Washington's dilemma on a 'lost'
planet By Noam Chomsky
[This piece is adapted from "Uprisings," a
chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on
Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges
to US Empire, Noam Chomsky's new interview
book with David Barsamian (with thanks to the
publisher, Metropolitan Books). The questions are
Barsamian's, the answers Chomsky's.]
David Barsamian: Does the
United States still have the same level of control
over the energy resources of the Middle East as it
once had?
Noam Chomsky: The
major energy-producing countries are still firmly
under the control of the Western-backed
dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by
the Arab Spring is limited, but it's not
insignificant. The Western-controlled dictatorial
system is
eroding. In fact, it's been
eroding for some time. So, for example, if you go
back 50 years, the energy resources - the main
concern of US planners - have been mostly
nationalized. There are constantly attempts to
reverse that, but they have not succeeded.
Take the US invasion of Iraq, for example. To
everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was
pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of
our love of democracy but because it's maybe the
second- or third-largest source of oil in the
world, and is right in the middle of the major
energy-producing region. You're not supposed to
say this. It's considered a conspiracy theory.
The United States was seriously defeated
in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism - mostly by
nonviolent resistance. The United States could
kill the insurgents, but they couldn't deal with
half a million people demonstrating in the
streets. Step by step, Iraq was able to dismantle
the controls put in place by the occupying forces.
By November 2007, it was becoming pretty clear
that it was going to be very hard to reach US
goals. And at that point, interestingly, those
goals were explicitly stated.
So in
November 2007, the George W Bush administration
came out with an official declaration about what
any future arrangement with Iraq would have to be.
It had two major requirements: one, that the
United States must be free to carry out combat
operations from its military bases, which it will
retain; and two, "encouraging the flow of foreign
investments to Iraq, especially American
investments". In January 2008, Bush made this
clear in one of his signing statements. A couple
of months later, in the face of Iraqi resistance,
the United States had to give that up. Control of
Iraq is now disappearing before their eyes.
Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by
force something like the old system of control,
but it was beaten back. In general, I think, US
policies remain constant, going back to the Second
World War. But the capacity to implement them is
declining.
DB: Declining
because of economic weakness?
NC:
Partly because the world is just becoming
more diverse. It has more diverse power centers.
At the end of the Second World War, the United
States was absolutely at the peak of its power. It
had half the world's wealth and every one of its
competitors was seriously damaged or destroyed. It
had a position of unimaginable security and
developed plans to essentially run the world - not
unrealistically at the time.
DB:
This was called "Grand Area" planning?
NC: Yes. Right after the
Second World War, George Kennan, head of the US
State Department policy planning staff, and others
sketched out the details, and then they were
implemented. What's happening now in the Middle
East and North Africa, to an extent, and in South
America substantially goes all the way back to the
late 1940s. The first major successful resistance
to US hegemony was in 1949.
That's when an
event took place, which, interestingly, is called
"the loss of China". It's a very interesting
phrase, never challenged. There was a lot of
discussion about who is responsible for the loss
of China. It became a huge domestic issue. But
it's a very interesting phrase. You can only lose
something if you own it. It was just taken for
granted: we possess China - and if they move
toward independence, we've lost China. Later came
concerns about "the loss of Latin America", "the
loss of the Middle East", "the loss of" certain
countries, all based on the premise that we own
the world and anything that weakens our control is
a loss to us and we wonder how to recover it.
Today, if you read, say, foreign policy
journals or, in a farcical form, listen to the
Republican debates, they're asking, "How do we
prevent further losses?"
On the other
hand, the capacity to preserve control has sharply
declined. By 1970, the world was already what was
called tripolar economically, with a US-based
North American industrial center, a German-based
European center, roughly comparable in size, and a
Japan-based East Asian center, which was then the
most dynamic growth region in the world. Since
then, the global economic order has become much
more diverse. So it's harder to carry out our
policies, but the underlying principles have not
changed much.
Take the Clinton doctrine.
The Clinton doctrine was that the United States is
entitled to resort to unilateral force to ensure
"uninhibited access to key markets, energy
supplies, and strategic resources". That goes
beyond anything that George W Bush said. But it
was quiet and it wasn't arrogant and abrasive, so
it didn't cause much of an uproar. The belief in
that entitlement continues right to the present.
It's also part of the intellectual culture.
Right after the assassination of Osama bin
Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there
were a few critical comments questioning the
legality of the act. Centuries ago, there used to
be something called presumption of innocence. If
you apprehend a suspect, he's a suspect until
proven guilty. He should be brought to trial. It's
a core part of American law. You can trace it back
to Magna Carta. So there were a couple of voices
saying maybe we shouldn't throw out the whole
basis of Anglo-American law. That led to a lot of
very angry and infuriated reactions, but the most
interesting ones were, as usual, on the left
liberal end of the spectrum. Matthew Yglesias, a
well-known and highly respected left liberal
commentator, wrote an article in which he
ridiculed these views. He said they're "amazingly
naive", silly.
Then he expressed the
reason. He said that "one of the main functions of
the international institutional order is precisely
to legitimate the use of deadly military force by
Western powers". Of course, he didn't mean Norway.
He meant the United States. So the principle on
which the international system is based is that
the United States is entitled to use force at
will. To talk about the United States violating
international law or something like that is
amazingly naive, completely silly. Incidentally, I
was the target of those remarks, and I'm happy to
confess my guilt. I do think that Magna Carta and
international law are worth paying some attention
to.
I merely mention that to illustrate
that in the intellectual culture, even at what's
called the left liberal end of the political
spectrum, the core principles haven't changed very
much. But the capacity to implement them has been
sharply reduced. That's why you get all this talk
about American decline. Take a look at the
year-end issue of Foreign Affairs, the main
establishment journal. Its big front-page cover
asks, in bold face, "Is America Over?" It's a
standard complaint of those who believe they
should have everything.
If you believe you
should have everything and anything gets away from
you, it's a tragedy, the world is collapsing. So
is America over? A long time ago we "lost" China,
we've lost Southeast Asia, we've lost South
America. Maybe we'll lose the Middle East and
North African countries. Is America over? It's a
kind of paranoia, but it's the paranoia of the
superrich and the superpowerful. If you don't have
everything, it's a disaster.
DB:
The New York Times describes the "defining
policy quandary of the Arab Spring: how to square
contradictory American impulses that include
support for democratic change, a desire for
stability, and wariness of Islamists who have
become a potent political force". The Times
identifies three US goals. What do you make of
them?
NC: Two of them are
accurate. The United States is in favor of
stability. But you have to remember what stability
means. Stability means conformity to US orders.
So, for example, one of the charges against Iran,
the big foreign policy threat, is that it is
destabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan. How? By trying
to expand its influence into neighboring
countries. On the other hand, we "stabilize"
countries when we invade them and destroy them.
I've occasionally quoted one of my
favorite illustrations of this, which is from a
well-known, very good liberal foreign policy
analyst, James Chace, a former editor of Foreign
Affairs. Writing about the overthrow of the
Salvador Allende regime and the imposition of the
dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1973, he said
that we had to "destabilize" Chile in the
interests of "stability". That's not perceived to
be a contradiction - and it isn't. We had to
destroy the parliamentary system in order to gain
stability, meaning that they do what we say. So
yes, we are in favor of stability in this
technical sense.
Concern about political
Islam is just like concern about any independent
development. Anything that's independent you have
to have concern about because it might undermine
you. In fact, it's a little ironic, because
traditionally the United States and Britain have
by and large strongly supported radical Islamic
fundamentalism, not political Islam, as a force to
block secular nationalism, the real concern.
So, for example, Saudi Arabia is the most
extreme fundamentalist state in the world, a
radical Islamic state. It has a missionary zeal,
is spreading radical Islam to Pakistan, funding
terror. But it's the bastion of US and British
policy. They've consistently supported it against
the threat of secular nationalism from Gamal Abdel
Nasser's Egypt and Abd al-Karim Qasim's Iraq,
among many others. But they don't like political
Islam because it might become independent.
The first of the three points, our
yearning for democracy, that's about on the level
of Joseph Stalin talking about the Russian
commitment to freedom, democracy, and liberty for
the world. It's the kind of statement you laugh
about when you hear it from commissars or Iranian
clerics, but you nod politely and maybe even with
awe when you hear it from their Western
counterparts.
If you look at the record,
the yearning for democracy is a bad joke. That's
even recognized by leading scholars, though they
don't put it this way. One of the major scholars
on so-called democracy promotion is Thomas
Carothers, who is pretty conservative and highly
regarded - a neo-Reaganite, not a flaming liberal.
He worked in Reagan's State Department and has
several books reviewing the course of democracy
promotion, which he takes very seriously. He says,
yes, this is a deep-seated American ideal, but it
has a funny history. The history is that every US
administration is "schizophrenic". They support
democracy only if it conforms to certain strategic
and economic interests. He describes this as a
strange pathology, as if the United States needed
psychiatric treatment or something. Of course,
there's another interpretation, but one that can't
come to mind if you're a well-educated, properly
behaved intellectual.
Within several
months of the toppling of [President Hosni]
Mubarak in Egypt, he was in the dock facing
criminal charges and prosecution. It's
inconceivable that US leaders will ever be held to
account for their crimes in Iraq or beyond. Is
that going to change anytime soon?
That's
basically the Yglesias principle: the very
foundation of the international order is that the
United States has the right to use violence at
will. So how can you charge anybody?
And
no one else has that right.
Of course not.
Well, maybe our clients do. If Israel invades
Lebanon and kills 1,000 people and destroys half
the country, okay, that's all right. It's
interesting. Barack Obama was a senator before he
was president. He didn't do much as a senator, but
he did a couple of things, including one he was
particularly proud of. In fact, if you looked at
his website before the primaries, he highlighted
the fact that, during the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon in 2006, he cosponsored a Senate
resolution demanding that the United States do
nothing to impede Israel's military actions until
they had achieved their objectives and censuring
Iran and Syria because they were supporting
resistance to Israel's destruction of southern
Lebanon, incidentally, for the fifth time in 25
years. So they inherit the right. Other clients
do, too.
But the rights really reside in
Washington. That's what it means to own the world.
It's like the air you breathe. You can't question
it. The main founder of contemporary IR
[international relations] theory, Hans Morgenthau,
was really quite a decent person, one of the very
few political scientists and international affairs
specialists to criticize the Vietnam War on moral,
not tactical, grounds. Very rare. He wrote a book
called The Purpose of American Politics.
You already know what's coming. Other
countries don't have purposes. The purpose of
America, on the other hand, is "transcendent": to
bring freedom and justice to the rest of the
world. But he's a good scholar, like Carothers. So
he went through the record. He said, when you
study the record, it looks as if the United States
hasn't lived up to its transcendent purpose. But
then he says, to criticize our transcendent
purpose "is to fall into the error of atheism,
which denies the validity of religion on similar
grounds" - which is a good comparison. It's a
deeply entrenched religious belief.
It's
so deep that it's going to be hard to disentangle
it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near
hysteria and often to charges of anti-Americanism
or "hating America" - interesting concepts that
don't exist in democratic societies, only in
totalitarian societies and here, where they're
just taken for granted.
Noam
Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the
MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. A TomDispatch
regular, he is the author of numerous
best-selling political works, including recently
Hopes
and ProspectsandMaking
the Future. This piece is adapted from the
chapter "Uprisings" in his newest book (with
interviewer David Barsamian), Power Systems:
Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and
the New Challenges to US Empire (The
American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books).
Excerpted from Power Systems:
Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and
the New Challenges to US Empire, published this
month by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry
Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2013 by Noam
Chomsky and David Barsamian. All rights
reserved.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
