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Whistle Stopper - Terror and Consent : The Wars for the Twenty-First Century
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Manufacturer: Knopf
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.320973
EAN: 9781400042432
ISBN: 1400042437
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 688
Publication Date: 2008-04-01
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: 2008-04-01
Studio: Knopf
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Many interesting arguments for the open minded
Comment: As opposed to assumptions, prejudices and irrationality, well argued and well referenced. He analyses the "whirlpool of reasoning" surrounding the "terrorism" threat. Interesting information supporting the arguments places the work in context for the 21st century - eg, the US National Security Agency estimated that by the end of 2007 the Internet carried 647 petabytes a day (the entire Library of Congress 130 million items including 30 million books, represent only .02 petabytes) (p.314). We are now in a new world order which has arisen out of globalization which demands a new co-operation between States of Consent in order to combat terrorism. Such co-operation is being called for now by advanced economies to address the financial crisis sweeping the world, though some commentators have noted Islamic banks are less at threat than most as they have not indulged in wild lending practices common to the USA. The military now will play complex roles combining greater skills of individual soldiers with those normally associated with policing in urban centres. National identity cards will be normal. Counter insurgency operations will be common cf General Petraeus. New laws will be required, international. Digital data mining will be undertaken by agencies. Agencies must co-operate. Established academics will be sought over new graduates for intelligence analyses. In short, and I hate to use this cliche, but it is THOUGHT PROVOKING. Worth a read.
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Summary: bordering on fraudulent
Comment: well, not this book actually, but a related book by Parag Khanna titled The Second World.
Some of the various, and numerous, factual errors that riddle the book are relatively trivial, but suggest serious sloppiness and disregard for getting facts right. For example, Yugoslavia was not part of Warsaw pact, as Khanna states. Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov was appointed to office in 1992 by Boris Yeltsin, and not by Vladimir Putin. Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia and Albania are not all smaller by population than Manhattan, and the death toll from the civil wars in former Yugoslavia was not greater than half a million. Other obviously wrong assertions seem to be made up simply to provide lurid background color to Khanna's travelogue: the former KGB headquarters in Moscow has not been turned into "a high-class disco," expensive Moscow malls do not charge entrance fees, and police road checkpoints in Uzbekistan do not stop and check all vehicles. And other gross misstatements of fact display a simple complete lack of understanding the history and culture of the countries of which he writes: the (Orthodox) Uspenky cave monastery in Crimea is not representative of Ukraine's "proud Catholic heritage," Zoran Djindjic was not the first democratically elected leader since World War II in former Yugoslavia , and in the 1980s Yugoslav republics like Bosnia and Macedonia were not richer than Spain. Many of Khanna's wildly wrong claims sound like local myths that he has taken at face value. I can easily imagine some misguided elderly Belgrade resident waxing nostalgically for the days "when every one of our republics was richer than Spain!"
Yet more of Khanna's assertions are not merely factually wrong, but far exceed the ludicrous. In the fast paced and dangerous Russian business world, "one is safe only in the sauna, where everyone is naked and no weapons are allowed." It was news to me to learn from Khanna that every winter "waves" of Russians and "thousands of Ukrainians" freeze to death in "crumbling heatless apartment blocks." And he employs gross mischaracterizations of fact to buttress his claims. For example, according to Khanna, in 2006 Greek GDP increased 25% when the government started to account for prostitution and cigarette smuggling in its figures. In fact, the government said it would include all unreported economic activity, mostly in construction and trade, but including a "small" amount for illegal activities such as smuggling. And this is merely a sampling of patently ridiculous claims.
And for a "foreign policy whiz-kid," Khanna makes numerous and serious analytical mistakes, showing a clear misunderstanding of economics, international institutions, and international relations. The unhedged statement, "Russia's diplomatic position is purely residual," will surely surprise diplomats from Brussels to Tokyo. Noting that Gazprom's market capitalization is $300 billion leads Khanna to the conclusion that Gazprom is one third of the Russian economy, confusing market capitalization with GDP. And his bald assertion that "[n]one of Central Asian legal systems have evolved beyond Kakfaaesque" is belied by the numerous successful legislative accomplishments of Kazakhstan and its quite sophisticated legal code, for example.
But the worst moments of Khanna's book are when he quotes conversations that seem of such dubious authenticity as to make me believe they may be fabricated, or at best the result of very selective reporting, only relating those comments that fit within his pre-existing views. "'Our pride has suffered'" explains a "Moscow intellectual over a narrow glass of [of course] ice-chilled vodka, `but this only drives our nationalism further.'" In Kiev, the locals "give lifts to strangers for a token fare." Why? "We suffered enough together, so we still trust each other." There are just too many such (anonymous) quotations that fail to ring true to trust in the author's integrity. And he also reports statements by national leaders as if they were heard in personal conversation, yet in a curiously indirect fashion that suggests otherwise.
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Summary: Transformational
Comment: 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.
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Summary: Terror and Consent
Comment: 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.
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Summary: Outstanding analysis of the relationship between the liberal state and jihadist terror
Comment: 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.
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Editorial Reviews:
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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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