Matthew Dancona

‘Everything we think about the wars on terror is wrong’

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

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

Cometh the war, cometh the guru. South of Baghdad, insurgents shoot down a US helicopter, killing two US servicemen, days after five British military servicemen died when their Lynx was brought down in Basra. Iran’s President scornfully rejects the EU’s latest desperate bid to stop him building nuclear weapons. A parliamentary report on the 7 July bombings reveals terrible intelligence errors. The Afghan foreign minister complains that Osama bin Laden is still at large in Pakistan. A war on many fronts: but are we winning?

Step forward Philip Bobbitt, a tall, immaculately dressed 57-year-old Texan scholar, who now spends most of his time in London. Four years ago, this constitutional lawyer – who has held several senior posts on the National Security Council and is a professor at the University of Texas – won international acclaim for The Shield of Achilles, a 900-page exploration of war and peace in our times. The main text was completed before 9/11, though it foretold much of what followed that atrocity. Now Bobbitt is returning to the fray, working on a book that will demand that we rethink entirely our lazy assumptions about the war on terror.

A sneak preview of the sage’s new ideas reveals the following, devastating premise: his belief that ‘almost every widely held idea we currently entertain about 21st-century terrorism and its relationship to the wars on terror is wrong and must be thoroughly rethought’.

Gulp. So, I ask Bobbitt in an interview hosted by the think-tank Policy Exchange, what has gone wrong? The answer, he says, is that we do not understand either the enemy or, crucially, ourselves. We lack the ‘intellectual tools’.

At the heart of his analysis is the concept of the ‘market state’, the millennial successor to the nation state.

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