Thursday, August 21, 2003
The Fruits of Chomsky’s Mind Need First to be Checked for Worms and then Washed
I can not help but think that the muddled thinking of many young activists can be traced back to Chomsky. Although Chomsky has done some decent work and there is certainly a place for him, he is as dogmatic as they come and this dogmatism leads him to say and do some stupid things. The most notorious example that comes to mind is the support he gave to holocaust denier Robert Faurisson.
Chomsky, in classic civil libertarian fashion, threw his support behind Faurisson when a number of people tried to prevent his work from being disseminated. The problem was Chomsky had never bothered to read a thing Faurisson had put to pen and so was embarrassed when the debate turned to what is hate literature and whether Faurisson’s work could be described as such. The upshot of all this was Chomsky admitted that he should have familiarized himself with Faurisson’s writings before publicly saying that he should have the right to disseminate his work.
This though is, in the greater scheme of things, a forgivable mistake and besides he willingly ate crow for it. There are other more dubious causes for which he has been questioned about in the past (e.g. his selective reading of Pol Pot’s litany of crimes). However, it is only in recent times that people on the both the Left and Right have really started to openly question the accuracy of his moral compass. For example, he was, rightly, taken to task by Hitchens for saying that the bombing of the pharmaceutical factor in Sudan was on the same level as the 911 attack. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011015&s=hitchens20011004
What is just is bad is that some of predications and analysis of late have been so horribly wrong. Consider, for example, the following monumental gaffe about what he thought might happen in Afghanistan. “The US has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the US has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that. The significance is heightened by the fact that this is mentioned in passing, with no comment, and probably will hardly be noticed. We can learn a great deal about the moral level of the reigning intellectual culture of the West by observing the reaction to this demand.”
Then there was his willingness to defend France, Germany and his old whipping boy Turkey from those who would question their motives for opposing the US lead war in Iraq. “There is now a whole literature trying to explain why France, Germany, the so-called "old Europe", and Turkey and others are trying to undermine the United States. It is inconceivable to the pundits that they are doing so because they take democracy seriously and they think that when the overwhelming majority of a population has an opinion, a government ought to follow it.”
To say the least, Chomsky is being a tad hypocritical here. Could anyone imagine Chomsky ever saying that the American government is doing X because it takes democracy seriously? Did he forget that the majority of the Americans supported the war and by the same logic the American government did the right thing? At any rate, what he said was flat wrong. France did not snuggle up to the thugs in Zimbabwe because they wanted to ensure the will of the French people prevailed and the war was stopped. (Three members of the UN Security Council are small African nations. Both France and the US both tried to curry favor with them. One of the things France did was invite, as Guinea, Cameron and Angola wanted, Zimbabwean leader Mugabe to EU conference dealing with EU sanctions against Zimbabwe for its poor human rights record. One of the impositions placed on the Zimbabwean leader had been a European wide travel ban. Now, the travel ban had ended the day before the conference. So, by inviting Mugabe, France technically played by the rules. However, the other council members viewed the invitation as a direct challenge to the authority of the council and the decision to invite Mugabe was highly unpopular with the French people.)
Finally there is the following.
“This should be seen as a trial run. Iraq is seen as an extremely easy and totally defenceless target. It is assumed, probably correctly, that the society will collapse, that the soldiers will go in and that the U.S. will be in control, and will establish the regime of its choice and military bases. They will then go on to the harder cases that will follow. The next case could be the Andean region, it could be Iran, it could be others.
The trial run is to try and establish what the U.S. calls a "new norm" in international relations. The new norm is "preventive war" (notice that new norms are established only by the United States). So, for example, when India invaded East Pakistan to terminate horrendous massacres, it did not establish a new norm of humanitarian intervention, because India is the wrong country, and besides, the U.S. was strenuously opposed to that action.
This is not pre-emptive war; there is a crucial difference. Pre-emptive war has a meaning, it means that, for example, if planes are flying across the Atlantic to bomb the United States, the United States is permitted to shoot them down even before they bomb and may be permitted to attack the air bases from which they came. Pre-emptive war is a response to ongoing or imminent attack.
The doctrine of preventive war is totally different; it holds that the United States - alone, since nobody else has this right - has the right to attack any country that it claims to be a potential challenge to it. So if the United States claims, on whatever grounds, that someone may sometime threaten it, then it can attack them.
The doctrine of preventive war was announced explicitly in the National Strategy Report last September. It sent shudders around the world, including through the U.S. establishment, where, I might say, opposition to the war is unusually high. The National Strategy Report said, in effect, that the U.S. will rule the world by force, which is the dimension - the only dimension - in which it is supreme. Furthermore, it will do so for the indefinite future, because if any potential challenge arises to U.S. domination, the U.S. will destroy it before it becomes a challenge.
This is the first exercise of that doctrine. If it succeeds on these terms, as it presumably will, because the target is so defenceless, then international lawyers and Western intellectuals and others will begin to talk about a new norm in international affairs. It is important to establish such a norm if you expect to rule the world by force for the foreseeable future.”
Where should I start? Well, first of all, it was a lot more strategically important to oust Saddam than take out the leadership in either Syria or Iran or Libya or the Sudan. They are not of a piece. As Pollack has pointed out, Saddam loved to upset the apple cart, frequently miscalculated, was extremely risk tolerant, and the information his yes man provided him meant he lived in a kind of Never Never Land. No one and mean no one wanted Saddam to get his hands on a nuke.
Two, Chomsky has this annoying habit of using international law to buttress his arguments and ignoring it when it harms them. This is particularly true in this case. Technically speaking the US did not launch a unilateral War back in March. They were already at with war with Iraq and so technically was the UN. Talk of the US doing what Japan did back in 1941 is thus a misnomer.
Three, the Iraq situation was different from, say, Iran. Attacking Iraq did not have the backing of the world public opinion, but at least it had certain degree of legitimacy. UN resolution 1441 passed and it is possible to argue that the US was doing what the UN itself lacked the political will to do. Plus, let us not forget that everyone believed that Saddam possessed WMD. Indeed, German intelligence believed that he would have a bomb in 2 to 3 years time.
Four, far from proving that America will strike preemptively whenever it sees fit, the Iraq case has revealed that the doctrine of preemption is a dead letter and that the likelihood of any adventures in the near future is close to zero. The doctrine of preemption now scares no one. This administration lacks the economic, political, and diplomatic wherewithal to carry the battle to, say, Syria. What is more, although the supremacy of the American military goes without saying, every available soldier the US has in Iraq.
Now, the failure to find any WMD was not foreseeable and a result neither was the amount of political and diplomatic fallout. However the simple fact of the matter is that many inside and outside government foresaw the costs of the Iraq campaign and how this would tie the administration’s hands (see, for example, James Fallows 51st state in the Atlantic Monthly). What is more, the General staff thought Rumsfeld’s suggestion that only 75,000 troops would be needed to take Iraq and that this number could be brought down in a matter of months to 40,000 was completely absurd. They were quite clear that at least 200,000 would be needed to secure the peace and that a least a good chunk of those would be needed for the foreseeable future. As the US only had about 200,000 non-committed troops with which to work with, without re-imposing the draft, something that just is not going to happen, just where did Chomsky think the US was going to get the troop strength to occupy, say, Iran which has more than 2 times as many people as Iraq and territorially is much larger? The only one it would seem that bought into the rosy post war scenario being painted by the Pentagon was Chomsky.
The ironic thing about the doctrine of preemption and all the surrounding intellectual infrastructure is that far from laying down the scary precedent, in terms of foreign policy doctrine there is a large gap between what American says it will do and what it can do.
I can not help but think that the muddled thinking of many young activists can be traced back to Chomsky. Although Chomsky has done some decent work and there is certainly a place for him, he is as dogmatic as they come and this dogmatism leads him to say and do some stupid things. The most notorious example that comes to mind is the support he gave to holocaust denier Robert Faurisson.
Chomsky, in classic civil libertarian fashion, threw his support behind Faurisson when a number of people tried to prevent his work from being disseminated. The problem was Chomsky had never bothered to read a thing Faurisson had put to pen and so was embarrassed when the debate turned to what is hate literature and whether Faurisson’s work could be described as such. The upshot of all this was Chomsky admitted that he should have familiarized himself with Faurisson’s writings before publicly saying that he should have the right to disseminate his work.
This though is, in the greater scheme of things, a forgivable mistake and besides he willingly ate crow for it. There are other more dubious causes for which he has been questioned about in the past (e.g. his selective reading of Pol Pot’s litany of crimes). However, it is only in recent times that people on the both the Left and Right have really started to openly question the accuracy of his moral compass. For example, he was, rightly, taken to task by Hitchens for saying that the bombing of the pharmaceutical factor in Sudan was on the same level as the 911 attack. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011015&s=hitchens20011004
What is just is bad is that some of predications and analysis of late have been so horribly wrong. Consider, for example, the following monumental gaffe about what he thought might happen in Afghanistan. “The US has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the US has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that. The significance is heightened by the fact that this is mentioned in passing, with no comment, and probably will hardly be noticed. We can learn a great deal about the moral level of the reigning intellectual culture of the West by observing the reaction to this demand.”
Then there was his willingness to defend France, Germany and his old whipping boy Turkey from those who would question their motives for opposing the US lead war in Iraq. “There is now a whole literature trying to explain why France, Germany, the so-called "old Europe", and Turkey and others are trying to undermine the United States. It is inconceivable to the pundits that they are doing so because they take democracy seriously and they think that when the overwhelming majority of a population has an opinion, a government ought to follow it.”
To say the least, Chomsky is being a tad hypocritical here. Could anyone imagine Chomsky ever saying that the American government is doing X because it takes democracy seriously? Did he forget that the majority of the Americans supported the war and by the same logic the American government did the right thing? At any rate, what he said was flat wrong. France did not snuggle up to the thugs in Zimbabwe because they wanted to ensure the will of the French people prevailed and the war was stopped. (Three members of the UN Security Council are small African nations. Both France and the US both tried to curry favor with them. One of the things France did was invite, as Guinea, Cameron and Angola wanted, Zimbabwean leader Mugabe to EU conference dealing with EU sanctions against Zimbabwe for its poor human rights record. One of the impositions placed on the Zimbabwean leader had been a European wide travel ban. Now, the travel ban had ended the day before the conference. So, by inviting Mugabe, France technically played by the rules. However, the other council members viewed the invitation as a direct challenge to the authority of the council and the decision to invite Mugabe was highly unpopular with the French people.)
Finally there is the following.
“This should be seen as a trial run. Iraq is seen as an extremely easy and totally defenceless target. It is assumed, probably correctly, that the society will collapse, that the soldiers will go in and that the U.S. will be in control, and will establish the regime of its choice and military bases. They will then go on to the harder cases that will follow. The next case could be the Andean region, it could be Iran, it could be others.
The trial run is to try and establish what the U.S. calls a "new norm" in international relations. The new norm is "preventive war" (notice that new norms are established only by the United States). So, for example, when India invaded East Pakistan to terminate horrendous massacres, it did not establish a new norm of humanitarian intervention, because India is the wrong country, and besides, the U.S. was strenuously opposed to that action.
This is not pre-emptive war; there is a crucial difference. Pre-emptive war has a meaning, it means that, for example, if planes are flying across the Atlantic to bomb the United States, the United States is permitted to shoot them down even before they bomb and may be permitted to attack the air bases from which they came. Pre-emptive war is a response to ongoing or imminent attack.
The doctrine of preventive war is totally different; it holds that the United States - alone, since nobody else has this right - has the right to attack any country that it claims to be a potential challenge to it. So if the United States claims, on whatever grounds, that someone may sometime threaten it, then it can attack them.
The doctrine of preventive war was announced explicitly in the National Strategy Report last September. It sent shudders around the world, including through the U.S. establishment, where, I might say, opposition to the war is unusually high. The National Strategy Report said, in effect, that the U.S. will rule the world by force, which is the dimension - the only dimension - in which it is supreme. Furthermore, it will do so for the indefinite future, because if any potential challenge arises to U.S. domination, the U.S. will destroy it before it becomes a challenge.
This is the first exercise of that doctrine. If it succeeds on these terms, as it presumably will, because the target is so defenceless, then international lawyers and Western intellectuals and others will begin to talk about a new norm in international affairs. It is important to establish such a norm if you expect to rule the world by force for the foreseeable future.”
Where should I start? Well, first of all, it was a lot more strategically important to oust Saddam than take out the leadership in either Syria or Iran or Libya or the Sudan. They are not of a piece. As Pollack has pointed out, Saddam loved to upset the apple cart, frequently miscalculated, was extremely risk tolerant, and the information his yes man provided him meant he lived in a kind of Never Never Land. No one and mean no one wanted Saddam to get his hands on a nuke.
Two, Chomsky has this annoying habit of using international law to buttress his arguments and ignoring it when it harms them. This is particularly true in this case. Technically speaking the US did not launch a unilateral War back in March. They were already at with war with Iraq and so technically was the UN. Talk of the US doing what Japan did back in 1941 is thus a misnomer.
Three, the Iraq situation was different from, say, Iran. Attacking Iraq did not have the backing of the world public opinion, but at least it had certain degree of legitimacy. UN resolution 1441 passed and it is possible to argue that the US was doing what the UN itself lacked the political will to do. Plus, let us not forget that everyone believed that Saddam possessed WMD. Indeed, German intelligence believed that he would have a bomb in 2 to 3 years time.
Four, far from proving that America will strike preemptively whenever it sees fit, the Iraq case has revealed that the doctrine of preemption is a dead letter and that the likelihood of any adventures in the near future is close to zero. The doctrine of preemption now scares no one. This administration lacks the economic, political, and diplomatic wherewithal to carry the battle to, say, Syria. What is more, although the supremacy of the American military goes without saying, every available soldier the US has in Iraq.
Now, the failure to find any WMD was not foreseeable and a result neither was the amount of political and diplomatic fallout. However the simple fact of the matter is that many inside and outside government foresaw the costs of the Iraq campaign and how this would tie the administration’s hands (see, for example, James Fallows 51st state in the Atlantic Monthly). What is more, the General staff thought Rumsfeld’s suggestion that only 75,000 troops would be needed to take Iraq and that this number could be brought down in a matter of months to 40,000 was completely absurd. They were quite clear that at least 200,000 would be needed to secure the peace and that a least a good chunk of those would be needed for the foreseeable future. As the US only had about 200,000 non-committed troops with which to work with, without re-imposing the draft, something that just is not going to happen, just where did Chomsky think the US was going to get the troop strength to occupy, say, Iran which has more than 2 times as many people as Iraq and territorially is much larger? The only one it would seem that bought into the rosy post war scenario being painted by the Pentagon was Chomsky.
The ironic thing about the doctrine of preemption and all the surrounding intellectual infrastructure is that far from laying down the scary precedent, in terms of foreign policy doctrine there is a large gap between what American says it will do and what it can do.
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