Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century [Hardcover]

This book is a really interesting look at 21st-century terrorism, from its evolution in history to its current aims and capabilities and to future predictions as to how society will live with terrorism in the future. Central to the argument of the book is the paradigm shift that a globalised and decentralised terrorist network represents to 20th-century thinking over state provision of security to its citizens. Where terrorist networks adopt the tools of a globalised world. The Internet as a tool for the dissemination of propaganda, the recruitment of supporters, and creation of a virtual "ummah" (Muslim brotherhood). The franchise model of market capitalism for the outsourcing of terrorist attacks, motivated by disparate grievances and perpetrated by disparate individuals but united by the "Al Qaeda" brand. The free-market exchange of commodities to pursue weapons of mass destruction (such as that presided over by AQ Khan in his distribution of nuclear secrets on the black market).

There is discussion on the future vulnerabilities from biological attack as biological capability becomes more widely spread. In particular the recent developments in DNA sequencing viruses from scratch in laboratories poses a real danger in the future of pathogen control. With highly contagious and lethal viruses such as smallpox now having the potential to be manufactured by doctorate level chemists able to bypass the top security government biochemical laboratories with DNA sequences readily published online, the traditional state controls on bio weapons are significantly weakened.

There is also a discussion on the evolution of terrorist ideology to justify the targeting of civilians, the challenges for modern intelligence agencies and the impact on society from a significant biological or nuclear attack.

The book is written in an intelligent but highly readable manner, furnished with literally hundreds of footnotes, citations of reports and analysis from experts in the field. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the effect of terrorism on 21st-century politics. It is a fascinating read.

`Terror and Consent' deserves high praise for both insight and thoroughness. The insights are of an analytical rather than a revelatory kind. It might be true to say that any intelligent citizen given enough time could have come up with many of the better perceptions in the book, but it is certainly true that not many analysts would have been capable of the sustained concentration that we find here. If it is clarity, mental honesty and detachment that you are looking for in trying to sort out this abominable tangle of a topic, I have yet to see these qualities better combined between the covers of a book.

What the work mainly needs, in my opinion, is pruning. Bobbitt has valuable things to say about more topics than really belong together without risking incoherency. A `war on terror' may be metonymy for a `war on terrorism'. It may also validly signify a strategy for coping with natural disasters, but it would have been better to separate the two issues. In fact I would say in general that the thoughts and insights are better than their presentation and expression, although the actual writing is of high quality - articulate, literate and easy to read. The other difficulty that I found concerned some of the basic terms and expressions that underlie Bobbitt's thinking. `Market State' must be a term that enjoys currency among academics, and if so one can go along with it. However Bobbitt labours it in a way that suggests that he thinks we need convincing of its real value, as probably we do. Also, in trying to reinforce it Bobbitt spoils his exposition by talking about `market state terrorism', an expression that surely conveys nothing to anyone. To me, the real point to be made is that terrorists, unlike generals and political leaders, fight today's battle and not yesterday's, so if the current establishment that they wish to attack is some `market state', then a market state is what they will attack, not because it is a market state but because it is what is there to be attacked.

I am certainly convinced by the proposition that these days nations and states are not synonymous entities, insofar as they ever were. The modern battle with terrorism is obviously more a conflict between cultures than between states and `nations' in the old senses. Bobbitt is interesting, illuminating and quite subtle in picking his way carefully through the ambiguities that the whole situation is replete with. I felt nevertheless that he slightly fluffs a good opportunity when dealing with the notion of state terrorism. It is perfectly true, of course, that a state like the former East Germany which treats its own population as its own enemies is a terror state by definition. However that is (intellectually at least) a simple case. What I was hoping for from a thinker of Bobbitt's calibre was some firm and authoritative handling of the deplorably vague but extremely emotive, misleading and dangerous notions surrounding supposed `state sponsorship' of terrorism, together with the even more nebulous and easily abused concept of `sympathising' with terrorism or terrorists. Sympathising is, on its own, a difficult enough idea, but sympathising with terrorism is not the same thing as sympathising with terrorists, and the whole field is fertile with opportunities to muddy matters further by shortening either of these words into `terror'.

It is in the nature of the case that any thoughtful reader is going to jib at some of the points aired in a book of this kind. I felt that section II had a rather hand-wringing feel about it of `Something Must Be Done'. Again, I felt that the chaos and slaughter in Iraq that Bobbitt ascribes, perhaps a little carelessly, to terrorist `strategy' is not strategy but just the nature of the fissiparous and factional Iraqi society asserting itself in what passes for its `natural' way. However I would rate the better insights as far more important. It is absolutely true, for instance, and if it was not clear before it ought to be clear now, that the establishment of civic order is a higher and more urgent priority than the wretched campaign for Demoxy an' Freem that so drove Mr Bush's brainwashed administration. And it is if possible even truer that `the question whether it is wise to invade becomes easy to answer: it is never wise to commence an anticipatory war that is lost.'

When I first read this book I would have reviewed it differently because at that time the expression `War on Terror' was still current. It seems now to be an embarrassment, and so I hope that we and our leaders do not lose sight of some important truths that the expression embodied. In his characteristic way Professor Bobbitt takes us methodically through the various things that such an expression may denote. He might have been better and clearer if he had simply appealed to the man in the street's ordinary way of using such a term and built his alternatives around that. On the other hand, if he is right in his claim that the fault lay with pedantic and legalistic casuistry in Washington when the issue was first sidelined by the DoD and then viewed by them mistakenly as a police operation, then we should treat his corrective linguistic analysis with the respect it deserves. That error may have cost us dearly already.