Philip Bobbitt explains in detail his position on torture and terrorism

Will it be smallpox or Spanish flu? A genocidal frenzy or a suitcase-sized nuclear bomb acquired through the Ukrainian mafia and detonated in Manhattan? Will it be al-Qaeda, a successor global terrorism network, or a catastrophic blunder?

The scenarios are at least as apocalyptic as September 11. Each brings massive civilian suffering and an even more widespread climate of fear. In doing so they undermine the very legitimacy of the modern democratic state by exposing its failure to protect its citizens.

Is this really what the future holds for Western civilisation? If we are not very careful – and very proactive in passing laws and building international institutions – it could well be. Such is the bleak forecast of a soft-spoken Texan academic who is also one of the most respected analysts alive of the true nature of terrorism.

Professor Philip Bobbitt, the nephew of Lyndon B. Johnson and a White House insider during the rule of six other US presidents, is an exquisitely gracious host. Along with his sobering world view he offers aperitifs, a light lunch and reassuring small talk about British race relations. (“You don’t have a race problem,” he recalls telling anxious British friends at the time of the Brixton riots. “You have a parking problem.”) He then lights a cigar with a small aluminium blowtorch, and through the smoke insists that he is not out to tell people what to think.

The trouble is, he says: “We’re not thinking [at all]. We’re going off unreflectively with the habits of mind that were quite successful for us in the struggles of the 20th century. Understandably, we are reluctant to abandon those habits. My fear is that it will take some catastrophe to shake us out of our complacency.”

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.

To prevail, therefore, the West’s states of consent need to focus less on specific sources of terror than on their own vulnerabilities. It isn’t doing this yet. As a result, “the developments that empower terror are gaining . . . at a faster pace than our defences . . . are adapting”. We have time to adapt, he says. But how much?

“Less than we think.” In one of two reviews carried by The New York Times, Terror and Consent has been called “the most profound book to have been written on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11”.

A prominent British critic has called it “nothing less than a philosophical route-map for the war on terror” and urged its publisher to send a copy to every MP in Westminster. Tony Blair praises its author on the cover for grasping “the revolution in traditional thinking necessary to achieve victory” and Henry Kissinger ranks the book as “simply indispensable”.

With notices like these, Professor Bobbitt might be forgiven for a certain self-importance. But, greeting The Times at his desirable London bolt-hole (he has others in New York and Austin), he describes himself modestly as a “retrograde Southerner” with his head firmly in the past.

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).

On state-sponsored terrorism, Professor Bobbitt has more than academic knowledge. As an adviser to President Clinton he saw satellite imagery of the effects of Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing efforts in Kosovo, and helped to write the legal justification for military intervention there.

Nine years on he looks with dismay at the suffering in Darfur that continues unchecked by Western hand-wringing: “If [under current law] the United Nations Security Council will allow hundreds of thousands of people to die in Darfur, you need a change in the law.” Law reform is central to the Bobbitt plan for freedom from terror.

Indeed, his faith in law might seem naive but for his starting point – thinly veiled disgust at American legal hypocrisy from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo and beyond.

“When our governments engage in torture or degrading behaviour,” he writes, “they substantiate the charges made against them by those who say ours are the true rogue states, and that the state terror of the US is as much a threat to mankind as the terrorism of al-Qaeda”.

He would outlaw torture, then – but would still condone it in a “ticking bomb” scenario in which a torturer could prove to have saved lives by inflicting deliberate harm on a terrorist with vital, time-sensitive information.

How could a legal system cope with such complexity? At trial. With the right laws, juries would not just acquit justified torturers, “they would raise them to the peerage,” Professor Bobbitt says with absolute conviction. “These people would be heroes.”

Through the cigar smoke, and in imagined prison cells where good people do bad things for good reasons in the confidence that the law will back them in the end, one gets a glimpse of the scope of the new legal and institutional framework that Professor Bobbitt believes we need to defeat modern terrorism. Far from scrapping the Geneva Convention, he would rewrite it. Far from giving up on the International Criminal Court as a forum to try terrorists, he would redefine terrorism to end the deliberate confusion of terrorists and freedom fighters, then hand the ICC a grand new antiterror jurisdiction. Far from letting the UN shrivel, he would rewrite its charter to allow “preclusionary” international intervention in a range of new circumstances, including such disasters as Cyclone Nargis.

For good measure, this tireless optimist would like to see a new global military alliance of democracies to replace the quintessentially regional – and therefore outdated – Nato. He would draw China, India and Brazil into the G8 and create within it an informal “G2” consisting of the US and the EU. Between them, he believes the world’s largest military power and its largest market can beat terrorism, as long as they understand it, adapt to it and work together.

Thinking man

— Adviser to six US presidents including Carter, George H.W. Bush and Clinton

— Framer of legal justification for Nato bombing of Kosovo

— Expert in US constitutional law, which he argues must be revised to win the war on terror

— Last book, The Shield of Achilles, became required reading on the evolution of the nation state over the past 400 years

— Latest book, Terror and Consent, is first academic justification for phrase War on Terror, which he claims is an inevitable result of the modern “market state”

— “He understands that this war is new in every aspect of its nature – how it has come about, the profound threat that it poses . . . and the revolution in traditional thinking necessary to achieve victory” – Tony Blair

— “Perhaps the outstanding political philosopher of our time” – Henry Kissinger

— Professor of Federal Jurisprudence and Director of the Centre for National Security at Columbia University

Source: Times Archives

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