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Terror and Consent : The Wars for the Twenty-First Century

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Since the time of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), the nation state has been viewed as a "sovereign entity," designed to protect and promote the general welfare of its citizens. Now, according to Philip Bobbitt, in the age of globalization, this sovereign entity is becoming increasingly "porous." As nation states integrate into the global economy, the constitutional foundations dedicated to protecting their rights and liberties are no longer adequate. The new entity that is emerging is what Bobbitt calls the "market state," a term he borrows from a previous work, The Shield of Achilles, in which he traced the evolution of the nation state.

This new market state Bobbitt describes is no longer confined to a sovereign territory, it is a decentralized and privatized network of relationships. It has all the characteristics of a multinational corporation and it treats its citizens much like a consumers. The market state has many upsides in that it presents its citizens with unprecedented freedoms and opportunities.

This book, however, is about the downside of the market state and the opportunities it provides terrorists. Today's terrorist networks are a byproduct of the market state, indeed they are an opportunistic parasite of the market state. They harness its technology and networks to wage war against it.

Bobbitt is not a neoconservative, he is a law professor who sees the need for a new constitutional order that reflects the needs of this new market state. Although he supported the war in Iraq, he now emphasizes the need for stronger international alliances and a "commitment to globalize the systems of human rights and government by consent." In other words, market states must collectively protect human rights and liberties.

On the counterterrorism side, Bobbitt calls for more invasive intelligence gathering, not only domestically but across national borders. Something along the lines of the Total Information Awareness program. He also calls for "preclusive" actions on the part of governments. Containment and deterrence are no longer adequate since terrorists now have access to weapons of mass destruction; they must be neutralized before they act. In short, terrorism must be fought more aggressively without undermining fundamental human rights and within the framework of international alliances.

This is a very well-researched and very well-argued work on how to fight terrorism in the 21st century. Bobbitt concludes that there is something in his proposals to offend everyone. Liberals will not like his call for preclusive actions by the governments and conservatives will not like his call to abide by some international standards. Achieving a so-called state of consent is already difficult in theory, it will be even more so in practice.

The work is sophisticated and explores, among other things, how strategy must align with the rule of law if our policies on terror are to succeed. This is a good read and well ahead of the proverbial curve. You will see the themes of this book, again and again, in the popular literature on terrorism. Enjoy!

In the first page, Professor Bobbitt introduces a broad definition of terror which includes the socially debilitating effects of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, as well as man-made disasters, including terrorism and human rights violations. This is both an accurate and elegant definition - it encompasses things that diminish the human condition; and it is a practical definition in an age of transnational threats where multi-lateral action is a necessity. "We are fighting terror, not just terrorists." I like that.

Yet how does a state effectively and legitimately pursue such policies and enact such cooperation? This question inevitably raises strategic and constitutional issues.

Professor Bobbitt's approach compels a reexamination of strategy, which includes how we organize our resources and conceptualize intervention - peaceful or otherwise - in the highly complex and uncertain environment of the 21st century. And here he makes the case that the alignment of strategy with law is absolutely essential. Our response to terror must be from the legal high ground; which, one hopes, also corresponds to the moral high ground.

I especially liked his detailed discussion of bio-terrorism and the detailed rebuttal to the International Institute for Strategic Studies Adelphi Paper - Nuclear Terrorism After 9/11. This, in conjunction with the background surrounding the A. H. Khan nuclear proliferation network, drives home the importance of a sound and multi-dimensional response to the proliferation of WMDs. Bobbitt draws on the likes of Brian Jenkins, Mary Kaldor, and Sir Michael Howard to both sustain his points and provoke argument. This is good stuff!

I have touched on one element in this brief review. There are numerous theoretical forays in this book that is rich with historical detail and anecdote, as well as legal and policy theory...much more than can be adequately summarized in a few paragraphs.

One should never judge a book by its cover; however, one can judge the credibility of the message and that of its author by looking at the citations in the back of the book. Professor Bobbitt is meticulous. There are over 100 pages of detailed footnotes; and in the text, there are often 5 or 6 citations per page! This detail is invaluable in providing a deeper and more contextually rich background to the text. Compare this level of professionalism with some of the popular literature on terrorism that, if the author is an especially generous mood, has 12 or so footnotes per Chapter.

Professor Bobbitt is "the best of the best." His work demonstrates an intellectual tradition the hallmark of which is well reasoned argument supported by detailed references and intellectual rigor. Why would you settle for anything less?

Bobbitt graciously sent me a pre-production copy of this book. Unfortunately, the book is a complex and legalistic edifice based on several flawed assumptions.

To save you the time required to read it. Here's a synopsis.

The premise of the book is that we are in the midst of a transition to a market-based global order. This means that the nation-state (and even the entire notion of public governance) will be replaced by corporate surrogates (via outsourcing) operating on a global level. The basis for the legitimacy of this new order will be that it offers individuals more choices than ever before (the political parallel to a fully stocked supermarket). However, its emergence will be at the expense of minimal safety nets and communitarian efforts.

The enemy of this newly emerging market-based system, and the main focus of this book, are (naturally) terrorists. Terrorists, Bobbitt claims, fight us because they hate the choices provided to us by this emerging market-world.

The way they fight us is by limiting our choices through terror. Terror, in this context, is essentially theater. In this theater, disgruntled people (Islamic terrorists and beyond) will use the threat of flamboyant attacks to limit the choices offered by the market-world. Since the market-state will continue to produce ever greater levels of choice to an ever greater number of people, this clash is inevitable. Therefore, our societal objective is to harden ourselves (through smart legal maneuvers and investments in infrastructure) to limit the the levels of terror that can be produced by our opponents. By doing this, we can buy time as the market-world continues to expand to ever greater numbers of people.

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I was hopeful that Bobbitt would approach terrorism in a more nuanced way than merely through the lens of the prevailing narrative fallacy (for example: "The Looming Tower"). Unfortunately, he didn't and his depiction of terrorism is merely as a means for disgruntled groups to negate choice (a variant of Bush's "they hate us for our freedoms").

A more complex and realistic view of terrorism is to approach it as illegal warfare directed against civilians. This warfare also has more complex objectives that merely limiting choices through the production of terror. In many cases, it advances the groups that conduct it economically, socially, etc. (usually at the expense of state competitors). For example: Nigeria's MEND, Brazil's PCC, Mexico's Cartels/Zetas, Lebanon's Hezbollah, Colombia's FARC, Peru's Sendero Luminoso and most of the groups in Iraq/Afghanistan (who advance through smuggling/corruption/etc.). Unfortunately, Bobbitt didn't deviate from the simplistic view of terrorism and his book suffers mightily from the result.

I also have a problem with the market-state and market-world construct. First, it's vague. Second, it is potentially ruinous. While choices may be available, it says nothing of your ability (your means) to exercise those choices. Who cares if the supermarket offers unlimited choice if you can't afford anything but the generics? It's very likely a market-state would reduce human worth to a mere economic value at the cost of the bonds that hold us together as a community. Perversely, this would serve to create the very violent groups that use terrorism to advance their own economic/social level, since no other values have any power to mitigate/dissuade an impulse to violence. In short, Bobbitt's market-state, a society legitimized by "choice" alone, is insufficiently credible as something we should a) help emerge and b) defend.

Hope this helps.

John Robb, author of:
Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization

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.

The study of terrorism as both a reality and as a philosophy has generated a voluminous literature in the past decade, most of this no doubt because of the terrorist attacks against the United States in 2001. Whenever a country like the United States is victim to an attack, whether it is classified as terrorism or not, it is safe to say that a lot of grandiose rhetoric, patriotic fervor, and an excess of moralizing will result. Such activities may serve as a catharsis, but in the long run one needs an intelligent, rational discussion of terrorism, so as to discover which institutional and individual changes must be made in order to deal with it effectively. And when entering into this discussion, one must be prepared to examine the evidence and arguments carefully, and be willing to put aside to the best of one's ability, the extreme biases that can arise in legal and political dialog. Lastly, whatever methodology one agrees upon for dealing with terrorism, one must be willing to get actively involved in the realization of this methodology. This means that one must not assume this burden will be taken on by someone else, and excuse oneself from military conflict if such does arise.

In this lengthy book, which must be studied in-depth in order to give it a fair analysis, the author indulges the reader in such a rational discussion. It is perhaps better appreciated if the reader is familiar with the author's earlier works, but he does give enough background so that the book can be studied independently of these. Many of the author's recommendations and analysis will no doubt provoke many readers to anger , but if such readers can work through their emotions they may find that the author has a great deal to offer when it comes to dealing with one of the most important issues in the twenty-first century. But although the discussions are keen on rationality, the author fails to confront the personal obligations that everyone faces when confronting the "war on terror", for he does not address the question as to who is to be involved in actual combat. Nowhere in this book does he discuss the reasons as to why he excuses himself from participating in the fighting.

For this reviewer, one of the most mistaken and dangerous perceptions of government is that it is responsible for protecting the populace from crime rather than merely being responsible for the apprehension of criminals and their punishment. In order to protect a citizen from criminal or violent acts the state must have knowledge that such acts are going to occur. Since such foreknowledge is impossible, the state must rely on intelligence estimates and probabilistic assessments, forcing it to become a surveillance state with all its attending dangers and threats to privacy and civil liberties.

But the author argues throughout the book that this kind of activity is just what is necessary to fight the "war on terror". But most importantly, he believes that this activity will be tolerated by the general populace since we are entering a world of the "market states." The market state is to be distinguished from the "nation state" of the twentieth century by its emphasis on insuring that its citizens have the empowerment they need to pursue their economic and personal interests. On the surface this sounds good, but it makes the implicit assumption that citizens will be willing to be servile to a degree that they will enjoy living under the protectionist umbrella of what could accurately be called a "nanny state." But there seems to be strong libertarian undercurrents in the political situation at the present time, and these trends may prohibit the "market state" of the author from being realized as he describes it.

From a study of the book, particularly the discussions on American constitutional and international law, it is fair to say that the author is advocating a new world order. Since change is what the twenty-first century is all about, one must not be frightened at the prospect of changes in domestic and governmental institutions. But any changes that are going to be made must be measured against the degree of the threat they are designed to deal with. The author underestimates the resilience and fortitude of the general citizen, and overestimates the ability of terrorism to bring this same populace to its knees. In addition, he undervalues the importance of technology in negating the terrorist threat. Yes, terrorist use of biotechnology is something of great concern, but any bio-weapons the terrorist might use could be made ineffective by bio-countermeasures. Developing these bio-countermeasures should be part of the "war on terror" as well as countermeasures to other types of weapons of mass destruction.

The author also does not emphasize the power of education in assisting the general citizen in dealing with perceived and actual terrorism. A populace that is "terrorist-aware" and cognizant of the terrorist exploitation of psychological impact will be able to deal effectively with a realized terrorist attack, remain relatively calm, and not allow terrorists to dictate their attitudes and emotions. The same could be said for the media, which are the targets of a lot of criticism from the author in this book, some of this justified. A responsible media, trained according to sound journalistic ethics, would not deliberately or inadvertently hype up a terrorist event, satisfying the terrorist craving for attention--just think of the ramifications if the press and all governmental representatives would have been completely silent after 9/11. The supporters of the 9/11 attacks would no doubt have felt cheated and extremely disturbed as to what the next move the American government was going to be. Such silence could be an effective use of psychological warfare against the terrorists.

But along with articulating ideas that could be highly effective in fighting the war on terror, the author also makes some statements that are definitely outlandish. For instance, he refers to the doctrine of deterrence during the cold war as a "brilliant intellectual achievement", forgetting that it does not take the decisions of people to trigger a catastrophic nuclear war; technology mishaps such as false alarms can do the same. He also refers to the immoral American participation in World War I as the "most selfless international intervention by a major power", forgetting the horror it brought to soldiers and their families. Wilson and the American government were definitely wrong in getting involved in that war, and Wilson's pronouncement that Americans needed a "serious moral adventure" has to rank as one of the most outlandish in all of American history, even if compared to the many statements one hears from the current American regime.

But the author has many interesting ideas, and this work deserves serious consideration from those who are concerned with the evolution of the legal structures, both domestic and international, that need to be put in place to fight a successful war on terror. The author's outlines new conceptions of state sovereignty and takes on the topic of torture without reservation. And such legal structures are part of a classical optimization game, in that the privacies and rights of every world citizen must be respected while at the same time still being successful militarily. But when the citizens of the world decide to make changes in legal frameworks to fight the war on terror, they need to remember that inkblots on paper do not fight such a war. People do. And participation from everyone in this war must follow immediately once the decision has been made as to its necessity.

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.

In Phillip Bobbitt's book, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century, he argues that we are in a new world reality. Where the major American challenge of the twentieth century was to defeat our enemies (fascism, communism, totalitarianism) without taking on their characteristics, a fundamental problem now is confronting the challenges of terror while simultaneously maintaining "official accountability in the face of largely hypothetical threats that require anticipatory action based on secret intelligence."

In other words, we must structure governmental forms and policies that effectively gather, analyze and act on secret information, and find ways to keep those who know the secrets from using them in a way that reduces freedom.

It is no overstatement to stay that this is a huge challenge.

The American framers created, through the U.S. Constitution, a system where all power was separated, checked, and balanced. The state powers were separated, checked and balanced by federal powers and the federal by state powers. Executive, legislative and judicial powers were separated at both levels and they in turn checked and balanced each other. Hopefully, any high school student can explain this. What is often forgotten, however, is that these types of checks were "auxiliary," as the Federalist Papers put it. Not auxiliary as in unnecessary, but auxiliary as in secondary, vital backups. The real check was the on-going vigilance of the people.

This worked incredibly well from at least 1789 to 1955, empowering government to fulfill its role in protecting the nation while at the same time keeping government from attacking the freedoms of its citizens---like nearly all governments in history. Then in 1955 the Soviet Union began building its atomic arsenal, and the Cold War turned governments even more toward secrecy. If that secrecy now has to monitor the whole globe, seeking out threats and responding before a terrorist strike, how can we possibly stop a massive reduction of privacy and freedom?

Bobbitt goes on to discuss the danger that in responding to the terrorist threat we are in danger of adopting the belief that "the ends justify the means." He discusses both sides of this idea, and suggests that we are fighting for the rule of law and had better be sure that this fight doesn't compromise our ability to defend ourselves.

This is bigger than most people consider, and the easy answers aren't good enough. On one extreme, the idea is that whatever it takes to maintain our defense is good---even if that means reduced freedom and a secret government. At the other extreme, the argument is that we should get rid of any and all secrecy and just let the government decide under the original constitutional rules---even though terrorists will strike before we can respond. There are many mid-road arguments; such as declaring war officially on terrorism and responding to it through military channels.

I think what we really need is for this discussion to be wide-spread. I hope you'll read Bobbitt's book and really think about it. And I hope you'll re-read the Constitution and The Federalist Papers and really think about them. Then I hope you'll go a step further. Terrorism is a threat. A secretive government is a huge threat. What should we do? Seriously, what would Washington do, or Jefferson? We need leaders like them today. And the only way we'll get them is if regular citizens really think about those things and share their conclusions.

`Terror and Consent' deserves high praise for both insight and thoroughness. The insights are of an analytical rather than a revelatory kind. It might be true to say that any intelligent citizen given enough time could have come up with many of the better perceptions in the book, but it is certainly true that not many analysts would have been capable of the sustained concentration that we find here. If it is clarity, mental honesty and detachment that you are looking for in trying to sort out this abominable tangle of a topic, I have yet to see these qualities better combined between the covers of a book.

What the work mainly needs, in my opinion, is pruning. Bobbitt has valuable things to say about more topics than really belong together without risking incoherency. A `war on terror' may be metonymy for a `war on terrorism'. It may also validly signify a strategy for coping with natural disasters, but it would have been better to separate the two issues. In fact I would say in general that the thoughts and insights are better than their presentation and expression, although the actual writing is of high quality - articulate, literate and easy to read. The other difficulty that I found concerned some of the basic terms and expressions that underlie Bobbitt's thinking. `Market State' must be a term that enjoys currency among academics, and if so one can go along with it. However Bobbitt labours it in a way that suggests that he thinks we need convincing of its real value, as probably we do. Also, in trying to reinforce it Bobbitt spoils his exposition by talking about `market state terrorism', an expression that surely conveys nothing to anyone. To me, the real point to be made is that terrorists, unlike generals and political leaders, fight today's battle and not yesterday's, so if the current establishment that they wish to attack is some `market state', then a market state is what they will attack, not because it is a market state but because it is what is there to be attacked.

I am certainly convinced by the proposition that these days nations and states are not synonymous entities, insofar as they ever were. The modern battle with terrorism is obviously more a conflict between cultures than between states and `nations' in the old senses. Bobbitt is interesting, illuminating and quite subtle in picking his way carefully through the ambiguities that the whole situation is replete with. I felt nevertheless that he slightly fluffs a good opportunity when dealing with the notion of state terrorism. It is perfectly true, of course, that a state like the former East Germany which treats its own population as its own enemies is a terror state by definition. However that is (intellectually at least) a simple case. What I was hoping for from a thinker of Bobbitt's calibre was some firm and authoritative handling of the deplorably vague but extremely emotive, misleading and dangerous notions surrounding supposed `state sponsorship' of terrorism, together with the even more nebulous and easily abused concept of `sympathising' with terrorism or terrorists. Sympathising is, on its own, a difficult enough idea, but sympathising with terrorism is not the same thing as sympathising with terrorists, and the whole field is fertile with opportunities to muddy matters further by shortening either of these words into `terror'.

It is in the nature of the case that any thoughtful reader is going to jib at some of the points aired in a book of this kind. I felt that section II had a rather hand-wringing feel about it of `Something Must Be Done'. Again, I felt that the chaos and slaughter in Iraq that Bobbitt ascribes, perhaps a little carelessly, to terrorist `strategy' is not strategy but just the nature of the fissiparous and factional Iraqi society asserting itself in what passes for its `natural' way. However I would rate the better insights as far more important. It is absolutely true, for instance, and if it was not clear before it ought to be clear now, that the establishment of civic order is a higher and more urgent priority than the wretched campaign for Demoxy an' Freem that so drove Mr Bush's brainwashed administration. And it is if possible even truer that `the question whether it is wise to invade becomes easy to answer: it is never wise to commence an anticipatory war that is lost.'

When I first read this book I would have reviewed it differently because at that time the expression `War on Terror' was still current. It seems now to be an embarrassment, and so I hope that we and our leaders do not lose sight of some important truths that the expression embodied. In his characteristic way Professor Bobbitt takes us methodically through the various things that such an expression may denote. He might have been better and clearer if he had simply appealed to the man in the street's ordinary way of using such a term and built his alternatives around that. On the other hand, if he is right in his claim that the fault lay with pedantic and legalistic casuistry in Washington when the issue was first sidelined by the DoD and then viewed by them mistakenly as a police operation, then we should treat his corrective linguistic analysis with the respect it deserves. That error may have cost us dearly already.

This dense text reminds me of political science books in college. It uses a historical context of governments, and compares how wars were fought as governments evolved. During this evolution, the methods of war have shifted, and those that adapt quickly fare much better.

Although much of the book focuses on Al Qaeda, the principles apply to any broad terror organization - many of which are likely to form in the next century. In the same way that conventional forces became an ineffective tool against low-intensity conflict, the new war on terror requires a different tool-set than prior wars. The old doctrines of conflict do not work against an enemy that has no capital, no obvious center of center of mass, or sometimes not even a known identity. Surviving this foe requires new doctrine and philosophy. This enemy cannot be stopped by sending in bombers or divisions of infantry. Bobbitt proposes a myriad of changes to our legal system to fight internal threats and new international law to collectively oppose threats beyond our border. He also suggests that we need a new focus on our "war objectives", and must focus more on international diplomacy.

One factor that made the book very persuasive was the ever-present focus on the rule of law, which is a manifestation of a government of consent. What is the difference between an oppressive government versus a government of consent? Abiding by the rule of law presents all sorts of challenges to governments, but is also the greatest identifier of legitimate governments. The focus on political philosophy and the legitimate means of winning future wars on terror made this book the most significant forward-looking book I have read in the last decade.

Recent events have highlighted some other ideas of his. Some of the same tools that combat terrorism also provide relief from natural disasters. An earthquake in Haiti leaves millions homeless and without food or water. Rioting and lawlessness cause as much damage as the original earthquake. Hurricane Katrina had a similar pattern, and one might expect similar problems to a very successful attack. If a major city were hit by a nuclear weapon or biological infection, an inability to quickly restore order and aid the survivors makes the aftermath far worse than what was caused by the initial attack/natural disaster. I wish Bobbitt were a policy creator for the DoD and Homeland security - his analysis and "plague treatise" explaining what we must do is far more coherent and practical than anything I have seen issues by the U.S. government.

Philip Bobbitt's "Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century" is an especially provocative, powerfully-argued manifesto that can be seen as a "prescription" for waging the ongoing war against Islamofascist terror. As such, it is definitely a book that should be required reading by diplomats, bureaucrats, intelligence analysts and others who are actively engaged in charting our present and future course in this war which we have been waging long before the deadly terrorist attacks of 9/11/01. But is it one that will ultimately be persuasive to a broader public readership? Not likely, unless the audience which Bobbitt seeks is one that is reasonably well educated in both international law and the development of empires and nation states during the past few centuries. If I - as someone unfamiliar with international law - can view aspects of Bobbitt's discussion of terrorism as being overly naive and simplistic, especially in neglecting the important, detrimental impact that terrorism has had against civilian populations, it is reasonable to wonder what his learned colleagues well versed in international law and terrorism might conclude. For Bobbitt is arguing here for a two-track course of diplomacy with regards to building "coalitions" with other nations threatened by terrorism and for a far more aggressive belligerency against terrorists (and states which sponsor terrorism) than anyone in the current or relatively recent United States presidential administrations would regard as reasonable. It's a two-track strategy that many will perceive rightly as quite provocative.