VDH's Private Papers::Plan for a Century

June 3, 2008
Plan for a Century
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Magazine

Review of Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century, by Philip Bobbitt (Knopf, 2008, 688 pp.)

Anyone who finished Philip Bobbitt’s massive, 900-page-plus The Shield of Achilles (2002) might not be surprised about the size and organization of its sequel, Terror and Consent — a 600-page-plus volume replete with book parts, chapters within chapters, Roman-numeraled subsections, bullet-marked sub-subsections, a conclusion, and a coda, all fortified with lengthy indented quotations, footnotes, and italicized passages. It would be easy to dismiss Terror and Consent as a rambling excursus, in desperate need of an editor to prune away redundancy, extraneous argument, and circumlocution. Indeed, the book at times becomes a labyrinth of obfuscation, in which insights — often brilliant and original — are trying desperately to avoid blind alleys and somehow bump their way out to the reader.

That said, Bobbitt — a noted law professor at Columbia University and veteran public servant — has raised a number of critical issues that confront the United States in our post-9/11 world. If there is a voice-in-the wilderness prophetic quality about the book, it at least achieves the effect of bringing earnestness to the discussion rather than the “I told you so” one-upmanship that dominates so many exposés of our supposed failures in Iraq. Americans of all persuasions, according to Bobbitt, do not grasp that we still are in deadly danger in the present war on terror, because of the nonsensical manner in which we are fighting, and the rapidly changing conditions abroad that favor our enemies.

Bobbitt envisions three broad theaters in which we must seek to avoid another 9/11. First, the U.S. must preempt attacks by global networks of terrorists. Second, we must be eternally vigilant to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. And, third, the West must protect people worldwide from natural and manmade catastrophes that destroy civilized society or take away basic human rights, and thus leave them as fodder for terrorist ideologues and religious extremists. Throughout the book, Bobbitt summarizes these three aims by the simple refrain, “We are fighting terror, not just terrorists.”

At the heart of the book is the author’s complaint about how we’re waging the war against terror generally, and the Iraq War specifically. He argues that our government is complacent and blinkered: We are utterly failing to realize that the once autonomous and sovereign nation-state is disappearing. Transnational companies globalize our economies and create layers of life-sustaining complexity — and vulnerability — in our daily lives that the nation-state cannot fully manage or even understand, much less protect from terrorists. Communications increasingly are without national sponsorship, identity, or responsibility. Terrorists, in turn, fight for religious and racial grievances that are rooted not in nationalism or patriotism, but rather in more direct grass-roots appeals to specific angry groups The stilted news coverage of an al-Jazeera, or Internet rumors of a flushed Koran, can do as much harm as an enemy division, while a terrorist killer can download off the web everything from the ingredients of nerve gas to instructions on how to make a dirty bomb — without the need for a multi-billion-dollar Manhattan Project.

Whole swaths of tribal Pakistan, the interiors of some South American countries, and ghettoes in Middle Eastern cities are beyond the control of central governments. And yet here are found the most likely future enemies of Western nation-states. Many terrorists assume that they are immune from America’s conventional military reach, and at times serve the anti-Western interests of their patrons, who officially deny any culpability for terrorist operations launched from their soil. That jihadists don’t have Abrams tanks or F-22 fighter jets does not mean that in the future a half-dozen or so cannot kill millions.

Bobbitt argues that we rely far too much on conventional military power designed to take out hostile nation-states. Strategic success far more often requires careful counterinsurgency, in which highly trained and relatively small military forces target stateless terrorists, while not offending the surrounding populations among whom such belligerents operate. Sophisticated intelligence, too, is critical — but impossible without trained linguists steeped in the cultural byways of the enemy. Artificial government fiefdoms and protocols, such as the many firewalls between the FBI, CIA, and the various defense intelligence agencies, are dangerous relics of the Cold War. Yet even the most successful anti-terrorism operations, Bobbitt believes, will inevitably fail unless the U.S. can conduct them with plausible legal justification — one that reassures billions abroad that they have a stake in a shared global economy that functions logically and according to law.

Note carefully that, while Bobbitt adopts much of the Left’s criticism of the current administration’s war policies, his point is more sophisticated and compelling. Instead of endorsing the usual tired harangue that Bush deliberately destroyed American jurisprudence and ignored international law, Bobbitt contends that even if the Bush administration had wished to follow the letter of the law, there was simply no existing statute offering the necessary legitimacy to win the necessary war. The fault he finds in Guantanamo, for example, or in the much-publicized renditions and waterboarding, is not the administration’s supposed snubbing of national and international law, but rather the absence of any existing jurisprudence that would have addressed the situation. Just as the Pentagon is going to have to find a way to win the hearts and minds of foreign populations, and turn them against the terrorists in their midst, so too legal scholars and politicians must craft new sorts of anti-terrorism laws to provide legitimization for the unconventional operations that will be necessary to save civilization as we know it.

Bobbitt artfully explains “why they hate us”: The world’s sole “hyperpower” presents to the angry and envious a symbolic summation of others’ collective success, and — when hit — it alone can extend proof of terrorist prowess. This is why the legal scholar Bobbitt’s pragmatic, and completely accurate, assessment of the need for lawfulness is so welcome. With so many abroad gunning for the American colossus, we sorely need a framework that extends legality to military operations that are poorly understood but completely necessary. We must never separate law from strategy, since only the formal sense of right will transform battlefield victories into lasting strategic success. Market-based and transnational systems of commerce may ultimately bring us all to an end of history where we at last share universal human rights and affluence. But the current ugly transition is alienating millions of the desperate and dangerous, who must be outsmarted as well as simply opposed.

While Bobbitt draws a great deal from the Western past, and cites history and literature as often as political science, I am not sure that globalization and 9/11 have quite yet made the world all that new. War, like water, has an eternal essence, even if its pump becomes ever more efficient in sending out torrents rather than mere dribbles — inasmuch as human nature remains fixed across time and space. In that sense, a Syria or Iran might well reconsider its sponsorship of terrorists should it be warned that its government and people will pay the collective price for the acts of a few supposed renegades on its soil. And, in some cases, the deniability of culpability of a Teheran or Damascus for terrorist operations does not reflect so much a brave new world as our own gullibility in accepting such old lies and excuses.

Should the North Korean army cross the DMZ, the Argentines land again on the Falklands, or another Milosevic conduct a similar genocide, generals will still look to their jets, carriers, and tanks as they have for the last seven decades. And should terrorists pull off another couple of 9/11s, the American people — in righteous outrage, as when they faced down the aggressions of Japanese militarism and German fascism — won’t worry too much about whether their response is inordinate or deemed by some bystanders abroad insufficiently legal.

I end with a modest suggestion. Bobbitt is too valuable a voice not to be heard. A range of authors, from Robert Kagan to Christopher Hitchens, have appealed to general audiences by condensing complex ideas into easily accessible and often short extended essays. Should Bobbitt write a brief summary of the 1,500 pages of The Shield of Achilles and Terror and Consent, his valuable and astute ideas might find the audience that his recent two books sadly will not — but surely deserve.