Tgk1946's Blog

From Philip Bobbit’s Terror and Consent (2008) pp80-4

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Bin Laden attacked the very basis for the society of nation states – its national orientation – and attacked, too, the principal institutions of that society, the United Nations and other nation state international organizations, and the systems of representative democracy of the nation state that had triumphed in the twentieth century. His own account of the moral responsibilities of the democracies recapitulates the market state assault on the legitimacy of nation states. This emerges from an examination of the justifications bin Laden offers for al Qaeda’s actions in attacking civilians, the protection of whom, as we shall see in chapter 3, is the war aim of market states of consent.

To put bin Laden’s problem in terms familiar from the Western tradition: he had to derive justifications for al Qaeda’s decision to wage war (jus ad bellum) and its tactics in war (jus in bello). Bin Laden attempted to provide these concepts in the fatwa declaring war.

First, despite the fact that he was not recognized as having the theological authority that entitled him to issue fatwas, bin Laden argued that his literal reading of the Koran (a textual argument) was more consistent with the Koran’s own account of its revelatory truths as unchanging and comprehensive than were interpretations by clerics whose readings of the Koran were legitimated solely on the basis of their official roles and education (a doctrinal argument); to do otherwise would be to “worship these men rather than the Book.” Second, he described the role of the United States and its ally Israel as only the most recent example of a centuries-long effort to oppress the Muslims of the Near East, the “hears” of Islam. The Crusader invasion and the planting of a Crusader colony in the Holy Land in the late twelfth century183 provide the paradigm of which the insertion of a Zionist state by Britain in the twentieth century is the most recent example. Israelis the European colony that the West intends to extend all the way to the ocean. Western intentions are manifested in an entire panoply of conspiracies: the support for corrupt regimes that, though nominally Islamic, do not respect the sharia in the enforcement of domestic law; the steady enrichment of the West at the expense of the Muslim nation through confiscatory energy deals, by which the wealth of the Near East is siphoned off to the West through sub-market clearing prices for oil; the refusal to permit the Muslim masses to elect Islanilcist leaders, as evidenced by the cancellation of the Algerian elections when it appeared that fundamentalist candidates would have won and the West’s refusal to support the validly elected Palestinian Hamas ministers; the indifference to Muslim suffering in Chechnya, Kashmir, and Bosnia; the U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq that led to the deaths of countless innocents; the destruction of the fundamentalist Islamicist regime in Afghanistan; and most recently the overt invasion of Iraq by U.S. and U.K. forces on a deceitful pretext. Even though the Koran limits the legitimate grounds for jihad to defensive actions, it also enjoins every Muslim to protect every other Muslim, and thus bin Laden argues that he has ample grounds for declaring jihad against the Americans and their allies. On this basis he concludes there is a moral duty of every Muslim to wage jihad, and thereby provides the basis for an Islamicist doctrine of jus ad bellum.

This argument for jus ad bellum, however, does not resolve the problem of jus in bello, which is raised by the call in the al Qaeda fatwas for indiscriminate attacks on American civilians. Here too bin Laden had to overcome a theological obstacle: the Koran limits jihad to the destruction of combatants and strictly forbids the killing of innocents. Bin Laden addresses this issue by framing the problem in the context of Western consensual political practices:

You may then dispute that [the rationale that justifies a fatwa for war] does not justify aggression against civilians. . . This [objection, however,] contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom . . . Therefore the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will, a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. . . the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade [and now the occupation] of Iraq. . . So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates.’

Note that this basis is not the conventional rationale for an attack on an enemy nation that was heard in the total wars of twentieth century nation states. Rather it is a market state approach because it addresses the responsibilities of citizens as individuals rather than as a vulnerable body politic. Consistent with market state parameters, bin Laden repeatedly refers to the results of polling (rather than elections) to establish the political intentions of a particular polity. Similarly, the war aim of al Qaeda is not national, though at one time Zawahiri and bin Laden may have thought in these terms with regard to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Rather it is – though this may at first seem perverse – a market state claim for truly maximizing the opportunities of the individual, which can only be realized by using the tools God has given for the fulfillment of the individual, that is, opportunities to live under the sharia that the West and its human rights regimes would deny to Muslims. You Americans and the peoples of the West, charges bin Laden,

rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?

“Contrary to Bush’s claim that we hate freedom, “186 all we seek, bin Laden says, is freedom. Though market states in the West claim they endeavor to maximize opportunity, they would deny Muslims to live under divinely inspired law. “Leave us alone,” he writes, “or else expect us in New York and Washington.” 87 Very simply, al Qaeda seeks a free hand to establish a transnational market state of terror. If this sounds paradoxical, bear in mind that unless we take the appropriate steps in law and strategy for our own countries, we will some day make the same demand: that only a state of terror can allow us individual freedom by protecting our own constitutional preferences – the right to freedom of conscience – from attacks.

On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared war on terrorism. His exact words are worth recalling. The war, he said, “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated .”88 This remark has been ridiculed in some quarters; one critic expressed an opinion generally held that it “is misleading to talk of a ‘war on terrorism,’ let alone a war on ‘global terrorism.’ “189 (Whether it is in fact misleading to use the term “war” in this context will be discussed in chapter 3.) If it does make sense, however, it makes sense precisely against a global network, as opposed to terrorism generally. The development of a global terror network is an example of market state terrorism, which is potentially more lethal than its predecessor, nation state terrorism, and is clearly distinguishable from it. The president was right to recognize this distinction. 190 As two commentators on terrorism – and persons who formerly held antiterrorism posts on the U.S. National Security Council – wrote in the summer of 2006,

[t]hejihadists comprise a social movement, not just a cluster of terrorist organizations, and they are totally opportunistic and endlessly plastic in how they accommodate to circumstances. They thrive on our preconceptions and our instinctive determination to come up with rigid schematizations, and we will get the better of them only when our thinking is as flexible and innovative as theirs.

Market state terrorism is global terrorism. Markets, unlike nations, are often global. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly apparent that al Qaeda is not only a reaction to globalization192 but that it is a manifestation and exploitation of globalization. To see that is also to see that market state terrorism is an unintended side effect of the globalization of international communications (including travel), rapid computation, and radical weapons development of the late twentieth century, which is to say the very strategic developments that are bringing into being the constitutional innovations of the market state. This suggests that al Qaeda will be copied by other globally networked infrastructures engendered by the emergence of market states. It is against these forms of global terrorism that war must be waged when we speak, as did President Bush, of a war against terrorists.

The unifying element among the groups to which al Qaeda outsources its operations is not a mystical, retrograde form of Islam but a shared hatred of the U.S. For this reason it is imperative that the U.S. not solidify that hatred among nation state terrorists but rather address their grievances generously. Casting America as a global, common enemy is one reason why the rising level of anti-Americanism should be of considerable concern to all; it is only a matter of time before an adolescent of European descent and no particular religious views is used as a suicide bomber. 193 If George Bush has done much to arouse anti-Americanism, many of America’s friends have done little to suppress it.

“The notion;’ wrote the political scientist Richard Betts, “that the [twenty-first] century requires a whole new approach for a whole new ball game may seem intuitively right, but it is, in fact, wrong. The difference between the world of 2006 and that of 1999 is no more radical than the difference between the worlds of 1999 and 1992.” Actually, such a notion does not appeal to our intuitions, which are so heavily governed by the experience of the wars of the twentieth century. If we believe, however, that the post-1989 world is merely a continuation of the international environment that preceded it, we will be ill-equipped to take measures to cope with that new world. As Audrey Kurth Cronin put it,

[t]errorists have access to more powerful technologies, more targets, more territory, more means of recruitment, and more exploitable sources of rage than ever before. The West’s twentieth century approach to terrorism is highly unlikely to mitigate any of these longterm trends.. . The U.S. government is still thinking in outdated terms, little changed since the end of the Cold War… The means and the ends of terrorism are changing in fundamental, important ways; but the means and the ends of the strategy being crafted in response are not.

IV

In earlier centuries, liberationist, secessionist, and other political groups have used terror to gain or keep state power. In the twentieth century, terrorists did not customarily challenge the idea or the inevitability of the system of sovereign nation states; rather, they used violence to keep or to acquire power within that system. Terrorism represented national and nationalist ambitions, pitting established powers against nascent ones who wished to control or create states.

In the twenty-first century, terrorism presents a different face. It is global, not national; it is decentralized and networked in its operations like a mutant nongovernmental organization (NGO) or a multinational corporation; it does not resemble the centralized and hierarchical bureaucracy of a nation state. As in previous centuries, terrorism in this century will attack the legitimacy of the State, but terrorism in its new guise will increasingly have a less national focus and a less nationalist agenda. It will operate in the international marketplace of weapons, targets, personnel, information, media influence, and persuasion, not in the national arenas of revolution and policy reform. Its diplomacy will be theatrical and depend upon the new media of satellite television and Internet links. One might say that the televised terrorist pronouncement is a kind of d6marche.196 The greatest difference, however, will lie in the potential combination of a global terror network and access to weapons of mass destruction and therefore it is to that subject we now turn. This looming intersection of an innovative organization and a novel means of terror will require a fundamental rethinking of conventional doctrines in international security and foreign policy, 197 that is, in strategy and in law.