Despite his habit of resorting to jargon (such as “disconfirmable”), Bobbitt could not be much clearer: he is here defending the use of torture on a much more extensive scale than the Bush administration has hitherto advocated, let alone practised. From Bobbitt’s insistence that the state of consent is fighting a war for survival, much follows. He suggests, for example, that al-Qa’eda terrorists “have sworn allegiance to a virtual state” and thus, after due process (a process that must be “internationally recognized”), they “can be coercively interrogated should they refuse to surrender their most dangerous weapon, their deadly plans”. Or, to put it more succinctly: “Sheikh Khalid Mohammed is not Jean Moulin.”

Bobbitt’s strategy for winning the wars – he emphasizes their plurality – on terror depends on a three-pronged offensive: fighting terrorism, preventing the proliferation of WMD and dealing with the consequences of humanitarian catastrophes. He argues that the impressive US diversion of military resources to aid the victims of the 2004 south-east Asian tsunami was a victory in the battle for hearts and minds, no less than the overthrow of Saddam or the Taliban. But he is worried that the West is complacent; it does not feel sufficiently threatened by the concatenation of global terrorism, WMD proliferation and humanitarian disaster which he thinks could together bring about a collapse of democracy and “an indefinite period of martial law”. It is Bobbitt’s background as a professor of jurisprudence that makes him attach supreme importance to the rule of law and to the notion of consent. His primary concern throughout is to preserve the legitimacy of that fragile construct, the modern liberal democratic polity that the terrorist organisations and their despotic allies (“states of terror”) wish to destroy. To this end, he advocates a reform of international law designed to make trading in WMD a crime against humanity, to create a standing international Terror Court which could try terrorists in absentia, and much else besides. Unfortunately, he still believes in the ability of the United Nations Security Council to bring these things about. The UN is no more likely to follow his advice than Israel is likely to trust its neighbours sufficiently to renounce nuclear weapons, as he also proposes.