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Adapting U.S. to a different world order
to understand that terrorism has changed playing field at home and abroad
By Mark Bowden
Eight years ago this week,
Mohamed Atta was in New York City
looking for a flight school.
Atta, a zealous anti-Semite from
Egypt who believed that Jews were
controlling the world from their
secret headquarters in New York
City, was a new kind of enemy for
the United States. He was not a sol¬
dier in the army of an enemy nation,
but something more like a free agent
or entrepreneur of mass murder, who
had essentially contracted with al
Qaeda to carry out the most ambi¬
tious terrorist attack in history.
As we near seven years into the
“war on terror,” there are new
Mohamed Attas out there. Stopping
their attacks is one of this country’s
essential priorities, but it is not the
only one. As we prepare to elect a
new president, we have an important
opportunity to assess anew what this
war means, and how it should be
fought.
Al-Qaeda, the author of the 9/11
attacks, is a global network unlike
any seen before. Apart from its par¬
ticular beliefs and goals, it sprang
from the rarified atmosphere of the
modern world, and long after Osama
bin Laden and his gang are a foot¬
note to history, the threat they posed
will remain.
The terrorists of the 21st century
will not necessarily all be Islamist; in
fact, beliefs will matter less than
methods. It is terrorism itself that
poses the threat.
Al-Qaeda has just pointed the
way. It has employed the tools of the
emerging international market state,
air travel, and the ability to transfer
money and information worldwide. It
has plotted, recruited and instructed
martyrs, and advertised its goals and
accomplishments via satellite
phones, the Internet and international
media.
In the near future, it and other
networks like it will be able to buy
terrible weapons off the shelf and
seek to detonate them in congested
urban centers where they will do the
most harm. They are the curse of the
modem age, and like the curses of
previous eras, they mirror the law-
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There’s always the comics
Life has slowed consider¬
ably the last couple of weeks.
School is out and Jacob and I
don’t have to study spelling
words. I’ve suffered from one
of those numerous bacteria
floating around everywhere
and Jacob is silent as his throat
heals from removal of tonsils.
We have found numerous
new comic book Web sites that
display the hordes of books
available for collectors of the
Incredible Hulk and Spiderman
series. It has been a learning
experience for me as I realized
there are more comics pub¬
lished than anyone can collect.
When we found Mile High
Comics, I thought it was a “put
on,” but the title only means the
ones catalogued. There were
another 500,000 that were yet
to be catalogued and available
to the collectors of these two
characters and others.
Observing the list made me
realize how far the world of
comic collectors has gone in
my lifetime. We had Nancy and
Sluggo, Archie and Friends,
and Richie the rich kid. There
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abiding, civil societies they threaten.
This is the threat outlined succinct¬
ly in “Terror and Consent,” Philip
Bobbitt’s remarkable effort to make
sense of our post-9/11 world. Bobbitt
— director of the Center for National
Security at Columbia University —
describes our era as the “market state,”
as opposed to the nation-states that
dominated the 20th century.
The nationalist rebel movements
of that century sought primarily to
supplant government in their own
countries and modeled their own
hierarchy on the governments they
opposed.
So today’s terrorist networks are
international and stateless. They are
modeled after the global institutions
that define the nascent market state.
They seek to undermine the partner¬
ships, security, and rule of law that
enable free trade and prosperity,
replacing our “state of consent” with
a “state of terror.”
Better than anyone I have read,
Bobbitt has thought through both the
nature of the danger and how we
should defend ourselves from it. He
is no alarmist.
Al-Qaeda itself does not pose an
immediate threat to our way of life,
but the implications of its successes
are disturbing. They suggest that our
security can no longer be protected
by the mighty war machine that
defines the United States as the
world’s superpower. Our military,
unmatched in fighting the last great
wars, is already an anachronism.
In the years since Atta and his
men slammed planes into the World
Trade Centers and Pentagon, the
United States has lashed out violently
in a variety of directions, sometimes
effectively, often not. President Bush
has been decisive and consistent, to a
fault, but also incoherent. Congress
has become a persistent critic, but has
offered little else.
We need a strategy that rises
above political partisanship and the
bromides of a presidential race, one
that clearly defines not only what we
are fighting against but what we are
fighting for.
One first step is to acknowledge
the severity of the problem. Terrorism
is not simply a law enforcement
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Julianne
Boling
COLUMNIST s. r m 4
,
were a few others, but funds in
our family for purchases were
scarce. There were no collec¬
tions that one day might be sold
to send a kid to college.
A learning experience would
be to take a stroll through a real
comic book store. There, locked
behind thick glass doors are
comics worth more than a thou¬
sand dollars each. Just last week
a report of a man dressed as
Spiderman, walked into the
comic store and crashed the cab¬
inet of rare books and escaped
with more than $10,000 worth of
comics.
“What is this world coming
to?” It isn’t even safe to be in
stores that sell comics.
However, when I began think¬
ing about the subject of safety
in stores I think of all of the
people robbed and beaten in
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issue, although combating it may
mean blending military and police
methods. Terrible weapons once pos¬
sessed only by powerful states today
are becoming available on interna¬
tional black markets. The technology
and materials to build them are
already for sale, and it is likely that
soon the weapons themselves will be.
There is not only the terrible loss
of life and economic damage to con¬
sider — but also the fate of civil lib¬
erties and the rule of law after a
major attack that kills not just thou¬
sands, but tens of thousands. The
assumption of war powers by the
Bush administration in the years after
9/11 will seem benign by compari¬
son.
What we fight for is the safety of
civilians to live normal lives free of
chaos and catastrophe, and the
preservation of democratic, law-abid¬
ing states that respect human rights,
what Bobbitt calls “states of consent.”
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their own homes. This makes
me ask the question once again,
“What is this world coming
to?”
The man of the house keeps
predicting the fall of the world
caused by the Internet. He
assures me the banks will not
be able to give out money, the
electric companies will fail, and
telephones will stop working
when the world’s network of
computers goes down.
, It could be he does under¬
stand the Web more than most
since sin and corruption are
prime examples of the fall of
mankind on the Internet
spaces. I suppose the world
would shut down, at least for
some people.
I’m not worried too much
about his predictions. We may
not be able to surf the Net or
see the array of comics avail¬
able for purchase, but if “push
comes to shove,” as the old say¬
ing goes, Jacob and I will read
comics.
Cumming resident Julianne
Boling’s column appears each
Sunday.
FORSYTH COUNTY NEWS — Sunday, June 8,2008
The enemy seeks a “state of fear,”
and not just in al-Qaeda’s ludicrous,
cruel and imaginary caliphate. They
strive to sow enough fear to topple
the normal workings of a free society.
We protect ourselves not just by con¬
trolling how we respond to acts of
terror — as my Atlantic colleague
Jim Fallows has suggested — but
also by preventing such acts.
Prevention, or what Bobbitt calls
“preclusion,” means uniting the con¬
siderable moral, military and eco¬
nomic clout of the modem market
state —that is, global cooperation on
an unprecedented scale. Liberals will
gladly embrace the importance of
such alliances (it is a cornerstone of
the campaigns of Barack Obama and
Hillary Rodham Clinton) and the
need to function within the law, both
domestic and (such as it exists) inter¬
national.
Government also must get better
at responding to calamity, both man¬
made and natural. Part of protecting
civilians and preserving free institu¬
tions is the ability to recover rapidly
from disaster, whether it be Hurricane
Katrina or a dirty bomb in Chicago.
The growing concentration of
population around urban centers, and
quite possibly the effects of global
warming, make more likely cata¬
strophic events that undermine the
rule of law. Civil defense has been a
poor stepchild in the world of nation¬
al security; in the 21st century it has
become an urgent priority. When the
United States has deployed its mili¬
tary power to assist those stricken by
disaster'around the world, it has done
a great service to the cause of free¬
dom.
But responding to such threats
will also mean adapting American
law to deal with a changing world.
Civil defense in this country should
become a military mission, which
means breaking down some of the
antiquated barriers that prevent an
aggressive, rapid federal response.
Preventing damaging attacks also
means enacting laws that enable
sophisticated, time-sensitive intelli¬
gence-gathering, such as data-mining
and global electronic eavesdropping.
It also means wading into the moral¬
ly uncertain terrain of interrogation:
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PAGE 13A
How to acknowledge the necessity of
gathering intelligence, while avoid¬
ing the scandalous, stupid and self
defeating excesses at Abu Ghraib and
Bagram?
Those who say, “Protect civil lib¬
erties at all costs” should soberly
assess the consequences to their own
cause of failing to preempt signifi¬
cant attacks. If the consequences of
failure are the loss of all civil liber¬
ties, then sensible adaptation would
seem part of the genius of democra¬
cy. In football it is called “bend but
don’t break.”
This presidential election pro¬
vides us with a new opportunity to
focus our national effort effectively,
to make it clear to the world that we
stand for the rule of law, government
by consent, and the protection of
human rights, and aim to defend our¬
selves from those who would deny
them. The law should protect us from
the excesses of government, but first
and foremost it ought to protect us
from foreign enemies.
As Bobbitt writes, “For all the
good work they do, the chief protec¬
tor of American constitutional rights
is not the Lawyers Committee for
Civil Rights or the American Civil
Liberties Union or even the Supreme
Court; it is the 101st Airborne
Division.”
The Bush administration’s con¬
tempt for the strict rule of law and
disdain for international consent have
all but discredited the notion of self
defense against this modem threat. It
failed to realize that legitimacy and
legality are not always constraints on
power, but powerful tools against
those who would impose their will
with terror.
A new president and administra¬
tion have an opportunity to enunciate
a strategic doctrine that clearly puts
America on the side of protecting
civilians, preserving the rule of law,
the principle of consent, and defend¬
ing the pursuit of life, liberty, and
happiness.
Mark Bowden is author of
“Guests of the Ayatollah: The First
Battle in America's War with Militant
Islam." He wrote this for The
Philadelphia Inquirer; e-mail:
mhowden @ phillynews. com.