Philip Bobbitt's "New Rules of Engagement"

Philip Chase Bobbitt

(Image from Wikipedia)

Readers may recall that I posted several entries on Philip Bobbitt over a year ago when I was reading his book Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century. One of the central points of that work was that the war on terror needs to be pursued on a new legal basis rather than the extrajudicial basis generally favored by the Bush administration.

Bobbitt makes the same point in a recent Newsweek article, "The New Rules of Engagement" (January 2, 2010), and expresses the point in a pithy manner: "what we are fighting for in the wars on terror is precisely the rule of law." This point comes as part of a more extensive argument, which I quote:

Bush and Cheney were not wrong to conclude after 9/11 that the existing statutory framework for dealing with terrorism was outmoded -- it was. But rather than changing the laws, they refused to ask Congress for authorization to intercept communications linked to suspected terrorists without seeking warrants. They refused to seek statutory authority for preventive detentions (that was the point of going offshore to Guantánamo, where they thought a habeas-corpus-free zone could be created). They stripped military commissions of the protections recommended by a panel they had convened. In all these decisions, they kicked away the essential support of laws from their efforts and ended up being condemned by allies, handing terrorists a propaganda victory and having their policies repudiated by the American people. They carelessly invited the prosecution of loyal and earnest U.S. personnel whom they directed and refused to pardon for crimes.

And yet, in Talleyrand's famous phrase, their actions were worse than crimes: they were mistakes. That is because what we are fighting for in the wars on terror is precisely the rule of law. Thus, as British Gen. Sir Rupert Smith observed, "to operate tactically outside the law is to attack one's own war aim."

It is often asked, "How can we win a war against terror? Who would surrender? How can we make war against an emotion (terror) or a guerrilla technique (terrorism), neither of which are enemy states?" These questions assume that victory in war is simply a matter of defeating the enemy. In fact, that may be the criterion for winning in football or chess, but not warfare. Victory in war is a matter of achieving the war aim. The war aim in a war against terror is not territory, or access to resources, or conversion to our political way of life. It is the protection of civilians within the rule of law. Not coincidentally, this is what General Petraeus realized was necessary in Iraq, and it is what General McChrystal has testified will be his goal in Afghanistan.

If the laws are inadequate, then they must be reformed to take account of the new strategic context rather than be ignored or twisted. Failing to do this traps us in the Cheney/ACLU world, in which we either act lawlessly to protect our people and thus turn every success into failure, or we await the next attack with the very practices and rules that invited the last one. When Obama promised in his speech at the National Archives to go to Congress for new statutory counterterror authorities, he made a decision as important strategically as it was constitutionally.

Bobbitt goes on to make a number of suggestions -- he calls them "nine imperatives" -- but interested readers can go to the website and read these for themselves, along with the entire article. I won't say much on this article itself since Bobbitt makes his points well, but I do have a query. He says that our war aim is "is the protection of civilians within the rule of law," and he adds that "this is what General Petraeus realized was necessary in Iraq, and it is what General McChrystal has testified will be his goal in Afghanistan."

But what is the "rule of law" in a sense that applies to the US, Iraq, and Afghanistan? The concept of the rule of law seems to be one developed in the West, so I wonder how well it fits Iraq and Afghanistan. Aren't we, rather, aiming to restore order to those two places and thereby enabling them to apply their own customary 'laws'? Is rule by Pashtunwali, for example, rule of law? Or would we be satisfied if the Taliban retook Afghanistan and applied its extreme form of shariah while forswearing terrorism?

In short, while I understand what Bobbitt means by "rule of law" as our war aim in domestic terms, I'm less sure what it means in Iraq and Afghanistan.

National Sovereignty and the "Responsibility to Protect"

Gareth Evans
President and CEO
International Crisis Group
Brussels, Belgium
(Image from ICG)

I receive regular updates on international conflicts from the International Crisis Group (ICG). I'm not actually a member of this organization, but I think that its former Northeast Asia Director Peter Beck put me on the emailing list a couple of years ago after I had met him at a dinner in an Uzbek restaurant in downtown Seoul.

Anyway, I'm on the list, and I received an update this morning that illuminates the issue of national sovereignty and its limitations, a point that I've been looking into since reading Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent. The light shed on this issue comes from ICG president Gareth Evans, writing for the Los Angeles Times. His article, "Russia and the 'Responsibility to Protect'" (August 31, 2008), analyzes Russia's appeal to its responsibility to protect Ossetians against 'genocide'.

Evans does not find this appeal credible, nor do I, but what caught my interest was the limited national sovereignty implied by this principle, "the responsibility to protect":

The Russian government has argued that its recent military operations in Georgia were justified by the principle of "responsibility to protect" (colloquially known as R2P). This is the approach to dealing with mass-atrocity crimes that was embraced by 150 member states at the 2005 U.N. World Summit.

Evans examines Russia's appeal to the R2P in the light of five criteria -- seriousness of the threat, primary purpose of the response, military action only as a last resort, proportionality of response, and more good than harm from the intervention -- and finds the appeal does not clearly satisfy any of the criteria. Presumably, Evans knows the principle's proper application since he "co-chaired the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which introduced the 'R2P' concept," which he identifies as an "approach to dealing with mass-atrocity crimes that was embraced by 150 member states at the 2005 U.N. World Summit."

To turn now to my interest, I concede that this R2P principle doesn't directly meet Gopal Balakrishnan's argument in "Algorithms of War" (New Left Review 23, September-October 2003), in which he critiques Philip Bobbitt's Shield of Achilles, for the R2P principle was some 15 years after the "Peace of Paris" that Bobbitt discusses, and it concerns only "mass atrocity crimes," which makes the principle less restrictive of national sovereignty than the sort of limitations that Bobbitt discusses.

The principle does, however, lend credence to one of Bobbitt's basic points, namely, that our understanding of national sovereignty is shifting as we concede limitations on the right of a state to do whatever it pleases concerning its internal affairs -- the older conception that Bobbitt calls "opaque sovereignty."

But daylight is approaching, so I'll have to return to this issue another time.

"Peace of Paris?" Balakrishnan on Bobbitt

Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
Green: OSCE Participating States
Tan: Partners for Co-operation with OSCE
(Image from Wikipedia)

Some readers will recall my earlier post concerning a review by Gopal Balakrishnan, "Algorithms of War" (New Left Review 23, September-October 2003), in which he critiques Philip Bobbitt's Shield of Achilles. I've not read this earlier work by Bobbitt but Balakrishnan's review serves to illuminate Bobbitt's thinking in the more recent Terror and Consent, which I have read.

In a section titled 'Dawn or dusk at Paris?', Balakrishnan questions Bobbitt's understanding of the "Charter of Paris for a New Europe":

Bobbitt portrays what he calls the Peace of Paris -- the 'Charter for a New Europe' adopted by the CSCE [i.e., Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe] in late 1990 -- as the diplomatic stage upon which the liberal-democratic constitutional norm of the victorious West finally achieved the universal recognition it missed at Versailles. The importance of this moment for the architecture of Bobbitt's narrative is decisive: it is the true hinge of contemporary history, on which the present continues to turn. Yet just at this crux, the third and most fundamental aporia in his construction breaks open. For on the one hand, the Peace of Paris signals a new constitution of the society of states, based on worldwide legitimation of democracy, human rights and the market economy. As such it provides the empowering charter for military interventions to secure these norms wherever they are too grossly defied. As Bobbitt puts it:

The Peace of Paris ought to settle this constitutional question for the society of states: no state's sovereignty is unimpeachable if it studiedly spurns parliamentary institutions and human rights protections. The greater the rejection of these institutions -- which are the means by which sovereignty is conveyed by societies to their governments -- the more sharply curtailed is the cloak of sovereignty that would otherwise protect governments from interference by their peers. us action against the sovereignty of Iraq, for example, must be evaluated in this light. [16]

So too, he adds, the Peace of Paris strips the mantle of national sovereignty away from any government seeking nuclear weapons that fails to conform to its norms, warranting pre-emptive strikes against the delinquent. [17] In this register, the Charter of 1990 appears as the lineal successor of the Congress of Vienna, setting the terms of legitimate diplomacy and war for an entire epoch, the period ahead.

The briefest glance at the text of the Charter, however, makes clear that the 'Peace of Paris' bears no relation to this construal. It expressly rules out the actions Bobbitt would have it endorse. 'In accordance with our obligations under the Charter of the Nations and commitments under the Helsinki final act,' declared its signatories, 'we renew our pledge to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or from acting in any other manner inconsistent with the principles or purposes of these documents. We recall that non-compliance with obligations under the Charter of the United Nations constitutes a violation of international law'. [18] That this was no mere clause de style can be seen from the reaction of the figure who was historically speaking its most significant signatory -- given that most of the document was standard boiler-plate for Western politicians -- namely Gorbachev: who denounced both NATO’s attack on Yugoslavia and the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

Footnote 16: "SA, p. 680."

Footnote 17: "'No state that does not derive its authority from representative institutions that coexist with fundamental rights can legitimately argue that it can subject its own people to the threat of nuclear pre-emption or retaliation on the basis of its alleged rights of sovereignty because the people it thus makes into nuclear targets have not consented to bear such risks. At a minimum, the Peace of Paris stands for this': SA, p. 680."

Footnote 18: "See 'Charter of Paris for a New Europe': http://www.osce.org/." This footnote refers to page five of the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, which is located on the website for The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

Balakrishnan would appear to have raised a devastating point in citing the precise words of the Charter of Paris for a New Europe:

"we renew our pledge to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or from acting in any other manner inconsistent with the principles or purposes of these documents. We recall that non-compliance with obligations under the Charter of the United Nations constitutes a violation of international law."

On the face of it, this pledge would seem a rather clear affirmation of national sovereignty. Yet in looking closer, I note that the point seems to be about "territorial integrity or political independence," which I take to mean that no state can attack another to incorporate some or all of its territory. Moreover, this Charter of Paris refers to "obligations under the Charter of the United Nations," which is surely ambiguous wording. Granted, Balakrishnan is correct that this Charter of Paris announces no ringing endorsement of limited national sovereignty, but since this charter refers the reader to the United Nations, one would need to analyze what the UN allows in terms of interventions.

This might explain why Bobbitt, in chapter 10 of his more recent Terror and Consent -- "Mise-en-Scène: The Properties of Sovereignty" -- turns to an analysis of what is allowed by the United Nations.

Perhaps I'll look further into this tomorrow, but that's enough for now. A new semester has started, and I've now accepted a new position, at Ewha University, where I'm teaching undergraduate students the techniques of essay composition . . . and, for this semester at least, teaching graduate students the finer points of Gnosticism and Johannine theology.

Gopal Balakrishnan reviews Bobbitt's Shield of Achilles

Council of Four, Treaty of Versailles
"a constitution of the society of states"
Prime Minister David Lloyd George (United Kingdom)
Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando (Italy)
Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (France)
President Woodrow Wilson (United States)
(Image from Wikipedia)

In an attempt to clarify my understanding of Philip Bobbitt's thinking, I'm reading book reviews. The journal Foreign Affairs has a recent review by G. John Ikenberry of Bobbitt's Terror and Consent, but I don't have online access to that journal, so I've contented myself for now with looking elsewhere for analyses.

I've not yet found online a serious, scholarly review of Terror and Consent that I can access, but I have located an interesting academic review of Bobbitt's earlier Shield of Achilles by Gopal Balakrishnan, "Algorithms of War," published in New Left Review 23, September-October 2003.

Yes, I survey broadly in composing my reading list.

I've not yet finished Balakrishnan's rather longish review, for as the semester is about to start, I'm limiting my time online, so this will be piecemeal. In a section titled 'Strategy and legality', Balakrishnan gives some structure helpful for understanding the architecture of Bobbitt's thinking:

The Shield of Achilles is not . . . reducible to its many weaknesses and eccentricities. As a theoretical work, it possesses one core strength that sets it apart in the strategic literature of the current period. Bobbitt's unusual combination of backgrounds -- as constitutional lawyer and weapons expert -- has allowed him to combine two perspectives that, as he notes, are normally dissociated: the internal legal -- and social -- order of states, and their external military and diplomatic constellation. The originality of his book lies in its attempt to address the problem of how to conceptualize the state as, simultaneously, an inwardly and outwardly tested concentration of legitimate public force. In itself, the merit of this enterprise is plain. Bobbitt's way of negotiating it is the most significant criterion for judging the book. Here the architrave on which his account of the succession of modern state-forms as a coherent series depends -- the notion that allows him to unify their inner and outer fields as a single system -- is that of 'constitution'.

Domestically, of course, this is a familiar part of the political lexicon, denoting the juridical framework of state power within any given social order: in pre-modern societies, accepted by custom or tradition; in nearly all modern ones, codified in written charters. Bobbitt's key move is to extend its application from the intra-state to the inter-state arena. The Shield of Achilles posits a succession of international legal regimes that established the norms of war and diplomacy from late medieval times to the twentieth century:

It is my premise that there is a constitution of the society of states as a whole: that it is proposed and ratified by the peace conferences that settle the epochal wars previously described, and amended in various peace conferences of lesser scope; and that its function is to institutionalize an international order derived from the triumphant constitutional order of the war-winning state. [Footnote 9: "SA, p. 483"]

Bobbitt conceives of these historic peace conferences -- Augsburg, Westphalia, Utrecht, Vienna, Versailles -- as constitutional conventions following protracted violent conflicts, where the signatories agree to accept the fundamental precepts, over which they will then contend during the next Long War. The conferences that set the rules for this game sanction the strategic doctrine of a hegemonic state whose internal arrangements have proven themselves as the most effective mode of mobilizing and deploying forces.

This focus by Balakrishnan on "constitution" is useful for me because the same aspect characterizes Bobbitt's thinking in Terror and Consent. I hadn't seen clearly -- probably due to inattention -- that Bobbitt derives his concept of "a constitution of the society of states as a whole" from "the peace conferences that settle the epochal wars."

This is useful.

Bobbitt . . . or 'Spengler' on Russia's role in the Caucasus?

Our Contemporary 'Spengler'
"of the boudoir eyes"
(Image from Asia Times)

I had wondered what Philip Bobbitt might have to say about the scenario in Georgia and how it fits his views on the current trajectory of states from nation states to market states. Here, in "Russia's aggression in Georgia is a portent of perils to come," Spectator.co.uk (August 13, 2008), is his take on things in the Caucasus:

[In the wake of the USSR's collapse,] developed states began to move from the constitutional order of nation states, which had fought the Cold War, to market states. In Europe, the EU began to evolve away from a super-nation state toward a more flexible congeries of national enclaves: Scots, Lombards, Catalonians and others found a constitutional umbrella within which they could develop. In America, deregulation of everything from industrial practices to women's reproduction, the replacement of conscription by an all-volunteer force, the substitution of job retraining for unemployment compensation -- were all heralds of this change. In China, the embrace of free trade, private investment and market pricing were similar events. Elsewhere, sovereign wealth funds created further harbingers of this new order. A global system of human rights norms was given martial effect in the former state of Yugoslavia, another event that reflected this dramatic evolution of states.

But not in Russia. There political and economic leaders -- and their Western advisers -- confused the market with the market state, creating a vast criminal enterprise that more resembled the Mafia than the multinational corporation. In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the nation state has come roaring back. It was Vladimir Putin who described the end of the USSR as 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century'. He will not be able to reverse the ultimate trend toward market states; this new constitutional order is too formidable an innovation meekly to give way. Indeed the Russian tactic of granting vast numbers of Ossetians Russian citizenship -- which gave it the legal pretext that it used to intervene -- is at bottom a market state manoeuvre which encourages multiple juridical identities. But the hope that the transition away from nation states could be done without bloodshed in Europe has been dashed. The end of the first era of globalised constitutional transformation has come with unpredictable consequences because war, as Clausewitz told us, has its own momentum. I should be surprised if there were no further violence in Georgia.

But this leads us again to the question of Bobbitt's distinction between a nation state and a market state, which I thumbnailed as:

The former promises to protect and increase its citizens' material well-being, whereas the latter promises to guarantee and maximize its citizens' opportunities (cf. Bobbitt, Terror and Consent, pages 11-12)

I was citing Bobbitt's recent Terror and Consent, but he made the same distinction in his earlier tome, The Shield of Achilles, which I haven't read but which some contributor to Wikipedia has, for we find there in the entry on Shield of Achilles a summary of Book 1, Part 3 that provides a more expansive explanation than my brief one:

The constitutional order of the 21st century . . . market state will supersede the 20th century nation state as a consequence of the end of the Long War [i.e., the 'war' lasting from 1914 to 1989]. A constitutional order is distinguished by its unique claim for legitimacy. Give us power, the nation state said, and we will improve your material well-being. But whereas the nation state, with its mass free public education, universal franchise, and social security policies promised to guarantee the welfare of the nation, the market state promises to maximize the opportunity of the people and thus tends to privatize many state activities and to make voting and representative government less influential and more responsive to the market. This does not mean that market states cease to be interested in the well-being of their peoples or that nationalism is any less potent but that the State no longer claims legitimacy on that unique basis.

That's well-put by some anonymous commentor on Bobbitt's Shield of Achilles. Now, bringing us back to Bobbitt's take on the Georgian crisis, we can better see what Bobbitt means in stating that for Vladimir Putin's Russia, "the nation state has come roaring back." Putin, as we know if we've been reading the papers, has reversed some of the market and political freedoms achieved by Russia in the 1990s and has promised more security for Russians in exchange for restrictions on freedom. Bobbitt thinks that this retrograde move by Russia will not be possible in the longer run, and he notes the irony that even "the Russian tactic of granting vast numbers of Ossetians Russian citizenship . . . is at bottom a market state manoeuvre which encourages multiple juridical identities."

But Russians always take a circuitous route toward the future. Last time, they detoured through the 20th century, taking 70 years to reach a future that they'd promised to leap over. This time, they're appealing to the Old Russia from before the Bolshevik Revolution and attempting to restore the old Czarist empire -- but now, as with the Czars, an empire in the interests of the Russian nation. This implies "nation" state in an even stronger sense than Bobbitt means, for we're really talking about an ethnic nationalism in which Russia uses minorities within its empire to further the power of Russians.

For this, they don't have much time.

In one of his many lunacies of great insight, "Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess," Asia Times (August 19, 2008), our current-day 'Spengler' writes:

Russia is fighting for its survival, against a catastrophic decline in population and the likelihood of a Muslim majority by mid-century. The Russian Federation's scarcest resource is people. It cannot ignore the 22 million Russians stranded outside its borders after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, nor, for that matter, small but loyal ethnicities such as the Ossetians. Strategic encirclement, in Russian eyes, prefigures the ethnic disintegration of Russia, which was a political and cultural entity, not an ethnic state, from its first origins.

The Russians, argues Spengler, are inviting loyal ethnic groups to become 'Russian' by joining its declining Russian majority -- not precisely an ethnic state, but an ethnically dominated one. If Spengler is right, then Putin's Russia is engaged in some long-term planning to ensure that ethnic Russians come out on top in the changing demographics of an uncertain future.

Who's right? Spengler or Bobbitt? I'd prefer to think that Bobbitt has his finger on the measured pulse of a rational history, but Spengler reminds us that in history, there will be blood.

Kenneth Anderson: Review of Bobbitt's Terror and Consent

Kenneth Anderson
Washington College of Law
American University
(Image from WCL)

Several blog entries ago, I mentioned that I was reading Philip Bobbitt's tome Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century and that I would be writing more . . . eventually.

I'm not yet ready to write the definitive review, for the book is overwhelming, especially, in my case, because of my weakness in legal theory, one of the three fields from which Bobbitt draws his ideas and offers his proposals.

So, I am relying upon the words of others to shape my thinking. This morning I read a review written by Kenneth Anderson, who teaches law for the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington DC, but who is also a research fellow of the Hoover Institution, at Stanford University.

Anderson's review, "States of terror, states of consent: Philip Bobbitt's strategic transnational politics for the twenty-first century," appeared in The Times Literary Supplement on July 23, 2008. Since readers of this blog can go directly to Anderson's article if they have sufficient interest, I want to focus on just small bits of the review. Here's his summary of the book's scope and argument:

Terror and Consent . . . offers strategic thinking on an unapologetically grand scale. It is synthetic across three large fields: history, law and strategic international politics. Bobbitt is able to combine academic and real-world experience -- a Democrat by affiliation, he has served in senior positions in both law and intelligence in the Clinton and Bush senior administrations. His core insight is that transnational jihadist terrorism must be understood on the largest historical scale, and that requires understanding the shifting nature of the state and society in both the liberal democratic West and the rest of the world. For Bobbitt, jihadist transnational terrorism gets going by being able to exploit the interstices of the state system, not just on a geographical basis -- the failed state of Afghanistan, for example -- but on a historical basis, as the nature of the state moves from its incarnation in the twentieth century to something quite different in the twenty-first. Bobbitt's main point is that al-Qaeda terrorism, and what might eventually replace and transform it, cannot be understood without reference to the state system and its evolution over a long period of time. This leads Terror and Consent into a long walk through the history of the state in the West.

Narrow specialists will register many particular objections, and if one rejects in principle the notion of grand synthetic history, then one’s reaction will be positively allergic. Bobbitt outlines, as a deliberate caricature, a kind of rough historical sketch (picking up the thread of his earlier masterwork, The Shield of Achilles, reviewed in the TLS, June 21, 2002), that the "princely state" system of Europe eventually gave way to the nation-state system that gradually emerged in the nineteenth and then dominated the twentieth century. Wars of the twentieth century were wars between Westphalian nation-states . . . . [E]ven the wars of decolonialization were fought largely by parties that aspired to the status of nation-states. Since the end of the Cold War, however, liberal democratic nation-states -- what Bobbitt calls "states of consent" -- have been moving towards something different from the nation-state, which Bobbitt calls the "market-state". In the market-state, consent becomes less that of the citoyen [i.e., the citizen] and more that of the consumer, for whom the state is a supplier of services. The market-state itself bears some resemblance to a corporation, outsourcing and privatizing significant activities; it is more relaxed about its territorial sovereignty while at the same time being willing to extend its regulatory reach beyond its borders. Globalization's increased wealth is one driver of the market-state, but so is the secular (in both senses of the term) drive of individuals towards greater individual liberty. "States of consent" contrast with "states of terror" -- the end aim of the transnational, nongovernmental and, today, Islamist terrorist groups that are also able to grow in the eco-system of economic globalization and the relaxed conditions of, and among, market-states. States of terror are the evil twin of the states of consent -- parasitical upon and enabled by the states of consent, at once pre-modern and postmodern but never really modern, and hostile toward states of consent.

One might add by way of clarification Bobbitt's central distinction between a nation state and a market state. The former promises to protect and increase its citizens' material well-being, whereas the latter promises to guarantee and maximize its citizens' opportunities (cf. Bobbitt, Terror and Consent, pages 11-12).

But this distinction leads to a question that Anderson formulates as follows:

As a believer in liberty and consent, I should greatly like to share Philip Bobbitt's hopes for the market-state. It does not take a conservative to wonder, however, whether this is enough to sustain liberal democracy in the face of spiritual threats. A long tradition of what Lawrence Solum has called the "left Burkeans" -- Christopher Lasch, for example, or Zygmunt Bauman -- has argued that the market is as much socially corrosive of the values of liberal democracy as it is materially supportive. The market and democracy are both sustained by wells of social capital that stable material prosperity helps to deepen, but which are not the moral logic of the market itself.

The market of the market-state is not self-sustaining. On the contrary, it requires a form of social life that goes outside it in order to function in the long term. Honour, loyalty, sacrifice, gratitude to those who came before -- these are not the evident virtues of capitalism, but they are necessary virtues in a liberal-democratic-capitalist form of life. Without them, society eats its seedcorn, the social capital bequeathed by the past to bless the future. Even after the marvellous argumentation of this marvellous book, therefore, room remains to question whether the market-state pays sufficient attention to the spiritual habits of the heart that make the market-state -- and the willing defence of states of consent against states of terror -- over the long struggle of years in this twenty-first century even possible.

The expression "habits of the heart" is a nod to my old advisor Robert Bellah, who argues that the radical individualism of a capitalist society can undermine the values essential for a good society. Bellah's is a critique from the left, but it has some points in common with the Burkean conservative critique of capitalism in wondering if the market itself might undermine its own foundations. As Anderson puts this concern:

The logic of the market, after all, is to write off the past as past, cut losses and get out as soon as cost-benefit analysis says things are looking dim. Is that really enough? If these are indeed its market values, is the market-state sufficiently nurtured by other values to have the will to defend itself?

I guess that we'll find out.

Light Summer Reading: Bobbitt's Terror and Consent

"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"

Early Suicide Bombing

(Image from Wikipedia)

A discussion list that I belong to has asked for its members to make recommendations for heavy but enlightening summer reading, and since I expended most of my "precious bodily fluids" sweating this one out, I now feel emptied of my 'essence', far too fatigued to accomplish any creative blogging today, so I'll merely repost here what I posted on that mysterious, unnamed discussion list:

I've almost finished Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century, by Philip Bobbitt.

This book is a follow-up to The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, which I haven't read but which got a lot of attention for its argument that we are leaving the era of nation-states and entering the era of market-states. By this, Bobbitt means that we are are leaving behind the nation-state, which promised to care for a nation's welfare, and entering the market-state, which will promise to maximize a people's opportunities.

Concurrent with this shift is the rise of a new type of terrorism that we see in terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda, which do not use terror merely as a method but use it also toward their aim of instituting a state of terror, rather than the state of consent offered by democracies. For this reason, Bobbitt argues, the expression "War on Terror" is well-phrased, for states of consent really do need to pursue a war consciously aimed at defeating terror itself (and not just terrorists).

Bobbitt, despite being a Democrat (and nephew to President Johnson), supported both the attack on Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq and thinks that much of what President Bush and the current administration have done is right. However, he also argues that much is wrong, especially the administration's scofflaw attitude. Even on this point, Bobbitt expresses some understanding, for he thinks that many of our laws are outmoded, and he calls for legal reforms on both a domestic and international level to conform to a more realistic battle against terror.

As noted above, I've not yet finished the book, but I can definitely recommend it for August reading.

Next, I guess that I need to go back and read The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History . . .

I haven't yet concluded what I think of Bobbitt's views, which are rather complex and partly outside my fields of expertise -- especially in the realm of legal theory -- but his ideas are definitely thought-provoking, and after I've finished the book and had sufficient time to reflect, I'll post something definitive, as always.

Definitive subject to revision, of course.