UN Security Council Acts within Constraints Set by Great Powers

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Nermeen Al Mufti
The New Anatolian, August 21, 2006


UN Security Council Resolution 1701 came very late and posed a fragile ceasefire, yet there will be another war as long as the Bush-backed Israel has the pretext of "safer borders," and Bush himself is insisting on going further in his war against terrorism.
Eminent Professor Noam Chomsky, in this interview with The New Anatolian, speaks about Israeli-Lebanese war and the UN Security Council.

TNA: The first question is very simple yet has never been answered: Why does Israel have the right of self-defense while the Arab countries don't? The U.S. has the same right, while Iraq doesn't!

Chomsky: The answer was given a long time ago by Thucydides (the Melian dialogue, in The Peloponnesian War, Book 5): The strong do as they can, and the weak suffer as they must. One of the leading principles of international affairs. Many Arab States declared that they will not boycott relations with Israel; in the same time (breath) they declared the war is Hezbollah's war and fault.

TNA: Do you think there was and still is an American pressure behind this, or are the Arab regimes afraid of "regime change" and doing their best to satisfy the White House?

Chomsky: At an emergency Arab League meeting, most of the Arab states (apart from Algeria, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen) condemned Hezbollah. In doing so, they were willing to "openly defy public opinion," as the New York Times reported. They later had to back down, including Washington's oldest and most important ally in the region, Saudi Arabia: King Abdullah said that "if the peace option is rejected due to the Israeli arrogance, then only the war option remains, and no one knows the repercussions befalling the region, including wars and conflict that will spare no one, including those whose military power is now tempting them to play with fire."

Most analysts assume -- plausibly I think -- that their primary concern is the growing influence of Iran, and the embarrassment caused by the fact that alone in the Arab world, Hezbollah has offered support for Palestinians under brutal attack in the occupied territories.

TNA: Was there any legal or moral justification for this war, as President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Western media insisted?

Chomsky: We can ignore Bush and Rice, who are participants in the U.S.-Israeli invasion of Lebanon. We know very well that by Western standards, there is no moral or legal justification for the war. Sufficient proof is the fact that for many years, Israel regularly kidnapped Lebanese, sending them to prisons in Israel, including secret prisons like the notorious Camp 1391, which was exposed by accident and quickly forgotten (and in the U.S., never even reported within the mainstream). No one suggested that Lebanon, or anyone else, had the right to invade and destroy much of Israel in retaliation. As this long and ugly record makes clear, kidnapping of civilians -- a far worse crime than capture of soldiers - - is considered insignificant by the U.S., UK, and other Western states, and by articulate opinion within them quite generally, when it is done by "our side." That fact was revealed very dramatically once again at the outset of the current upsurge of violence after Hamas captured an Israeli soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, on June 25. That action elicited a huge show of outrage in the West, and support for Israel's sharp escalation of its attacks in Gaza. One day before, on June 24, Israeli forces kidnapped two civilians in Gaza, a doctor and his brother, and sent them off somewhere in Israel's prison system. The event was scarcely reported, and elicited little if any comment within the mainstream. The timing alone reveals with vivid clarity that the show of outrage over the capture of Israeli soldiers is a cynical fraud, and undermines any shreds of moral legitimacy for the ensuing actions.

TNA: Is there any pretext that could justify the daily massacres in Lebanon and Gaza?

Chomsky: With a vivid imagination, one can conjure up all sorts of pretexts. In the real world, there are none. And we may add the forgotten West Bank, where the U.S. and Israel are proceeding with their plans to drive the last nails into the coffin of Palestinian national rights by their programs of annexation, cantonization, and imprisonment (by takeover of the Jordan Valley). These plans are carried out within the framework of another cynical fraud: "convergence" (Israeli "hitkansut"), portrayed in the U.S. as "withdrawal," in a remarkable public relations triumph. Also long- forgotten is the occupied Golan Heights, virtually annexed by Israel in violation of unanimous Security Council orders (but with tacit U.S. support).

TNA: I couldn't understand this Israeli arrogance. Do you?

Chomsky: The maxim of Thucydides again. And it is worth bearing in mind that Israel can go just as far as its protector in Washington permits and supports.

TNA: As an Iraqi, I understand that the ongoing war against Lebanon and Gaza is an essential part of the Bush scheme toward reshaping the region -- I mean redrawing the borders drawn by the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement.

Chomsky: I doubt that most of them have even heard of Sykes-Picot. They have their own plans for the region. Primary among them is the traditional commitment to control the world's major energy resources. Those who do not fall in line can expect to be targets of subversion or aggression. That should not be

surprising, at least to those familiar with the history of the past century (in fact well before).

TNA: How could we explain the role of the UN Security Council in destroying Lebanon and Gaza now, and Iraq before?

Chomsky: The Security Council acts within constraints set by the great powers, primarily the United States, by virtue of its enormous power. It can generally rely on Britain, particularly Blair's Britain, which is described sardonically in Britain's leading journal of international affairs as "the spear-carrier of the pax Americana." In the early post-war years, for obvious reasons, the UN was generally under U.S. domination, and was very popular among U.S. elites. By the mid-1960s, that was becoming less true, with decolonization and the recovery of the industrial societies from wartime devastation. Since that time, the U.S. has been far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions on a wide range of issues, with Britain second, and none of the others even close. Correspondingly, elite support for the UN sharply declined in the U.S. -- though, interestingly, popular support for the UN remains remarkably high, one of the many illustrations of an enormous gap between public opinion and public policy in the U.S. Over and above that crucial constraint, U.S. power allows it to shape those resolutions and actions that it is willing to accept. Other powers have their own cynical reasons for what they do, but their influence is naturally less -- again, the maxim of Thucydides. Popular forces could make a substantial difference, and sometimes do, but until the prevailing "democratic deficit" is reduced, that effect will be limited.

TNA: Do you think that Iran and Syria were behind this war, as Bush said?

Chomsky: It is generally assumed that they at least gave Hezbollah authorization for the July 12 attack on the Israeli military forces at the border. However, many of the most serious analysts of Hezbollah, and of Iran, have expressed their conclusion that Hezbollah's actions are on its own initiative.

Failed States
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Amy Goodman & Juan Gonzalez
Democracy Now, March 31, 2006


AMY GOODMAN: In this first broadcast interview upon publication of his book, Professor Noam Chomsky joins us today from Boston for the hour. We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Noam.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Glad to be with you again.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Failed States, what do you mean?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, over the years there have been a series of concepts developed to justify the use of force in international affairs for a long period. It was possible to justify it on the pretext, which usually turned out to have very little substance, that the U.S. was defending itself against the communist menace. By the 1980s, that was wearing pretty thin. The Reagan administration concocted a new category: terrorist states. They declared a war on terror as soon as they entered office in the early 1980s, 1981. ‘We have to defend ourselves from the plague of the modern age, return to barbarism, the evil scourge of terrorism,’ and so on, and particularly state-directed international terrorism.

A few years later -- this is Clinton -- Clinton devised the concept of rogue states. ‘It’s 1994, we have to defend ourselves from rogue states.’ Then, later on came the failed states, which either threaten our security, like Iraq, or require our intervention in order to save them, like Haiti, often devastating them in the process. In each case, the terms have been pretty hard to sustain, because it's been difficult to overlook the fact that under any, even the most conservative characterization of these notions -- let's say U.S. law -- the United States fits fairly well into the category, as has often been recognized. By now, for example, the category -- even in the Clinton years, leading scholars, Samuel Huntington and others, observed that -- in the major journals, Foreign Affairs -- that in most of the world, much of the world, the United States is regarded as the leading rogue state and the greatest threat to their existence.

By now, a couple of years later, Bush years, same journals’ leading specialists don't even report international opinion. They just describe it as a fact that the United States has become a leading rogue state. Surely, it's a terrorist state under its own definition of international terrorism, not only carrying out violent terrorist acts and supporting them, but even radically violating the so-called "Bush Doctrine," that a state that harbors terrorists is a terrorist state. Undoubtedly, the U.S. harbors leading international terrorists, people described by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department as leading terrorists, like Orlando Bosch, now Posada Carriles, not to speak of those who actually implement state terrorism.

And I think the same is true of the category “failed states.” The U.S. increasingly has taken on the characteristics of what we describe as failed states. In the respects that one mentioned, and also, another critical respect, namely the -- what is sometimes called a democratic deficit, that is, a substantial gap between public policy and public opinion. So those suggestions that you just read off, Amy, those are actually not mine. Those are pretty conservative suggestions. They are the opinion of the majority of the American population, in fact, an overwhelming majority. And to propose those suggestions is to simply take democracy seriously. It's interesting that on these examples that you've read and many others, there is an enormous gap between public policy and public opinion. The proposals, the general attitudes of the public, which are pretty well studied, are -- both political parties are, on most of these issues, well to the right of the population.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Professor Chomsky, in the early parts of the book, especially on the issue of the one characteristic of a failed state, which is its increasing failure to protect its own citizens, you lay out a pretty comprehensive look at what the, especially in the Bush years, the war on terrorism has meant in terms of protecting the American people. And you lay out clearly, especially since the war, the invasion of Iraq, that terrorist, major terrorist action and activity around the world has increased substantially. And also, you talk about the dangers of a possible nuclear -- nuclear weapons being used against the United States. Could you expand on that a little bit?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there has been a very serious threat of nuclear war. It's not -- unfortunately, it's not much discussed among the public. But if you look at the literature of strategic analysts and so on, they're extremely concerned. And they describe particularly the Bush administration aggressive militarism as carrying an “appreciable risk of ultimate doom,” to quote one, “apocalypse soon,” to quote Robert McNamara and many others. And there's good reasons for it, I mean, which could explain, and they explain. That's been expanded by the Bush administration consciously, not because they want nuclear war, but it's just not a high priority. So the rapid expansion of offensive U.S. military capacity, including the militarization of space, which is the U.S.'s pursuit alone. The world has been trying very hard to block it. 95% of the expenditures now are from the U.S., and they're expanding.

All of these measures bring about a completely predictable reaction on the part of the likely targets. They don't say, you know, ‘Thank you. Here are our throats. Please cut them.’ They react in the ways that they can. For some, it will mean responding with the threat or maybe use of terror. For others, more powerful ones, it's going to mean sharply increasing their own offensive military capacity. So Russian military expenditures have sharply increased in response to Bush programs. Chinese expansion of offensive military capacity is also beginning to increase for the same reasons. All of that threatens -- raises the already severe threat of even -- of just accidental nuclear war. These systems are on computer-controlled alert. And we know that our own systems have many errors, which are stopped by human intervention. Their systems are far less secure; the Russian case, deteriorated. These moves all sharply enhance the threat of nuclear war. That's serious nuclear war that I'm talking about.

There's also the threat of dirty bombs, small nuclear explosions. Small means not so small, but in comparison with a major attack, which would pretty much exterminate civilized life. The U.S. intelligence community regards the threat of a dirty bomb, say in New York, in the next decade as being probably greater than 50%. And those threats increase as the threat of terror increases.

And Bush administration policies have, again, consciously been carried out in a way, which they know is likely to increase the threat of terror. The most obvious example is the Iraq invasion. That was undertaken with the anticipation that it would be very likely to increase the threat of terror and also nuclear proliferation. And, in fact, that's exactly what happened, according to the judgment of the C.I.A., National Intelligence Council, foreign intelligence agencies, independent specialists. They all point out that, yes, as anticipated, it increased the threat of terror. In fact, it did so in ways well beyond what was anticipated.

To mention just one, we commonly read that there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. Well, it's not totally accurate. There were means to develop weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and known to be in Iraq. They were under guard by U.N. inspectors, who were dismantling them. When Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest sent in their troops, they neglected to instruct them to guard these sites. The U.N. inspectors were expelled, the sites were left unguarded. The inspectors continued their work by satellite and reported that over a hundred sites had been looted, in fact, systematically looted, not just somebody walking in, but careful looting. That included dangerous biotoxins, means to hide precision equipment to be used to develop nuclear weapons and missiles, means to develop chemical weapons and so on. All of this has disappeared. One hates to imagine where it's disappeared to, but it could end up in New York.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Noam Chomsky, and we're going to come back with him. His new book, just published, is called Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. We'll be back with Professor Chomsky in a minute.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Professor Noam Chomsky, upon the release of his new book, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I'm Amy Goodman, here with Juan Gonzalez. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Professor Chomsky, in your book you also talk about how Iraq has become almost an incubator or a university now for advanced training for terrorists, who then are leaving the country there and going around the world, very much as what happened in the 1980s in Afghanistan. Could you talk about that somewhat?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Actually, that's -- actually, these are just quotes from the C.I.A. and other U.S. intelligence agencies and analysts. Yes, they describe Iraq now as a training ground for highly professionalized terrorists skilled in urban contact. They do compare it to Afghanistan, but say that it's much more serious, because of the high level of training and skill. These are almost entirely Iraqis. There's a small number of foreign fighters drawn to Iraq. Estimates are maybe 5% to 10%. And they are, as in the case of Afghanistan, are expected to spread into throughout many parts of the world and to carry out the kinds of terrorism that they're trained in, as a reaction to -- clearly reaction to the invasion. Iraq was, whatever you thought about it, was free from connections to terror prior to the invasion. It's now a major terror center.

It's not as President Bush says, that terrorists are being concentrated in Iraq so that we can kill them. These are terrorists who had no previous record of involvement in terrorism. The foreign fighters who have come in, mostly from Saudi Arabia, have been investigated extensively by Saudi and Israeli and U.S. intelligence, and what they conclude is that they were mobilized by the Iraq war, no involvement in terrorist actions in the past. And undoubtedly, just as expected, the Iraq war has raised an enormous hostility throughout much of the world, and particularly the Muslim world.

It was the most -- probably the most unpopular war in history, and even before it was fought. Virtually no support for it anywhere, except the U.S. and Britain and a couple of other places. And since the war itself was perhaps one of the most incredible military catastrophes in history, has caused utter disaster in Iraq and has -- and all of that has since simply intensified the strong opposition to the war of the kind that you heard from that Indonesian student of a few moments ago. But that's why it spread, and that's a -- it increases the reservoir of potential support for the terrorists, who regard themselves as a vanguard, attempting to elicit support from others, bring others to join with them. And the Bush administration is their leading ally in this. Again, not my words, the words of the leading U.S. specialists on terror, Michael Scheuer in this case. And definitely, that's happened.

And it's not the only case. I mean, in case after case, the Bush administration has simply downgraded the threat of terror. One example is the report of the 9/11 Commission. Here in the United States, the Bush administration didn't want the commission to be formed, tried to block it, but it was finally formed. Bipartisan commission, gave many recommendations. The recommendations, to a large extent, were not carried out. The commission members, including the chair, were appalled by this, set up their own private commission after their own tenure was completed, and continued to report that the measures are simply not being carried out.

There are many other examples. One of the most striking is the Treasury Department has a branch, the Office of Financial Assets Control, which is supposed to monitor suspicious funding transfers around the world. Well, that's a core element of the so-called war on terror. They've given reports to Congress. It turns out that they have a few officials devoted to al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but about -- I think it was -- six times that many devoted to whether there are any evasions of the totally illegal U.S. embargo against Cuba.

There was an instance of that just a few months ago, when the U.S. infuriated even energy corporations by ordering a Sheraton Hotel in Mexico City to cancel a meeting between Cuban oil specialists and U.S. oil companies, including some big ones, seeking to explore the development of offshore Cuban oil resources. The government ordered -- this OFAC ordered the hotel, the U.S. hotel, to expel the Cubans and terminate the meeting. Mexico wasn't terribly happy about this. It’s a extraordinary arrogance. But it also reveals the hysterical fanaticism of the goal of strangling Cuba.

And we know why. It's a free country. We have records going from way back, and a rich source of them go back to the Kennedy-Johnson administrations. They had to carry out a terrorist war against Cuba, as they did, and try to strangle Cuba economically, because of Cuba's -- what they called Cuba's successful defiance of U.S. policies, going back to the Monroe Doctrine. No Russians, but the Monroe Doctrine, 150 years back at that time. And the goal was, as was put very plainly by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, to make the people of Cuba suffer. They are responsible for the fact that the government is in place. We therefore have to make them suffer and starve, so that they'll throw out the government. It's a policy, which is pretty consistent. It’s being applied right now in Palestine. It was applied under the Iraqi sanctions, plot in Chile, and so on. It’s savage.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Noam Chomsky, his new book, after he wrote Hegemony or Survival, one of scores of books, if not a hundred books that Professor Chomsky has written, his new one is called Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.

You mention Israel, Palestine, and I wanted to ask you about this new study that's come out. A dean at Harvard University and a professor at the University of Chicago are coming under intense criticism for publishing an academic critique of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. The paper charges that the United States has willingly set aside its own security and that of many of its allies, in order to advance the interests of Israel. In addition, the study accuses the pro-Israel lobby, particularly AIPAC, the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, of manipulating the U.S. media, policing academia and silencing critics of Israel by labeling them as anti-Semitic. The study also examines the role played by the pro-Israel neoconservatives in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The authors are the Stephen Walt, a dean at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. They, themselves, are now being accused of anti-Semitism. In Washington, a Democratic congressman, Eliot Engle of New York, described the professors as dishonest so-called intellectuals and anti-Semites. The Harvard professor, Ruth Wisse, called for the paper to be withdrawn. Harvard Law School professor, Alan Dershowitz, described the study as trash that could have been written by neo-Nazi David Duke. The New York Sun reported Harvard has received several calls from pro-Israel donors, expressing concern about the paper, and Harvard has already taken steps to distance itself from the report. Last week, it removed the logo of the Kennedy School of Government from the paper and added a new disclaimer to the study. The report is 81 pages. It was originally published on Harvard's website and an edited version appeared in the London Review of Books.

The controversy comes less than a year after Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz attempted to block the publication of Norman Finkelstein’s book Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. Now, this goes into a lot of issues: the content of the study, what you think of it, the response to it and also the whole critique. In this country, what happens to those who criticize the policies of the state of Israel? Noam Chomsky.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the answer to your last question is well described in Norman Finkelstein's quite outstanding book and also in the record of Dershowitz’s attempts to prevent its publication. Some of the documents were just published in the Journal of Palestine Studies. Finkelstein's book gives an extensive detailed account, the best one we have, of a frightening record of Israeli crimes and abuses, where he relies on the most respectable sources, the major human rights organizations, Israeli human rights organizations and others, and demonstrates, just conclusively, that Alan Dershowitz's defense of these atrocities, based on no evidence at all, is outrageous and grotesque.

Nevertheless, Finkelstein comes under tremendous attack for being anti-Semitic, and so on. Now that's pretty normal. It goes back, I suppose, to the distinguished diplomat, Abba Eban -- it must be thirty years ago -- wrote in an American Jewish journal that “the task of Zionists,” he said, “is to show that all political anti-Zionism” – that means criticism of the policies of the state of Israel – “is either anti-Semitism or Jewish self-hatred.” Well, okay, that excludes all possible criticism, by definition. As examples of neurotic Jewish self-hatred, I should declare an interest. He mentioned two people. I was one; the other was Izzy Stone.

Once you release the torrent of abuse, you don't need arguments and evidence, you can just scream. And Professors Walt and Mearsheimer deserve credit for publishing a study, which they knew was going to elicit the usual streams of abuse and hysteria from supporters of Israeli crimes and violence. However, we should recognize that this is pretty uniform. Try to say a sane and uncontroversial word about any other issue dear to the hearts of the intellectual elite that they've turned into holy writ, you get the same reaction. So – and there's no lobby, which does raise one of a few minor points that raises questions about the validity of the critique.

It's a serious, careful piece of work. It deserves to be read. They deserve credit for writing it. But it still it leaves open the question of how valid the analysis is, and I notice that there's a pretty subtle question involved. Everyone agrees, on all sides, that there are a number of factors that enter into determining U.S. foreign policy. One is strategic and economic interests of the major power centers within the United States. In the case of the Middle East, that means the energy corporations, arms producers, high-tech industry, financial institutions and others. Now, these are not marginal institutions, particularly in the Bush administration. So one question is to what extent does policy reflect their interests. Another question is to what extent is it influenced by domestic lobbies. And there are other factors. But just these two alone, yes, they are – you find them in most cases, and to try to sort out their influence is not so simple. In particular, it's not simple when their interests tend to coincide, and by and large, there's a high degree of conformity. If you look over the record, what's called the national interest, meaning the special interests of those with -- in whose hands power is concentrated, the national interest, in that sense, tends to conform to the interests of the lobbies. So in those cases, it's pretty hard to disentangle them.

If the thesis of the book – the thesis of the book is that the lobbies have overwhelming influence, and the so-called “national interest” is harmed by what they do. If that were the case, it would be, I would think, a very hopeful conclusion. It would mean that U.S. policy could easily be reversed. It would simply be necessary to explain to the major centers of power, like the energy corporations, high-tech industry and arms producers and so on, just explain to them that they've – that their interests are being harmed by this small lobby that screams anti-Semitism and funds congressmen, and so on. Surely those institutions can utterly overwhelm the lobby in political influence, in finance, and so on, so that ought to reverse the policy.

Well, it doesn't happen, and there are a number of reasons for it. For one thing, there's an underlying assumption that the so-called national interest has been harmed by these policies. Well, you know, you really have to demonstrate that. So who's been harmed? Have the energy corporations been harmed by U.S. policy in the Middle East over the last 60 years? I mean, they're making profits beyond the dream of avarice, as the main government investigation of them reported. Even more today – that was a couple years ago. Has the U.S. – the main concern of the U.S. has been to control what the State Department 60 years ago called “a stupendous source of strategic power,” Middle East oil. Yeah, they’ve controlled it. There have been – in fact, the invasion of Iraq was an attempt to intensify that control. It may not do it. It may have the opposite effect, but that's a separate question. It was the intent, clearly.

There have been plenty of barriers. The major barrier is the one that is the usual one throughout the world: independent nationalism. It’s called “radical nationalism,” which was serious. It was symbolized by Nasser, but also Kassem in Iraq, and others. Well, the U.S. did succeed in overcoming that barrier. How? Israel destroyed Nasser. That was a tremendous service to the United States, to U.S. power, that is, to the energy corporations, to Saudi Arabia, to the main centers of power here, and in fact, it's in – that was 1967, and it was after that victory that the U.S.-Israeli relations really solidified, became what's called a “strategic asset.”

It's also then that the lobby gained its force. It's also then, incidentally, that the educated classes, the intellectual political class entered into an astonishing love affair with Israel, after its demonstration of tremendous power against a third-world enemy, and in fact, that's a very critical component of what's called the lobby. Walt and Mearsheimer mention it, but I think it should be emphasized. And they are very influential. They determine, certainly influence, the shaping of news and information in journals, media, scholarship, and so on. My own feeling is they're probably the most influential part of the lobby. Now, we sort of have to ask, what's the difference between the lobby and the power centers of the country?

But the barriers were overcome. Israel has performed many other services to the United States. You can run through the record. It's also performed secondary services. So in the 1980s, particularly, Congress was imposing barriers to the Reagan administration's support for and carrying out major terrorist atrocities in Central America. Israel helped evade congressional restrictions by carrying out training, and so on, itself. The Congress blocked U.S. trade with South Africa. Israel helped evade the embargo to all the – both the racist regimes of Southern Africa, and there have been many other cases. By now, Israel is virtually an offshore U.S. military base and high-tech center in the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, we have to break for stations to identify themselves, but we'll come back. Professor Noam Chomsky is our guest for the hour. His latest book has just been published, and it’s called Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today is Professor Noam Chomsky. His new book is Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. Noam Chomsky, longtime professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, world-renowned linguist and political analyst. I'm Amy Goodman, here with Juan Gonzalez. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Professor Chomsky, in your book you have a fascinating section, where you talk about the historical basis of the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, and also its relationship to empire or to the building of a U.S. empire. And you go back, you mention a historian, John Lewis Gaddis, who the Bush administration loves, because he's actually tried to find the historical rationalization for this use, going back to John Quincy Adams and as Secretary of State in the invasion by General Andrew Jackson of Florida in the Seminole Wars, and how this actually is a record of the use of this idea to continue the expansionist aims of the United States around the world.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, that's a very interesting case, actually. John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale. And he wrote the one, so far, book-length investigation into the roots of the Bush Doctrine, which he generally approves, the usual qualifications about style and so on. He traces it is back, as you say, to his hero, the great grand strategist, John Quincy Adams, who wrote a series of famous state papers back in 1818, in which he gave post facto justification to Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida. And it's rather interesting.

Gaddis is a good historian. He knows the sources, cites all the right sources. But he doesn't tell you what they say. So what I did in the book is just add what they say, what he omitted. Well, what they describe is a shocking record of atrocities and crimes carried out against what were called runaways Negros and lawless Indians, devastated the Seminoles. There was another major Seminole war later, either exterminated them or drove them into the marshes, completely unprovoked. There were fabricated pretexts. Gaddis talks about the threat of England. There was no threat from England. England didn't do a thing. In fact, even Adams didn't claim that. But it was what Gaddis calls an -- it established what Gaddis calls the thesis that expansion is the best guarantee of security. So you want to be secure, just expand, conquer more. Then you'll be secure.

And he says, yes, that goes right through all American administrations -- he's correct about that -- and is the centerpiece of the Bush Doctrine. So he says the Bush Doctrine isn't all that new. Expansion is the key to security. So we just expand and expand, and then we become more secure. Well, you know, he doesn't mention the obvious precedents that come to mind, so I'll leave them out, but you can think of them. And there's some truth to that, except for what he ignores and, in fact, denies, namely the huge atrocities that are recorded in the various sources, scholarly sources that he cites, which also point out that Adams, by giving this justification for Jackson's war -- he was alone in the administration to do it, but he managed to convince the President -- he established the doctrine of executive wars without congressional authorization, in violation of the Constitution. Adams later recognized that and was sorry for it, and very sorry, but that established it and, yes, that's been consistent ever since then: executive wars without congressional authorization. We know of case after case. It doesn't seem to bother the so-called originalists who talk about original intent.

But that aside, he also -- the scholarship that Gaddis cites but doesn't quote also points out that Adams established other principles that are consistent from then until now, namely massive lying to the public, distortion, evoking hysterical fears, all kinds of deceitful efforts to mobilize the population in support of atrocities. And yes, that continues right up to the present, as well. So there's very interesting historical record. What it shows is almost the opposite of what Gaddis claims and what the Reagan -- the Bush administration -- I think I said Reagan -- the Bush administration likes. And it's right out of the very sources that he refers to, the right sources, the right scholarship. He simply ignores them. But, yes, the record is interesting.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, I wanted to ask you a question. As many people know, you're perhaps one of the most cited sources or analysis in the world. And I thought this was an interesting reference to these citations. This was earlier this month, program, Tim Russert, Meet the Press, questioning the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace.

TIM RUSSERT: Mr. Jaafari said that one of his favorite American writers is Professor Noam Chomsky, someone who has written very, very strongly against the Iraq war and against most of the Bush administration foreign policy. Does that concern you?

GEN. PETER PACE: I hope he has more than one book on his nightstand.

TIM RUSSERT: So it troubles you?

GEN. PETER PACE: I would be concerned if the only access to foreign ideas that the Prime Minister had was that one author. If, in fact, that's one of many, and he's digesting many different opinions, that's probably healthy.

AMY GOODMAN: That's General Peter Pace, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, being questioned by Tim Russert, talking about Jaafari, who at this very moment is struggling to be -- again, to hold on to his position as prime minister of Iraq. Your response, Noam Chomsky?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I, frankly, rather doubt that General Pace recognized my name or knew what he was referring to, but maybe he did. The quote from Tim Russert, if I recall, was that this was a book that was highly critical of the Iraq war. Well, that shouldn't surprise a prime minister of Iraq. After all, according to U.S. polls, the latest ones I've seen reported, Brookings Institution, 87%, 87% of Iraqis want a timetable for withdrawal. That's an astonishing figure. If it really is all Iraqis, as was asserted. That means virtually everyone in Arab Iraq, the areas where the troops are deployed. I, frankly, doubt that you could have found figures like that in Vichy, France, or, you know, Poland under -- when it was a Russian satellite.

What it means essentially is that virtually everyone wants a timetable for withdrawal. So, would it be surprising that a prime minister would read a book that's critical of the war and says the same thing? It's interesting that Bush and Blair, who are constantly preaching about their love of democracy, announce, declare that there will be no timetable for withdrawal. Well, that part probably reflects the contempt for democracy that both of them have continually demonstrated, them and their colleagues, virtually without exception.

But there are deeper reasons, and we ought to think about them. If we're talking about exit strategies from Iraq, we should bear in mind that for the U.S. to leave Iraq without establishing a subordinate client state would be a nightmare for Washington. All you have to do is think of the policies that an independent Iraq would be likely to pursue, if it was mildly democratic. It would almost surely strengthen its already developed relations with Shiite Iran right next door. Any degree of Iraqi autonomy stimulates autonomy pressures across the border in Saudi Arabia, where there's a substantial Shiite population, who have been bitterly repressed by the U.S.-backed tyranny but is now calling for more autonomy. That happens to be where most of Saudi oil is. So, what you can imagine -- I'm sure Washington planners are having nightmares about this -- is a potential -- pardon?

JUAN GONZALEZ: I would like to ask you, in terms of this whole issue of democracy, in your book you talk about the democracy deficit. Obviously, the Bush administration is having all kinds of problems with their -- even their model of democracy around the world, given the election results in the Palestinian territories, the situation now in Iraq, where the President is trying to force out the Prime Minister of the winning coalition there, in Venezuela, even in Iran. Your concept of the democracy deficit, and why this administration is able to hold on in the United States itself?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there are two aspects of that. One is, the democracy deficit internal to the United States, that is, the enormous and growing gap between public opinion and public policy. Second is their so-called democracy-promotion mission elsewhere in the world. The latter is just pure fraud. The only evidence that they're interested in promoting democracy is that they say so. The evidence against it is just overwhelming, including the cases you mentioned and many others. I mean, the very fact that people are even willing to talk about this shows that we're kind of insisting on being North Koreans: if the Dear Leader has spoken, that establishes the truth; it doesn't matter what the facts are. I go into that in some detail in the book.

The democracy deficit at home is another matter. How have -- I mean, they have an extremely narrow hold on political power. Their policies are strongly opposed by most of the population. How do they carry this off? Well, that's been through an intriguing mixture of deceit, lying, fabrication, public relations. There's actually a pretty good study of it by two good political scientists, Hacker and Pearson, who just run through the tactics and how it works. And they have barely managed to hold on to political power and are attempting to use it to dismantle the institutional structure that has been built up over many years with enormous popular support -- the limited benefits system; they’re trying to dismantle Social Security and are actually making progress on that; to the tax cuts, overwhelmingly for the rich, are creating -- are purposely creating a future situation, first of all, a kind of fiscal train wreck in the future, but also a situation in which it will be virtually impossible to carry out the kinds of social policies that the public overwhelmingly supports.

And to manage to carry this off has been an impressive feat of manipulation, deceit, lying, and so on. No time to talk about it here, but actually my book gives a pretty good account. I do discuss it in the book. That's a democratic deficit at home and an extremely serious one. The problems of nuclear war, environmental disaster, those are issues of survival, the top issues and the highest priority for anyone sensible. Third issue is that the U.S. government is enhancing those threats. And a fourth issue is that the U.S. population is opposed, but is excluded from the political system. That's a democratic deficit. It's one we can deal with, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, we're going to have to leave it there for now. But part two of our interview will air next week. Professor Noam Chomsky's new book, just published, is called Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.

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On Iraq, Iran and Blair
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Andrew Stephen
New Statesman, June 19, 2006

The New York Times calls him "arguably the most important intellectual alive", yet he has needed police guards on his own campus. Andrew Stephen discusses Iraq, Iran and Blair with a man who divides opinion like no other
You might think the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would be well designed, but you would be wrong. I arrived to see the legendary Professor Noam Chomsky with five minutes to spare, but it then took 20 minutes of misdirections and meanderings before I finally reached MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, where Chomsky has reigned supreme for 51 years.

I arrived hot and sweaty, because I had been told by some that he did not suffer fools gladly, though others had insisted he was unfailingly courteous. People tend to have widely divergent, passionate views of Chomsky: to many he is a revered beacon of academe and politics, while critics exult in dismissing him as (take your pick) a fraud, a Zionist, an anti-Semite (he is Jewish), an off-the-chart commie, an agent of the CIA, Mossad, the KGB, MI6 and so on. The world is so split between Chomskyites and anti-Chomskyites that there is even a book called The Anti-Chomsky Reader.

My anxieties, though, turned out to be groundless. I was greeted by a softly spoken man in a speckled green pullover who could have been a decade younger than his 77 years, and who showed immediate empathy. "It's a crazy building," he said. "Can you imagine the point of having a faculty office with angled walls where you can't even put a bookcase or blackboard?"

Hardly a minute has passed in the last half-century, it seems, when Chomsky has not been pouring out ideas and passions. He has published more than 100 books, ranging from his seminal 1957 work on linguistics, Syntactic Structures, to this year's Failed States: the abuse of power and the assault on democracy, which deftly turns the Bush administration's description of countries such as Afghanistan on the US itself. Linguistics is hardly my field, but I had tried in advance to get a feel for just how important his academic work is. I knew that his basic theory, put exceedingly simply, is that language is not something merely picked up by children in the course of growing up, but that we all come into the world with a linguistic framework embedded in our brains. My further research faltered, though, when the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy told me his work had evolved so that the "grammaticality" of a sentence could be explained by the theorem: X-NP1-V-NP2-Y->(1)X-NP2-be+enV-by+NP1-Yx. Then a friend who has a doctorate in linguistics came to my rescue: "Chomsky redid linguistics the way Freud redid psychology," she explained in an e-mail. That was enough for me to place the man's academic standing in context.

And so, that settled, to politics. We spoke about Iraq and Afghanistan, about Blair's Britain ("I guess if the country's going to blindly follow US orders it's going to inherit the threats that come with that"), about how Messrs Bush, Blair, Straw and others were war criminals and why America is a failed state. But we began with the story dominating the media that day: the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. Chomsky was not joining in the triumphalism.

"He was certainly a leading gangster and I don't think there's many people outside of his village in Jordan that mourn him. He's had a horrible role that was basically created by the Iraq invasion, which we can't escape responsibility for. He had a loose connection with al-Qaeda, mostly symbolic, with each trying to exploit the other. But that whole system which we call al-Qaeda is not an organisation, it's a network of networks, a lot of loosely interconnected people. What the effects [of killing al-Zarqawi] will be in the massive terrorist apparatus that's been created by the Bush-Blair invasion, one can only guess. The invasion was an enormous stimulant for terrorism, as was anticipated."

Mastery of detail
Chomsky's unremitting clarity and his seeming mastery of detail somehow defy interruption or argument, but they are wondrous to behold. When we talk about Bush, Blair and co being hauled before the War Crimes Tribunal, I mention Milosevic and he switches subjects without pausing. The case against the Bush administration is stronger, he insists, than that against the late Serb president. "Remember, the Milosevic Tribunal began with Kosovo, right in the middle of the US-British bombing in late '99 . . . Now if you take a look at that indictment, with a single exception, every charge was for crimes after the bombing.

"There's a reason for that. The bombing was undertaken with the anticipation explicit [that] it was going to lead to large-scale atrocities in response. As it did. Now there were terrible atrocities, but they were after the bombings. In fact, if you look at the British parliamentary inquiry, they actually reached the astonishing conclusion that, until January 1999, most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas.

"So later they added charges [against Milosevic] about the Balkans, but it wasn't going to be an easy case to make. The worst crime was Srebrenica but, unfortunately for the International Tribunal, there was an intensive investigation by the Dutch government, which was primarily responsible - their troops were there - and what they concluded was that not only did Milosevic not order it, but he had no knowledge of it. And he was horrified when he heard about it. So it was going to be pretty hard to make that charge stick."

And Saddam Hussein? "Saddam Hussein is, of course, a leading monster, but he is being charged right now with crimes he committed in 1982 - with having killed about 150 Shiites after an assassination attempt in 1982. Well, 1982 is a pretty important year in US-Iraqi relations. That's the year in which Ronald Reagan removed Iraq from the list of states supporting terrorism, so that the US would be able to provide their friend Saddam with large-scale aid. Donald Rumsfeld had to [go to] Iraq to tie up the agreement. That included the means to develop weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons, and so on.

"A large point of that was to punish Iran. The weapons that were provided by the United States and Britain and Germany and Russia and France and plenty of others were supporting Iraq's aggression. The US and Britain and those others were supporting it, so why aren't they in the dock next to Saddam Hussein?"

I mentioned the hanging by Iraq of my then colleague on the Observer, Farzad Bazoft - and my feelings when a deputation of US senators went to Baghdad soon afterwards to see Saddam, and one of them told him that his regime's main problem with the west was media perception. Chomsky did not miss a beat. "That was April 1990, a few months before the invasion of Kuwait. It was a high-level senatorial commission led by Robert Dole, who was the next presidential candidate for the Republicans, to convey President Bush's greetings and to assure him that the United States had their best wishes for him and that he should not pay attention to the carping in the media because we have this free-press thing here . . . They were grovelling, and that was a couple of months before the invasion [of Kuwait]."

It's worse in Britain, he says. "Jack Straw, in 2002, was wailing about Saddam Hussein's atrocities - and right before that he turned down an application for asylum from an Iraqi dissident who had escaped the torture chambers. And he turned it down with a letter saying that [the man] could be sure that if he went back to Iraq he would be treated properly by their justice system." He likes the description of Blair's Britain, he tells me, as pillion rider on the American motorcycle.

And Afghanistan? "I think Afghanistan, if we look at it, is one of the most grotesque acts of modern history. There's a lot of reinvented fables about it. But the war was undertaken explicitly on 7 October [2001] with Bush's announcement that unless the Taliban handed over to the United States people who the US suspected - not knew, but suspected - were involved in 9/11, then the US would bomb the people of Afghanistan.

"Admiral Boyce, I think it was, the British commander, then announced a change in the war aims after about three weeks of bombing. He said that the bombing of Afghanistan would continue - I wish I could remember the exact words, but it was something like 'until the people of Afghanistan overthrow their government'. They bombed Afghanistan with the knowledge that there were about five million people, according to their estimates, who were at serious risk of starvation."

So he believes that the attacks on Afghanistan were worse than those on Iraq? "Every crime is distinct. I mean, is it worse than invading South Vietnam in 1962? Is it worse than the Russian invasion of Afghanistan?"

Understand the crimes
Which brings us back to war-crimes trials. Did he seriously envisage Bush and Blair in handcuffs at The Hague? No: charging them would be symbolic. "What was important about the Nuremberg trials was not that they hung however many people it was, but that the German population were given the proper means to understand what the crimes were. I want their crimes to be fully understood, to be in elementary school textbooks, and ensure that those of our countries which tolerated these crimes should look themselves in the eye."

Then we move on to Iran, and Chomsky's methodical deconstruction of US and British policies there. In American eyes, he says, there's only one event in US-Iranian history in the past half-century. "That's 1979, when Iranians committed a crime: they threw out a tyrant installed by a US-British military coup, and they took hostages. And they had to be punished.

"Well, did anything else happen in the last half-century or so? Yes. The US and Britain overthrew the parliamentary government, installed a brutal tyrant, supported him right through the years of torture and violence. As soon as he was overthrown they turned to supporting Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians - many with chemical weapons provided by the US and others. Right after that they imposed sanctions which have crushed the population.

"That means that for over 50 years the US and Britain have been torturing the people of Iran." Yet they remain defiant, Chomsky says, and for that they have to be punished. "Starting in the summer of 2003, two interesting things happened. First, all of a sudden, the reason for invading Iraq was not weapons of mass destruction. It was to bring democracy to Iraq and the Middle East and the world . . . But the other thing that happened which has been little noticed is that there was already the beginning of building up a government media campaign about Iranian nuclear weapons.

"And as Bush's popularity declined, the intensity of this campaign increased. Maybe it's just coincidence, but I don't think so. In fact, the Iranian alleged nuclear weapons are now providing a pretext which will be used for a permanent US presence in Iraq. They're building the biggest embassy in the world in Baghdad which towers over everything, they're building military bases. Is that because they intend to get out and leave Iraq to itself? No. If you're staying in Iraq you have to have a reason. Well, the reason will be that you have to defend the world against Iran."

Admiration and hatred
By now Chomsky's assistant is knocking on the door and leaving it ajar, a signal that time is nearly up with the man the New York Times has called "arguably the most important intellectual alive today". The leading monitor of academic journals says he is the most cited authority in the world today: yet that blend of admiration and hatred, of reverence and revulsion, runs as powerfully as ever through the US bloodstream when his name comes up.

Stanford's Professor Paul Robinson wrote in the New York Review of Books that Chomsky has a "maddeningly simple-minded view of the world", while Marxist-turned-neo-con pundit David Horowitz, co-editor of The Anti-Chomsky Reader, describes him as the "ayatollah of anti-Americanism". Chomsky even figured on the list of targets of Theodore Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, and he is frequently given police protection, even on the MIT campus, though he insists he does not seek it.

He says, however, that when he takes his grandson to a baseball game he enjoys being part of mainstream America: "It's my country," he told me, with what I thought was just a hint of defensiveness. His latest book, though, defines his country as a failure. There are three main criteria for failed states, he says: unwillingness or inability to protect its citizens from violence, insistence that they are not answerable to international law or to any external consensus, and failure to implement true democracy.

The Bush administration, he believes, "has got no interest, or very little interest" in protecting American citizens from terrorism - containers coming into US ports, for example, are not inspected properly - "but the most serious threats are literal threats to survival, the threats of nuclear war and of environmental destruction". And Bush is not protecting Americans against those either.

Showing scant respect for international law or external consensus, too, has a pedigree in the US going back over almost two centuries of expansionism. "There's a lot of outrage about the Bush Doctrine, but what about the Clinton Doctrine? It said that the United States has the right to undertake unilateral use of force to protect key markets, resources and investments."

The third crucial sign of America's failure, he says, is that "there's a huge gap between public opinion and public policy. Both political parties are well to the right of the population on a host of major issues, and the elections that are run are carefully designed so that issues do not arise."

But Americans still voted overwhelmingly for either Bush or Kerry in 2004, didn't they? "I don't know if you watched the presidential debates. I didn't but my wife [they have been married since 1949] did. She has a college PhD and taught for 25 years at Harvard and is presumably capable of following arguments. She literally couldn't tell where the candidates stood on issues, and people didn't because the elections are designed that way." By whom? "The public relations industry, because they sell candidates the same way they sell toothpaste or lifestyle drugs." Who are their masters? "Their masters are concentrations of private capital which invest in control of the state. That funds the elections, that designs the framework."

That was all very well. But if we could wave a magic wand what would be the first thing President Chomsky would do? "I would set up a War Crimes Tribunal for my own crimes, because if I take on that position [I would need] to deal with the institutional structure and the culture, the intellectual culture. The culture has to be cured."

The clearly much-practised assistant has knocked three times now, but Chomsky moves on to the "Fissban" treaty, "which would place the production of fissile materials under some kind of international control, so that then anybody could get access to them for nuclear power but nobody could use them for nuclear weapons. Unless that treaty is passed, the species will almost certainly destroy itself."

The US, he explains, is willing to have a treaty "as long as it's not verifiable". The matter came to a vote in a UN committee in November 2004 and the result was 147-1 in favour, with two abstentions, he says. "The one was, of course, the United States. The abstentions were Israel, which reflects that they have to vote for the US - and the other was Britain. So it's more important [for the Blair government] to be a spear-carrier than to save the species from destruction."

Pillion passenger
And so we had come full circle, back to Britain the pillion passenger. By the time the assistant knocked a fourth time, I was starting to leave. In the corridor outside I spotted a board crammed with squiggles and formulae every bit as impenetrable as that encyclopaedic explanation of Chomsky's work. It was precisely because he can plumb such academic depths, I mused as I wended my way back across the Charles river to Boston, that nobody should blithely dismiss Chomsky's political views as those of a crackpot.

In fact, a thought came to me that will probably not only seem heretical to many Chomskyites but will also outrage the White House enough to get me sent to Guantanamo: what struck me was that even though Chomsky was brought up in a thoroughly Jewish household, went to Hebrew schools and camps and had what he calls a "visceral fear" of Catholics in childhood, there was something profoundly Christian about the thrust of his message to me that morning.

He loathed violence and aggression, that was clear; yet he sought vengeance only in a symbolic sense. Though passionate, he did not seem bitter. Maybe I saw him on a good day. But if there's one virtue of the US to which Chomsky repeatedly returns it is its unique tolerance for free speech. And what better example of that could there be than to listen to a Hebrew-speaking, self-proclaimed libertarian socialist preaching the virtues of Christian pacifism in Bush's America of 2006?

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New World Relationships
Noam Chomsky
Khaleej Times, March 10, 2006

The prospect that Europe and Asia might move toward greater independence has troubled US planners since World War II. The concerns have only risen as the ‘tripolar order’ — Europe, North America and Asia — has continued to evolve. Every day, Latin America, too, is becoming more independent. Now Asia and the Americas are strengthening their ties while the reigning superpower, the odd man out, consumes itself in misadventures in the Middle East.
Regional integration in Asia and Latin America is a crucial and increasingly important issue that, from Washington's perspective, betokens a defiant world gone out of control. Energy, of course, remains a defining factor — the object of contention — everywhere. China, unlike Europe, refuses to be intimidated by Washington, a primary reason for the fear of China by US planners, which presents a dilemma: Steps towards confrontation are inhibited by US corporate reliance on China as an export platform and growing market, as well as China's financial reserves, reported to be approaching Japan's in scale.

In January, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia visited Beijing, which is expected to lead to a Sino-Saudi memorandum of understanding calling for "increased cooperation and investment between the two countries in oil, natural gas and investment," The Wall Street Journal reports. Already, much of Iran's oil goes to China, and China is providing Iran with weapons that both states presumably regard as deterrent to US designs. India also has options. India may choose to be a US client, or it may prefer to join the more independent Asian bloc that is taking shape, with ever more ties to Middle East oil producers. Siddarth Varadarajan, deputy editor of The Hindu, observes that "if the 21st century is to be an 'Asian century,' Asia's passivity in the energy sector has to end."

The key is India-China cooperation. In January, an agreement signed in Beijing "cleared the way for India and China to collaborate not only in technology, but also in hydrocarbon exploration and production, a partnership that could eventually alter fundamental equations in the world's oil and natural gas sector," Varadarjan points out. An additional step, already being contemplated, is an Asian oil market trading in euros. The impact on the international financial system and the balance of global power could be significant. It should be no surprise that President Bush paid a recent visit to try to keep India in the fold, offering nuclear cooperation and other inducements as a lure.

Meanwhile, in Latin America, left-centre governments prevail from Venezuela to Argentina. The indigenous populations have become much more active and influential, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador, where they either want oil and gas to be domestically controlled or, in some cases, oppose production altogether. Many indigenous people apparently do not see any reason why their lives, societies and cultures should be disrupted or destroyed so that New Yorkers can sit in their SUVs in traffic gridlock.

Venezuela, the leading oil exporter in the hemisphere, has forged probably the closest relations with China of any Latin American country, and is planning to sell increasing amounts of oil to China as part of its effort to reduce dependence on the openly hostile US government. Venezuela has joined Mercosur, the South American customs union, a move described by Argentine President Nestor Kirchner as ‘a milestone’ in the development of this trading bloc, and welcomed as a "new chapter in our integration" by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Venezuela, apart from supplying Argentina with fuel oil, bought almost a third of Argentine debt issued in 2005, one element of a region-wide effort to free the countries from the controls of the International Monetary Fund after two decades of disastrous conformity to the rules imposed by the US -dominated international financial institutions. Steps towards Southern Cone integration advanced further in December with the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia, the country's first indigenous president. Morales moved quickly to reach a series of energy accords with Venezuela.

The Financial Times reported that these "are expected to underpin forthcoming radical reforms to Bolivia's economy and energy sector" with its huge gas reserves, second only to Venezuela's in South America. Cuba-Venezuela relations are becoming ever closer, each relying on its comparative advantage. Venezuela is providing low-cost oil, while in return Cuba organises literacy and health programmes, sending thousands of highly-skilled professionals, teachers and doctors, who work in the poorest and most neglected areas, as they do elsewhere in the Third World.

Cuban medical assistance is also being welcomed elsewhere. One of the most horrendous tragedies of recent years was the earthquake in Pakistan last October. Besides the huge death toll, unknown numbers of survivors have to face brutal winter weather with little shelter, food or medical assistance. “Cuba has provided the largest contingent of doctors and paramedics to Pakistan," paying all the costs (perhaps with Venezuelan funding), writes John Cherian in India's Frontline, citing Dawn, a leading Pakistan daily.

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan expressed his ‘deep gratitude’ to Fidel Castro for the ‘spirit and compassion’ of the Cuban medical teams —reported to comprise more than 1,000 trained personnel, 44 per cent of them women, who remained to work in remote mountain villages, "living in tents in freezing weather and in an alien culture" after Western aid teams had been withdrawn. Growing popular movements, primarily in the South, but with increasing participation in the rich industrial countries, are serving as the bases for many of these developments towards more independence and concern for the needs of the great majority of the population.

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On the US-Israeli Invasion of Lebanon
Noam Chomsky
Al-Adab, August 19, 2006

Though there are many interacting factors, the immediate issue that lies behind the latest US-Israeli invasion of Lebanon remains, I believe, what it was in the four preceding invasions: the Israel-Palestine conflict. In the most important case, the devastating US-backed 1982 Israeli invasion was openly described in Israel as a war for the West Bank, undertaken to put an end to annoying PLO calls for a diplomatic settlement (with the secondary goal of imposing a client regime in Lebanon). There are numerous other illustrations. Despite the many differences in circumstances, the July 2006 invasion falls generally into the same pattern.
Among mainstream American critics of Bush administration policies, the favored version is that “We had always approached [conflict between Israel and its neighbors] in a balanced way, assuming that we could be the catalyst for an agreement,” but Bush II regrettably abandoned that neutral stance, causing great problems for the United States (Middle East specialist and former diplomat Edward Walker, a leading moderate). The actual record is quite different: For over 30 years, Washington has unilaterally barred a peaceful political settlement, with only slight and brief deviations.

The consistent rejectionism can be traced back to the February 1971 Egyptian offer of a full peace treaty with Israel, in the terms of official US policy, offering nothing for the Palestinians. Israel understood that this peace offer would put an end to any security threat, but the government decided to reject security in favor of expansion, then mostly into northeastern Sinai. Washington supported Israel’s stand, adhering to Kissinger’s principle of “stalemate”: force, not diplomacy. It was only 8 years later, after a terrible war and great suffering, that Washington agreed to Egypt’s demand for withdrawal from its territory.

Meanwhile the Palestinian issue had entered the international agenda, and a broad international consensus had crystallized in favor of a two-state settlement on the pre-June 1967 border, perhaps with minor and mutual adjustments. In December 1975, the UN Security Council agreed to consider a resolution proposed by the Arab “confrontation states” with these provisions, also incorporating the basic wording of UN 242. The US vetoed the resolution. Israel’s reaction was to bomb Lebanon, killing over 50 people in Nabatiye, calling the attack “preventive” – presumably to “prevent” the UN session, which Israel boycotted.

The only significant exception to consistent US-Israeli rejectionism was in January 2001, when Israeli and Palestinian negotiators came close to agreement in Taba. But the negotiations were called off by Israeli Prime Minister Barak four days early, ending that promising effort. Unofficial but high-level negotiations continued, leading to the Geneva Accord of December 2002, with similar proposals. It was welcomed by most of the world, but rejected by Israel and dismissed by Washington (and, reflexively, the US media and intellectual classes).

Meanwhile US-backed Israeli settlement and infrastructure programs have been “creating facts on the ground” in order to undermine potential realization of Palestinian national rights. Throughout the Oslo years, these programs continued steadily, with a sharp peak in 2000: Clinton’s final year, and Barak’s. The current euphemism for these programs is “disengagement” from Gaza and “convergence” in the West Bank – in Western rhetoric, Ehud Olmert’s courageous program of withdrawal from the occupied territories. The reality, as usual, is quite different.

The Gaza “disengagement” was openly announced as a West Bank expansion plan. Having turned Gaza into a disaster area, sane Israeli hawks realized that there was no point leaving a few thousand settlers taking the best land and scarce resources, protected by a large part of the IDF. It made more sense to send them to the West Bank and Golan Heights, where new settlement programs were announced, while turning Gaza into “the world’s largest prison,” as Israeli human rights groups accurately call it. West Bank “Convergence” formalizes these programs of annexation, cantonization, and imprisonment. With decisive US support, Israel is annexing valuable lands and the most important resources of the West Bank (primarily water), while carrying out settlement and infrastructure projects that divide the shrinking Palestinian territories into unviable cantons, virtually separated from one another and from whatever pitiful corner of Jerusalem will be left to Palestinians. All are to be imprisoned as Israel takes over the Jordan Valley, and of course any other access to the outside world.

All of these programs are recognized to be illegal, in violation of numerous Security Council resolutions and the unanimous decision of the World Court any part of the "separation wall" that is built to “defend” the settlements is “ipso facto” illegal (U.S. Justice Buergenthal, in a separate declaration). Hence about 80-85% of the wall is illegal, as is the entire “convergence” program. But for a self-designated outlaw state and its clients, such facts are minor irrelevancies.

Currently, the US and Israel demand that Hamas accept the 2002 Arab League Beirut proposal for full normalization of relations with Israel after withdrawal in accord with the international consensus. The proposal has long been accepted by the PLO, and it has also been formally accepted by the “supreme leader” of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has made it clear that Hezbollah would not disrupt such an agreement if it is accepted by Palestinians. Hamas has repeatedly indicated its willingness to negotiate in these terms.

The facts are doctrinally unacceptable, hence mostly suppressed. What we see, instead, is the stern warning to Hamas by the editors of the New York Times that their formal agreement to the Beirut peace plan is “an admission ticket to the real world, a necessary rite of passage in the progression from a lawless opposition to a lawful government.” Like others, the NYT editors fail to mention that the US and Israel forcefully reject this proposal, and are alone in doing so among relevant actors. Furthermore, they reject it not merely in rhetoric, but far more importantly, in deeds. We see at once who constitutes the “lawless opposition” and who speaks for them. But that conclusion cannot be expressed, even entertained, in respectable circles.

The only meaningful support for Palestinians facing national destruction is from Hezbollah. For this reason alone it follows that Hezbollah must be severely weakened or destroyed, just as the PLO had to be evicted from Lebanon in 1982. But Hezbollah is too deeply embedded within Lebanese society to be eradicated, so Lebanon too must be largely destroyed. An expected benefit for the US and Israel was to enhance the credibility of threats against Iran by eliminating a Lebanese-based deterrent to a possible attack. But none of this turned out as planned. Much as in Iraq, and elsewhere, Bush administration planners have created catastrophes, even for the interests they represent. That is the primary reason for the unprecedented criticism of the administration among the foreign policy elite, even before the invasion of Iraq.

In the background lie more far-reaching and lasting concerns: to ensure what is called “stability” in the reigning ideology. “Stability,” in simple words, means obedience. “Stability” is undermined by states that do not strictly follow orders, secular nationalists, Islamists who are not under control (in contrast, the Saudi monarchy, the oldest and most valuable US ally, is fine), etc. Such “destabilizing” forces are particularly dangerous when their programs are attractive to others, in which case they are called “viruses” that must be destroyed. “Stability” is enhanced by loyal client states. Since 1967, it has been assumed that Israel can play this role, along with other “peripheral” states. Israel has become virtually an off-shore US military base and high-tech center, the natural consequence of its rejection of security in favor of expansion in 1971, and repeatedly since. These policies are subject to little internal debate, whoever holds state power. The policies extend world-wide, and in the Middle East, their significance is enhanced by one of the leading principles of foreign policy since World War II (and for Britain before that): to ensure control over Middle East energy resources, recognized for 60 years to be “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”

The standard Western version is that the July 2006 invasion was justified by legitimate outrage over capture of two Israeli soldiers at the border. The posture is cynical fraud. The US and Israel, and the West generally, have little objection to capture of soldiers, or even to the far more severe crime of kidnapping civilians (or of course to killing civilians). That had been Israeli practice in Lebanon for many years, and no one ever suggested that Israel should therefore be invaded and largely destroyed. Western cynicism was revealed with even more dramatic clarity as the current upsurge of violence erupted after Palestinian militants captured an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, on June 25. That too elicited huge outrage, and support for Israel's sharp escalation of its murderous assault on Gaza. The scale is reflected in casualties: in June, 36 Palestinian civilians were killed in Gaza; in July, the numbers more than quadrupled to over 170, dozens of them children. The posture of outrage was, again, cynical fraud, as demonstrated dramatically, and conclusively, by the reaction to Israel's kidnapping of two Gaza civilians, the Muamar brothers, one day before, on June 24. They disappeared into Israel's prison system, joining the hundreds of others imprisoned without charge -- hence kidnapped, as are many of those sentenced on dubious charges. There was some brief and dismissive mention of the kidnapping of the Muamar brothers, but no reaction, because such crimes are considered legitimate when carried out by “our side.” The idea that this crime would justify a murderous assault on Israel would have been regarded as a reversion to Nazism.


The distinction is clear, and familiar throughout history: to paraphrase Thucydides, the powerful are entitled to do as they wish, while the weak suffer as they must.

We should not overlook the progress that has been made in undermining the imperial mentality that is so deeply rooted in Western moral and intellectual culture as to be beyond awareness. Nor should we forget the scale of what remains to be achieved, tasks that must be undertaken in solidarity and cooperation by people in North and South who hope to see a more decent and civilized world.

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