Philip Bobbitt
TERROR AND CONSENT
The wars for the twenty-first century
688pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 0 713 99784 2
Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent is a big book, enormous in concept and
sweep, full of portent for transnational politics in the twenty-first
century. Portentousness in a book can be a good thing, provided it delivers
as promised, and this one delivers more intellectual punch on the fraught
relationships between state and society, terrorism and terrorists, than any
book I know. Not everyone feels this way; one indicator of the book’s
intrinsic interest is the volatility of the reviews. The Economist was
distinctly cool; Bobbitt’s grand ambition, it said, “is confusing, hard to
digest, and perhaps wrong”. Niall Ferguson, on the other hand, recently
called it the “most profound book on the subject of American foreign policy
since the attacks of 9/11 – indeed, since the end of the cold war”.
A problem with much current analysis of this nature is that it thinks small.
Today’s most serious efforts tend to avoid anything resembling a grand
strategy for winning a long-term struggle against terrorists and terrorist
organizations, and the states that sponsor and shield them. Favoured instead
is the narrowing method of cost-benefit analysis and (adopting one version
of it) an endorsement of defensive, immediate measures that are most
obviously cost-effective. Talk of “victory” or “winning”, meanwhile, might
resemble talk of “war” – but these days few dare call it war, at least if
one wants to remain respectable among Western policy, academic and political
elites. Governments shrink back, in fear of precisely the Muslim backlash
their timidity invites. Terror and Consent, for its part, is heterodox on a
long list of things. Bobbitt thinks that the struggle against terrorism is
plainly a war, to be called a war and fought as a war, against religiously
driven Islamist ideologues who seek to establish, he says, their vision of
the caliphate. These figures operate in what he flatly calls “states of
terror” that must be defeated. Nonetheless, changing conditions of
twenty-first-century war, because of changing conditions of the
twenty-first-century state, mean that war is not as it has long been.
Recent approaches to terrorism are driven not just by narrow cost-benefit
analysis, but by a still narrower focus on something we might call
“event-specific catastrophism”: preventing the next attack.
This is understandable for the Bush administration, considering what its
officials see every day in secret threat assessments. The US Attorney
General since late 2007, Michael Mukasey, has mused publicly about how
constant and serious the threats against the US are; despite no successful
homeland attacks since 9/11, he is “surprised by how surprised I am”. This
may well be self-serving administration rhetoric, but much US policy is
based less on “war” than on the last defensive perimeters: airport security,
daily monitoring of cellphone traffic, internet analysis, watch lists, and
many, many cement barriers. This is counterterrorism in a vital but
stiflingly narrow sense. The cost-benefit analysis underlying such planning
bears little resemblance to any strategic conceptual response to jihad that
goes beyond preventing particular events of uncertain probability and
magnitude.
Indeed, since 9/11, the Bush administration has undertaken only one genuinely
strategic gambit – rolling the dice on Iraq and inviting al-Qaeda and other
jihadists to make their stand there. But this is a post-hoc rationale: the
Bush administration obviously undertook the Iraq war on a very different
strategic basis.
The Bush administration’s numerous critics ridicule US counterterrorism policy
in great measure within the same narrow framework that the administration
has used. Sometimes the cost-benefit analysis would scarcely pass muster in
an undergraduate economics class – the political scientist John Mueller, in
his bestselling Overblown (2006), or the journalist James Fallows, each
breezily announcing that the chances of getting killed in a terrorist attack
are less than getting struck by lightning, or that 9/11 killed 3,000 people
whereas 40,000 Americans die each year in automobile accidents and, ergo,
well what? Cost-benefit comparison of opportunity costs makes sense only if
comparing genuinely apposite opportunities. There have been some serious
cost-benefit analyses offered in criticism of US policy. Cass R. Sunstein,
for example, in his impressive, thoughtful Worst-Case Scenarios (2007),
calmly demolished the so-called “One Percent Doctrine” – Vice-President
Cheney’s assertion that even a 1 per cent chance of a catastrophic terrorist
event requires a response as though it were a complete, 100 per cent
certainty. Not even all the instruments of the national will (what President
Bush committed to the fight against terrorism after 9/11) are unlimited.
Choices still have to be made and priorities established and, as Sunstein
observed, preventative actions bring risks of their own.
Nonetheless, even sophisticated analysis takes the prevention of particular
events as the fundamental analytic objective. There is an important
political reason for this. The American public has been gradually
downgrading terrorism as a political priority, even while continuing to say
that it supports serious measures against it. American elites, for their
part, have been sliding to a dismissively contemptuous view that questions
the whole idea of counterterrorism as a serious, large-scale necessity. The
threat is downgraded, deploying cost-benefit-style arguments to call the
administration’s counterterrorism programmes trumped up and exaggerated, and
to suggest that the terrorist threat is quite capable of management without
special military or even extraordinary intelligence measures.
Leaving aside the frequent starting assumption that the Bush administration
has illegitimately grabbed executive power, and that this, rather than
terrorism, is the primary thing against which to protect, the fundamental
factual claim is that the probability of a successful attack has been
seriously exaggerated. How to interpret, in other words, the fact that the
US has not been hit on its territory since 9/11: as evidence of the
effectiveness of the anti-terrorism efforts, or evidence that the threat was
always more chimerical than real? Thus, in Barack Obama’s reckoning,
Islamist terrorism is just one threat among so many: climate change and
poverty, genocide and disease. The task is to learn to do as Western
European countries do, and manage terror and terrorism, preferably within
the existing confines of the criminal justice system. A certain amount of
terrorism is normal, because a certain amount of criminality is normal. Of
course, the strategic circumstances of Western Europe are different from the
US (the threat to Britain, for example, lies mostly within, not without);
and few in the US stop to consider that the European approach is as much a
matter of necessity as strategic preference.
It might make sense to pursue policies that can at least command wide if
shallow support. The kind of fundamental agreement that bound the Cold War’s
“Vital Center” in the US over decades appears not to be forthcoming. Even
so, few will oppose measures narrowly tailored, through recourse to
cost-benefit analysis, towards preventing the next attack. But the
difficulty with this policy minimalism, as Bobbitt has observed, is that
event-specific cost-benefit analysis is “relentlessly tactical”. Even when
not event-specific – even when it takes “Islamist terrorism” as a whole – it
is by its very nature reactive. Cost-benefit analysis does not propose
solutions; it evaluates proposed solutions offered by other processes. It is
not a strategic form of thinking.
Terror and Consent, by contrast, offers strategic thinking on an
unapologetically grand scale. It is synthetic across three large fields:
history, law and strategic international politics. Bobbitt is able to
combine academic and real-world experience – a Democrat by affiliation, he
has served in senior positions in both law and intelligence in the Clinton
and Bush senior administrations. His core insight is that transnational
jihadist terrorism must be understood on the largest historical scale, and
that requires understanding the shifting nature of the state and society in
both the liberal democratic West and the rest of the world. For Bobbitt,
jihadist transnational terrorism gets going by being able to exploit the
interstices of the state system, not just on a geographical basis – the
failed state of Afghanistan, for example – but on a historical basis, as the
nature of the state moves from its incarnation in the twentieth century to
something quite different in the twenty-first. Bobbitt’s main point is that
al-Qaeda terrorism, and what might eventually replace and transform it,
cannot be understood without reference to the state system and its evolution
over a long period of time. This leads Terror and Consent into a long walk
through the history of the state in the West.
Narrow specialists will register many particular objections, and if one
rejects in principle the notion of grand synthetic history, then one’s
reaction will be positively allergic. Bobbitt outlines, as a deliberate
caricature, a kind of rough historical sketch (picking up the thread of his
earlier masterwork, The Shield of Achilles, reviewed in the TLS, June 21,
2002), that the “princely state” system of Europe eventually gave way to the
nation-state system that gradually emerged in the nineteenth and then
dominated the twentieth century. Wars of the twentieth century were wars
between Westphalian nation-states, and enemies in the wars of the twentieth
century nation-states; even the wars of decolonialization were fought
largely by parties that aspired to the status of nation-states. Since the
end of the Cold War, however, liberal democratic nation-states – what
Bobbitt calls “states of consent” – have been moving towards something
different from the nation-state, which Bobbitt calls the “market-state”. In
the market-state, consent becomes less that of the citoyen and more that of
the consumer, for whom the state is a supplier of services. The market-state
itself bears some resemblance to a corporation, outsourcing and privatizing
significant activities; it is more relaxed about its territorial sovereignty
while at the same time being willing to extend its regulatory reach beyond
its borders. Globalization’s increased wealth is one driver of the
market-state, but so is the secular (in both senses of the term) drive of
individuals towards greater individual liberty. “States of consent” contrast
with “states of terror” – the end aim of the transnational, nongovernmental
and, today, Islamist terrorist groups that are also able to grow in the
eco-system of economic globalization and the relaxed conditions of, and
among, market-states. States of terror are the evil twin of the states of
consent – parasitical upon and enabled by the states of consent, at once
pre-modern and postmodern but never really modern, and hostile toward states
of consent.
Bobbitt’s market-states crucially retain key markers of states. This is not
the dissolution of the state. On the contrary, it is precisely because
market-states continue, for Bobbitt, meaningfully to be states that they are
able to have national interests, marshal resources against the states of
terror, and provide security for their citizens. Indeed, because Bobbitt
insists on market-states as states, he likewise insists that the response to
terrorism is a war on terror. These are criminals, yes, but also enemies –
and states make war upon their enemies. War enables forms of strategic
thinking about jihadist terror organizations that neither cost-benefit
analysis nor the legal conception of terrorists purely as criminals allows
as a conceptual frame. The double-sided vision of Bobbitt’s market-state
leads Terror and Consent to a remarkably rich strategic vision of how
concretely to make war against terror, terrorists and violent jihad – a
vision that will make everyone, however, on every side of the strategic
debate, unhappy in some measure.
Law, including international law – the Geneva Conventions, for example – is
crucial. The Bush administration’s forays into arguments of permanent
emergency displacing the rule of law, reminiscent of the political theories
of Carl Schmitt, have been as disastrous as they are wrong. On the other
hand, while deeply respectful of international law, Bobbitt does not think
it – its meaning, interpretation and evolution – lies in the hands of
international-law professors and international bureaucrats. He is a
committed multilateralist, not a purveyor of utopian supranationalism. His
is a nuanced and practical international-law regime gradually shaped by the
practices of states as conditions shift – very much, in fact, the pragmatic
view that the US State Department has held of international law over many
generations. As to domestic law and terrorism, Terror and Consent is, for
example, decisively against Alan Dershowitz’s “special circumstance”
arguments for torture. Yet the constitution is no “suicide pact” for Bobbitt
– he endorses pre-emptive detention for terrorist suspects, significant
increases in electronic and other surveillance, and coercive techniques
short of torture in some circumstances.
He sharply criticizes the Bush administration for the incompetence of its
post-invasion Iraq policy. He observes that many mistakes arose from the
profoundly erroneous belief that this was a war of nation-states in which
the fall of the regime completed things, whereas, in the wars of
market-states and terrorist and insurgent groups, the war was just getting
underway. Yet Bobbitt not only supported the Iraq war, he firmly believes in
preventative war – and he thinks we will need more of it over the long run.
Each bit of this will discomfit someone. But the success of Terror and Consent
as an argument depends largely on whether “market” and “state” can be
corralled together as Bobbitt proposes, or whether, instead, the categories
fly apart. In my estimation, the argument is highly persuasive; its success
as policy in the real world, however, depends upon something different:
whether the market-state partakes of more than simply the ethic of the
market. The logic of the market, after all, is to write off the past as
past, cut losses and get out as soon as cost-benefit analysis says things
are looking dim. Is that really enough? If these are indeed its market
values, is the market-state sufficiently nurtured by other values to have
the will to defend itself? And this defence is not only against external
terrorist enemies, but against those, for example, who would see liberal
democracy converted, in the name of multiculturalism, to a form of religious
tribalism. George W. Bush and Tony Blair have found it weirdly easier, after
all, to send whole armies to fight in faraway places than ever to say no to
the demands of communalist, ultimately illiberal, Muslim groups at home.
As a believer in liberty and consent, I should greatly like to share Philip
Bobbitt’s hopes for the market-state. It does not take a conservative to
wonder, however, whether this is enough to sustain liberal democracy in the
face of spiritual threats. A long tradition of what Lawrence Solum has
called the “left Burkeans” – Christopher Lasch, for example, or Zygmunt
Bauman – has argued that the market is as much socially corrosive of the values
of liberal democracy as it is materially supportive. The market and
democracy are both sustained by wells of social capital that stable material
prosperity helps to deepen, but which are not the moral logic of the market
itself.
The market of the market-state is not self-sustaining. On the contrary, it
requires a form of social life that goes outside it in order to function in
the long term. Honour, loyalty, sacrifice, gratitude to those who came
before – these are not the evident virtues of capitalism, but they are
necessary virtues in a liberal-democratic-capitalist form of life. Without
them, society eats its seedcorn, the social capital bequeathed by the past
to bless the future. Even after the marvellous argumentation of this
marvellous book, therefore, room remains to question whether the
market-state pays sufficient attention to the spiritual habits of the heart
that make the market-state – and the willing defence of states of consent
against states of terror – over the long struggle of years in this
twenty-first century even possible.
Kenneth Anderson teaches law at American University, Washington DC. He
is a Research Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a
member of its task force on national security and law.
There are no ‘goodies’ in the Georgia conflict
