A manual for our times

This book is so important that I hope the publishers have the civic spirit to send a copy to every parliamentarian, decision-maker and opinion-former in the land. For Philip Bobbitt, the legal and constitutional historian best known for The Shield of Achilles, has drawn nothing less than a philosophical route-map for the war on terror and the geopolitical crisis of the early 21st century. The fact that he has done so in the calm, lucid tones of meticulous scholarship, without recourse to ideology or what Martin Amis would call ‘Westernism’, only adds to the book’s appeal.

Bobbitt, who holds a chair at Columbia University and has served in the White House and on the National Security Council, is resolute about the scale of the challenge. Al Qaeda, he warns, is ‘only a herald’ of worse to come. ‘The developments that empower terror are gaining,’ he writes, ‘as markets increase, as weapons technologies diffuse, as clandestine communications become more effective and infrastructures more fragile — at a faster pace than our defenses, our preemptive strategies, and our legal institutions are adapting.’

He is in no doubt that ‘the wars against 21st-century terror are preclusive in nature; that is, they seek to head off a state of affairs that has the potential to disable consensual governance well in advance of imminent aggression.’ And he is unashamed in his insistence that the United States is ‘the one state capable of leading coalitions to defend us’.

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But Terror and Consent is emphatically not a neo-con tract — nor could it be, given Bobbitt’s convictions, temperament and ancestry (he is Lyndon Johnson’s nephew). Indeed, that is one of the book’s many strengths. It takes as its premise the alarming contention that ‘almost every widely held idea we currently entertain about 21st- century terrorism and its relationship to the wars against terror is wrong and must be thoroughly rethought.’