[This piece is adapted from “Uprisings,” a chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. 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.]
Does the
United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of
the Middle East as it once had?
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 U.S. planners -- have been mostly nationalized. There are constantly
attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded.
Take the
U.S. 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 U.S. goals. And at that point, interestingly, those goals
were explicitly stated. So in November 2007 the Bush II 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, U.S. policies remain constant, going
back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.
Declining
because of economic weakness?
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.
This was
called “Grand Area” planning?
Yes. Right
after the Second World War, George Kennan, head of the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.-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.
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 U.S. goals. What do you make
of them?
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 U.S. 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
U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
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 a thousand
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 Prospects and Making 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 U.S. Empire (The American Empire
Project, Metropolitan Books).
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