A prominent academic advocate of empire reviews a propaganda tome in The New York Pravda, and if you can stomach it you see the rationale those who would rule have sold their minions.
These people can promote their grandoise schemes as a "...reinvention of the dominant role of the trans-Atlantic alliance..." to be ... read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to London’s West End.
Don't give me that bitterness line. That's real elitism.
It gets worse, or better from a MST 3000 viewpoint.
... “Terror and Consent” is much more than that readership might suggest. This is quite simply the most profound book to have been written on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11 — indeed, since the end of the cold war. I have no doubt it will be garlanded with prizes. It deserves to be. It is more important that it should be read, marked and inwardly digested by all three of the remaining candidates to succeed George W. Bush as president of the United States.
In other words, this book is a serious trip into neocon Chicago school neverland.
But be very afraid. For your consideration, the credentials of this author, one Philip Bobbitt.
...Bobbitt’s originality lies in his almost unique ability to synthesize three quite different traditions of scholarship. The first is history. The second is law, particularly constitutional law. The third is military strategy. This synthesis owes as much to the corridors of power as to the sequestered groves of academe. Bobbitt was an associate counsel to President Carter, legal counsel to the Senate’s Iran-Contra committee and a senior director on the National Security Council under President Clinton.
In his last book, “The Shield of Achilles” (2002), Bobbitt advanced a bold argument about the history of international relations since the time of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). His central argument was that, in the aftermath of the cold war, the traditional post-Westphalian ideal of the sovereign nation-state had become obsolescent. In the increasingly borderless world we associate with globalization, something new was emerging, which Bobbitt called (and continues to call) the “market-state.” This state’s relationship to its citizens resembles that between a corporation and consumers. Its counterpart — and enemy — is the terrorist network. The central problem raised in “The Shield of Achilles” was how far the market-state could and should go to defeat such networks, particularly when they were in some measure sponsored by traditional nation-states...
Welcome to the market-state of Amerika, brought to you by one of your DINOcratic party's intellectual leaders.
Now perhaps you know why I'm a little uneasy about HHHillary.
But there's more to this review, which is, after all a song of praise to the endless war.
...Some reviewers took it to be a neoconservative work, and Bobbitt’s support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 lent credence to that view. However, read as a work of history, it was no such thing. Rather, it was a reflection on the decline of national sovereignty in an age of globalization.
“Terror and Consent” is less historical; indeed, it is more concerned with the future and how best we should anticipate its challenges. Did I say “the future”? Bobbitt has learned from the scenario-builders of Royal Dutch Shell the essential point that there is really no such thing as the future — only futures (plural). The task he has set himself here is to challenge nearly all our existing ideas about the so-called wars on terror (note, once again, the plural), in the belief that only a root-and-branch rethinking will equip us to deal with the problems posed by “the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, mass terrorist atrocities and humanitarian crises that bring about or are brought about by terror.”
By that, somehow I don't think they're talking about General Dynamics selling hardware to the Turks who re-sale it to Iran.
Bobbitt’s central premise is that today’s Islamic terrorist network, which he calls Al Qaeda for short, is like a distorted mirror image of the post-Westphalian market-state: decentralized, privatized, outsourced and in some measure divorced from territorial sovereignty...
Ah, yes, Al Qaeda, he must be talking about the CIA giving weapons to the Saudis, factions of whom, after all, keep Al Qaeda in business. Along with the CIA, of course.
But seriously, this is the source of McCain's (and others') confusion. Ya seen one Ay-rab, ya seen 'em all. The white man's burden...
You know, it's not our freedom they hate us for, it's our willful stupidity. Ferguson is a professor at Harvard University and Harvard Business School, a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford reviewing this book. He knows better than this tripe of Bobbitt's.
Al Qaeda is a fundamentalist Sunni Wahhabist guerilla movement. It is an offshoot of the Saudi Royal House dedicated to takeover of the House and the Saudi nation. It fights America globally because America is the chief client state of the Saudis, not the other way around. Period.
But these miscalculations aren't the sum of Fergie's message. There's teh Terra:
... The terrorists are at once parasitical on, and at the same time hostile toward, the globalized economy, the Internet and the technological revolution in military affairs... terrorism is a negative externality of our borderless world.
...Al Qaeda is different. Its members seek to undermine the market-state by turning its own technological achievements against it in a protracted worldwide war, the ultimate goal of which is to create a Sharia-based “terror-state” in the form of a new caliphate. Osama bin Laden and his confederates want to acquire nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction. Precisely because of the nature of the market-state, as well as the actions of rogue nation-states, the key components and knowledge are very close to being available to them — witness the nuclear Wal-Mart run in Pakistan by A. Q. Khan. With such weapons, the terrorists will be able to unleash a super-9/11, with scarcely imaginable human and psychological costs.
In short, we are in a war. Those who say that you cannot fight an abstract noun have misunderstood that “terror” itself is being deployed as a weapon against us by a hostile and calculating nongovernmental organization. To refine his argument, Bobbitt introduces a distinction. Both the market-states and the nation-states of the West are democratic; they are “states of consent,” in which the rule of law exists to uphold individual liberty and rights. Our adversaries aim to replace our consent-based order with a “state of terror.”
Now that's entertainment. "...terrorism is a negative externality of our borderless world". You're either with us or against us, and since we are everywhere anywhere that isn't us is antimatter. One supposes.
Which is a statement about as rational as anything else the neocons have to say here.
There's the neocon lack of contriteness: the endless war on terror isn't the error, it's just the flawed vessel of Bush administration... but really, we can't have ...“states of consent,” in which the rule of law exists to uphold individual liberty and rights without the consent of the right people.
...Bush’s instinct was not wrong. In this war, we do need pre-emptive detention of suspected terrorists; we do need a significant increase of surveillance, particularly of electronic communications; we do need, in some circumstances, to use coercive techniques (short of torture) to elicit information from terrorists. The administration’s fatal mistake was its failure to understand that these things could be achieved by appropriate modifications of the law. By doing what indeed was needed, but doing it outside the law, the administration undermined the legitimacy of American policy at home as well as abroad. Bobbitt is emphatic: all branches of government must act in conformity with the Constitution and the law.
Bu$hie just forgot to ask the free market about what modifications of the law to make first, and to use coercive techniques.
And for god's sake, don't let the grunts bring their camera phones to war.
There's more madness.
...Bobbitt argues for a radical overhaul of our intelligence system, arguing that traditional antinomies (United States citizen/foreigner, gathering/analysis, private/public) are now an obstacle to effective action. Yes, we really do need something like the abortive Total Information Awareness program, pooling every available piece of data and mining it for clues about the next 9/11. We also need to take large-scale precautions to ensure that constitutional and legal order do not break down in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster...
The Elder Gods will continue to dine well off of the fruit of work of the neocon elite.
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