’ which, in the author’s view, will be a complex brew of bribery (security guarantees, access to nuclear energy), multilateral sanctions, and the gradual extension of political and economic opportunity to Iran’s citizens.
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Gil
May 22nd, 2008 9:06pm'On the US domestic front, he recommends, inter alia, a federal isolation and quarantine statute and regulations, national identification cards, legislation to permit the president to federalise National Guard troops in a natural disaster, new rules for preventive detention, and a better system for the analysis of personal data.'
And he isn't authoritarian? Blow me down with a feather. Can you imagine the slandering or sneering that would follow if one of the 'neo-cons' (code for Jewish) suggested these things.
But he's LBJ's relative, so that's ok then.
Commander jesse kochar
May 23rd, 2008 3:15pmI buy the back numbers of the Spectator and enjoy it thoroughly (despite its mindless right wing flavour). If translated in Indian rupees the cost of each copy of yr mag is about 1% of my month's take- home pay. I suggest that you make arragements for a less costlier version, or, send the two week old Spectator at a sliced price...we would love it because none of us Indians are interested in Tories hacking Mr Hacker or he buggering Tories. The interest in Speccie here is entirely intellectual. So here is sometthing to chew on and act. Regards, Commander Jesse Kochar I.N. Retired...some say Retarded !!!
schopenhauer
May 23rd, 2008 3:28pmPreclusive... What an unusual, pseudo-authoritative smoke-screen for the abandonment of so much of what our civilization stands upon.
Think about it. "preclusive": "to close before" - Perhaps to a superficial faith-based warriors like Tony Blair this just sounds like common sense ("Close the door before the horse has bolted"), but to anyone who can think, this is a doctrine in which an opaque government can close the jail cell door (or commit extra-judicial killing and torture) before any crime has occured, with no verifiable way of showing it would have occurred.
Dr Bobbitt's the minority reporter for neo-con pre-crime: Pedaling a doctrine of unquestionable, and uncontrollable coercion.
Preclusive policy precludes evidence, precludes oversight. precludes habeus-corpus, double jeopardy, free speech... in short precludes democracy.
If preclusion is not the definition of totalitarianism, I don't know what is.
Willia garrett
May 23rd, 2008 5:11pmIt seems to me that terrorist activity started with Israeli terrorists in 1948, the Irgun et al. Furthermore it was that installation of Israel by the West that started the turmoil in the region. Hamas, Hezbollah were a response to Israel's illegal actions. The present shambles in Lebanon is due to Israel's invasion wrecking the delicate balance of power there. As regards to international law, in 2004 Bush agreed that Israel could keep the illegal West Bank settlements, what kind of signal did this give to the Arab countries in the region. Bobbit may preach a more defensive attitude but it would help if the US did not generate enemies in the first place.
Gil
May 24th, 2008 6:17pm'Willia garret' you are clearly a propagandist. You say 'it seems to me...'; well, only if you want to invent facts to coincide with your views rather than the other way round. For the record, the UN partition resolution in 1947 was supported by the USSR as well as some countries in 'the West'.
And terrorist activity did not 'start with the Irgun'. Perhaps you should have mentioned in the Middle East but that would have also been incorrect. What about Jews massacared by Arab terrorists (in Mount Scopus for example)? This is not to exculpate the Irgun by the way.
jon livesey
May 27th, 2008 9:59pmMaybe I missed it, but I don't see much reference to what I consider the terrorist's greatest strength and cleverest tactic - his ability to divide liberal democracies against themselves.
The point of terror, as opposed to regular warfare, is not to impose your will on the enemy by armed force, but to undermine the enemy by dividing his society against itself.
Terror is mostly aimed at civilians, and their reactions contradict one another. Those who experience physical fear of violence will often react by demanding more safety, protection, regulation and restriction.
Those who view terrorism as an abstract threat rather than an immediate physical threat will often react by insisting on the preservation of "values" and will argue against extensions of Government power.
Add to this the usual mindlessness of Government and its tendency to accumulate power rather than to give it up, and you have a perfect recipe for a debate on security that leads no-where except to more debate.
The blame-the-victim trend on the left of the British Press on the subject of Northern Ireland was a good example. Civilians wanted protection while journalists wanted the perfect preservation of civil rights - the right to live excepted.
The way to avoid a sterile and divisive debate is for everyone concerned to discuss the issue while avoiding absolutist statements and positions, but of course then the problem is that absolute positions are much easier to state than more nuanced ones, easier to defend in a superficial way, and lend themselves to warm feelings of self-righteousness.
So I think it's going to be a bumpy ride.