By Noam Chomsky
All this was done with the utmost benevolence. So, for example, Massachusetts (the Mayflower and all that business) was given its Charter by the King of England in 1629. The Charter commissioned the settlers to save the native population from the misery of paganism. And, in fact, if you look at the great seal of the Bay Colony of Massachusetts, it depicts an Indian holding an arrow pointed down in a sign of peace. And out of his mouth is a scroll on which is written: "Come over and help us." That's one of the first examples of what's called humanitarian intervention today. And it's typical of other cases up to the present. The Indians were pleading with the colonists to come over and help them and the colonists were benevolently following the divine command to come over and help them. It turned out we were helping by exterminating them.
What about Hamas? Hamas became a serious threat—a serious terrorist organization—in January 2006 when Palestinians committed a really serious crime. That was the date of the first free election in any country in the Arab world and the Palestinians voted the wrong way. That's unacceptable to the U.S. Immediately, without a blink of an eye, the U.S. and Israel turned very publically towards punishing the Palestinians for that crime. You can read in the New York Times, in parallel columns, right afterwards—one of them talking about our love for democracy and so on and right alongside it, our plans to punish the Palestinians for the way they voted in the January election. No sense of conflict.
From a talk by Noam Chomsky, June 2010
It's tempting to go back to the beginning. The beginning goes pretty far back, but it is useful to think about some aspects of American history that bear directly on current U.S. policy in the Middle East. The U.S. is a pretty unusual country in many ways. It's maybe the only country in the world that was founded as an empire. It was an infant empire—as George Washington called it—and the founding fathers had broad aspirations. The most libertarian of them, Thomas Jefferson, thought that this infant empire should spread and become what he called the "nest" from which the entire continent would be colonized. That would get rid of the "Red," the Indians as they'd be driven away or exterminated. The Blacks would be sent back to Africa when we don't need them anymore and the Latins will be eliminated by a superior race.
Conquest of the National Territory
It was a very racist country all the way through its history, not just anti-black. That was Jefferson's image and the others more or less agreed with it. So it's a settler colonialist society. Settler colonialism is far and away the worst kind of imperialism, the most savage kind because it requires eliminating the indigenous population. That's not unrelated, I think, to the kind of reflexive U.S. support for Israel—which is also a settler colonial society. Its policies resonate with a sense of American history. It's kind of reliving it. It goes beyond that because the early settlers in the U.S. were religious fundamentalists who regarded themselves as the children of Israel, following the divine commandment to settle the promised land and slaughter the Amalekites and so on and so forth. That's right around here, the early settlers in Massachusetts.
All this was done with the utmost benevolence. So, for example, Massachusetts (the Mayflower and all that business) was given its Charter by the King of England in 1629. The Charter commissioned the settlers to save the native population from the misery of paganism. And, in fact, if you look at the great seal of the Bay Colony of Massachusetts, it depicts an Indian holding an arrow pointed down in a sign of peace. And out of his mouth is a scroll on which is written: "Come over and help us." That's one of the first examples of what's called humanitarian intervention today. And it's typical of other cases up to the present. The Indians were pleading with the colonists to come over and help them and the colonists were benevolently following the divine command to come over and help them. It turned out we were helping by exterminating them.That was considered rather puzzling. Around the 1820s, one Supreme Court justice wrote about it. He says it's kind of strange that, despite all our benevolence and love for the Indians, they are withering and dispersing like the "leaves of autumn." And how could this be? He said, the divine will of providence is "beyond human comprehension." It's just God's will. We can't hope to understand it. This conception—it's called Providentialism—that we are always following God's will goes right up to the present moment. Whatever we're doing, we're following God's will. It's an extremely religious country, off the spectrum in religious belief. A very large percentage of the population—I don't remember the numbers, but it's quite high—believes in the literal word of the Bible and part of that means supporting everything that Israel does because God promised the promised land to Israel. So we have to support them.
These same people—a substantial core of solid support for anything Israel does—also happen to be the most extreme anti-Semites in the world. They make Hitler look pretty mild. They are looking forward to the near total annihilation of the Jews after Armageddon. There's a whole long story about this, which is believed, literally, in high places—probably people like Reagan, George W. Bush, and others. It ties in with the kind of settler colonial history of Christian Zionism—which long preceded Jewish Zionism and is much stronger. It provides a solid base of reflexive support for whatever Israel happens to be doing.
The conquest of the national territory was a pretty ugly affair. It was recognized by some of the more honest figures like John Quincy Adams who was the great grand strategist of expansionism—the theorist of Manifest Destiny and so on. In his later years, long after his own horrifying crimes were in the past, he did lament what he called the fate of that "hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty." He said that's one of the sins that the Lord is going to punish us for. Still waiting for that.
His doctrines are highly praised right to the present. There's a major scholarly book by John Lewis Gaddis, a leading American historian, on the roots of the Bush doctrine. Gaddis correctly, plausibly, describes the Bush doctrine as a direct descendent of John Quincy Adams's grand strategy. He says, it's a concept that runs right through American history. He praises it; thinks it's the right conception—that we have to protect our security, that expansion is the path to security and that you can't really have security until you control everything. So we have to expand, not just over the hemisphere, but over the world. That's the Bush doctrine.
By WWII, without going into the details, though the U.S. had long been by far the richest country in the world, it was playing a kind of secondary role in world affairs. The main actor in world affairs was the British—even the French had a more global reach. WWII changed all that. American planners during WWII, Roosevelt's planners, understood very well from the beginning of the war that it was going to end with the U.S. in a position of overwhelming power.
As the war went on and the Russians ground down the Germans and pretty much won the European war, it was understood that the U.S. would be even more dominant. And they laid careful plans for what the post-war world would look like. The United States would have total control over a region that would include the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, the former British Empire, and as much of Eurasia as possible, including, crucially, its commercial and industrial core—Western Europe. That's the minimum. The maximum was the whole world and, of course, we need that for security. Within this region, the U.S. would have unquestioned control and would limit any effort at sovereignty by others.
The U.S. ended the war in a position of dominance and security that had no remote counterpart in history. It had half the world's wealth, it controlled the whole hemisphere, the opposite sides of both oceans. It wasn't total. The Russians were there and some things were still not under control, but it was remarkably expansive. Right at the center of it was the Middle East.
One of President Roosevelt's long-time, high-level advisers, Adolf A. Berle, a leading liberal, pointed out that control of Middle East oil would yield substantial control of the world—and that doctrine remains. It's a doctrine that's operative right at this moment and that remains a leading theme of policy.
After World War II
For a long time during the Cold War years, policies were invariably justified by the threat of the Russians. It was mostly an invented threat. The Russians ran their own smaller empire with a similar pretext, threat of the Americans. These clouds were lifted after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For those who want to understand American foreign policy, an obvious place to look is what happened after the Soviet Union disappeared. That's the natural place to look and it follows almost automatically that nobody looks at it. It's scarcely discussed in the scholarly literature though it's obviously where you'd look to find out what the Cold War was about. In fact, if you actually do look, you get very clear answers. The president at the time was George Bush I. Immediately after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there was a new National Security Strategy, a defense budget, and so on. They make very interesting reading. The basic message is: nothing is going to change except pretexts. So we still need, they said, a huge military force, not to defend ourselves against the Russian hordes because they're gone, but because of what they called the "technological sophistication" of third world powers. Now, if you're a well trained, educated person who came from Harvard and so on, you're not supposed to laugh when you hear that. And nobody laughed. In fact, I don't think anybody ever reported it. So, they said, we have to protect ourselves from the technological sophistication of third world powers and we have to maintain what they called the "defense industrial base"—a euphemism for high tech industry, which mostly came out of the state sector (computers, the Internet, and so on), under the pretext of defense.
With regard to the Middle East, they said, we must maintain our intervention forces, most of them aimed at the Middle East. Then comes an interesting phrase. We have to maintain the intervention forces aimed at the Middle East where the major threats to our interests "could not be laid at the Kremlin's door." In other words, sorry folks, we've been lying to you for 50 years, but now that pretext is gone, we'll tell you the truth. The problem in the Middle East is and has been what's called radical nationalism. Radical just means independent. It's a term that means "doesn't follow orders." The radical nationalism can be of any kind. Iran's a good case.
The Threat of Radical Nationalism
So in 1953, the Iranian threat was secular nationalism. After 1978, it's religious nationalism. In 1953, it was taken care of by overthrowing the parliamentary regime and installing a dictator who was highly praised. It wasn't a secret. The New York Times, for example, had an editorial praising the overthrow of the government as an "object lesson" to small countries that "go berserk" with radical nationalism and seek to control their own resources. This will be an object lesson to them: don't try any of that nonsense, certainly not in an area we need for control of the world. That was 1953.
Since the overthrow of the U.S.-imposed tyrant in 1979, Iran has been constantly under U.S. attack—without a stop. First, Carter tried to reverse the overthrow of the Shah immediately by trying to instigate a military coup. That didn't work. The Israelis—in effect the ambassador, as there'd been close relations between Israel and Iran under the Shah, although theoretically no formal relations—advised that if we could find military officers who were willing to shoot down 10,000 people in the streets, we could restore the Shah. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security advisor, had pretty much the same advice. That didn't quite work. Right away, the U.S. turned for support to Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Iran—which was no small affair. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians were slaughtered. The people who are now running the country are veterans of that war and deep in their consciousness is the understanding that the whole world is against them—the Russians, the Americans were all supporting Saddam Hussein and the effort to overthrow the new Islamic state.
It was no small thing. The U.S. support for Saddam Hussein was extreme. Saddam's crimes—like the Anfal genocide, the massacre of the Kurds—were just denied. The Reagan administration denied them or blamed them on Iran. Iraq was even given a very rare privilege. It's the only country other than Israel which has been granted the privilege of attacking a U.S. naval vessel and getting away with complete impunity. In the Israeli case, it was the Liberty in 1967. In Iraq's case it was the USS Stark in1987—a naval vessel which was part of the U.S. fleet protecting Iraqi shipments from Iran during the war. They attacked the ship using French missiles, killed a few dozen sailors, and got a slight tap on the wrist, but nothing beyond that.
U.S. support was so strong that they basically won the war for Iraq. After the war was over, U.S. support for Iraq continued. In 1989, George Bush I invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the U.S. for advanced training in nuclear weapons development. It's one of those little things that gets hushed up because a couple of months later Saddam became a bad boy. He disobeyed orders. Right after that came harsh sanctions and so on, right up till today.
The Iranian Threat
Coming up to today, in the foreign policy literature and general commentary what you commonly read is that the major policy problem for the U.S. has been and remains the threat of Iran. What exactly is the threat of Iran? Actually, we have an authoritative answer to that. It came out a couple of months ago in submissions to Congress by the DOD and US intelligence. They report to Congress every year on the global security situation. The latest reports, in April, of course have a section on Iran—the major threat. It's important reading. What they say is, whatever the Iranian threat is, it's not a military threat. They say that Iranian military spending is quite low, even by regional standards, and as compared with the U.S., of course, it's invisible—probably less than 2 percent of our military spending. Furthermore, they say that Iranian military doctrine is geared toward defense of the national territory, designed to slow down an invasion sufficiently so it will be possible for diplomacy to begin to operate. That's their military doctrine. They say it's possible that Iran is thinking about nuclear weapons. They don't go beyond that, but they say, if they were to develop nuclear weapons, it would be as part of Iran's deterrence strategy in an effort to prevent an attack, which is not a remote contingency. The most massive military power in history—namely us—which has been extremely hostile to them, is occupying two countries on their borders and is openly threatening them with attack, as is its Israeli client.
That's the military side of the Iranian threat as reported in Military Balance. Nevertheless, they say, Iran's a major threat because it's attempting to expand its influence in neighboring countries. It's called destabilization. They're carrying out destabilization in neighboring countries by trying to expand their influence and that's a problem for the U.S. because the U.S. is trying to bring about stability. When the U.S. invades another country, it's to bring about stability—a technical term in the international relations literature that means obedience to U.S. orders. So when we invade Iraq and Afghanistan, that's to create stability. If the Iranians try to extend their influence, at least to neighboring countries, that's destabilizing. This is built in to scholarly and other doctrine. It's even possible to say without ridicule, as was done by the liberal commentator and former editor of Foreign Affairs, James Chase, that the U.S. had to destabilize Chile under Allende to bring about stability, namely obedience to U.S. orders.
What's Terrorism?
The second threat of Iran is its support for terrorism. What's terrorism? Two examples of Iran's support for terrorism are offered. One is its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, the other its support for Hamas in Palestine. Whatever you think of Hezbollah and Hamas—maybe you think they're the worst thing in the world—what exactly is considered their terrorism? Well, the "terrorism" of Hezbollah is actually celebrated in Lebanon every year on May 25, Lebanon's national holiday commemorating the expulsion of Israeli invaders from Lebanese territory in 2000. Hezbollah resistance and guerilla warfare finally forced Israel to withdraw from Southern Lebanon, which Israel had been occupying for 22 years in violation of Security Council orders, with plenty of terror and violence and torture.
So Israel finally left and that's Lebanese Liberation Day. That's what's considered the main core of Hezbollah terrorism. It's the way it's described. Actually, in Israel it's even described as aggression. You can read the Israeli press these days where high level figures now argue that it was a mistake to withdraw from South Lebanon because that permits Iran to pursue its "aggression" against Israel, which it had been carrying out until 2000 by supporting the resistance to Israeli occupation. That's considered aggression against Israel. They follow U.S. principles, as we say the same thing. That's Hezbollah. There are other acts you could criticize, but that's the core of Hezbollah terrorism.
Another Hezbollah crime is that the Hezbollah-based coalition handily won the latest parliamentary vote, though because of the sectarian system of assigning seats, they did not receive the majority. That led Thomas Friedman to shed tears of joy, as he explained, over the marvels of free elections, in which U.S. President Obama defeated Iranian President Ahmadinejad in Lebanon. Others joined in this celebration. The actual voting record was never reported, to my knowledge.
What about Hamas? Hamas became a serious threat—a serious terrorist organization—in January 2006 when Palestinians committed a really serious crime. That was the date of the first free election in any country in the Arab world and the Palestinians voted the wrong way. That's unacceptable to the U.S. Immediately, without a blink of an eye, the U.S. and Israel turned very publically towards punishing the Palestinians for that crime. You can read in the New York Times, in parallel columns, right afterwards—one of them talking about our love for democracy and so on and right alongside it, our plans to punish the Palestinians for the way they voted in the January election. No sense of conflict.There'd been plenty of punishment of the Palestinians before the election, but it escalated afterwards—Israel went so far as to cut off the flow of water to the arid Gaza Strip. By June, Israel had fired about 7,700 rockets at Gaza and all sorts of other things. All of that's called defense against terrorism. Then, the U.S. and Israel, with cooperation from the Palestinian Authority, tried to carry out a military coup to overthrow the elected government. They were beaten back and Hamas took control. After that, Hamas became one of the world's leading terrorist forces. There's plenty of criticisms you can make of them—the way they treat their own population, for example—but Hamas terrorism is a little hard to establish. The current claim is that their terrorism consists of rockets from Gaza that hit Israel's border cities. That was the justification given for Operation Cast Lead (the U.S./Israeli invasion of December 2008) and also for the Israeli attack on the flotilla last June in international waters where nine people were murdered.
It's only in a deeply indoctrinated country that you can hear that and not laugh in ridicule. Putting aside the comparison between Qassam rockets and the terrorism that the U.S. and Israel are constantly carrying out, the argument has absolutely no credibility for a simple reason: Israel and the U.S. know exactly how to stop the rockets—by peaceful means. In June 2008, Israel agreed to a ceasefire with Hamas. Israel didn't really live up to it—they were supposed to open the borders and they didn't—but Hamas did live up to it. You can look it up on the official Israeli website or listen to their official spokesperson, Mark Regev, and they agree that during the ceasefire there wasn't a single Hamas rocket fired.
Israel broke the ceasefire in November 2008 when it invaded Gaza and killed half a dozen Hamas activists. Then there was some rocket fire and far greater attacks from Israel. A number of people were killed—all Palestinians. Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire. The Israeli cabinet considered it and rejected it, preferring to use violence. A couple of days later came the U.S./Israel attack on Gaza.
In the U.S. and the West generally, it is taken for granted, even by human rights groups and the Goldstone report, that Israel had the right to force and self-defense. There were criticisms that the attack was disproportionate, but they're a secondary matter as Israel had absolutely no right to use force in the first place. You have no justification for the use of force unless you've exhausted peaceful means. In this case, the U.S. and Israel had not just not exhausted them, they had refused even to try peaceful means, which they had every reason to believe would succeed. The concession that Israel had a right to attack is just an amazing gift.
In any case, according to the DOD and U.S. intelligence, Iran's efforts to extend its influence, as well as its support for Hezbollah and Hamas, are what constitute, for the U.S. and its allies, the Iranian threat.
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The Israel/Palestine issue
By Noam Chomsky
It's pretty common now for supporters of the Palestinians and Palestinian leaders themselves to say, "Well, we have to abandon hope in the two-state solution." As one of the Palestinian leaders said, "We should give Israel the key and let them take over the entire West Bank. It will be one state, we'll then carry out a civil rights struggle. We can win that one, like South Africa." But this view overlooks a simple point of logic. Those are not the two options. There is a third option, namely that the U.S. and Israel continue doing exactly what they are doing. They're not going to take control of the West Bank. They don't want it. They don't want the Palestinians. So the analogy to South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle is pretty misleading. South Africa needed its black population. They were its workforce. They couldn't get rid of them. They were 85 percent of the population doing the work of the country. So, as under slavery, they had to take care of them. Bantustans were bad enough, but they were intended to be more or less viable because it was necessary to reproduce the workforce. That's not true for Israel and the Palestinians. Israel doesn't want to take responsibility for them, rather it wants them to get out. It's like the United States and the indigenous population. There's no sense in taking care of them, just exterminate that "hapless race" of Native Americans.
Going back to the options for Palestinians: one of them is the two-state settlement, the other is not what is being proposed—a one-state settlement and anti-apartheid struggles. There isn't the slightest indication that anything like that will happen, there is no support for it anywhere. The U.S. and Israel would never accept it.
A lot has happened since then, but that single event is pretty instructive. It indicates that if a U.S. president was willing to tolerate a political settlement, it could probably be reached. Will that happen? So far there isn't the slightest indication of it. Obama's at least as extreme as George W. Bush, maybe more so. But there are some fissures developing and they are worth watching. One thing is that the American population, including the American Jewish population, especially younger Jews, are just not willing to support what's going on any longer. It's too inconsistent with standard liberal values. You see it in the polls and other indications. The Christian Zionists, who are a huge group, support it no matter what. Those who have a memory of U.S. settler colonialism, for them it's normal so they support it. But elite sectors and the American Jewish community are beginning to back off.
So that continued right through the 1980s. South Africa looked completely impregnable. It had crushed the ANC on the ground. The world hated it, but it looked like there was no real opposition, and that it was in a permanent position of victory. Then, around 1990, the U.S. shifted its policy. Mandela was let out of Robben Island and began to be groomed to take over. Within a couple of years, apartheid was gone. The South African foreign minister was correct: as long as the Godfather supports us, it doesn't matter what the world thinks. But, of course, the Godfather can change his mind. And that happened and you go to the post-apartheid era—not beautiful, but a big victory.
In parts one and two of "U.S. Savage Imperialism," Chomsky talks about the U.S. global mission and the Mideast with particular regard to Iran and Israel/Palestine. He closes by speculating on whether, with world pressure, the U.S. might shift its policy and insist on Israel accepting the international consensus on a two-state solution. What follows is a transcript of the first group of questions asked by the students attending Z Media Institute 2010.
Israel has a doctrine that goes back to the 1950s. They sometimes call it the Samson Complex, named after the most respected and honored suicide bomber in the world. Samson was a famous hero who killed a lot of Philistines. As the story goes, Delilah cut off his hair and he lost his strength and the Philistines captured and blinded him. But his hair grew back and he regained his strength. He was in the temple surrounded by thousands of Philistines when he pulled down the temple walls and killed himself and more Philistines in his death than in his lifetime.
International relations theory doesn't amount to much. There are some principles. Probably one of the most important is the Mafia principle. The Godfather does not accept disobedience. A small storekeeper somewhere who doesn't pay protection money can't get away with it. Maybe you don't even need the money, but if one storekeeper gets away with it, somebody else will get the idea and pretty soon the system erodes. So you don't just send in your goons to get the money, you send them to beat them to a pulp so everybody gets the idea. That's how international affairs works. Sometimes it's called the domino theory or some other thing. But you look at case after case and it constantly works like that.
It's pretty common now for supporters of the Palestinians and Palestinian leaders themselves to say, "Well, we have to abandon hope in the two-state solution." As one of the Palestinian leaders said, "We should give Israel the key and let them take over the entire West Bank. It will be one state, we'll then carry out a civil rights struggle. We can win that one, like South Africa." But this view overlooks a simple point of logic. Those are not the two options. There is a third option, namely that the U.S. and Israel continue doing exactly what they are doing. They're not going to take control of the West Bank. They don't want it. They don't want the Palestinians. So the analogy to South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle is pretty misleading. South Africa needed its black population. They were its workforce. They couldn't get rid of them. They were 85 percent of the population doing the work of the country. So, as under slavery, they had to take care of them. Bantustans were bad enough, but they were intended to be more or less viable because it was necessary to reproduce the workforce. That's not true for Israel and the Palestinians. Israel doesn't want to take responsibility for them, rather it wants them to get out. It's like the United States and the indigenous population. There's no sense in taking care of them, just exterminate that "hapless race" of Native Americans.Israel can't just murder them. You can't get away with that these days, the way the U.S. could in the 19th century, so you just get them to leave. Moshe Dayan, who was one of the more dovish members of the Israeli elite, happened to be defense minister in charge of the Occupied Territories in 1967. He advised his colleagues at the time that we should tell the Palestinians, "We have nothing for you, you're going to live like dogs, and whoever will leave will leave. And we will see where it all ends up."
And that's exactly the policy they're following. In recent years, the U.S./Israel have somewhat modified the policy. They are taking the advice of Israeli industrialists who some years ago suggested that Israel should shift from a policy of colonialism to one of neo-colonialism.
The Philippines is the standard model from which many of the modern programs of neo-colonialism were carefully crafted. We know what happened during the conquest with, as usual, the most "benevolent intentions," while slaughtering a couple of hundred thousand people and committing massive war crimes. Al McCoy now has a fine study of what happened after the conquest, which he goes into in 800 pages of detail. The U.S. crafted a new technique of control of the population, using the most advanced technology of the day. They imposed a system of close surveillance over the entire population, co-opting a Westernized elite who would be able to live in luxury, breaking up nationalist groups by various methods—sowing rumors, buying people off. And, of course, a paramilitary force—the Philippine constabulary—in case things go wrong.
That turned out to be very effective. In fact, it's still in place in the Philippines. If you look at today's papers, you'll notice that the U.S. welcomed the new government in the Philippines. They do point out that most of the population lives in misery. In fact, if you think about it, that's the one part of East and Southeast Asia that hasn't taken part in the spectacular East Asian economic growth during the last generation. It's also the one U.S. colony/neo-colony that is still run virtually the same way it was run 100 years ago—same elite elements, same brutal constabulary, different names—with the U.S. in the background, but not very far.
That was an extremely successful mode of colonization. It became the model for Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and many other neo-colonies later. It also turned back to the imperial countries. Both the U.S. and Britain adopted similar measures of population control domestically. At first, during WWI. Even more so today. So Britain is one of the leading surveillance societies with the U.S. not far behind. They're using modified versions of what was crafted with great care and success in the Philippines a century ago.
Well, Israel finally understood that that's the right way to proceed. You can read about, say, Ramallah in the West Bank and the reports, which are accurate, say it's kind of like Paris and London for the Palestinian elite. They live a nice life with theaters and restaurants. A typical third world country with a rich collaborationist elite in a sea of suffering and misery around them. That's the way the third world is structured. Israel has finally had the sense to follow the advice of industrialists and turn Palestine into a neo-colony. And it can be praised for how wonderful life is in Ramallah and so on. But you have to control it by force. There has to be the analog of the Philippine constabulary. And it's there. It's an Army run by an American general, Keith Dayton. It's constituted of Palestinians. Quite typically, in neo-colonial structures, the repressive force is domestic, but it's run by an American general. It's trained by Israel and Jordan (a harsh dictatorship). And it's very successful.
In fact, it's highly praised by American liberals. John Kerry, senator from Massachusetts, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—Obama's point person in the Middle East—gave a talk at the Brookings Institute in which he explains that, for the first time, Israel has a legitimate negotiating partner, so now it can pursue its passionate hope for peace. The negotiating partner he's referring to is the Palestinian Authority and the reason it became legitimate, Kerry explains, is because it has a military force that can control the population, namely the Dayton army. And he points to its success.
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Their main success story was during the U.S./Israeli invasion of Gaza, when they anticipated that there might be protests in the West Bank over the atrocities being carried out there. But there weren't any because the Dayton army was able to suppress them. So it kept things quiet. It kept things so quiet that General Dayton said, in a speech to one of the offshoots of the Israeli lobby, that he could dispatch forces to take part in the Gaza attack thanks to the American-run army controlling the West Bank. So that's considered a success, very much like the success in the Philippines and the later successes under the U.S.-imposed National Guard in Haiti, Nicaragua, and other neo-colonies.
Palestine can now look forward to the same auspicious fate. And we can praise ourselves for having created an army that can control the population so effectively that they can't even protest a major slaughter going on in the other part of Palestine. I say the other part of Palestine, but U.S./Israeli policy since the Oslo Accords in 1991 (and a crucial component of them) has been to separate Gaza and the West Bank. That's one of the ways to prevent any recognition of authentic Palestinian nationalism. If Gaza is part of the West Bank, as it is under international law, that means that a Palestinian state would actually have access to the outside world—it would have a seaport, for example. And that's dangerous. You want them to be completely controlled by the Jordanian dictatorship on one side and by U.S.-backed Israel on the other side, so you have to separate them from Gaza. And that's been done pretty effectively.
Going back to the options for Palestinians: one of them is the two-state settlement, the other is not what is being proposed—a one-state settlement and anti-apartheid struggles. There isn't the slightest indication that anything like that will happen, there is no support for it anywhere. The U.S. and Israel would never accept it.
But the third option—the real one—is a continuation of exactly what is being done and what's being done is not a secret. Actually, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert outlined it to a joint session of Congress a few years ago, to rousing applause. It's what he called convergence (it's now been expanded), which means that Israel takes over everything that's of any value; takes over everything between what's called the separation wall—it's really an annexation wall, which is completely illegal, there's no question about that, even Israel accepts it. So Israel takes over everything inside the separation wall, which happens to include many of the sources of water in the region. The main sources lie underneath the West Bank aquifer. It also includes the pleasant suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. So Israel takes that, takes over the Jordan Valley, which is about a third of what remains of Palestine, the 22 percent that's left for Palestine. Israel will take over that, too. That imprisons the rest. It's more arable land and the Palestinians are now pretty much kept out of it. In the remaining territory, Israel has established several corridors which cut through it. So the main one begins from what's called Jerusalem, actually way bigger than Jerusalem. It was illegally annexed by Israel. I think it's five times the size of Jerusalem. Israel takes over all of that.
To the east is a corridor extending though the town of Ma'ale Adumim, which was established in the 1970s, but mainly built with Clinton support under the Oslo agreements. The purpose of the corridor was to bisect the West Bank. It reaches almost to Jericho, which will be left to the Palestinians. The rest is mostly desert.
To the north there are a couple of other corridors, which cut through the rest. So what you end up with is what the architect of the policy, Ariel Sharon, called bantustans or cantons, all separated from Gaza. Sharon's description was quite unfair because they're worse than bantustans, for the reason I mentioned. South Africa had to sustain the bantustans. Israel has no interest in sustaining these cantons. For them, it can follow the Dayan proposals: we have nothing to offer you, you're going to live like dogs, leave if you can. And many are leaving, especially the more wealthy Christian population. But some will be left in the neo-colonies for New York Times reporters to write travelogs about how wonderful they are, as has been done recently. That leaves nothing for the Palestinians. They are gone.
Can they call it a state? They can if they like. In fact, the first Israeli prime minister to accept the notion of a Palestinian State was, in fact, Netanyahu, the current prime minister. He took office as prime minister for the first time in 1996, replacing Shimon Peres, who's regarded here as a great dove. Peres left office in 1996, informing the press that there would never be a Palestinian State. After Netanyahu, condemned as a super hawk, came in, his minister of information was asked at a press conference, Look, you know you're going to leave fragments here and there for the Palestinians. What are you going to do if they call it a State? He answered, well, they can call it a State if they like or they can call it "fried chicken." We don't care. Either one will do.
So that was the first Israeli recognition of the possibility of Palestinian self-determination. A couple of years later, the Labor Party said pretty much the same thing, namely that the realistic option, if nothing is done, is to pursue present policies and end up by leaving what's left of the Palestinians as fried chicken. That's the option: not one state, not an anti-apartheid struggle. That's all pipe dreams, pie in the sky.
Is there any other alternative? What about the first option of a two-state settlement? There are a lot of problems in the world where it's hard to think of a solution, but in this case, it's remarkably easy to conjure one up. It's there. Furthermore, there's overwhelming international support for it and it's supported by international law. It has one barrier. The U.S. won't accept it. That's it. It's been sitting there since 1976 when the major Arab states introduced a Security Council resolution calling for a two-state settlement on the international border, using the wording of UN 242—which guarantees the security of every state in the region, including Israel, of course, with secure and recognized borders, all the nice words. That was the proposal in 1976. Israel refused to attend the session and the U.S. vetoed the resolution—and again in 1980, up to today.
Who supports it? Everybody, including the Arab League, Europe, the Non-Aligned countries, the Organization of Islamic Unity, which includes Iran. It's supported by Hamas and Hezbollah (which says it will support anything the Palestinians accept). So there's exactly one barrier: the U.S./Israel refuse to accept it. And they refuse to accept it on grounds that were established in 1971 when Israel made probably the most fateful decision in its history. In 1971, Egypt, under President Sadat, offered Israel a full peace treaty. Egypt, of course, is the only significant military force in the Arab world. So a peace with Egypt meant full security. There was, of course, a quid pro quo—Israel should withdraw from Egyptian territory (he said all occupied territory, but clearly cared primarily about Egyptian territory). Israel didn't want to do that because it was then planning on expanding into the Sinai and building a big city of a million people in the north on the Mediterranean—settlements and so on. Israel had to make a choice: expansion or security. They settled on expansion.
That was amplified the following year when Jordan made the same offer about the West Bank. At that point, Israel could have had full security, but it chose expansion—mostly into the Sinai at the time, but also into the West Bank. Israel recognized that this was completely illegal. In 1967, their leading legal authorities, including a very well known international lawyer, informed the government—and the attorney general seconded him—that any expansion into the Occupied Territories was in violation of international law. Moshe Dayan, who, as I said, was defense minister in charge of the Territories, agreed. He said, Yes, we know it's in violation of international law, but states violate international laws, so we'll do it, too. And we can do that as long as the U.S. supports us. And that's what's been going on.
The rejection of Sadat's offer led to the 1973 war, which was a very close thing for Israel. They were almost destroyed. At that point, the U.S. and Israel recognized that you can't just disregard Egypt. Then starts Kissinger's famous shuttle diplomacy, leading to the Camp David agreements in which the U.S./Israel basically accepted Sadat's 1971 offer—they had no choice. But from that point on, the U.S. and Israel have preferred expansion. It could have security now with no hostile countries on its borders, but then it would have to abandon expansion into the West Bank and the savage, criminal siege of Gaza.
Is it possible? Yes, it's possible. The U.S. has led the rejectionists pretty solidly since 1976, with one exception. It's a revealing one. In Clinton's last months in office, he recognized that the offers that had been made to the Palestinians by the U.S./Israel at the Camp David negotiations could not possibly be accepted by any Palestinians no matter how accommodating. He produced what he called his parameters, which were sort of vague, but more forthcoming. He then made a speech in which he pointed out that both sides had accepted his parameters and both sides have reservations. They met in Egypt in January 2001 to iron out those reservations. We have detailed information about the negotiations, most of it comes from high level Israeli sources. They came very close to a settlement. In their final press conference, the two sides jointly announced that if they had had a few more days, they probably could have settled everything—all the details. But Israel called off the negotiations prematurely. That's been the end of that.
A lot has happened since then, but that single event is pretty instructive. It indicates that if a U.S. president was willing to tolerate a political settlement, it could probably be reached. Will that happen? So far there isn't the slightest indication of it. Obama's at least as extreme as George W. Bush, maybe more so. But there are some fissures developing and they are worth watching. One thing is that the American population, including the American Jewish population, especially younger Jews, are just not willing to support what's going on any longer. It's too inconsistent with standard liberal values. You see it in the polls and other indications. The Christian Zionists, who are a huge group, support it no matter what. Those who have a memory of U.S. settler colonialism, for them it's normal so they support it. But elite sectors and the American Jewish community are beginning to back off.That's one development. Another one is that, apparently for the first time, there's a significant split in the Pentagon and intelligence. Up until now, they've been strongly supportive of Israel. They regard it as a very valuable ally. The U.S. high-tech industry has been highly supportive of Israel. The Wall Street Journal, among major newspapers, is the one that's most pro-Israel, in favor of Israeli expansion. But all of this is beginning to weaken. There are striking indications of it. You've probably seen a comment by David Petraeus—sometimes called Lord Petraeus, the great genius who's now the head of the Central Command. He made some comments months ago about how the U.S. now has armies in the field in several countries in the region—Afghanistan, Iraq, and maybe next in Iran—and it's dangerous for those forces in the field if U.S./Israeli intransigence creates problems among the population that could endanger U.S. forces in the region. He was told to shut up and he quickly withdrew his statements. But others have been repeating them. One of the major Mideast U.S. intelligence officials, Bruce Riedel, who ran Obama's Afghanistan policy review, he repeated pretty much the same statement. It got to the point that Mark Indyk, who was Clinton's ambassador to Israel and has roots in the Israeli lobby, wrote an op-ed in the Times warning Israel not to take the U.S. for granted as its policy could shift.
The head of Mossad in Israel, Meir Dagan, warned the government that they were treading on thin ice. If they pushed too far, they might lose U.S. support. And there's some history which is worth paying attention to, particularly regarding the many comparisons drawn between Israel and South Africa. Most of them I don't think amount to much, like the apartheid/bantustan comparison which I don't think works for the reasons mentioned earlier. But there is one comparison, which isn't discussed that is worth attention. Around 1960, the white nationalists in South Africa were beginning to recognize that they were becoming a pariah state and losing global support. They were being voted down in the UN by a big majority of the former colonies and so on, even losing some European support. The foreign minister of South Africa called in the U.S. ambassador to discuss it and he said, Yes, we're becoming a pariah state. They're voting against us in the United Nations. But you and I both know there's only one vote in the UN—yours. As long as you support us, we'll stand up against the world. And that's what happened.
If you look at the following years, anti-apartheid sentiment increased. By 1980 or so, even U.S. corporations were pulling out of South Africa in opposition to apartheid. A few years later, Congress passed sanctions and the Reagan administration had to evade Congressional sanctions as well as popular and global opinion in order to continue supporting South Africa—as indeed they did right through the 1980s. The pretext was the war on terror. In 1988, the Reagan administration declared that the African National Congress, Mandela's ANC, was one of the more notorious terrorist organizations in the world. So we had to keep supporting white South Africa as part of the famous war on terror—which Reagan declared, not Bush. In fact, just a year ago, Mandela was taken off the terrorist list and can enter the U.S. without special dispensation.
So that continued right through the 1980s. South Africa looked completely impregnable. It had crushed the ANC on the ground. The world hated it, but it looked like there was no real opposition, and that it was in a permanent position of victory. Then, around 1990, the U.S. shifted its policy. Mandela was let out of Robben Island and began to be groomed to take over. Within a couple of years, apartheid was gone. The South African foreign minister was correct: as long as the Godfather supports us, it doesn't matter what the world thinks. But, of course, the Godfather can change his mind. And that happened and you go to the post-apartheid era—not beautiful, but a big victory.
It's not the only time. None of these things are ever discussed. They can't be discussed because what follows from them is that the U.S. rules the world and rules it by force. You can't accept that, though it's true. Another example, which is quite instructive, is Indonesia. In 1975, Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese territory of East Timor with strong U.S.—later French and British—support. It carried out some of the worst crimes of the late 20th century, virtual genocide—wiping out maybe a quarter of the population. This went on right through 1999, through all the posturing about Serbia and Kosovo and so on, with the Indonesian military declaring it was never going to leave, we don't care what the world thinks, it's our territory and we're going to keep it—with U.S. support.
In mid-September 1999, Clinton uttered a quiet phrase. He informed the Indonesian military that the game was over and the Indonesian military immediately withdrew. The U.S. could have done that 25 years earlier. Incidentally, Clinton's actions now go into history as "humanitarian intervention." Why did Clinton shift position? For one thing, there was a lot of international opposition at the time. There was also a domestic solidarity movement, which had some effect. But probably the major effect was the far right Catholics, who represent a strong sector of power in the U.S., including some leading figures in the Reagan administration. East Timor was a Catholic colony and they turned against the invasion. Under those pressures, Clinton changed his mind and a day later, the Indonesian military left. No more control.
It could happen in Israel. The Mossad director could be correct. The U.S. could shift its policy with enough pressure and insist on joining the world in accepting the international consensus on a two-state settlement. Israel will have no choice. It will have to follow U.S. orders, just as Indonesia did, just as white South Africa did. That's how power systems work. Could that happen? Well, we don't know. We do have the capacity to influence that consequence, maybe bring it about. That's kind of an optimistic conclusion in a way.
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Part three of a Z Media Institute talk
In parts one and two of "U.S. Savage Imperialism," Chomsky talks about the U.S. global mission and the Mideast with particular regard to Iran and Israel/Palestine. He closes by speculating on whether, with world pressure, the U.S. might shift its policy and insist on Israel accepting the international consensus on a two-state solution. What follows is a transcript of the first group of questions asked by the students attending Z Media Institute 2010.Q: Can you talk about Egypt's role in supporting the siege of Gaza and also about the steel wall it's building?
CHOMSKY: You're quite right that Egypt has been complicit in Israel's savage siege of Gaza. Actually, Egypt is more frightened by Hamas than Israel is. Egypt is a brutal dictatorship, strongly supported by President Obama who has said straight out that he's not going to criticize them because Egypt helps us maintain stability in the Middle East. That's why nobody in the Middle East with a brain functioning can take Obama seriously when he talks about human rights.
But Egypt's very worried because if they ever allowed anything remotely like a democratic election, there's a popular force in Egypt which could turn into a majority—namely the Muslim Brotherhood. And the U.S. supports them in that. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt was horrified by their popular victory in Palestine. Egypt also understands U.S./Israeli policy, which is not very obscure. The U.S. and Israel want to throw Gaza, which has been virtually destroyed by the Israelis, into the hands of Egypt. Israel doesn't want it, the U.S. doesn't want it. They can't just kill everybody the way they could in the 19th century because you couldn't get away with it now. So the idea is to keep the population in Gaza barely alive, to abandon any responsibility for them, and to toss them into the hands of Egypt, which doesn't want them. For that reason, and because of the fact that they're ruled by an offshoot of the Muslim brotherhood, Egypt has been participating in the siege.
They are, as you said, also building a wall—apparently with U.S. engineering support—to seal off the country totally, partly just to increase the savagery of the siege, but also partly to confound U.S./Israeli policy of attempting to toss Gaza into Egypt's hands, which they don't want.
I've been interested in Israel's motivations for the Gaza attack. Norman Finkelstein has written that it was to restore Israel's deterrence capacity. I wonder if you agree with his thesis and his position that Israel at some point must suffer a military defeat, possibly at the hands of Hezbollah.
I think Finkelstein has a case. Israel was defeated in 2006 and they need to maintain a posture of invincibility after being so terrible harmed. Maybe they thought by smashing up Gaza, they could restore it, but I don't know exactly who they thought they were impressing. To show that an advanced modern army can destroy a totally defenseless population which can't even fire a pistol in response is not a very impressive demonstration of deterrence capacity.
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They know that they can stop the rocket attacks, but to do so would mean accepting an agreement with Hamas and providing some legitimacy for the elected government in Palestine. And they don't want to provide any legitimacy. It can't be tolerated. They've got most of the cabinet in prison, in fact. They want to destroy it as an independent force.
What about a military defeat? I was in Lebanon recently and I talked to some of the leading Western Middle East correspondents. Some of them have been based there for decades so they know the region very well. The most knowledgeable of them expect a war. In fact, they think both Israel and Hezbollah want a war. Israel wants a war so it can show it really can destroy Lebanon—it won't be beaten, as it was last time. And if Israel, with U.S. backing, decides to attack Iran, as might happen, they have to destroy Lebanon first because Lebanon has deterrence capacity—namely Hezbollah.
So they may attack and there could be a war and the two of them will destroy each other. It could happen soon. States don't necessarily act rationally and Israel is becoming extremely irrational, paranoid, and ultra-nationalist. Take the attack on the flotilla. It was a completely irrational act. If they wanted to they could have easily disabled the boats. Attacking a Turkish-flagged ship and killing Turks is about the craziest thing they could do from a strategic point of view. Turkey has been their one close regional ally since 1958. Attacking your one regional ally for absolutely no reason is a kind of insanity. And they've done it before. Earlier, Israel had purposely humiliated the Turkish ambassador in a manner that I don't think has a precedent in diplomatic history. That's pretty irrational.
They claim there's an existential threat from Iran, but according to the U.S. strategic analysis, the threat is that Iran doesn't obey orders and is a deterrent to Israel's efforts at regional dominance. But if the Israelis fool themselves into thinking Iran is an existential threat, the outcome of that you can't even think of.
It's not that Iran is that rational either. There's a possible conflict brewing in the region, which is really frightening to think about. As you may know, Iran has announced that it intends to send ships to break the Gaza blockade. If that happened, all bets are off. Israel could go berserk. It's a powerful state with hundreds of nuclear weapons. They could decide to destroy the region and destroy themselves in the process. Who knows. It's scary.
Israel has a doctrine that goes back to the 1950s. They sometimes call it the Samson Complex, named after the most respected and honored suicide bomber in the world. Samson was a famous hero who killed a lot of Philistines. As the story goes, Delilah cut off his hair and he lost his strength and the Philistines captured and blinded him. But his hair grew back and he regained his strength. He was in the temple surrounded by thousands of Philistines when he pulled down the temple walls and killed himself and more Philistines in his death than in his lifetime.The Samson Complex means if the world presses Israel too far, they will go crazy and bring down the temple walls. Of course, they'll be killed too. This attitude is part of the national psyche and it's expanding now. And it's not a joke. It could happen.
Talk about Netanyahu's attempt to crush left dissidents.
It's not just Netanyahu. It's blamed on him, but it is the national mood, which is shifting very far to the ultra-nationalist right. Take a look at the polls. The national mood is paranoid. Part of it is the feeling that Israel has to crush any attempt to question the legitimacy and magnificence of what they are doing. This change in the country in the last few years is dramatic.
When the international community asks for an independent investigation, who are these investigators and do they have any legitimacy at all?
Most of what's going on doesn't get reported. But a couple of days ago, there was an important meeting of what we call the international community—which means the United States and anybody who happens to agree with us. Maybe the whole world disagrees, but then they're against the international community. I'm not joking. Take the idea that the international community is calling on Iran to stop enriching uranium. You read that everywhere. Exactly who is this international community? It's not the non-aligned countries, which are most of the world. They vigorously support Iran's right to enrich uranium, so they can't be part of the international community.
A couple of years ago the majority of Americans agreed with them. So the majority of Americans also aren't part of the international community because the international community is Washington and whoever happens to be going along with it.
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It was pretty striking what happened in the last couple of weeks about this. Turkey and Brazil made a deal with Iran, which was pretty similar to what the U.S. had proposed. They would arrange for uranium to be enriched outside of Iran and then return it to them for medical purposes. It turns out that Obama had written a letter to Lula, the president of Brazil at the time, advocating a similar deal, probably because Obama believed that Iran would never agree and then he'd be able to refer to the letter and say, well, we tried and they wouldn't do it. But Iran did agree and the U.S. instantly reacted by ramming through a UN Security Council resolution, which is so weak that China and Russia agreed to it instantly. If you read the terms of the resolution—which was passed and praised here—if you look at the small print, it does almost nothing. Its only effect is to transfer to China even greater control over Iran's resources. So China's happy with it.
Russia's happy with it because it permits them to sell all the arms they want to Iran. But the U.S. had to ram the resolution through to make the world know who's boss. Not Brazil and Turkey. Turkey is the most important regional power, with a long border with Iran. So they're not allowed to be boss. Brazil is the most important, most respected country in the South, so they can't be boss. In fact, if you read the New York Times, the headlines say that there's a "spot on Lula's legacy" for standing up to the U.S. Today there's a report quoting some high level official saying, we've got to do something to make sure Turkey stays in line.
That's kind of like the Mafia. You have to make sure nobody interferes with your right to control everything. So the U.S. rams through an almost meaningless UN resolution to block a Turkish/Brazilian initiative which could have made some progress.
The relevant part of the international community is actually the Asian security system, CICA—I think. It includes most of the Asian states—China, India, Iran, Israel, and so on. They had a security meeting and decided strongly to call for an international investigation into Israel's attack on the flotilla. The rules of the organization, however, require consensus. Of course, Israel didn't agree so the vote was 22-1, or something close to that. Therefore, the group made a separate declaration calling for an international investigation. Obama immediately blocked that Security Council resolution calling for an independent investigation and the Asian security organization was blocked out of the media. So it didn't happen, except that it did happen.
International relations theory doesn't amount to much. There are some principles. Probably one of the most important is the Mafia principle. The Godfather does not accept disobedience. A small storekeeper somewhere who doesn't pay protection money can't get away with it. Maybe you don't even need the money, but if one storekeeper gets away with it, somebody else will get the idea and pretty soon the system erodes. So you don't just send in your goons to get the money, you send them to beat them to a pulp so everybody gets the idea. That's how international affairs works. Sometimes it's called the domino theory or some other thing. But you look at case after case and it constantly works like that.Does it mean anything that Turkey is in NATO and Israel attacked a Turkish ship in International waters?
There's some debate about technically how the ship was flagged, but if it was a Turkish flagged ship, as was claimed, that means it's Turkish territory. Under maritime law, a ship in waters is part of the territory of the country that flags it. There is a NATO treaty that requires NATO powers to go to the assistance of any NATO country under attack. So, if treaties meant anything, which, of course, they don't, the NATO countries, led by the United States, should have immediately gone to the support of the Turkish ship. If an Iranian ship had attacked a NATO vessel, probably Iran would have been blown off the face of the earth.
You mentioned this boss who says what can happen and what can't as a model of the way nation states work. Other times don't you have to look at economic classes instead? How does that work?
That's an interesting question and Iran is a very interesting case. There are a couple of principles of international affairs and all of them are missing from international relations theory. As I mentioned, one of these is the Mafia principle: another traces back to Adam Smith. We're supposed to worship Adam Smith, but we're not supposed to read him. That's much too dangerous. He's nowhere near the crazed capitalist lunatic that's constructed in ideology. He's a pretty sensible guy. Smith pointed out that in England—I'm quoting him—"the principle architects of policy are the merchants and manufacturers," the people who own the economy. And they make sure that "their own interests are most peculiarly attended to" no matter how "grievous" to the people of England, let alone others who were subjected to, what he called, "the savage injustice of the Europeans."
Sometimes these principles conflict and those cases are important for the study of policy formation. With Iran, for example, the major economic forces would be pretty happy to have the U.S. normalize relations with Iran. The U.S. energy corporations are not delighted that China is picking up all the goodies. But state policy requires that we give Iran's resources to China over the objections of U.S. energy corporations, which usually have a crucial impact on policy making.
That's the conflict between two doctrines: the Mafia doctrine and the Adam Smith doctrine. In this case, the Mafia doctrine wins. It's striking—if you look over the history, you find that the very same individuals will make different decisions depending on whether they are running a corporation or running the government. The same people who are making the decisions about Iran—let's give the resources to China—if they were still running their energy corporations, they'd make the opposite decision. They now have an institutional role in state policy, which is different from the role of the CEO of a corporation. The CEOs of corporations have an institutional role as well—to maximize profits. It's a legal requirement and if they don't do it, they're out and someone else comes in who will do it. The role of the same individual in, for example, the state department or the Pentagon is to consider the long-term consequences of policy choices that sometimes conflict with the parochial interests of a particular sector of the economy. So what you get is a conflict and, in Iran's case, the Mafia principle wins. The same individuals who might have run oil companies, now must decide that for the long-term goal of controlling the Middle East, it's necessary to take positions which, in fact, harm the energy corporations.
Iran is not the only case. U.S. policy toward Cuba is quite interesting to study for understanding international relations theory. For 50 years, ever since Cuban independence, the U.S. has been attacking and punishing the people of Cuba. And we know exactly why. The documents are all out. You have to punish the people of Cuba—this is Kennedy, Eisenhower, and so on—because Cuba isn't following orders. They are carrying out what the Kennedy and Johnson administrations called "successful defiance" of U.S. policies going back to the Monroe Doctrine, which said the U.S. runs the hemisphere.
Meanwhile, for decades the large majority of the U.S. population has been in favor of normalizing relations with Cuba. The rest of the world is totally opposed to U.S. policy towards Cuba. Just take a look at the UN Assembly votes every year. It's the World v. the United States—and the Marshall Islands or something. That's not unusual. What's striking in this case is that major sections of American business are also opposed. That includes energy, pharmaceutical, and agricultural corporations. They all want to normalize relation with Cuba. Following the Adam Smith principle, you'd expect them to determine policy, but it's overridden by the Mafia principle .
If you really want to study international affairs, those are the cases you should look at. Just as, if you want to understand U.S. Cold War policy, you should look at what happened in 1990. But those are exactly the topics that are off the agenda. You don't study them in graduate school, there's no academic literature about them, there's no commentary about them. They're just too revealing.
Incidentally, it's not the first time in the case of Iran. In 1953, when the U.S. and Britain overthrew the parliamentary regime and installed the Shah, the U.S. government wanted U.S. oil companies to take 40 percent of the British concession. It was part of the long-term U.S. policy of edging the British out of the Middle East and taking over and turning them into a junior partner. The oil companies didn't want to do it for short-term reasons. It turned out that there was an oil glut at the time and if they took over the Iranian concession, they would have to reduce their liftings in Saudia Arabia, which was much more important for them. But they were compelled by the government to take it. They were even threatened with anti-trust penalties, so they followed orders. In this case, long-term concerns about the control of oil overrode the specific parochial interest of the architects of policy.
I should mention that during the Second World War there was a kind of mini-war going on between Britain and the U.S. over control of Middle East oil, mainly in Saudi Arabia. It was understood by the 1930s that it was the real prize, the jewel in the crown. Britain wanted to keep it and the U.S. wanted to take it away. So there was a battle going on—we have the documents—and, of course, the U.S. won. Britain was in dire straits at the time, so the U.S. took over Saudi Arabia.
At the end of the war, the British understood that their role as the international hegemon was essentially over and the foreign office recognized that they would have to be what they called "junior" partners of the U.S. They had no illusions about what the U.S. was up to: they said, the U.S. is taking over the world under the pretext of benevolence, but they're just after power and we have no choice, except to be junior partners.
The U.S. treats them with total contempt and Britain just takes it. The most striking case was during the 1962 missile crisis. U.S. leaders—the Kennedys—were making decisions which they understood could lead to the destruction of England and all of Europe. They were pushing things to the point where there might be a Russian retaliation and they weren't telling the British about it. In fact, Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, didn't know what was going on, but tried desperately to find out. At one point, one of Kennedy's senior advisers—probably Dean Acheson—defined what he called the "special relationship" between the U.S. and Britain, which he said means that "Britain is our lieutenant—the fashionable word is 'partner'."
Of course, Britain has a choice. They could be part of the Eurozone, but they prefer to be a junior partner and think of themselves as independent actors in world affairs. Of course, Europe, too, has choices and these have been a serious concern for U.S. policy since 1950. U.S. planners understood that there would be industrial recovery in Europe in the early post-war period. Once they do, they're a power on the scale of the United States with a large economy, a larger educated population, with a lot of advantages. They could become an independent force in world affairs—what is called a third force. That's a big danger. You can't run the world if there's a big independent force. A lot of efforts were meant to prevent that. One of them is NATO. Part of the goal of NATO was to ensure that Europe would remain a vassal under U.S. control.
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What happened in 1990 is striking in this respect. If anybody believed the propaganda of the preceding 50 years, then as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, you'd expect NATA to be disbanded. The propaganda about NATO, at the time, was that it was there to protect us from the Russian hordes. Okay, no more Russian hordes, let's disband NATO. Is that what happened? No. NATO expanded in quite an interesting way. Gorbachev made an incredible concession. He agreed to let a unified Germany join NATO. If you think about it, that's pretty astonishing. Germany alone had virtually destroyed Russia a couple of times in the last century. Now Gorbachev was agreeing to let unified Germany join a hostile military alliance. Why did he do it? Because there was a quid pro quo. He made an agreement with the Bush (senior) administration that NATO would not expand "one inch to the East." It would not include East Germany and obviously nothing beyond it. Well, Gorbachev was naive. Bush was careful never to put the agreement on paper—we have a detailed scholarly record of this. Gorbachev made the stupid error of thinking he could make a gentleman's agreement with the U.S. Well, that's pretty stupid. The U.S. hadn't the slightest intention of living up to the agreement. And it didn't. So, of course, NATO expanded to the east and, under Clinton, right up to the Russian border—and even further.
NATO's official role now is to control the global energy system, the sea lanes, and pipelines. There was a conference in Washington recently led by former Secretary of State Albright, which outlined a global mission for NATO. The idea is that NATO should become a U.S.-run global intervention force. There's a conflict about this. The Europeans aren't all that happy about spending the money and the U.S. is charging them with being too non-violent and so on.
What happened with NATO is a dramatic illustration of the fact that all the propaganda of the Cold War was complete lies. NATO doesn't disappear when the Russian hordes are gone, it expands to make sure that Europe doesn't carry out that dangerous option of becoming an independent third force in world affairs.
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Noam Chomsky is Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at MIT and author of dozens of books and articles, mainly focused on U.S. foreign policy, as well as linguistics. Part four in this series will continue with more questions on a range of topics.
