Over at NASPIR, the Network of Activist Scholars of Politics and International Relations, Martin Shaw offers a review of a chapter from his own book, thus attempting an end run around any hostile book reviewers. But he makes some interesting points—

Were the terrorist atrocities in London the result of the 'warped logic' of the terrorists, as Tony Blair maintained, or of the logic of war in today's conditions, fuelled by the way the West fights its own wars, transferring risk from Western troops to innocent civilians? Can the West continue to fight wars in this way?

The concluding chapter of Martin Shaw's The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and Its Crisis in Iraq (Polity Press) analyses the links between the deliberate atrocities of Islamist terrorists in Western capitals and the 'accidental' massacres of civilians in Western wars. It argues that paradoxically the 'massacre embrace' of the terrorists trumps the 'massacre embarrassment' of the West, and that the answer for the West lies in the search for methods other than war, which has become counterproductive for our type of society. Hence we should abandon the idea of a 'war' on terror.
....

For Shaw, the contemporary Western way of war focuses on containing risks to the lives of Western soldiers in order to minimise political and electoral risk to governments. Risk is transferred to innocent civilians, whose killing is explained away as 'accidental'.1 Yet the idea of managing risk is fundamentally at odds with the brutal, unpredictable nature of war. Ultimately, attempts to manage, govern and rule over the risks of war produce greater risks for Western societies - as the bombings in Madrid and London have shown - and hence for those in power. After Iraq, the new Western way of war is in crisis and it will be more difficult for governments to fight this type of war.

It will only be more difficult if the public holds their feet to the fire!

Book details are here.

Related post
"The human cost of a fortnight in an embattled land" (1/17/05)