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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.320973
EAN num: 9781400042432
ISBN number: 1400042437
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 688
Printing Date: April 01, 2008
Publishing house: Knopf
Release Date: April 01, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 8759
Studio: Knopf
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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 very 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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Rated by buyers -
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 colour 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 very 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.
Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers -
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 subsequent 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 subsequent 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 subsequent 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 subsequent 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 subsequent 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 ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Bobbitt follows The Shield of Achilles with Terror and Consent : The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. The Shield of Achilles is a work for the ages; Terror and Consent is a work for our time, seen in the light of the ages.
In the previous book Bobbitt cast new light on the linkage between a State's ways of war and peace and its self-image and history. These evolve together according to a State's needs for survival and the challenges it faces. "The State is born in violence," writes Bobbitt, and the very first things it must do are secure a monopoly on internal violence so that it may rule and secure a monopoly on external violence so that it may act strategically towards its ends. He traces the development, from Machiavelli's Italy to the present, of five successive forms of the State and shows that we are in the metamorphosis of a sixth form, the Market State.
In Terror and Consent, he shows that terrorism is also adapting. In each age, the "anti-state" has matched the State's ways and means, but chosen opposite ends. Now, in our heavily networked world, the same world that Thomas Barnett looks to for our salvation (The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century) the terrorists have found their place in the network. Bobbitt takes A. Q. Khan's nuclear proliferation enterprise as an example: Khan provided knowledge and expertise, found subcontractors for materials and equipment, and managed the entire affair for clients just the same way an outsourcing firm might build and manage a data center for a client. Bin Laden built al Qaeda with similiar capabilities, but with a military dimension: the parts have redundancies; they are less dependent on a single point that can be isolated, arrested, or blown up. And, in the age of the Market State, an entity such as Al Qaeda may reside entirely within the geography of other states, making it immune to the traditional tools of statecraft and warfare.
Dealing with these networks has proven difficult for our existing institutions and systems, and as the terrorists get smarter it the difficulties increase. This is a crisis with profound moral, legal, and strategic dimensions, and the dimensions interlock. Worse, we are hamstrung for want of a definition of terrorism that allows us to consider the three together. Bobbitt proposes a definition, then examines the nature and recent history of the problem and its likely solutions. He admits that there is something here to offend everybody, but reminds us that neither the enemy nor the government is the sole threat--real or potential--to our freedoms.
The title, Terror and Consent, refers to the conflict between States based on terror (internal and external) and States based on the consent of the governed and good faith relationship with other states. Bobbitt shows us that to survive in a world filled with geographic and virtual States of terror we must know how we and our enemies understand means and ends. We must change the relationship between Law and Strategy because our enemies attack each one through the other. We must change not just our processes but our entire understanding of the world.
Nor does Bobbitt offer easy solutions. His last full chapter, Triage of Terror, identifies three principle foreign policy goals and shows that they will provide us with a delicate balancing act, since every action we take towards one will probably compromise the other two to a greater or lesser extent. They will also leave us open to charges of inconsistancy in foreign policy and in the Wars against Terror, requiring government and the press to explain seriously what the choices are and what the priorities must be.
The good news is that the USA is uniquely suited to lead the change, and will make things immeasurably better if we do so. Uniquely suited, because we have driven the change to the Market State. Immeasurably better, because if we lead change in the rules instead of ignoring them we will free ourselves of much criticism and distrust. Modern limited sovereignty began with these words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident" and we of the USA still understand it better than anyone else. Now we must understand how we have changed the world, and how we must change the implemention of our principles to match.
This is a deep and comprehensive analysis, not to be read in one evening or even two. Bobbitt achieves what von Clausewitz called critical analysis: he untangles the issues so that each part of the situation can be regarded on its own, and their interactions properly assessed. This is no small achievement; a clear analysis invites critics to advance it, refute it, or find other policies to recommend to answer the need.
In reading other reviews, I feel as if I did not read the same book. People react reflexively and Bobbitt admits that he brings something to upset everyone. Before you respond ... Read More
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