Noam Chomsky - American Power Under Challenge // The Costs of Violence
"It is the responsibility of
intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may
seem enough of a truism to pass without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.”
A half-century later, Noam Chomsky is still
writing with the same chilling eloquence about the updated war-on-terror
version of this American nightmare. His “concern” has not lagged,
something that can’t be missed in his new book, Who Rules the World?, which focuses on, among other
things, what in the Vietnam-era might have been called “the arrogance of power.” At a moment
when the Vietnam bomber of choice, the B-52, is being sent back into action in the war against the Islamic
State, he, too, is back in action. And so here is the first part of an
overview essay from his new book on American power and the world.
Masters of Mankind
(Part 1) By Noam
Chomsky
(excerpted from Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? Metropolitan Books)
When we ask “Who rules
the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world
affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions
and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep
in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.
States of course have
complex internal structures, and the choices and decisions of the political
leadership are heavily influenced by internal concentrations of power, while
the general population is often marginalized. That is true even for the more
democratic societies, and obviously for others. We cannot gain a realistic
understanding of who rules the world while ignoring the “masters of mankind,”
as Adam Smith called them: in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of
England; in ours, multinational conglomerates, huge financial institutions,
retail empires, and the like. Still following Smith, it is also wise to attend
to the “vile maxim” to which the “masters of mankind” are dedicated: “All for
ourselves and nothing for other people” -- a doctrine known otherwise as bitter
and incessant class war, often one-sided, much to the detriment of the people
of the home country and the world.
In
the contemporary global order, the institutions of the masters hold enormous
power, not only in the international arena but also within their home states,
on which they rely to protect their power and to provide economic support by a
wide variety of means. When we consider the role of the masters of mankind, we
turn to such state policy priorities of the moment as the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, one of the investor-rights agreements mislabeled “free-trade
agreements” in propaganda and commentary. They are negotiated in secret, apart
from the hundreds of corporate lawyers and lobbyists writing the crucial
details. The intention is to have them adopted in good Stalinist style with
“fast track” procedures designed to block discussion and allow only the choice
of yes or no (hence yes). The designers regularly do quite well, not
surprisingly. People are incidental, with the consequences one might
anticipate.
The Second
Superpower
The neoliberal
programs of the past generation have concentrated wealth and power in far fewer
hands while undermining functioning democracy, but they have aroused opposition
as well, most prominently in Latin America but also in the centers of global
power. The European Union (EU), one of the more promising developments of the
post-World War II period, has been tottering because of the harsh effect of the
policies of austerity during recession, condemned even by the economists of the
International Monetary Fund (if not the IMF’s political actors). Democracy has
been undermined as decision making shifted to the Brussels bureaucracy, with
the northern banks casting their shadow over their proceedings.
Mainstream parties
have been rapidly losing members to left and to right. The executive director
of the Paris-based research group EuropaNova attributes the general
disenchantment to “a mood of angry impotence as the real power to shape events
largely shifted from national political leaders [who, in principle at least,
are subject to democratic politics] to the market, the institutions of the
European Union and corporations,” quite in accord with neoliberal doctrine.
Very similar processes are under way in the United States, for somewhat similar
reasons, a matter of significance and concern not just for the country but,
because of U.S. power, for the world.
The rising opposition
to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial aspect of the standard
convention: it sets aside the public, which often fails to accept the approved
role of “spectators” (rather than “participants”) assigned to it in liberal
democratic theory. Such disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant
classes. Just keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the
common people who formed the militias that he was to command as “an exceedingly
dirty and nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the
lower class of these people.”
In Violent
Politics, his masterful review of insurgencies from “the American
insurgency” to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, William Polk concludes that
General Washington “was so anxious to sideline [the fighters he despised] that
he came close to losing the Revolution.” Indeed, he “might have actually done
so” had France not massively intervened and “saved the Revolution,” which until
then had been won by guerrillas -- whom we would now call “terrorists” -- while
Washington’s British-style army “was defeated time after time and almost lost
the war.”
A common feature of
successful insurgencies, Polk records, is that once popular support dissolves
after victory, the leadership suppresses the “dirty and nasty people” who
actually won the war with guerrilla tactics and terror, for fear that they
might challenge class privilege. The elites’ contempt for “the lower class of
these people” has taken various forms throughout the years. In recent times one
expression of this contempt is the call for passivity and obedience
(“moderation in democracy”) by liberal internationalists reacting to the
dangerous democratizing effects of the popular movements of the 1960s.
Sometimes states do
choose to follow public opinion, eliciting much fury in centers of power. One
dramatic case was in 2003, when the Bush administration called on Turkey to
join its invasion of Iraq. Ninety-five percent of Turks opposed that course of
action and, to the amazement and horror of Washington, the Turkish government
adhered to their views. Turkey was bitterly condemned for this departure from
responsible behavior. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, designated by
the press as the “idealist-in-chief” of the administration, berated the Turkish
military for permitting the malfeasance of the government and demanded an
apology. Unperturbed by these and innumerable other illustrations of our fabled
“yearning for democracy,” respectable commentary continued to laud President
George W. Bush for his dedication to “democracy promotion,” or sometimes
criticized him for his naïveté in thinking that an outside power could impose
its democratic yearnings on others.
The Turkish public was
not alone. Global opposition to U.S.-UK aggression was overwhelming. Support
for Washington’s war plans scarcely reached 10% almost anywhere, according to
international polls. Opposition sparked huge worldwide protests, in the United
States as well, probably the first time in history that imperial aggression was
strongly protested even before it was officially launched. On the front page of
the New York Times, journalist Patrick Tyler reported that “there
may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public
opinion.”
Unprecedented protest
in the United States was a manifestation of the opposition to aggression that
began decades earlier in the condemnation of the U.S. wars in Indochina,
reaching a scale that was substantial and influential, even if far too late. By
1967, when the antiwar movement was becoming a significant force, military
historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall warned 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.”
But the antiwar
movement did become a force that could not be ignored. Nor could it be ignored
when Ronald Reagan came into office determined to launch an assault on Central
America. His administration mimicked closely the steps John F. Kennedy had
taken 20 years earlier in launching the war against South Vietnam, but had to
back off because of the kind of vigorous public protest that had been lacking
in the early 1960s. The assault was awful enough. The victims have yet to
recover. But what happened to South Vietnam and later all of Indochina, where
“the second superpower” imposed its impediments only much later in the
conflict, was incomparably worse.
It is often argued
that the enormous public opposition to the invasion of Iraq had no effect. That
seems incorrect to me. Again, the invasion was horrifying enough, and its
aftermath is utterly grotesque. Nevertheless, it could have been far worse.
Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest
of Bush’s top officials could never even contemplate the sort of measures that
President Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson adopted 40 years earlier largely
without protest.
Western Power Under
Pressure
There is far more to
say, of course, about the factors in determining state policy that are put to
the side when we adopt the standard convention that states are the actors in
international affairs. But with such nontrivial caveats as these, let us
nevertheless adopt the convention, at least as a first approximation to
reality. Then the question of who rules the world leads at once to such
concerns as China’s rise to power and its challenge to the United States and
“world order,” the new cold war simmering in eastern Europe, the Global War on
Terror, American hegemony and American decline, and a range of similar
considerations…
Masters of Mankind (Part 2)
The Costs of Violence
[This piece, the
second of two parts, is excerpted from Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World?
In brief, the Global
War on Terror sledgehammer strategy has spread jihadi terror from a tiny corner
of Afghanistan to much of the world, from Africa through the Levant and South
Asia to Southeast Asia. It has also incited attacks in Europe and the United States.
The invasion of Iraq made a substantial contribution to this process, much as
intelligence agencies had predicted. Terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and
Paul Cruickshank estimate that the Iraq War “generated a stunning sevenfold
increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally
hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and thousands of civilian lives lost;
even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the
rest of the world have increased by more than one-third.” Other exercises have
been similarly productive.
A group of major human
rights organizations -- Physicians for Social Responsibility (U.S.), Physicians
for Global Survival (Canada), and International Physicians for the Prevention
of Nuclear War (Germany) -- conducted a study that sought "to provide as
realistic an estimate as possible of the total body count in the three main war
zones [Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan] during 12 years of ‘war on
terrorism,'" including an extensive review “of the major studies and data
published on the numbers of victims in these countries,” along with additional
information on military actions. Their "conservative estimate" is
that these wars killed about 1.3 million people, a toll that "could also
be in excess of 2 million." A database search by independent researcher
David Peterson in the days following the publication of the report found
virtually no mention of it. Who cares?
More generally,
studies carried out by the Oslo Peace Research Institute show that two-thirds
of the region’s conflict fatalities were produced in originally internal
disputes where outsiders imposed their solutions. In such conflicts, 98% of
fatalities were produced only after outsiders had entered the domestic dispute
with their military might. In Syria, the number of direct conflict fatalities
more than tripled after the West initiated air strikes against the
self-declared Islamic State and the CIA started its indirect military
interference in the war -- interference which appears to have drawn the
Russians in as advanced US antitank missiles were decimating the forces of
their ally Bashar al-Assad. Early indications are that Russian bombing is
having the usual consequences.
The evidence reviewed
by political scientist Timo Kivimäki indicates that the “protection wars
[fought by ‘coalitions of the willing’] have become the main source of violence
in the world, occasionally contributing over 50% of total conflict fatalities.”
Furthermore, in many of these cases, including Syria, as he reviews, there were
opportunities for diplomatic settlement that were ignored. That has also been
true in other horrific situations, including the Balkans in the early 1990s,
the first Gulf War, and of course the Indochina wars, the worst crime since World
War II. In the case of Iraq the question does not even arise. There surely are
some lessons here.
The
general consequences of resorting to the sledgehammer against vulnerable
societies comes as little surprise. William Polk’s careful study of
insurgencies, Violent Politics, should be essential reading for
those who want to understand today’s conflicts, and surely for planners,
assuming that they care about human consequences and not merely power and
domination. Polk reveals a pattern that has been replicated over and over. The
invaders -- perhaps professing the most benign motives -- are naturally
disliked by the population, who disobey them, at first in small ways, eliciting
a forceful response, which increases opposition and support for resistance. The
cycle of violence escalates until the invaders withdraw -- or gain their ends
by something that may approach genocide.
Playing by the
Al-Qaeda Game Plan
Obama’s global drone
assassination campaign, a remarkable innovation in global terrorism, exhibits
the same patterns. By most accounts, it is generating terrorists more rapidly
than it is murdering those suspected of someday intending to harm us -- an
impressive contribution by a constitutional lawyer on the 800th anniversary of
Magna Carta, which established the basis for the principle of presumption of
innocence that is the foundation of civilized law.
Another characteristic
feature of such interventions is the belief that the insurgency will be
overcome by eliminating its leaders. But when such an effort succeeds, the
reviled leader is regularly replaced by someone younger, more determined, more
brutal, and more effective. Polk gives many examples. Military historian Andrew
Cockburn has reviewed American campaigns to kill drug and then terror
“kingpins” over a long period in his important study Kill Chain and
found the same results. And one can expect with fair confidence that the
pattern will continue.
No doubt right now
U.S. strategists are seeking ways to murder the “Caliph of the Islamic State”
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who is a bitter rival of al-Qaeda leader Ayman
al-Zawahiri. The likely result of this achievement is forecast by the prominent
terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s
Combating Terrorism Center. He predicts that “al-Baghdadi’s death would likely
pave the way for a rapprochement [with al-Qaeda] producing a combined terrorist
force unprecedented in scope, size, ambition and resources.”... read more:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176138/