A Plague Treatise for the 21st Century

[stilltrucking]

It is a grave error, he says, to see contemporary Islamic terrorism as mediaeval. ‘Al-Qa’eda is not a consequence of the interface between a globalised secular modernist culture and a more simple, more backward, less literate culture. I don’t think that’s it at all. I think al-Qa’eda is a slick, very modern, very post-modernist, very with-it group, and you see this in the sophistication of their media strategies.’

Next, we must accept that the global centre of Islamic terror ‘is in Europe, not in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. The most important cell for 9/11 wasn’t in Jeddah, it was in Hamburg. And I think this will only increase.’

He insists, most pointedly, that we speak in the plural of the ‘wars on terror’, and create a new constitutional order – global and national – capable of withstanding these many threats, some of them as yet unknown.

‘You have to be able to defend yourself when you don’t know who is hitting you, or you can get hit again. At one point I was going to call my book A Plague Treatise for the 21st Century; as you know, plague treatises were written in the 13th and 14th centuries by physicians and clerics and they talked about a phenomenon that they by and large didn’t understand. They didn’t have germ theory. I don’t think we really understand the operation of terror in the 21st century. But this much I think we do understand: that we have to build up our immune systems. We cannot simply win this fight by going after our adversaries, and attacking them and killing them.’

http://www.utexas.edu/law/news/2006/052 ... tator.html