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Imminent Crises: Threats and Opportunities
By Noam Chomsky
06/29/07 "ZNet"
-- -- Regrettably, there are all too many candidates that
qualify as imminent and very serious crises. Several should be
high on everyone’s agenda of concern, because they pose literal
threats to human survival: the increasing likelihood of a
terminal nuclear war, and environmental disaster, which may not
be too far removed. However, I would like to focus on narrower
issues, those that are of greatest concern in the West right
now. I will be speaking primarily of the United States, which I
know best, and it is the most important case because of its
enormous power. But as far as I can ascertain, Europe is not
very different.
The area of greatest concern is the Middle East. There is
nothing novel about that. I often have to arrange talks years in
advance. If I am asked for a title, I suggest “The Current
Crisis in the Middle East.” It has yet to fail. There’s a good
reason: the huge energy resources of the region were recognized
by Washington sixty years ago as a “stupendous source of
strategic power,” the “strategically most important area of the
world,” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world
history.”1 Control over this stupendous prize has been a primary
goal of U.S. policy ever since, and threats to it have naturally
aroused enormous concern.
For years it was pretended that the threat was from the
Russians, the routine pretext for violence and subversion all
over the world. In the case of the Middle East, we do not have
to consider this pretext, since it was officially abandoned.
When the Berlin Wall fell, the first Bush administration
released a new National Security Strategy, explaining that
everything would go as before but within a new rhetorical
framework. The massive military system is still necessary, but
now because of the “technological sophistication of third world
powers”—which at least comes closer to the truth—the primary
threat, worldwide, has been indigenous nationalism. The official
document explained further that the United States would maintain
its intervention forces aimed at the Middle East, where “the
threat to our interests” that required intervention “could not
be laid at the Kremlin’s door,” contrary to decades of
fabrication.2 As is normal, all of this passed without comment.
The most serious current problem in the minds of the population,
by far, is Iraq. And the easy winner in the competition for the
country that is the most feared is Iran, not because Iran really
poses a severe threat, but because of a drumbeat of
government-media propaganda. That is a familiar pattern. The
most recent example is Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was virtually
announced in September 2002. As we now know, the U.S.-British
invasion was already underway in secret. In that month,
Washington initiated a huge propaganda campaign, with lurid
warnings by Condoleezza Rice and others that the next message
from Saddam Hussein would be a mushroom cloud in New York City.
Within a few weeks, the government-media propaganda barrage had
driven Americans completely off the international spectrum.
Saddam may have been despised almost everywhere, but it was only
in the United States that a majority of the population were
terrified of what he might do to them, tomorrow. Not
surprisingly! , support for the war correlated very closely with
such fears. That has been achieved before, in amazing ways
during the Reagan years, and there is a long and illuminating
earlier history. But I will keep to the current monster being
crafted by the doctrinal system, after a few words about Iraq.
There is a flood of commentary about Iraq, but very little
reporting. Journalists are mostly confined to fortified areas in
Baghdad, or embedded within the occupying army. That is not
because they are cowards or lazy, but because it is simply too
dangerous to be anywhere else. That has not been true in earlier
wars. It is an astonishing fact that the United States and
Britain have had more trouble running Iraq than the Nazis had in
occupied Europe, or the Russians in their East European
satellites, where the countries were run by local civilians and
security forces, with the iron fist poised if anything went
wrong but usually in the background. In contrast, the United
States has been unable to establish an obedient client regime in
Iraq, under far easier conditions.
Putting aside doctrinal blinders, what should be done in Iraq?
Before answering, we should be clear about some basic
principles. The major principle is that an invader has no
rights, only responsibilities. The first responsibility is to
pay reparations. The second responsibility is to follow the will
of the victims. There is actually a third responsibility: to
bring criminals to trial, but that obligation is so remote from
the imperial mentality of Western culture that I will put it
aside.
The responsibility to pay reparations to Iraqis goes far beyond
the crime of aggression and its terrible aftermath. The United
States and Britain have been torturing the population of Iraq
for a long time. In recent history, both governments strongly
supported Saddam Hussein’s terrorist regime through the period
of his worst crimes, and long after the end of the war with
Iran. Iran finally capitulated, recognizing that it could not
fight the United States, which was, by then, openly
participating in Saddam’s aggression—something that Iranians
have surely not forgotten, even if Westerners have. Dismissing
history is always a convenient stance for those who hold the
clubs, but their victims usually prefer to pay attention to the
real world. After the Iran-Iraq war, Washington and London
continued to provide military equipment to their friend Saddam,
including means to develop weapons of mass destruction and
delivery systems. Iraqi nuclear engineers were even being
brought to t! he United States for instruction in developing
nuclear weapons in 1989, long after Saddam’s worst atrocities
and Iran’s capitulation.
Immediately after the 1991 Gulf War, the United States and the
United Kingdom returned to their support for Saddam when they
effectively authorized him to use heavy military equipment to
suppress a Shi’ite uprising that might well have overthrown the
tyrant. The reasons were publicly explained. The New York Times
reported that there was a “strikingly unanimous view” among the
United States and its allies, Britain and Saudi Arabia, that
“whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and
the region a better hope for his country’s stability than did
those who have suffered his repression”; the term “stability” is
a code word for “following orders.”3 New York Times chief
diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman explained that “the
best of all worlds” for Washington would be an “iron-fisted
military junta” ruling Iraq just the way Saddam did. But lacking
that option, Washington had to settle for second-best: Saddam
himself. An unthinkable option—then and now—is that ! Iraqis
should rule Iraq independently of the United States.
Then followed the murderous sanctions regime imposed by the
United States and Britain, which killed hundreds of thousands of
people, devastated Iraqi civilian society, strengthened the
tyrant, and forced the population to rely on him for survival.
The sanctions probably saved Saddam from the fate of other
vicious tyrants, some quite comparable to him, who were
overthrown from within despite strong support from the United
States and United Kingdom to the end of their bloody rule:
Ceausescu, Suharto, and quite a rogues gallery of others, to
which new names are being added regularly. Again, all of this is
boring ancient history for those who hold the clubs, but not for
their victims, or for people who prefer to understand the world.
All of those actions, and much more, call for reparations, on a
massive scale, and the responsibility extends to others as well.
But the deep moral-intellectual crisis of imperial culture
prevents any thought of such topics as these.
The second responsibility is to obey the will of the population.
British and U.S. polls provide sufficient evidence about that.
The most recent polls find that 87 percent of Iraqis want a
“concrete timeline for US withdrawal,” up from 76 percent in
2005.4 If the reports really mean Iraqis, as they say, that
would imply that virtually the entire population of Arab Iraq,
where the U.S. and British armies are deployed, wants a firm
timetable for withdrawal. I doubt that one would have found
comparable figures in occupied Europe under the Nazis, or
Eastern Europe under Russian rule.
Bush-Blair and associates declare, however, that there can be no
timetable for withdrawal. That stand in part reflects the
natural hatred for democracy among the powerful, often
accompanied by eloquent calls for democracy. The calls for
democracy moved to center stage after the failure to find
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so a new motive had to be
invented for the invasion. The president announced the doctrine
to great acclaim in November 2003, at the National Endowment for
Democracy in Washington. He proclaimed that the real reason for
the invasion was not Saddam’s weapons programs, as Washington
and London had insistently claimed, but rather Bush’s messianic
mission to promote democracy in Iraq, the Middle East, and
elsewhere. The media and prominent scholars were deeply
impressed, relieved to discover that the “liberation of Iraq” is
perhaps the “most noble” war in history, as leading liberal
commentators announced—a sentiment echoed even by critics, who
objected ! that the “noble goal” may be beyond our means, and
those to whom we are offering this wonderful gift may be too
backward to accept it. That conclusion was confirmed a few days
later by U.S. polls in Baghdad. Asked why the United States
invaded Iraq, some agreed with the new doctrine hailed by
Western intellectuals: 1 percent agreed that the goal was to
promote democracy. Another 5 percent said that the goal was to
help Iraqis.5 Most of the rest took for granted that the goals
were the obvious ones that are unmentionable in polite
society—the strategic-economic goals we readily attribute to
enemies, as when Russia invaded Afghanistan or Saddam invaded
Kuwait, but are unmentionable when we turn to ourselves.
But rejection of the popular will in Iraq goes far beyond the
natural fear of democracy on the part of the powerful. Simply
consider the policies that are likely to be pursued by an
independent and more or less democratic Iraq. Iraqis may have no
love for Iran, but they would doubtlessly prefer friendly
relations with their powerful neighbor. The Shi’ite majority
already has ties to Iran and has been moving to strengthen them.
Furthermore, even limited sovereignty in Iraq has encouraged
efforts by the harshly repressed Shi’ite population across the
border in Saudi Arabia to gain basic rights and perhaps
autonomy. That is where most of Saudi Arabia’s oil happens to
be.
Such developments might lead to a loose Shi’ite alliance
controlling the world’s major energy resources and independent
of Washington, the ultimate nightmare in Washington—except that
it might get worse: the alliance might strengthen its economic
and possibly even military ties with China. The United States
can intimidate Europe: when Washington shakes its fist, leading
European business enterprises pull out of Iran. But China has a
three-thousand-year history of contempt for the barbarians: they
refuse to be intimidated.
That is the basic reason for Washington’s strategic concerns
with regard to China: not that it is a military threat, but that
it poses the threat of independence. If that threat is
unacceptable for small countries like Cuba or Vietnam, it is
certainly so for the heartland of the most dynamic economic
region in the world, the country that has just surpassed Japan
in possession of the world’s major financial reserves and is the
world’s fastest growing major economy. China’s economy is
already about two-thirds the size of that of the United States,
by the correct measures, and if current growth rates persist, it
is likely to close that gap in about a decade—in absolute terms,
not per capita of course.
China is also the center of the Asian Energy Security Grid and
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes the
Central Asian countries, and just a few weeks ago, was joined by
India, Iran, and Pakistan as observers, soon probably members.
India is undertaking significant joint energy projects with
China, and it might join the Energy Security Grid. Iran may as
well, if it comes to the conclusion that Europe is so
intimidated by the United States that it cannot act
independently. If Iran turns to the East, it will find willing
partners. A major conference on energy last September in Teheran
brought together government officials and scholars from Iran,
China, Pakistan, India, Russia, Egypt, Indonesia, Georgia,
Venezuela, and Germany, planning an extensive pipeline system
for the entire region and also more intensive development of
energy resources. Bush’s recent trip to India, and his
authorization of India’s nuclear weapons program, is part of the
jockeying over how ! these major global forces will crystallize.
A sovereign and partially democratic Iraq could be another
contribution to developments that seriously threaten U.S. global
hegemony, so it is not at all surprising that Washington has
sought in every way to prevent such an outcome, joined by “the
spear carrier for the pax americana,” as Blair’s Britain is
described by Michael MccGwire in Britain’s leading journal of
international affairs.6
If the United States were compelled to grant some degree of
sovereignty to Iraq, and any of these consequences would ensue,
Washington planners would be facing the collapse of one of their
highest foreign policy objectives since the Second World War,
when the United States replaced Britain as the world-dominant
power: the need to control “the strategically most important
area of the world.” What has been central to planning is
control, not access, an important distinction. The United States
followed the same policies long before it relied on a drop of
Middle East oil, and would continue to do so if it relied on
solar energy. Such control gives the United States “veto power”
over its industrial rivals, as explained in the early postwar
period by influential planners, and reiterated recently with
regard to Iraq: a successful conquest of Iraq would give the
United States “critical leverage” over its industrial rivals,
Europe and Asia, as pointed out by Zbigniew Brzezinski, an i!
mportant figure in the planning community. Vice President Dick
Cheney made the same point, describing control over petroleum
supplies as “tools of intimidation and blackmail”—when used by
others.7 He went on to urge the dictatorships of Central Asia,
Washington’s models of democracy, to agree to pipeline
construction that ensures that the tools remain in Washington’s
hands.
The thought is by no means original. At the dawn of the oil age
almost ninety years ago, Britain’s first lord of the admiralty
Walter Hume Long explained that “if we secure the supplies of
oil now available in the world we can do what we like.”8 Woodrow
Wilson also understood this crucial point. Wilson expelled the
British from Venezuela, which by 1928 had become the world’s
leading oil exporter, with U.S. companies then placed in charge.
To achieve this goal, Wilson and his successors supported the
vicious and corrupt dictator of Venezuela and ensured that he
would bar British concessions. Meanwhile the United States
continued to demand—and secure—U.S. oil rights in the Middle
East, where the British and French were in the lead.
We might note that these events illustrate the actual meaning of
the “Wilsonian idealism” admired by Western intellectual
culture, and also provide the real meaning of “free trade” and
the “open door.” Sometimes that is even officially acknowledged.
When the post-Second World War global order was being shaped in
Washington, a State Department memorandum on U.S. petroleum
policy called for preserving absolute U.S. control of Western
hemisphere resources “coupled with insistence upon the Open Door
principle of equal opportunity for United States companies in
new areas.”9 That is a useful illustration of “really existing
free market doctrine”: What we have, we keep, closing the door
to others; what we do not yet have, we take, under the principle
of the Open Door. All of this illustrates the one really
significant theory of international relations, the maxim of
Thucydides: the strong do as they can, and the weak suffer as
they must.
With regard to Iraq today, talk about exit strategies means very
little unless these realities are confronted. How Washington
planners will deal with these problems is far from clear. And
they face similar problems elsewhere. Intelligence projections
for the new millennium were that the United States would control
Middle East oil as a matter of course, but would itself rely on
more stable Atlantic Basin reserves: West African dictatorships’
and the Western hemisphere’s. But Washington’s postwar control
of South America, from Venezuela to Argentina, is seriously
eroding. The two major instruments of control have been violence
and economic strangulation, but each weapon is losing its
efficacy. The latest attempt to sponsor a military coup was in
2002, in Venezuela, but the United States had to back down when
the government it helped install was quickly overthrown by
popular resistance, and there was turmoil in Latin America,
where democracy is taken much more seriously than in! the West
and overthrow of a democratically elected government is no
longer accepted quietly. Economic controls are also eroding.
South American countries are paying off their debts to the IMF—basically
an offshoot of the U.S. Treasury department. More frightening
yet to Washington, these countries are being aided by Venezuela.
The president of Argentina announced that the country would “rid
itself of the IMF.” Rigorous adherence to IMF rules had led to
economic disaster, from which the country recovered by radically
violating the rules. Brazil too had rid itself of the IMF, and
Bolivia probably will as well, again aided by Venezuela. U.S.
economic controls are seriously weakening.
Washington’s main concern is Venezuela, the leading oil producer
in the Western hemisphere. The U.S. Department of Energy
estimates that its reserves might be greater than Saudi Arabia’s
if the price of oil stays high enough for exploitation of its
expensive extra-heavy oil to become profitable. Extreme U.S.
hostility and subversion has accelerated Venezuela’s interest in
diversifying exports and investment, and China is more than
willing to accept the opportunity, as it is with other
resource-rich Latin American exporters. The largest gas reserves
in South America are in Bolivia, which is now following much the
same path as Venezuela. Both countries pose a problem for
Washington in other respects. They have popularly elected
governments. Venezuela leads Latin America in support for the
elected government, increasing sharply in the past few years
under Chávez. He is bitterly hated in the United States because
of his independence and enormous popular support. Bolivia just
had! a democratic election of a kind next to inconceivable in
the West. There were serious issues that the population
understood very well, and there was active participation of the
general population, who elected someone from their own ranks,
from the indigenous majority. Democracy is always frightening to
power centers, particularly when it goes too far beyond mere
form and involves actual substance.
Commentary on what is happening reveals the nature of the fears.
London’s Financial Times warned that President Evo Morales of
Bolivia is becoming increasingly “authoritarian” and
“undemocratic.” This is a serious concern to Western powers, who
are dedicated to freedom and democracy everywhere. The proof of
his authoritarian stance and departure from democratic
principles is that he followed the will of 95 percent of the
population and nationalized Bolivia’s gas resources, and is also
gaining popularity by cutting public salaries and eliminating
corruption. Morales’s policies have come to resemble the
frightening leader of Venezuela. As if the popularity of
Chávez’s elected government was not proof enough that he is an
anti-democratic dictator, he is attempting to extend to Bolivia
the same programs he is instituting in Venezuela: helping
“Bolivia’s drive to stamp out illiteracy and pay[ing] the wages
of hundreds of Cuban doctors who have been sent to work there”
among the p! oor, to quote the Financial Times’ lament.10
The latest Bush administration’s National Security Strategy,
released March 2006, describes China as the greatest long-term
threat to U.S. global dominance. The threat is not military, but
economic. The document warns that Chinese leaders are not only
“expanding trade, but acting as if they can somehow ‘lock up’
energy supplies around the world or seek to direct markets
rather than opening them up.”11 In the U.S.-China meetings in
Washington a few weeks ago, President Bush warned President Hu
Jintao against trying to “lock up” global supplies. Bush
condemned China’s reliance on oil from Sudan, Burma, and Iran,
accusing China of opposition to free trade and human
rights—unlike Washington, which imports only from pure
democracies that worship human rights, like Equatorial Guinea,
one of the most vicious African dictatorships; Colombia, which
has by far the worst human rights record in Latin America;
Central Asian states; and other paragons of virtue. No
respectable person woul! d accuse Washington of “locking up”
global supplies when it pursues its traditional “open door
policy” and outright aggression to ensure that it dominates
global energy supplies, firmly holding “the tools of
intimidation and blackmail.” It is interesting, perhaps, that
none of this elicits ridicule in the West, or even notice.
The lead story in the New York Times on the Bush-Hu meeting
reported that “China’s appetite for oil also affects its stance
on Iran....The issue [of China’s effort to ‘lock up’ global
supplies] is likely to come to a particular head over Iran,”
where China’s state-owned oil giant signed a $70 billion deal to
develop Iran’s huge Yadavaran oil field.12 That’s a serious
matter, compounded by Chinese interference even in Saudi Arabia,
a U.S. client state since the British were expelled during the
Second World War. This relationship now threatened by growing
economic and even military ties between China and the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia, now China’s largest trading partner in West Asia
and North Africa—perhaps further proof of China’s lack of
concern for democracy and human rights. When President Hu
visited Washington, he was denied a state dinner, in a
calculated insult. He cheerfully reciprocated by going directly
to Saudi Arabia, a serious slap in the face to Washington that
was! surely not misunderstood.
This is the barest sketch of the relevant global context over
what to do in Iraq. But these critical matters are scarcely
mentioned in the ongoing debate about the problem of greatest
concern to Americans. They are barred by a rigid doctrine. It is
unacceptable to attribute rational strategic-economic thinking
to one’s own state, which must be guided by benign ideals of
freedom, justice, peace, and other wonderful things. That leads
back again to a very severe crisis in Western intellectual
culture, not of course unique in history, but with dangerous
portent.
We can be confident that these matters, though excluded from
public discussion, engage the attention of planners. Governments
typically regard their populations as a major enemy, and keep
them in ignorance of what is happening to them and planned for
them. Nevertheless, we can speculate. One reasonable speculation
is that Washington planners may be seeking to inspire
secessionist movements that the United States can then “defend”
against the home country. In Iran, the main oil resources are in
the Arab areas adjacent to the Gulf, Iran’s Khuzestan—and sure
enough, there is now an Ahwazi liberation movement of unknown
origin, claiming unspecified rights of autonomy. Nearby, Iraq
and the gulf states provide a base for U.S. military
intervention.
The U.S. military presence in Latin America is increasing
substantially. In Venezuela, oil resources are concentrated in
Zulia province near Colombia, the one reliable U.S. land base in
the region, a province that is anti-Chávez and already has an
autonomy movement, again of unknown origins. In Bolivia, the gas
resources are in richer eastern areas dominated by elites of
European descent that bitterly oppose the government elected by
the indigenous majority, and have threatened to secede. Nearby
Paraguay is another one of the few remaining reliable land bases
for the U.S. military. Total military and police assistance now
exceeds economic and social aid, a dramatic reversal of the
pattern during Cold War years. The U.S. military now has more
personnel in Latin America than most key civilian federal
agencies combined, again a sharp change from earlier years. The
new mission is to combat “radical populism”—the term that is
regularly used for independent nationalism that does n! ot obey
orders. Military training is being shifted from the State
Department to the Pentagon, freeing it from human rights and
democracy conditionality under congressional supervision—which
was always weak, but had some effects that constrained executive
violence.
The United States is a global power, and its policies should not
be viewed in isolation, any more than those of the British
Empire. Going back half a century, the Eisenhower administration
identified three major global problems: Indonesia, North Africa,
and the Middle East—all oil producers, all Islamic. In all
cases, the concern was independent nationalism. The end of
French rule in Algeria resolved the North African problem. In
Indonesia, the 1965 Suharto coup removed the threat of
independence with a huge massacre, which the CIA compared to the
crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. The “staggering mass
slaughter,” as the New York Times described it, was greeted in
the West with unconcealed euphoria and relief.13 The military
coup destroyed the only mass-based political party, a party of
the poor, slaughtered huge numbers of landless peasants, and
threw the country open to Western exploitation of its rich
resources, while the large majority tries to survive in misery.
Two yea! rs later, the major problem in the Middle East was
resolved with Israel’s destruction of the Nasser regime, hated
by the United States and Britain, which feared that secular
nationalist forces might seek to direct the vast energy
resources of the region to internal development. A few years
earlier, U.S. intelligence had warned of popular feelings that
oil is a “national patrimony” exploited by the West by unjust
arrangements imposed by force. Israel’s service to the United
States, its Saudi ally, and the energy corporations confirmed
the judgment of U.S. intelligence in 1958 that a “logical
corollary” of opposition to Arab nationalism is reliance on
Israel as “the only strong pro-Western power in the Middle
East,” apart from Turkey, which established a close military
alliance with Israel in 1958, within the U.S. strategic
framework.14
The U.S.-Israeli alliance, unique in world affairs, dates from
Israel’s 1967 military conquests, reinforced in 1970 when Israel
barred possible Syrian intervention in Jordan to protect
Palestinians who were being slaughtered during Black September.
Such intervention by Syria was regarded in Washington as a
threat to its ally Jordan and, more important, to the
oil-producers that were Washington’s clients. U.S. aid to Israel
roughly quadrupled. The pattern is fairly consistent since,
extending to secondary Israeli services to U.S. power outside
the Middle East, particularly in Latin America and southern
Africa. The system of domination has worked quite well for the
people who matter. Energy corporation profits are breaking all
records. High-tech (including military) industry has lucrative
ties with Israel, as do the major financial institutions, and
Israel serves virtually as an offshore military base and
provider of equipment and training. One may argue that other
policies wo! uld have been more beneficial to the concentrations
of domestic power that largely determine policy, but they seem
to find these arrangements quite tolerable. If they did not,
they could easily move to terminate them. And in fact, when
there are conflicts between U.S. and Israeli state power, Israel
naturally backs down; exports of military technology to China
are a recent example, when the Bush administration went out of
its way to humiliate Israel after it was initially reluctant to
follow the orders of what Israeli commentator Aluf Benn calls
“the boss-man called ‘partner.’”
Let us turn next to Iran and its nuclear programs. Until 1979,
Washington strongly supported these programs. During those
years, of course, a brutal tyrant installed by the U.S.-U.K.
military coup that overthrew the Iranian parliamentary
government ruled Iran. Today, the standard claim is that Iran
has no need for nuclear power, and therefore must be pursuing a
secret weapons program. Henry Kissinger explained that “For a
major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful
use of resources.” As secretary of state thirty years ago,
Kissinger held that “introduction of nuclear power will both
provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free
remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to
petrochemicals,” and the United States acted to assist the
Shah’s efforts. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz,
the leading planners of the second Bush administration, worked
hard to provide the Shah with a “complete ‘nuclear fuel
cycle’—reactors powered by an! d regenerating fissile materials
on a self-sustaining basis. That is precisely the ability the
current administration is trying to prevent Iran from acquiring
today.” U.S. universities were arranging to train Iranian
nuclear engineers, doubtless with Washington’s approval, if not
initiative; including my own university, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, for example, despite overwhelming
student opposition. Kissinger was asked about his reversal, and
he responded with his usual engaging frankness: “They were an
allied country.”15 So therefore they had a genuine need for
nuclear energy, pre-1979, but have no such need today.
The Iranian nuclear programs, as far as is known, fall within
its rights under Article IV of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),
which grants non-nuclear states the right to produce fuel for
nuclear energy. The Bush administration argues, however, that
Article IV should be strengthened, and I think that makes sense.
When the NPT came into force in 1970, there was a considerable
gap between producing fuel for energy and for nuclear weapons.
But with contemporary technology, the gap has been narrowed.
However, any such revision of Article IV would have to ensure
unimpeded access for nonmilitary use, in accord with the initial
bargain. A reasonable proposal was put forth by Mohamed
ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency: that
all production and processing of weapon-usable material be under
international control, with “assurance that legitimate would-be
users could get their supplies.”16 That should be the first
step, he proposed, towards fully implementing th! e 1993 UN
resolution calling for a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (called
FISSBAN, for short), which bans production of fissile materials
by individual states. ElBaradei’s proposal was dead in the
water. The U.S. political leadership, surely in its current
stance, would never agree to this delegation of sovereignty. To
date, ElBaradei’s proposal has been accepted by only one state,
to my knowledge: Iran, last February. That suggests one way to
resolve the current crisis—in fact, a far more serious crisis:
continued production of fissile materials by individual states
is likely to doom humanity to destruction.
Washington also strenuously opposes a verifiable FISSBAN treaty,
regarded by specialists as the “most fundamental nuclear arms
control proposal,” according to Princeton arms control
specialist Frank von Hippel.17 Despite U.S. opposition, in
November 2004, the UN Disarmament Committee voted in favor of a
verifiable FISSBAN. The vote was 147 to 1, with 2 abstentions:
Israel, which is reflexive, and Britain, which is more
interesting. British ambassador John Freeman explained that
Britain supported the treaty, but could not vote for this
version, because he said it “divides the international
community”—divided it 147 to 1.18 A later vote in the full
General Assembly was 179 to 2, Israel and Britain again
abstaining. The United States was joined by Palau.
We gain some insight into the ranking of survival of the species
among the priorities of the leadership of the hegemonic power
and its spear carrier.
In 2004, the European Union (EU) and Iran reached an agreement
on nuclear issues: Iran agreed to temporarily suspend its legal
activities of uranium enrichment, and the EU agreed to provide
Iran with “firm commitments on security issues.” As everyone
understands, the phrase “security issues” refers to the very
credible U.S.-Israeli threats and preparations to attack Iran.
These threats, a serious violation of the UN Charter, are no
small matter for a country that has been tortured for fifty
years without a break by the global superpower, which now
occupies the countries on Iran’s borders, not to speak of the
client state that is the regional superpower.
Iran lived up to its side of the bargain, but the EU, under U.S.
pressure, rejected its commitments. Iran finally abandoned the
bargain as well. The preferred version in the West is that Iran
broke the agreement, proving that it is a serious threat to
world order.
In May 2003, Iran had offered to discuss the full range of
security matters with the United States, which refused,
preferring to follow the same course it did with North Korea. On
taking office in January 2001, the Bush administration withdrew
the “no hostile intent” condition of earlier agreements and
proceeded to issue serious threats, while also abandoning
promises to provide fuel oil and a nuclear reactor. In response,
North Korea returned to developing nuclear weapons, the roots of
another current crisis. All predictable, and predicted.
There are ways to mitigate and probably end these crises. The
first is to call off the threats that are virtually urging Iran
(and North Korea) to develop nuclear weapons. One of Israel’s
leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, wrote that if
Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, then they are “crazy,”
immediately after Washington demonstrated that it will attack
anyone it likes as long as they are known to be defenseless.19
So the first step towards ending the crisis would be to call off
the threats that are likely to lead potential targets to develop
a deterrent—where nuclear weapons or terror are the only viable
options.
A second step would be to join with other efforts to reintegrate
Iran into the global economy. A third step would be to join the
rest of the world in accepting a verifiable FISSBAN treaty, and
to join Iran in accepting ElBaradei’s proposal, or something
similar—and I repeat that the issue here extends far beyond
Iran, and reaches the level of human survival. A fourth step
would be to live up to Article VI of the NPT, which obligates
the nuclear states to take “good faith” efforts to eliminate
nuclear weapons, a binding legal obligation, as the World Court
determined. None of the nuclear states have lived up to that
obligation, but the United States is far in the lead in
violating it—again, a very serious threat to human survival.
Even steps in these directions would mitigate the upcoming
crisis with Iran. Above all, it is important to heed the words
of Mohamed ElBaradei: “There is no military solution to this
situation. It is inconceivable. The only durable solution is a
neg! otiated solution.”20 And it is within reach. Similar to the
Iraq war: a war against Iran appears to be opposed by the
military and U.S. intelligence, but might well be undertaken by
the civilian planners of the Bush administration: Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Rice, and a few others, an unusually dangerous
collection.
There is wide agreement among prominent strategic analysts that
the threat of nuclear war is severe and increasing, and that the
threat can be eliminated by measures that are known and in fact
legally obligatory. If such measures are not taken, they warn
that “a nuclear exchange is ultimately inevitable,” that we may
be facing “an appreciable risk of ultimate doom,” an “Armageddon
of our own making.”21 The threats are well understood, and they
are being consciously enhanced. The Iraq invasion is only the
most blatant example.
Clinton’s military and intelligence planners had called for
“dominating the space dimension of military operations to
protect U.S. interests and investment,” much in the way armies
and navies did in earlier years, but now with a sole hegemon,
which must develop “space-based strike weapons [enabling] the
application of precision force from, to, and through space.”
Such measures will be needed, they said, because “globalization
of the world economy” will lead to a “widening economic divide”
along with “deepening economic stagnation, political
instability, and cultural alienation,” hence unrest and violence
among the “have-nots,” much of it directed against the United
States. The United States must therefore be ready to plan for a
“precision strike from space [as a] counter to the worldwide
proliferation of WMD” by unruly elements.22 That is a likely
consequence of the recommended military programs, just as a
“widening divide” is the anticipated consequence of the specific
vers! ion of international integration that is misleadingly
called “globalization” and “free trade” in the doctrinal system.
A word should be added about these notions. Both are terms of
propaganda, not description. The term “globalization” is used
for a specific form of international economic integration,
designed—not surprisingly—in the interests of the designers:
multinational corporations and the few powerful states to which
they are closely linked. An opposing form of globalization is
being pursued by groups that are far more representative of the
world’s population, the mass global justice movements, which
originated in the South but now have been joined by northern
popular organizations and meet annually in the World Social
Forum, which has spawned many regional and local social forums,
concentrating on their own issues though within the same
overarching framework. The global justice movements are an
entirely new phenomenon, perhaps the seeds of the kind of
international that has been the hope of the workers movements
and the left since their modern origins. They are called
“antiglobalizati! on” in the reigning doctrinal systems, because
they seek a form of globalization oriented towards the interests
of people, not concentrated economic power—and unfortunately,
they have often adopted this ridiculous terminology.
Official globalization is committed to so-called neoliberalism,
also a highly misleading term: the regime is not new, and it is
not liberal. Neoliberalism is essentially the policy imposed by
force on the colonies since the eighteenth century, while the
currently wealthy countries radically violated these rules, with
extensive reliance on state intervention in the economy and
resort to measures that are now banned in the international
economic order. That was true of England and the countries that
followed its path of protectionism and state intervention,
including Japan, the one country of the South that escaped
colonization and the one country that industrialized. These
facts are widely recognized by economic historians.
A comparison of the United States and Egypt in the early
nineteenth century is one of many enlightening illustrations of
the decisive role of sovereignty and massive state intervention
in economic development. Having freed itself from British rule,
the United States was able to adopt British-style measures of
state intervention, and developed. Meanwhile British power was
able to bar anything of the sort in Egypt, joining with France
to impose Lord Palmerston’s doctrine that “No ideas therefore of
fairness towards Mehemet [Ali] ought to stand in the way of such
great and paramount interests” as barring competition in the
eastern Mediterranean.23 Palmerston expressed his “hate” for the
“ignorant barbarian” who dared to undertake economic
development. Historical memories resonate when, today, Britain
and France, fronting for the United States, demand that Iran
suspend all activities related to nuclear and missile programs,
including research and development, so that nuclear ene! rgy is
barred and the country that is probably under the greatest
threat of any in the world has no deterrent to attack—attack by
the righteous, that is. We might also recall that France and
Britain played the crucial role in development of Israel’s
nuclear arsenal. Imperial sensibilities are delicate indeed.
Had it enjoyed sovereignty, Egypt might have undergone an
industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. It shared many
of the advantages of the United States, except independence,
which allowed the United States to impose very high tariffs to
bar superior British goods (textiles, steel, and others). The
United States in fact became the world’s leader in protectionism
until the Second World War, when its economy so overwhelmed
anyone else’s that “free competition” was tolerable. After the
war, massive reliance on the dynamic state sector became a
central component of the U.S. economy, even more than it had
been before, continuing right to the present. And the United
States remains committed to protectionism, when useful. The most
extreme protectionism was during the Reagan years—accompanied,
as usual, by eloquent odes to liberalism, for others. Reagan
virtually doubled protective barriers, and also turned to the
usual device, the Pentagon, to overcome management failures a!
nd “reindustrialize America,” the slogan of the business press.
Furthermore, high levels of protectionism are built into the
so-called “free trade agreements,” designed to protect the
powerful and privileged, in the traditional manner.
The same was true of Britain’s flirtation with “free trade” a
century earlier, when 150 years of protectionism and state
intervention had made Britain by far the world’s most powerful
economy, free trade seemed an option, given that the playing
field was “tilted” in the right direction, to adapt the familiar
metaphor. But the British still hedged their bets. They
continued to rely on protected markets, state intervention, and
also devices not considered by economic historians. One such
market was the world’s most spectacular narcotrafficking
enterprise, designed to break into the China market, and also
producing profits that financed the Royal Navy, the
administration of conquered India, and the purchase of U.S.
cotton—the fuel of the industrial revolution. U.S. cotton
production was also based on radical state intervention:
slavery, virtual extermination of the native population, and
military conquest—almost half of Mexico, to mention one case
relevant to current news. When! Britain could no longer compete
with Japan, it closed off the empire in 1932, followed by other
imperial powers, a crucial part of the background for the Second
World War. The truth about free trade and economic development
has only a limited resemblance to the doctrines professed.
Throughout modern history, democracy and development have had a
common enemy: the loss of sovereignty. In a world of states, it
is true that decline of sovereignty entails decline of hope for
democracy, and decline in ability to conduct social and economic
policy. That in turn harms development, a conclusion well
confirmed by centuries of economic history. The work of economic
historian M. Shahid Alam is particularly enlightening in this
respect. In current terminology, the imposed regimes are called
neoliberal, so it is fair to say that the common enemy of
democracy and development is neoliberalism. With regard to
development, one can debate causality, because the factors in
economic growth are so poorly understood. But correlations are
reasonably clear. The countries that have most rigorously
observed neoliberal principles, as in Latin America and
elsewhere, have experienced a sharp deterioration of
macroeconomic indicators as compared with earlier years. Those
that have i! gnored the principles, as in East Asia, have
enjoyed rapid growth. That neoliberalism harms democracy is
understandable. Virtually every feature of the neoliberal
package, from privatization to freeing financial flows,
undermines democracy for clear and well-known reasons.
The crises we face are real and imminent, and in each case means
are available to overcome them. The first step is understanding,
then organization and appropriate action. This is the path that
has often been followed in the past, bringing about a much
better world and leaving a legacy of comparative freedom and
privilege, for some at least, which can be the basis for moving
on. Failure to do so is almost certain to lead to grim
consequences, even the end of biology’s only experiment with
higher intelligence.
Notes
1. See Aaron David Miller, Search for Security (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Irvine Anderson,
Aramco, the United States and Saudi Arabia (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1981); Michael Stoff, Oil, War and
American Security (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980);
Steven Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985), 51.
2. National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington
DC: The White House, March 1990).
3. Alan Cowell, “Kurds Assert Few Outside Iraq Wanted Them to
Win,” New York Times, April 11, 1991.
4. Nina Kamp and Michael E. O’Hanlon, “The State of Iraq,” New
York Times, March 19, 2006.
5. Walter Pincus, “Skepticism About U.S. Deep, Iraq Poll Shows;
Motive for Invasion Is Focus of Doubts,” Washington Post,
November 12, 2003; Richard Burkholder, “Gallup Poll of Baghdad,”
Government & Public Affairs, October 28, 2003.
6. Michael MccGwire, “The Rise and Fall of the NPT,”
International Affairs 81 (January 2005): 134.
7. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Hegemonic Quicksand,” National Interest
74 (Winter 2003/2004): 5-16; Stefan Wagstyl, “Cheney Rebukes
Putin on Energy ‘Blackmail,’” Financial Times, May 4, 2006.
8. See Ian Rutledge, Addicted to Oil (London: I. B. Tauris,
2005).
9. See Multinational Oil Corporation and U.S. Foreign Policy,
Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate,
January 2, 1975 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office,
1975).
10. Hal Weitzman, “Nationalism Fuels Fears over Morales’ Power,”
Financial Times, May 2, 2006.
11. National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington
DC: The White House, March 2006), 41.
12. David E. Sanger, “China’s Rising Need for Oil Is High on
U.S. Agenda,” New York Times, April 18, 2006.
13. Editorial, New York Times, August 25, 1966
14. Mark Curtis, The Great Deception (London: Pluto Press,
1998), 133.
15. Darna Linzer, “Past Arguments Don’t Square with Current Iran
Policy,” Washington Post, March 27, 2005.
16. Mohamed ElBaradei, “Towards a Safer World,” The Economist,
October 16, 2003.
17. Frank von Hippel, “Coupling a Moratorium To Reductions as a
First Step toward the Fissile-Material Cutoff Treaty,” in Rakesh
Sood, Frank von Hippel, and Morton Halperin, “The Road to
Nuclear Zero,” Center for Advanced Study of India, 1998, 17.
18. See Rebecca Johnson, “2004 UN First Committee,” Disarmament
Diplomacy 79 (April/May 2005), and Jean du Preez, “The Fissban,”
Disarmament Diplomacy 79 (April/May 2005), http://www.acronym.org.
19. Martin van Creveld, “Sharon on the Warpath” International
Herald Tribune, August 21, 2004.
20. Jeffrey Fleishman and Alissa Rubin, “ElBaradei Asks for
Restraint on Iran Sanctions,” Los Angeles Times, March 31, 2006.
21. Michael MccGwire, “The Rise and Fall of the NPT,”
International Affairs 81 (January 2005), 127; John Steinbruner
and Nancy Gallagher, “Constructive Transformation,” Daedalus
133, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 99; Sam Nunn, “The Cold War’s Nuclear
Legacy Has Lasted too Long,” Financial Times, December 6, 2004.
22. National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2015
(Washington DC, December 2000); U.S. Space Command, Vision for
2020 (February 1997), 7; Pentagon, Quadrennial Defense Review,
May 1997.
23. See Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of
Muhammad Ali (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 240;
Harold Temperley, England and the Near East (London: Longmans,
Green and Co., 1936).
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor and Professor of
Linguistics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. This article is based on a talk delivered May 12,
2006, in Beirut, two months before Israel began its military
campaign against Lebanon on July 13, 2006. It appears in Inside
Lebanon: Journey to a Shattered Land with Noam and Carol Chomsky
(just published by Monthly Review Press, order online at
www.monthlyreview.org or call 1-800-670-9499).
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