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2 AMERICAN DECLINE IN
PERSPECTIVE, Part 1 'Losing' the world By Noam Chomsky
Significant
anniversaries are solemnly commemorated - Japan’s
attack on the United States naval base at Pearl
Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we
can often learn valuable lessons from them about
what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.
At the moment, we are failing to
commemorate the 50th anniversary of president John
F Kennedy's decision to launch the most
destructive and murderous act of aggression of the
post-World War II period: the invasion of South
Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions
dead and four countries devastated, with
casualties still mounting from the long-term
effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of
the most lethal
carcinogens
known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food
crops.
The prime target was South Vietnam.
The aggression later spread to the North, then to
the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and
finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the
stunning level of all allied air operations in the
Pacific region during World War II, including the
two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In this, Henry Kissinger's orders were
being carried out - "anything that flies on
anything that moves" - a call for genocide that is
rare in the historical record. Little of this is
remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow
circles of activists.
When the invasion
was launched 50 years ago, concern was so slight
that there were few efforts at justification,
hardly more than the president's impassioned plea
that "we are opposed around the world by a
monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies
primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere
of influence" and if the conspiracy achieves its
ends in Laos and Vietnam, "the gates will be
opened wide".
Elsewhere, he warned further
that "the complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft
societies are about to be swept away with the
debris of history [and] only the strong ... can
possibly survive," in this case reflecting on the
failure of US aggression and terror to crush Cuban
independence.
By the time protest began to
mount half a dozen years later, the respected
Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard
Fall, no dove, forecast that "Vietnam as a
cultural and historic entity ... is threatened
with extinction ... [as] ... the countryside
literally dies under the blows of the largest
military machine ever unleashed on an area of this
size." He was again referring to South Vietnam.
When the war ended eight horrendous years
later, mainstream opinion was divided between
those who described the war as a "noble cause"
that could have been won with more dedication, and
at the opposite extreme, the critics, to whom it
was "a mistake" that proved too costly. By 1977,
president Jimmy Carter aroused little notice when
he explained that we owe Vietnam "no debt" because
"the destruction was mutual".
There are
important lessons in all this for today, even
apart from another reminder that only the weak and
defeated are called to account for their crimes.
One lesson is that to understand what is happening
we should attend not only to critical events of
the real world, often dismissed from history, but
also to what leaders and elite opinion believe,
however tinged with fantasy.
Another
lesson is that alongside the flights of fancy
concocted to terrify and mobilize the public (and
perhaps believed by some who are trapped in their
own rhetoric), there is also geostrategic planning
based on principles that are rational and stable
over long periods because they are rooted in
stable institutions and their concerns. That is
true in the case of Vietnam as well. I will return
to that, only stressing here that the persistent
factors in state action are generally well
concealed.
The Iraq war is an instructive
case. It was marketed to a terrified public on the
usual grounds of self-defense against an awesome
threat to survival: the "single question", then US
president George W Bush and British premier Tony
Blair declared, was whether Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein would end his programs of developing
weapons of mass destruction. When the single
question received the wrong answer, government
rhetoric shifted effortlessly to our "yearning for
democracy", and educated opinion duly followed
course; all routine.
Later, as the scale
of the US defeat in Iraq was becoming difficult to
suppress, the government quietly conceded what had
been clear all along. In 2007-2008, the
administration officially announced that a final
settlement must grant the US military bases and
the right of combat operations, and must privilege
US investors in the rich energy system - demands
later reluctantly abandoned in the face of Iraqi
resistance. And all well kept from the general
population.
Gauging American
decline With such lessons in mind, it is
useful to look at what is highlighted in the major
journals of policy and opinion today. Let us keep
to the most prestigious of the establishment
journals, Foreign Affairs. The headline blaring on
the cover of the December 2011 issue reads in bold
face: "Is America Over?"
The title article
calls for "retrenchment" in the "humanitarian
missions" abroad that are consuming the country's
wealth, so as to arrest the American decline that
is a major theme of international affairs
discourse, usually accompanied by the corollary
that power is shifting to the East, to China and
(maybe) India.
The lead articles are on
Israel-Palestine. The first, by two high Israeli
officials, is entitled "The Problem is Palestinian
Rejection": the conflict cannot be resolved
because Palestinians refuse to recognize Israel as
a Jewish state - thereby conforming to standard
diplomatic practice: states are recognized, but
not privileged sectors within them. The demand is
hardly more than a new device to deter the threat
of political settlement that would undermine
Israel's expansionist goals.
The opposing
position, defended by an American professor, is
entitled "The Problem Is the Occupation". The
subtitle reads "How the Occupation is Destroying
the Nation". Which nation? Israel, of course. The
paired articles appear under the heading "Israel
under Siege".
The January 2012 issue
features yet another call to bomb Iran now, before
it is too late. Warning of "the dangers of
deterrence", the author suggests that
... skeptics of military action fail
to appreciate the true danger that a
nuclear-armed Iran would pose to US interests in
the Middle East and beyond. And their grim
forecasts assume that the cure would be worse
than the disease - that is, that the
consequences of a US assault on Iran would be as
bad as or worse than those of Iran achieving its
nuclear ambitions. But that is a faulty
assumption. The truth is that a military strike
intended to destroy Iran's nuclear program, if
managed carefully, could spare the region and
the world a very real threat and dramatically
improve the long-term national security of the
United States.
Others argue that the
costs would be too high, and at the extremes some
even point out that an attack would violate
international law - as does the stand of the
moderates, who regularly deliver threats of
violence, in violation of the United Nations
charter.
Let us review these dominant
concerns in turn.
American decline is
real, though the apocalyptic vision reflects the
familiar ruling class perception that anything
short of total control amounts to total disaster.
Despite the piteous laments, the US remains the
world dominant power by a large margin, and no
competitor is in sight, not only in the military
dimension, in which of course the US reigns
supreme.
China and India have recorded
rapid (though highly inegalitarian) growth, but
remain very poor countries, with enormous internal
problems not faced by the West. China is the
world's major manufacturing center, but largely as
an assembly plant for the advanced industrial
powers on its periphery and for western
multinationals.
That is likely to change
over time. Manufacturing regularly provides the
basis for innovation, often breakthroughs, as is
now sometimes happening in China. One example that
has impressed Western specialists is China's
takeover of the growing global solar panel market,
not on the basis of cheap labor but by coordinated
planning and, increasingly, innovation.
But the problems China faces are serious.
Some are demographic, reviewed in Science, the
leading US science weekly. The study shows that
mortality sharply decreased in China during the
Maoist years, "mainly a result of economic
development and improvements in education and
health services, especially the public hygiene
movement that resulted in a sharp drop in
mortality from infectious diseases." This progress
ended with the initiation of the capitalist
reforms 30 years ago, and the death rate has since
increased.
Furthermore, China's recent
economic growth has relied substantially on a
"demographic bonus", a very large working-age
population. "But the window for harvesting this
bonus may close soon," with a "profound impact on
development": "Excess cheap labor supply, which is
one of the major factors driving China's economic
miracle, will no longer be available."
Demography is only one of many serious
problems ahead. For India, the problems are far
more severe.
Not all prominent voices
foresee American decline. Among international
media, there is none more serious and responsible
than the Financial Times in London. It recently
devoted a full page to the optimistic expectation
that new technology for extracting North American
fossil fuels might allow the US to become energy
independent, hence to retain its global hegemony
for a century. There is no mention of the kind of
world the US would rule in this happy event, but
not for lack of evidence.
At about the
same time, the International Energy Agency (IEA)
reported that, with rapidly increasing carbon
emissions from fossil fuel use, the limit of
safety will be reached by 2017 if the world
continues on its present course. "The door is
closing," the IEA chief economist said, and very
soon it "will be closed forever."
Shortly
before, the US Department of Energy reported the
most recent carbon dioxide emissions figures,
which "jumped by the biggest amount on record" to
a level higher than the worst-case scenario
anticipated by the International Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). That came as no surprise to many
scientists, including the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology program on climate change, which for
years has warned that the IPCC predictions are too
conservative.
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