Sustaining Relatively Good Poem by gershon hepner

Sustaining relatively good
in the face of greater evil
requires doing what we should
not do: sup with the devil.

Edward Rothstein (“In a Changing World, an Ever-Changing Terrorism, ” NYT, May 0,2008) reviews Philip Bobbitt’s new book, “Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century.” Bobbitt teaches law at the University of Texas and Columbia University and directs the Center for National Security at Columbia:
Contemporary terrorist groups, Mr. Bobbitt shows, are far less concerned with the death of innocents than their predecessors; they are not seeking to sway public opinion, but to expand their domain of terror. Weapons of mass destruction become so much more threatening because traditional ideas of deterrence have less sway — and this at the very moment when the global marketplace offers frightening options. But when facing this new market-state world, we often mistakenly apply the older nation-state model, which blinds us to both opportunities and dangers. Mr. Bobbitt traces many of the early errors in Iraq to a misconception that the confrontation was a traditional battle between nation-states. Similar misconceptions, he argues, are at the root of the idea that terrorism could possibly be controlled by police action; in such an approach the need to anticipate and preclude terrorist action, rather than punish it, is overlooked. Even the structure of intelligence agencies, Mr. Bobbitt argues, is a relic of the battles last fought. “As long as we continue to think in twentieth century, nation state terms, ” he writes, “we will not be able to develop doctrines and capabilities” appropriate for new threats. In his view those threats strike at the foundation of the modern state, seeking to affect its policies and structure. They attempt to replace an authority that derives from the “consent of the governed” with a condition of fear and horror, transforming a “state of consent” into a “a state of terror.” That makes Mr. Bobbitt adamant that the United States demand more of itself, championing the very rule of law that terrorists seek to overturn. This is an advocacy that he finds lacking in the conflicting regulations and extraterritorial prisons the United States established after 9/11. He acknowledges that the task will not be easy. Once-helpful distinctions become useless. Police action and military force, disaster relief and strategic operations, domestic investigations and international espionage: boundaries have already started to disappear. The Wars on Terror will also require the state to deal with mass catastrophe whatever its cause; hurricanes will demand the same humanitarian skills and strategic foresight as an explosion of a dirty bomb. So Mr. Bobbitt shifts the paradigm for understanding terrorism. The challenges posed by the conflict become more clear but also more daunting as he illuminates them. He barely begins to address the more knotty particulars: how to overcome the lifelong support for terror that so skews Palestinian opinion, or how to reformulate international laws when international institutions are inadequate and unreliable. He is also more confident than I am that a shift in the approach of the United States to the world order will sufficiently inspire international change. But there is so much to think about in this book that the disagreements it inspires are part of its value. There is also a tragic consciousness overshadowing it, evident in the fragments of poetry Mr. Bobbitt cites throughout. He quotes St. Augustine, calling the looming task “mournful work”: “sustaining relative good in the face of greater evil.”


5/9/08