Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century

  ***** Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. By Philip Bobbitt; published by Alfred A. Knopf, www.randomhouse.com/knopf (Web); 672 pages, $35.

When I saw the title Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century, I expected a new look at terrorism and how it has affected the law and civil liberties in our post-9-11 world. Unfortunately, 672 pages later, I had finished a fairly tedious and somewhat revisionist review of terrorism and its effect on our future that read like an amalgam of Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

Central to the author’s view is the belief that the modern nation state is being replaced by something he calls the “market state,” which he defines as “an emerging order that promises to maximize the opportunity of its people, tending to privatize many state activities and making representative government more responsible to consumers.”

It sounds much like a form of government created by a committee equally split between free marketers and state socialists. He then goes on to add that, “I believe that almost every widely held idea we currently entertain about twenty-first century terrorism and its relationship to the wars against terrorism is wrong and must be thoroughly rethought.” He suggests that weapons of mass destruction are only tangentially related to terrorism and suggests that the effects of terrorism are on a par with those of natural disasters.

This unusual overview carries with it equally unexpected arguments for much more aggressive counterterrorism efforts than those employed thus far, including controversial tactics such as preemptive military action, increased government surveillance activities, and extreme intrusions on civil liberties.

This is a convoluted book that offers only occasional insights that might be useful in either understanding terrorism or in fashioning an effective response to it. The time spent reading it can be better spent elsewhere.

Reviewer: Mayer Nudell, CSC (Certified Security and Safety Consultant), is an independent consultant on crisis management, contingency planning, and related issues, and an adjunct professor at Webster University. He is a member of ASIS International.