Who gets to define the war on terrorism?
The fundamental proposition that I think 9/11 had illustrated to all of us is this phenomenon of the privatization of force. In a normal sixteenth-century through twentieth-century world the ability to inflict catastrophic harm has by and large been monopolized by nation states. That is why international law is really the law among nations to govern the conduct of civilized nation in their use of individual monopolies of force. The fundamental proposition that 9/11 illustrated to the world was that force is no longer monopolized by nation but rather has been privatized in the hands of a couple of evil doers. No longer does catastrophic attacks have to be perpetrated by nation states against each other, but rather any Joe Schmo with a couple of hundred thousand dollars and evil intent can do a lot of damage not only to the physical structure of a particular country and to kill a whole lot of its citizens, but also to disrupt fundamentally the constitutional democratic order upon which o
