Philip Bobbitt 's new book "Terror & Consent" reviewed

[emad]

SNIP:
Professor Bobbitt is used to being misunderstood and vilified. A lifelong Democrat and fierce critic of the Bush Administration, he is frequently mistaken for a neocon. His e-mail box is full of hate messages from compatriots accusing him of wanting to tear up the US Constitution, even though the opposite is true. But few policymakers on either side of the Atlantic will be able to ignore his new book, Terror and Consent, even though it arrives just when many were daring to ridicule al-Qaeda and relax about the threat posed by its methods.

In his last book, the bestselling The Shield of Achilles, Professor Bobbitt redefined the post-Cold War nation state as a vastly more complex, fluid and expansive entity that he called the “market state”. This time he posits a more or less permanent state of war between two types of market state – those of consent, where power still flows from the governed and is used to defend their liberal democratic values, and those of terror, where control through fear is both the means and the end of the enemies of consent, be they jihadists or whatever global strain of fundamentalism comes next.

Terror, Professor Bobbitt argues, thrives in precisely the same conditions as consent – namely the blurred national boundaries, globalised economies and internet-linked societies of the early 21st century.

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He is less modest in his diagnosis of the present or prescription for the future. The book lists 22 “widely held” ideas about 21st century terrorism that he says are wrong and must be thoroughly rethought. These include: the notion of the War on Terror as a clash of the medieval and the modern (al-Qaeda is by no means the only adversary, he says, and anyway its methods and vision of a new global Caliphate are “actually quite contemporary”); the idea that intelligence is the key to defeating global terror networks (it is “necessary but not sufficient”, he says, “because intelligence does not provide decisions”); and the view that wars against terrorism have nothing to do with “such state-centric activities as ethnic cleansing and genocide” (states outsource terrorism to groups such as Hezbollah, he notes, and can all too easily become agents of terrorism).

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3994910.ece


THOSE 22 widely held ideas more like Catch 22.