http://MondeDiplo.com/2003/08/02chomsky
Le Monde diplomatique ---- August 2003
Iraq: invasion that will live in infamy
___________________________________________________________
The war on Iraq is not over. In the United States President George Bush
has had to admit that his accusations about Baghdad's purchase of uranium
in Niger were wrong. In the United Kingdom, the suicide of Dr David Kelly
is making Prime Minister Tony Blair's future less certain. In Iraq attacks
against US troops are increasing, and the new governing council seems
incapable of guiding the country out of its present chaos.
By NOAM CHOMSKY *
* Noam Chomsky is professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
___________________________________________________________
SEPTEMBER 2002 was marked by three events of considerable importance,
closely related. The United States, the most powerful state in history,
announced a new national security strategy asserting that it will maintain
global hegemony permanently. Any challenge will be blocked by force, the
dimension in which the US reigns supreme. At the same time, the war drums
began to beat to mobilise the population for an invasion of Iraq. And the
campaign opened for the mid-term congressional elections, which would
determine whether the administration would be able to carry forward its
radical international and domestic agenda.
The new "imperial grand strategy", as it was termed at once by John
Ikenberry writing in the leading establishment journal, presents the US as
"a revisionist state seeking to parlay its moment ary advantages into a
world order in which it runs the show", a unipolar world in which "no
state or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader, protector,
and enforcer" (1). These policies are fraught with danger even for the US
itself, Ikenberry warned, joining many others in the foreign policy elite.
What is to be protected is US power and the interests it represents, not
the world, which vigorously opposed the concept. Within a few months
studies revealed that fear of the US had reached remarkable heights, along
with distrust of the political leadership. An international Gallup poll in
December, which was barely noticed in the US, found almost no support for
Washington's announced plans for a war in Iraq carried out unilaterally by
America and its allies - in effect, the US-United Kingdom coalition.
Washington told the United Nations that it could be relevant by endorsing
US plans, or it could be a debating society. The US had the "sovereign
right to take military action", the administration's moderate Colin Powell
told the World Economic Forum, which also vigorously opposed the war
plans: "When we feel strongly about something we will lead, even if no one
is following us" (2).
President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair underscored
their contempt for international law and institutions at their Azores
summit meeting on the eve of the invasion. They issued an ultimatum, not
to Iraq, but to the Security Council: capitulate, or we will invade
without your meaningless seal of approval. And we will do so whether or
not Saddam Hussein and his family leave the country (3). The crucial
principle is that the US must effectively rule Iraq.
President Bush declared that the US "has the sovereign authority to use
force in assuring its own national security", threatened by Iraq with or
without Saddam, according to the Bush doctrine. The US will be happy to
establish an Arab facade, to borrow the term of the British during their
days in the sun, while US power is firmly implanted at the heart of the
world's major energy-producing region. Formal democracy will be fine, but
only if it is of a submissive kind accepted in the US's backyard, at least
if history and current practice are any guide.
The grand strategy authorises the US to carry out preventive war:
preventive, not pre-emptive. Whatever the justifications for pre-emptive
war might be, they do not hold for preventive war, particularly as that
concept is interpreted by its current enthusiasts: the use of military
force to eliminate an invented or imagined threat, so that even the term
"preventive" is too charitable. Preventive war is, very simply, the
supreme crime that was condemned at Nuremberg.
That was understood by those with some concern for their country. As the
US invaded Iraq, the historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote that Bush's grand
strategy was "alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan
employed at the time of Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier
American president [Franklin D Roosevelt] said it would, lives in infamy".
It was no surprise, added Schlesinger, that "the global wave of sympathy
that engulfed the US after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred
of American arrogance and militarism" and the belief that Bush was "a
greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein" (4).
For the political leadership, mostly recycled from the more reactionary
sectors of the Reagan-Bush Senior administrations, the global wave of
hatred is not a particular problem. They want to be feared, not loved. It
is natural for the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, to quote the
words of Chicago gangster Al Capone: "You will get more with a kind word
and a gun than with a kind word alone." They understand just as well as
their establishment critics that their actions increase the risk of
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terror. But that
too is not a major problem. Far higher in the scale of their priorities
are the goals of establishing global hegemony and implementing their
domestic agenda, which is to dismantle the progressive achievements that
have been won by popular struggle over the past century, and to
institutionalise their radical changes so that recovering the achievements
will be no easy task.
It is not enough for a hegemonic power to declare an official policy. It
must establish it as a new norm of international law by exemplary action.
Distinguished commentators may then explain that the law is a flexible
living instrument, so that the new norm is now available as a guide to
action. It is understood that only those with the guns can establish norms
and modify international law.
The selected target must meet several conditions. It must be defenceless,
important enough to be worth the trouble, an imminent threat to our
survival and an ultimate evil. Iraq qualified on all counts. The first two
conditions are obvious. For the third, it suffices to repeat the orations
of Bush, Blair, and their colleagues: the dictator "is assembling the
world's most dangerous weapons [in order to] dominate, intimidate or
attack"; and he "has already used them on whole villages leaving thousands
of his own citizens dead, blind or transfigured. If this is not evil then
evil has no meaning." Bush's eloquent denunciation surely rings true. And
those who contributed to enhancing evil should certainly not enjoy
impunity: among them, the speaker of these lofty words and his current
associates, and all those who joined them in the years when they were
supporting that man of ultimate evil, Saddam Hussein, long after he had
committed these terrible crimes, and after the first war with Iraq.
Supported him because of our duty to help US exporters, the Bush Senior
administration explained.
It is impressive to see how easy it is for polit ical leaders, while
recounting Saddam the monster's worst crimes, to suppress the crucial
words "with our help, because we don't care about such matters". Support
shifted to denunciation as soon as their friend Saddam committed his first
authentic crime, which was disobeying (or perhaps misunderstanding)
orders, by invading Kuwait. Punishment was severe - for his subjects. The
tyrant escaped unscathed, and was further strengthened by the sanctions
regime then imposed by his former allies.
Also easy to suppress are the reasons why the US returned to support
Saddam immediately after the Gulf war, as he crushed rebellions that might
have overthrown him. The chief diplomatic correspondent of the New York
Times, Thomas Friedman, explained that the best of all worlds for the US
would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein", but since
that goal seemed unattainable, we would have to be satisfied with second
best (5). The rebels failed because the US and its allies held the
"strikingly unanimous view [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" (6).
All of this was suppressed in the commentary on the mass graves of the
victims of the US- authorised paroxysm of terror of Saddam Hussein, which
commentary was offered as a justification for the war on "moral grounds".
It was all known in 1991, but ignored for reasons of state.
A reluctant US population had to be whipped to a proper mood of war fever.
From September grim warnings were issued about the dire threat that Saddam
posed to the US and his links to al-Qaida, with broad hints that he had
been involved in the 9/11 attacks. Many of the charges that had been
"dangled in front of [the media] failed the laugh test," commented the
editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, "but the more ridiculous
[they were,] the more the media strove to make whole-hearted swallowing of
them a test of patriotism" (7). The propaganda assault had its effects.
Within weeks, a majority of Americans came to regard Saddam Hussein as an
imminent threat to the US. Soon almost half believed that Iraq was behind
the 9/11 terror. Support for the war correlated with these beliefs. The
propaganda campaign was just enough to give the administration a bare
majority in the mid-term elections, as voters put aside their immediate
concerns and huddled under the umbrella of power in fear of a demonic
enemy.
The brilliant success of public diplomacy was revealed when Bush, in the
words of one commentator, "provided a powerful Reaganesque finale to a
six-week war on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on 1
May". This reference is presumably to President Ronald Reagan's proud
declaration that America was "standing tall" after conquering Grenada, the
nutmeg cap ital of the world, in 1983, preventing the Russians from using
it to bomb the US. Bush, as Reagan's mimic, was free to declare - without
concern for sceptical comment at home - that he had won a "victory in a
war on terror [by having] removed an ally of al-Qaida" (8). It has been
immaterial that no credible evidence was provided for the alleged link
between Saddam Hussein and his bitter enemy Osama bin Laden and that the
charge was dismissed by competent observers. Also immaterial was the only
known connection between the victory and terror: the invasion appears to
have been "a huge setback in the war on terror" by sharply increasing
al-Qaida recruitment, as US officials concede (9).
The Wall Street Journal recognised that Bush's carefully staged aircraft
carrier extravaganza "marks the beginning of his 2004 re-election
campaign" which the White House hopes "will be built as much as possible
around national-security themes". The electoral campaign will focus on
"the battle of Iraq, not the war", chief Republican political strategist
Karl Rove explained : the war must continue, if only to control the
population at home (10).
Before the 2002 elections Rove had instructed party activists to stress
security issues, diverting attention from unpopular Republican domestic
policies. All of this is second-nature to the re cycled Reaganites now in
office. That is how they held on to political power during their first
tenure in office. They regularly pushed the panic button to avoid public
opposition to the policies that had left Reagan as the most disliked
living president by 1992, by which time he may have ranked even lower than
Richard Nixon.
Despite its narrow successes, the intensive propaganda campaign left the
public unswayed in fundamental respects. Most continue to prefer UN rather
than US leadership in international crises, and by two to one prefer that
the UN, rather than the US, should direct reconstruction in Iraq (11).
When the occupying coalition army failed to discover WMD, the US
administration's stance shifted from absolute certainty that Iraq
possessed WMD to the position that the accusations were "justified by the
discovery of equipment that potentially could be used to produce weapons"
(12). Senior officials then suggested a refinement in the concept of
preventive war, to entitle the US to attack a country that has "deadly
weapons in mass quantities". The revision "suggests that the
administration will act against a hostile regime that has nothing more
than the intent and ability to develop WMD" (13). Lowering the criteria
for a resort to force is the most significant consequence of the collapse
of the proclaimed argument for the invasion.
Perhaps the most spectacular propaganda achievement was the praising of
Bush's vision to bring democracy to the Middle East in the midst of an
extraordinary display of hatred and contempt for democracy. This was
illustrated by the distinction that was made by Washington between Old and
New Europe, the former being reviled and the latter hailed for its
courage. The criterion was sharp: Old Europe consists of governments that
took the same position over the war on Iraq as most of their populations;
while the heroes of New Europe followed orders from Crawford, Texas,
disregarding, in most cases, an even larger majority of citizens who were
against the war. Political commentators ranted about disobedient Old
Europe and its psychic maladies, while Congress descended to low comedy.
At the liberal end of the spectrum, the former US ambassador to the UN,
Richard Holbrooke, stressed the "very important point" that the population
of the eight original members of New Europe is larger than that of Old
Europe, which proves that France and Germany are "isolated". So it does,
unless we succumb to the radical-left heresy that the public might have
some role in a democracy. Thomas Friedman then urged that France be
removed from the permanent members of the Security Council, because it is
"in kindergarten, and does not play well with others". It follows that the
population of New Europe must still be in nursery school, at least judging
by the polls (14).
Turkey was a particularly instructive case. Its government resisted the
heavy pressure from the US to prove its democratic credentials by
following US orders and overruling 95% of its population. Turkey did not
cooperate. US commentators were infuriated by this lesson in democracy, so
much so that some even reported Turkey's crimes against the Kurds in the
1990s, previously a taboo topic because of the crucial US role in what
happened, although that was still carefully concealed in the lamentations.
The crucial point was expressed by the deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul
Wolfowitz, who condemned the Turkish military because they "did not play
the strong leadership role that we would have expected" - that is they did
not intervene to prevent the Turkish government from honouring
near-unanimous public opinion. Turkey had therefore to step up and say,
"We made a mistake - let's figure out how we can be as helpful as possible
to the Americans" (15). Wolfowitz's stand was particularly informative
because he had been portrayed as the leading figure in the
administration's crusade to democratise the Middle East.
Anger at Old Europe has much deeper roots than just contempt for
democracy. The US has always regarded European unification with some
ambivalence. In his Year of Europe address 30 years ago, Henry Kissinger
advised Europeans to keep to their regional responsibilities within the
"overall framework of order managed by the US". Europe must not pursue its
own independent course, based on its Franco-German industrial and
financial heartland.
The US administration's concerns now extend as well to Northeast Asia, the
world's most dynamic economic region, with ample resources and advanced
industrial economies, a potentially integrated region that might also
flirt with challenging the overall framework of world order, which is to
be maintained permanently, by force if necessary, Washington has declared.
________________________________________________________
(1) John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs, Sept.-Oct. 2002.
(2) Wall Street Journal, 27 January 2003.
(3) Michael Gordon, The New York Times, 18 March 2003.
(4) Los Angeles Times, 23 March 2003.
(5) The New York Times, 7 June 1991. Alan Cowell, The New York Times, 11
April 1991.
(6) The New York Times, 4 June 2003.
(7) Linda Rothstein, editor, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July 2003.
(8) Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times, 2 May 2003; transcript, 2 May
2003.
(9) Jason Burke, The Observer, London 18 May 2003.
(10) Jeanne Cummings and Greg Hite, Wall Street Journal, 2 May 2003.
Francis Clines, The New York Times, 10 May 2003.
(11) Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland,
April 18-22.
(12) Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 1 June 2003
(13) Guy Dinmore and James Harding, Financial Times, 3/4 May 2003.
(14) Lee Michael Katz, National Journal, 8 February 2003; Friedman, The
New York Times, 9 February 2003.
(15) Marc Lacey, The New York Times, 7/8 May 2003.
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