Terror and Consent : The Wars for the Twenty-First Century | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Bobbitt
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 2917
Media: Hardcover
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Pages: 688
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.7
ISBN: 1400042437
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.320973
EAN: 9781400042432
ASIN: 1400042437
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
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Product Description
An urgent reconceptualization of the Wars on Terror from the author of The Shield of Achilles (“magisterial”— The New York Times, “a classic for future generations”—The New York Review of Books). In this book Philip Bobbitt brings together historical, legal, and strategic analyses to understand the idea of a “war on terror.” Does it make sense? What are its historical antecedents? How would such a war be “won”? What are the appropriate doctrines of constitutional and international law for democracies in such a struggle?
He provocatively declares that the United States is the chief cause of global networked terrorism because of overwhelming American strategic dominance. This is not a matter for blame, he insists, but grounds for reflection on basic issues. We have defined the problem of winning the fight against terror in a way that makes the situation virtually impossible to resolve. We need to change our ideas about terrorism, war, and even victory itself.
Bobbitt argues that the United States has ignored the role of law in devising its strategy, with fateful consequences, and has failed to reform law in light of the changed strategic context. Along the way he introduces new ideas and concepts—Parmenides’ Fallacy, the Connectivity Paradox, the market state, and the function of terror as a by-product of globalization—to help us prepare for what may be a decades-long conflict of which the battle against al Qaeda is only the first instance.
At stake is whether we can maintain states of consent in the twenty-first century or whether the dominant constitutional order will be that of states of terror. Challenging, provocative, and insightful, Terror and Consent addresses the deepest themes of governance, liberty, and violence. It will change the way we think about confronting terror—and it will change the way we evaluate public policies in that struggle.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
 Transformational July 13, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Terror and Consent : The Wars for the Twenty-First Century
This book is beyond question the most illuminating discourse on the subject I can imagine. The thinking is clear and yet very expansive and the subject is of urgent concern to every citizen of the world. I believe that only those who are blinded by religiously held preconceptions will fail to be transformed by this amazing book. So many myths with which we pupulate our contemporary thought and discussions are demolished that it would be pointless to list them. It is worth reading all the reviews, as there is a clear trend for the negative review to display firm adherence to some of these myths. I leave it to other readers to judge themselves, but for me, the positives are vast and the negatives are puny jealousies of people who are beyond rational argument.
A feature of the book for me was the outstanding writing. I usually find that reading 700 page books tiresome either because they are repetitious or poorly written or both. This book is neither. The writing is elegant, transparent, communicative, and a joy to read. The editing and organization is outstanding.
I've bought 75 copies of this book and am giving it to people who I think will appreciate, understand and benefit from the concepts argued, and who can do something about spreading this coherent vision to those who need to understand it and apply its wisdom in day-to-day affairs.
 Terror and Consent July 5, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I find Dr. Bobbitt rather wordy and repetitive. He does not clearly (to me) define what a market state is. He doesn't (as far as I know) distinguish a MAJOR difference between the market and nation state: the ability of the nation state to tax. The ramifications of of this oversight could possibly knock down many of the thesis proposed. This my main problem with the book so far.
Outstanding analysis of the relationship between the liberal state and jihadist terror July 4, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent is a big book, enormous in concept, ambition, 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. This brilliant, polymathic book delivers more intellectual punch on the fraught relationship between state and society, terrorism and terrorists, than any book I know. Let me simply adopt Niall Ferguson's judgment, on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, calling Terror and Consent 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."
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." But a problem with much current analysis of terrorism, terrorists, and US responses is that it thinks small. No lack of windy tomes, true, but while much genuinely serious stuff is admirably analytic, breaking matters down into bits and pieces, it seemingly dares not synthesize the bits back into a whole again. Today's most serious efforts tend to avoid anything resembling grand strategy for winning a long-term struggle against terrorists and terrorist organizations, and the states that sponsor and shield them.
Favored instead is the narrowing method of cost benefit analysis and (adopting one version of it) a tendency to favor defensive, protective, immediate measures that are most obviously cost effective. Talk of "victory" or "winning," meanwhile, might be thought to propose 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, and increasingly cannot even bring themselves to identify the terrorists as Islamist, let alone Islamic. Terror and Consent, for its part, is heterodox on a long list of things. Bobbitt thinks the struggle against terrorism is plainly a war, to be called a war, fought as a war, against religiously-driven Islamist ideologues who seek to establish, he says, their vision of the caliphate and which 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.
Regnant 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 as true of the Bush administration as of its leading opponents. What has the Bush administration focused upon, in speech after speech to the public? The imminence of the next attack, and the need to prevent it. One hopes this is mobilizing rhetoric for larger policies against jihadist terrorism, but in considerable part, the uncertain next attack is the focus of policy - a long-term strategy, if one can call it that, even after seven years, of just trying to make it to the next day unscathed.
This is understandable, considering what administration officials see every day in threat assessments. The US attorney general since late 2007, Michael Mukasey, mused publicly how constant and serious the threats against the United States are; despite no successful homeland attacks since 9-11, he is "surprised by how surprised I am." Self-serving administration rhetoric? Perhaps. But despite much discursive rhetoric about long-term policy and the war on terror, much US policy is what, in a strategically informed plan, might well be considered the last defensive perimeters. Airport security, daily monitoring of cell phone traffic, internet analysis in hopes of seeing spikes that might indicate imminent terrorist action, watch lists, and many, many cement barriers. Presumably no one in Britain is reassured by the fact that the Glasgow attack was prevented not by perceptive police work, nimble intelligence agents, deep penetration of homegrown terrorist cells - but simply by a physical barrier at the airport. But perhaps people are comforted; the cement barrier worked, after all, effectively and cost-effectively, while the rest of the counterterrorism apparatus, at enormous absolute and relative cost, did not. Still, these are fundamentally defensive measures aimed at preventing the next attack, counterterrorism in a vital but stiflingly narrow sense. The cost benefit analysis underlying such planning, shaped toward event-specific catastrophism, is necessary and fruitful, but bears little resemblance to planning or conducting a "war" on terrorism or, really, any strategic conceptual response to jihad that goes beyond preventing particular events of uncertain probability and magnitude.
Terror and Consent, by contrast, offers strategic thinking on an unapologetically grand scale. There is nothing minimalist about it. It is synthetic across three large fields: history, law, and strategic international politics. In an age where academic specialization is supreme, Bobbitt's ability to move across fields is bound to annoy narrow disciplinarians - it will seem to some to be a very old-style grand explanation of the kind that academics gave up a couple of generations ago, and they will find particulars to quarrel over. Bobbitt is able not only to range across academic fields, but also 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. Bobbitt understands political theory and he understands the practicalities of governing. Terror and Consent's 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. Sometimes nothing but the large historical scale will do. Why?
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. Readers, in other words, should not be confused wondering why the book seems peculiarly focused on the historical and political theory of the evolving state, rather than narrowly on terrorism today. Bobbitt's deep 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. Once again, 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 tells us, as a deliberate caricature, a kind of rough historical sketch (and picking up the thread of his earlier masterwork, Shield of Achilles), 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 of Westphalian nation-states, and enemies in the wars of the twentieth century nation-states were themselves, by and large, nation-states; even the wars of de-colonialization were fought largely by parties that aspired to the status of nation-states.
Since the end of the Cold War, at least, however, liberal democratic nation-states - what Bobbitt calls "states of consent" - have been moving toward something different from the nation-state, something Bobbitt calls the "market-state." In the market-state, consent becomes less that of the citoyen and much 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, and is both more relaxed about its territorial sovereignty while at the same time 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 toward 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 post-modern but never really modern, and irremediably hostile toward states of consent.
Bobbitt's market-states crucially retain key markers of states. This is not the dissolution of the state, the disaggregation of the state, eagerly awaited by watchful academics of international law, scanning the horizons for the breakdown of state sovereignty and the rise of some form of global governance and so to fulfill, after many heartbreaking centuries, the academicians' utopian, universal, planetary dreams. 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 for security for their citizens. And vice-versa. Indeed, in considerable part because Bobbitt insists on market-states as states, he likewise insists that the response to terrorism is a war on terror. Criminals, yes, but also enemies: 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 nearly Schmittian arguments of permanent emergency displacing the rule of law 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. Bobbitt 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 and many other alterations to existing presumptions of the rule of law. Yet the constitution is no `suicide pact' for Bobbitt - he endorses preemptive detention for terrorist suspects, significant increases in electronic and other surveillance, and coercive techniques short of torture in some circumstances, among other things.
Terror and Consent sharply criticizes the Bush administration for the incompetence of its post-invasion Iraq policy. It 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 (unlike many others following Iraq) in preventative war - he thinks we will need more of it over the long run, not less, because of the nature of terrorist threats. His strategic vision embraces carrying war to an enemy defined as such.
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 eventually 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, treat sunk costs as sunk, cut losses and get out as soon as cost benefit analysis says things are looking dim, look not sentimentally back to the past except as a source of future dividends, coolly calculate anticipated future flows of value, mark to market, and each and every day ask, "But what have you done for me lately?"
Is that really enough? If those are indeed the values that the market carries into the market state, is the market-state sufficiently nurtured by other values to have the will to defend itself as a political community? As consumers and not - in the older sense of the word, at least - citizens? Defend itself as a political community against not only external terrorist enemies, against states of terror, but also to have the courage to defend core internal values, not just of the market, but of liberal democracy - as against those, for example, who would see liberal democracy converted, in the name of multiculturalism, to a form of religious tribalism and religious communalism?
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 demands of communalist, ultimately illiberal, Muslim groups at home; easier to fight wars abroad than to insist at home upon the liberal separation of church and state, mosque and state; insist upon a public sphere that is neutral as between varieties of religion but which insists on the independent values of a liberal society; insist that this means limits, firmly drawn and enforced, to today's tightening ratchet of one-way religious accommodations; and, finally, insist that these limits are integrally part of liberal toleration, a regime of liberal toleration that is a species utterly apart from fashionable and, for liberal values, fatal multiculturalism. Communalism is not liberalism; the religious communalism of the Ottoman Empire was, in its way and time, a relatively humane order, but it was not and never could be liberal. It is, however, the path of least resistance that Britain appears to be taking.
A believer in liberty and consent, I should greatly like to share 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 requiring a vision and courage to stick with it, rather than the cold, reactive calculus of net present value. 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 liberal democracy are both sustained by wells of social capital that stable material prosperity helps 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. Honor, loyalty, sacrifice, courage, 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 seed-corn, devours and uses up today the social capital bequeathed by the past to bless the future. Even after the marvelous argumentation of this marvelous 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 defense of the market-state, states of consent as against states of terror - over the long struggle of years in this twenty-first century, even possible.
Analysis of issues strategic, legal, moral; comprehensive, sober, informed, logical June 28, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Bobbitt follows The Shield of Achilles with Terror and Consent : The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. The Shield of Achilles is a work for the ages; Terror and Consent is a work for our time, seen in the light of the ages.
In the previous book Bobbitt cast new light on the linkage between a State's ways of war and peace and its self-image and history. These evolve together according to a State's needs for survival and the challenges it faces. "The State is born in violence," writes Bobbitt, and the first things it must do are secure a monopoly on internal violence so that it may rule and secure a monopoly on external violence so that it may act strategically towards its ends. He traces the development, from Machiavelli's Italy to the present, of five successive forms of the State and shows that we are in the metamorphosis of a sixth form, the Market State.
In Terror and Consent, he shows that terrorism is also adapting. In each age, the "anti-state" has matched the State's ways and means, but chosen opposite ends. Now, in our heavily networked world, the same world that Thomas Barnett looks to for our salvation (The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century) the terrorists have found their place in the network. Bobbitt takes A. Q. Khan's nuclear proliferation enterprise as an example: Khan provided knowledge and expertise, found subcontractors for materials and equipment, and managed the entire affair for clients just the same way an outsourcing firm might build and manage a data center for a client. Bin Laden built al Qaeda with similiar capabilities, but with a military dimension: the parts have redundancies; they are less dependent on a single point that can be isolated, arrested, or blown up. And, in the age of the Market State, an entity such as Al Qaeda may reside entirely within the geography of other states, making it immune to the traditional tools of statecraft and warfare.
Dealing with these networks has proven difficult for our existing institutions and systems, and as the terrorists get smarter it the difficulties increase. This is a crisis with profound moral, legal, and strategic dimensions, and the dimensions interlock. Worse, we are hamstrung for want of a definition of terrorism that allows us to consider the three together. Bobbitt proposes a definition, then examines the nature and recent history of the problem and its likely solutions. He admits that there is something here to offend everybody, but reminds us that neither the enemy nor the government is the sole threat--real or potential--to our freedoms.
The title, Terror and Consent, refers to the conflict between States based on terror (internal and external) and States based on the consent of the governed and good faith relationship with other states. Bobbitt shows us that to survive in a world filled with geographic and virtual States of terror we must know how we and our enemies understand means and ends. We must change the relationship between Law and Strategy because our enemies attack each one through the other. We must change not just our processes but our entire understanding of the world.
Nor does Bobbitt offer easy solutions. His last full chapter, Triage of Terror, identifies three principle foreign policy goals and shows that they will provide us with a delicate balancing act, since every action we take towards one will probably compromise the other two to a greater or lesser extent. They will also leave us open to charges of inconsistancy in foreign policy and in the Wars against Terror, requiring government and the press to explain seriously what the choices are and what the priorities must be.
The good news is that the USA is uniquely suited to lead the change, and will make things immeasurably better if we do so. Uniquely suited, because we have driven the change to the Market State. Immeasurably better, because if we lead change in the rules instead of ignoring them we will free ourselves of much criticism and distrust. Modern limited sovereignty began with these words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident" and we of the USA still understand it better than anyone else. Now we must understand how we have changed the world, and how we must change the implemention of our principles to match.
This is a deep and comprehensive analysis, not to be read in one evening or even two. Bobbitt achieves what von Clausewitz called critical analysis: he untangles the issues so that each part of the situation can be regarded on its own, and their interactions properly assessed. This is no small achievement; a clear analysis invites critics to advance it, refute it, or find other policies to recommend to answer the need.
In reading other reviews, I feel as if I did not read the same book. People react reflexively and Bobbitt admits that he brings something to upset everyone. Before you respond to your deepest fears, ask whether Bobbitt is calling into question your principles or the legal and strategic ways that we have protected those principles in the world of the past. Bobbitt also admits his party affiliation, which explains what I think unfair blame (in light of his last chapter) of people trying to make the best of a situation that, until now, no one has understood. But this is a dust mote on a great work.
Terror and Consent deserves careful reading by everyone serious about the threats posed by terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, government-caused humanitarian crises (think Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and New Orleans) and the ability of functioning government to survive natural and artifical disaster. The problems won't go away by themselves; they will get worse as our enemies learn and adapt.
You may be sure our enemies will read Terror and Consent.
Provocative and Problematic June 25, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Phillip Bobbitt has a big idea with many consequences. Terror is not just the result of acts of terrorists; it includes the acts of mercenaries, pirates, resistance movements, and Mother Nature (e.g., earthquakes and floods). States are not just nation-states; Al Qaeda is a State. War is not just war; pursuing narcotics traffickers or Terror is also war.
In Terror and Consent, Bobbitt wishes to fundamentally change the way we think about the problem of security in the new century. His prescriptions would have significant impact: changing the balance of powers among the branches of government, extensive "reform" of laws and regulations including more extensive surveillance, modified distinctions between internal and external security, and fundamental changes in the missions and powers of the armed forces. Hence, Bobbitt's arguments warrant close scrutiny.
His big idea is an "impending change in the constitutional order of states" (p544), a transformation of nation-states into market states. Changes in the constitutional order drive changes in globalization and vice-versa. These developments are driving the emergence of a global terror network, which is undermining nation states. If we are not sufficiently proactive in anticipating threats and preparing responses in advance, the parlimentary democratic order we favor may succumb.
Is the constitutional order changing? The strongest evidence for this proposition would have to be the European Union, yet Bobbitt tells us that the US is the leading state advancing the new order. But there have not been wholesale reforms in the US at the level of its formal constitution. The changes have occurred at the more ephemeral level of government policies and regulations. We indeed see the trends collected together in the hypothesis of emerging market-states: the emphasis on international trade, the outsourcing of government, even military functions, and a contested shift from welfare-state security to individual market-based opportunity - grandly, the increasing penetration of capitalist relations into the public sphere.
We also see, however, a push-back against these trends, notably in the drive for national health insurance and rising protectionist sentiment. The 19th century era of laissez-faire trade and migration demonstrates how trends may be reversed. Laissez faire trade peaked around the 1880s; social and economic dislocations provoked a rising recourse to various protections and migration regulations. Trade continued to increase, but with the boundaries of European imperiums as the leading powers raced to acquire colonies to expand their protected markets for labor, raw materials, and finished goods. This reversal of free trade and renewed imperialism should serve as a caution: It is simply too early to predict the triumph of a constitutional order of market states.
How necessary is Bobbitt's big idea to his policy analysis of the implications of Terror and his prescriptions for the Wars against Terror? Bobbitt's key argument is that because of the changing constitutional order we are facing new challenges. Terrorism is no longer the product of nationalist movements; it is international in scope and highly networked. The old ordering of strategy and law, where law concerns internal matters and strategy addresses external challenges, is insufficient for current circumstances. Strategy and law must be reformed to work in concert. Strategy without law de-legitimizes action and prevents the formation of the coalitions necessary to achieve strategic goals. Law without strategy may block effective actions, increasing the damage from terrorism. This in turn de-legitimizes governments unable to provide security.
The spread of WMD is a threat multiplier. Increasing levels of international commerce and communications exacerbate the threat of WMD, providing channels for proliferation which may allow terrorists to acquire these weapons. This undermines the old anti-proliferation strategies of containment and deterence; international-networked terrorism presents no concentrated center of gravity for containment or retribution. This presents a fundamental challenge to states where government is based on the consent of the governed. Terrorist attacks with WMD are likely to lead towards martial law as publics will be willing to sacrifice liberty for security. In Bobbitt's formulation, this is a victory for Terror, for consent, which implies the ability to chose, is precisely the target of terrorists: they do hate us for our freedoms, the choices offered by markets and democracy. Therefore, waiting for attacks before responding will not provide adequate protection for states of consent. Such states must be prepared to act preclusively or even pre-emptively to head off such attacks before they happen.
Bobbitt also adds natural disasters and threats to human rights to the regime of Terror. This is a matter both of legitimacy, i.e., the demand of the public for effective security; and pragmatics: only the military has sufficient forces, resources, and organization to respond effectively to the largest disasters or conduct humanitarian interventions.
Here is an irony: the de-centering of the nation state requires a centralization of powers: Internally, the executive must have increased powers of surveillance and intervention, including the power to deploy the military in anticipation of attacks or in response to disasters. Internationally, the UN, even NATO, diffuse power too much for effective action. We should form a League of Democracies, which if it constrains US actions nevertheless expands the power to intervene where non-conforming states or terrorist virtual states present threats. This League would be essentially a multiple-participant global hegemon. Despite Babbitt's special pleading, I doubt that this hegemon would arouse much less opposition from those states left outside of the club than a unipolar hegemon. How would threatened states desiring to preserve autonomy react? By driving to acquire WMD and supporting terrorist groups whose actions might draw the attention and sap the power of the hegemon, escalating the threat it is supposed to counter?
Bobbitt's calls for a War against Terror, not a struggle under some less dire cover term. Terror threatens the survival of constitutional order as states of consent; where survival is at stake, war is the appropriate response. What are the consequences of declaring war, indefinite in geographic and temporal extension, against a loosely defined enemy?
In a state of war, the president gains wide powers in the role of commander-in-chief. Indeed, George W. Bush sought a war against Iraq from the beginning of his administration, in part because he sought to expand his power to act outside of the checks of Congress and the courts. This is a problem Bobbitt overlooks. If he takes the administration to task for many errors, he assumes that the executive uses its expanded power only to prosecute the Wars against Terror. Declaring a Long War against Terror and centralizing more power in the executive weakens checks on the executive and harms the constitutional order of states of consent that Bobbitt wishes to preserve. Like the Bush administration, Bobbitt tends to exaggerate the threats and discount the importance of non-military responses.
In arguing the need for changes in the law, Bobbitt misrepresents the powers already available under FISA for surveillance, or for police to detain and inspect vehicles suspected of transporting WMD. In affiliating natural disasters to Terror and calling for intervention by the national armed forces, he overlooks the powers of governors to call up military forces under state control - the National Guard. Following Hurricane Katrina, the Bush adminstration withheld aid to New Orleans, attempting to discredit the Democratic governor and to force her to turn over command of the Lousianna National Guard. Power seeks more power, and power corrupts. If the goal is to preserve states of consent - democracies under the rule of law, responses to terror must be more narrowly tailored to the likely threats than Bobbitt's proposals.
Many of Bobbitt's points are well taken, particularly his insistence on combining law and strategy, our interdependence with other states in pursuing security, the need for a clear and coherent doctrine addressing terrorism, WMD, and humanitarian crises, and the need for a broad consensus on the legitimacy of our actions. His big idea adds a richness to his discussion by seeking grounding in historical contexts. Nonetheless, his big idea both overdetermines the unfolding of events and is not very necessary. Consent is necessary for any open state order, market state or nation state. Bobbitt asserts that legitimacy for markets states is particularly vulnerable to the threats of Terror, but offers little supporting evidence. The necessary responses to terror will be similar in either case. Successful responses may indeed forestall the necessity of changes in the constitutional order of nation states.
There are other problems. Bobbitt collapses vital differences between different players and events, leading to their conflation, elevating terrorism, control over WMD proliferation, and natural catastrophe into Terror. Many believe that it is necessary to maintain the kinds of distinctions which Bobbitt collapses in order to tailor more efficient and effective responses to threats at a more appropriate scale of action. Such responses with their smaller scope will generate more narrow opposition, more easily overcome. Divide and conquer - the principle that enabled Great Britain to form a global empire, leveraging its limited resources to exercise effective control over a far larger population. This is the essential element of the recent successes in Iraq, often attributed to the "surge" - recognizing the differences between various resistance, insurgent, and terrorist groups in Iraq, and using them to multiply our ability to project force. If Bobbitt calls attention to some of the failures of the Bush administration in the occupation of Iraq, he hails the doctrine of preclusive intervention, and integrates the conflation of threats into the core of his big idea. The pre-surge strategy in Iraq led to an escalating cycle of violence; we cannot risk applying Bobbitt's similar idea on a global scale.
The big idea of Terror and Consent and many of the arguments are problematic. Bobbitt nevertheless makes many thought-stimulating proposals and sometimes dead-on analysis of particular problems, particularly in his discussions of legitimacy and international law. Bobbitt's work will provoke much comment and debate, and that is to his credit.
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