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[Translated from Le Monde 2 (Paris)]

THE VERY SURVEILLED WORLD OF PROFESSOR BOBBITT
By Marc Weitzmann

Le Monde 2 (Paris)
July 3, 2008

Original source: Le Monde (Paris)

NEW YORK -- He does not appear on TV, nor is he seen beside either the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom he will no doubt support, or Hillary Clinton, who shares his views. Yet the work of Philip Bobbitt is read and annotated by each -- he also knows Republican John McCain -- and by their advisers.

His most recent book, not yet out in French, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century, was published this spring in the United States and was hailed by the New York Times as the most innovative and most important political work published since the end of the Cold War. And there can be little doubt that whoever wins the election in November, Bobbitt will be called to Washington to play a role in the areas he knows so well: national security, terrorism... You think of a sentence by Fitzgerald when Bobbitt, -- tall, athletically built, smiling cordially in an open-necked shirt that he wears under a jacket that suggests casual wealth -- opens his door, on the top floor of a prestigious building on New York's Park Avenue: "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us." The essayist Paul Berman, who met him at the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the corridors of Democratic Party politics -- where he was supporting Clinton --, remembers him as a man endowed with "an absurdly seductive physique."

Bobbitt brings you into an apartment bare of furniture except for a wooden table covered with press clippings and a small stereo system. His passion for racing cars is famous, as are his taste for skydiving and cigars, as well -- a particular cigar, rather, the pyramid Por Larrañaga, "the one Kipling mentions in his poem 'The Fiancé,'" he specifies, as he offers you a whisky. To finance a social program, for the past few years he's been teaching an extracurricular class entitled "How to Make a Perfect Martini" in Austin.

For Philip Bobbitt is, above all, professor of constitutional law at the University of Texas-Austin, at Columbia University in New York, and at Oxford University in Great Britain, author of a thesis on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and member of a multitude of international learned societies. And in the United States he is unquestionably one of the thinkers who has with the greatest perspicacity tried to reflect on the contemporary world and to make it understood. Even if you don't share his convictions, it's hard to deny the rigor of his approach, which is both modest and ambitious.

"THE MARKET STATE"

His mother, Rebekah Johnson, from a family of Baptist pastors and raised on a small farm in Texas, had as a younger brother a certain Lyndon Johnson -- who became the 36th president of the United States after the assassination of John Kennedy in November 1963. Six months later, at the beginning of summer in 1964, the young Bobbitt, then fifteen years old, served as an apprentice in the White House communications office. "That was the summer of race riots in Harlem," he recalls. "The summer of murders in the South linked to the struggle for civil rights, the summer of anti-segregationist laws. The summer of the election campaign, and the Gulf of Tonkin attacks. For me it was a crash course in political education." At Princeton a year later, nauseated "by the way they were teaching political science," he dropped his studies for a year and, without telling anyone about his family connections, got himself hired in a social-work program in the ghettos.

The sequel takes place in the corridors of power, in Washington. In 1979, at the age of 31, Bobbitt, named associate counsel to President Jimmy Carter, worked on the CIA charter. Eight years later, in 1987, a member and legal counsel to the Senate committee charged with investigating the Irangate scandal, he interrogated Robert McFarlane, then national security advisor, and President Reagan himself. "My role consisted in determining their respective responsibilites in this affair that was marked by the financing of an anti-Communist militia in Nicaragua with money from arms sales to Khomeini's Iran. I got McFarlane to resign."

"What sums up America the best is its Constitution," he says today. "The fundamental idea of the Constitution is that power must be governed by law." There can be no doubt for Bobbitt that the Bush administration has largely freed itself from that principle, and the recent decision of the Supreme Court disavowing the regime imposed on the prisoners at Guantánamo on the grounds that "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times" can only mean he's right. For him, however, these aberrations, from Guantánamo to the use of torture and the Patriot Act, are not the product of a regime that is out of control or tending toward fascism; they are the consequence of an inability to think out the global situation ('penser le monde') upon which we have entered.

From the end of the Cold War on, the structure of the nation state as conceived in the 17th century after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) has become obsolete. Bobbitt calls the "market state" the entity that is in the process of replacing it before our eyes: a constitutional order that is to a greater or lesser degree modeled, with respect to citizens, on the relation of a company to its customers. Think of Nicolas Sarkozy, of Berlusconi, even to a lesser degree of Putin.

This passage from one model to another is not without ironies. "In the 1950s," Bobbitt says, "America's biggest contribution to postwar international stability was to maintain and diffuse in the West a model of relatively open markets, a model of relatively free trade, and a relatively stable monetary system. These elements enabled the victory over the totalitarian regimes. Now, today, they have ended up undermining the constitutional order of the old nation states in favor of the market state." Looked at from the point of view of today, the 1990s, which began this transition, seem thus strangely optimistic. The world saw in the fall of the Berlin Wall the end of borders. Apartheid had fallen; the peace process in the Middle East had begun. Fukuyama predicted the end of history and Thomas Friedman analysed the "virtuous circle": liberal economics and global communications were going to carry democracy and human rights to the far corners of the world.

NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION

Symbolized by September 11, the decade beginning in 2000 violently forced a return to a brutally complex world. For the counterpart to this market state, its mirror image, as it were, is the terrorist network. Just as the plague in the 14th century was one of the unanticipated consequences of the first globalization. Here, too, the irony is patent. "Take the Internet, perfected by the Pentagon's defense research agency as a typical Cold War idea: it was a question of developing a system of communications that could survive an eventual Soviet nuclear attack. The Internet today is the symbol of globalization and also the tool without which al-Qaeda could not exist." The terrorist networks of the 21st century, decentralized, privatized, and capable of outsourcing, are, above all, de-territorialized -- conquering national sovereignty is of interest neither to Hezbollah in Lebanon nor to al-Qaeda.

Terror, for its movements, is all at once the weapon, an act of propaganda per se, and a political regime, as in Afghanistan. "Even as the market state enhances the possibilites for individuals to choose through consent," says Bobbitt, "fundamentalist groups seek to enhance in daily life opportunities to obey in order to ensure the spiritual salvation of their members and of the civilian populations they control."

Civilian populations. They are the nerve center. The systematic choice to make them the target goes back to the time Bobbitt calls "the Long War," the European 20th century: the bombing of London by Nazi Germany in 1942, the destruction of German cities by the Allies in 1944. Nagasaki and Hiroshima, finally, put paid to the old notion of the "battlefield": by its sheer power, the atom bomb made obsolete all military strategy, and implied that civilian urban centers would henceforth be the only rational targets in war. Thus appeared what was called the balance of terror.

What is this balance becoming in our present environment? The size of the target, first of all, is growing unceasingly: "The number of inhabitants of cities around the world," Bobbitt reminds us, "is now more than three billion." Then there's the threat of nuclear proliferation, which, with Iranian and North Korean ambitions alongside various trafficking, has not gone away. Bobbitt tells with a wealth of detail the story of Dr. Khan, who, if he had not been recently arrested, would have set off an arms race in the Middle East. And he talks of military or scientific technologies that are accessible to everyone. In the end, the strategic concepts that protected the West have vanished: who can say with certainty where the line between war and peace runs today? Such is, for Bobbitt, the Age of Terror: not an imminent wave of attacks that could destroy everything, but the threat that the emergence of new violent powers -- whether or not involving states -- presents to the constitutional order of the democracies. Thus he speaks of "the Wars against Terror" -- note the plural. According to him, the cycle began with the annexation of Kuwait by Baghdad in 1991, and has continued in the Balkans, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The attacks on New York, London, and Madrid have had a defining role in the sense that the panic that the attacks brought about is capable of placing the democratic order in peril. The struggle against terror, according to Bobbitt, consists in arming the democracies to enable them to struggle against, in the event of a terrorist attack, their own martial temptations. Herein lies the hellish dimension of the problem: how can victory be measured when it consists in an event that doesn't happen?

AMBIGUOUS IMPLICATIONS

Bobbitt favors, in the military sphere, the preparation of a new dissuasive strategy adapted to "Terror's new clothes." He actively campaigns, for example, for what he calls "preclusive" war, a form of armed interventionism. He also pleads, in the legal sphere, for adapting now the laws of civil society with a vew to the new times that are emerging. His reasoning has its logic: we have to act while we are still calm in order not to have to do so in an emergency, when there would be a risk of martial law; but the implications are ambiguous, since it's a question of adapting laws for living in peacetime as if we were already at war.

Thus Bobbitt is not content to advocate, in the United States, the strengthening of certain federal state powers and the creation of a national identity card (which still does not exist). He is also a defender, among other things, of eavesdropping on private communications and an obligatory medical exam for passengers in airports. In order to avoid a suicide attack by a contaminated terrorist, he describes a machine in which every passenger would spit a little saliva that would be automatically analyzed to produce individualized health reports, with the traveller facing the risk of not being allowed on the flight should an illness be detected.

Is this science fiction, paranoia, or the new face of the Western democracies? According to the American Department of Transportation, several airports, including JFK (in New York) and Los Angeles, have just equipped themselves with scanners the make it possible to see under passengers' clothes... Nothing can better "prepare the victor in [the presidential election campaign] for the transformations that will occur during her (or his) term of office," writes Bobbitt in one of the last sentences of his book, than "that on the horizon there is something -- possibly inimical to our system of governance -- that we have never encountered before." 

[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE:  Actually, these words come from three sentences at the end of Bobbitt's book: "As this book goes to press, a presidential election campaign is under way in the United States. There is no one big idea that could possibly prepare the victor in that contest for the transformations in strategy and law that will occur during her (or his) term of office. But there is this: that on the horizon there is something -- possibly inimical to our system of governance -- that we have never encountered before and that, without those who came before us, we could never have imagined. That is the growing union of strategy and law that will emerge as the legitimating basis of the State itself as it undergoes fundamental change" (Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008], pp. 544-45). --M.K.J.]

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Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
Phone: 253-535-7219
Web page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu