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
