Redraw the battle lines

We need new ways to fight terror groups who know no boundaries, says andrew anthony

One of the most mocked phrases of the 21st century is the 'War on Terror'. So unfashionable is the neologism that it's practically obligatory to encase it within ironic speech marks or employ the prefix 'so called' or, just to be on the safe side, do both. Yet the fact remains that there is a war taking place across the globe, and it is being fought on one side by means of indiscriminate terror.

Hasn't that always been the case? Isn't terror the weapon of the weak against overwhelming military might? Certainly the second half of the 20th century was filled with examples of shocking terrorist murders, from the creation of Israel via the liberation of Algeria to the conflicts in Northern Ireland and Palestine. But all of these struggles, however bloody, were concerned with the establishment of nationhood.

That paradigm changed on September 11 2001. There exists no territorial state

on whose behalf 3,000 people were incinerated that late summer's day. However, many observers continue to believe that as the target was the United States, the cause was in essence anti-imperialist. And rather than follow the amoral and limitlessly murderous logic of 9/11 through to its possibly nuclear conclusion, such analysts prefer to translate the problem back into the reassuring battle lines of the past. If only the West would withdraw from the Middle East and elsewhere, they suggest, everything would settle down.

Philip Bobbitt, the distinguished American professor of international security, has no time for such complacency. In his new book, Terror and Consent, he mounts a persuasive case to engage with the actuality of the unfolding situation. The nation state, he declares, has been supplanted by the 'market state', a globalised entity that seeks to maximise opportunity for its citizens. And "terrorists in the 21st century," he writes, "will not be like the national liberation groups of the 20th century that fought nation