Authors: Noam Chomsky
The Cuban missile crisis also sharply revealed the great powers’ red lines. The world came perilously close to nuclear war when President Kennedy rejected Premier Khrushchev’s offer to end the crisis by simultaneous public withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba and American missiles from Turkey. (The U.S. missiles were already scheduled to be replaced by far more lethal Polaris submarines, part of the massive system threatening Russia’s destruction.)
In this case too, the United States’ red lines were at Russia’s borders, and that was accepted on all sides.
The U.S. invasion of Indochina, like the invasion of Iraq, crossed no red lines, nor have many other U.S. depredations worldwide. To repeat the crucial point: Adversaries are sometimes permitted to have red lines, but at their borders, where America’s red lines are also located. If an adversary has “expansionist ambitions in its own neighborhood,” crossing U.S. red lines, the world faces a crisis.
In the current issue of the Harvard-MIT journal
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, Oxford University professor Yuen Foong Khong explains that there is a “long (and bipartisan) tradition in American strategic thinking: Successive administrations have emphasized that a vital interest of the United States is to prevent a hostile hegemon from dominating any of the major regions of the world.”
Furthermore, it is generally agreed that the United States must “maintain its predominance,” because “it is U.S. hegemony that has upheld regional peace and stability”—the latter a term of art referring to subordination to U.S. demands.
As it happens, the world thinks differently and regards the United States as a “pariah state” and “the greatest threat to world peace,” with no competitor even close in the polls. But what does the world know?
Khong’s article concerns the crisis in Asia, caused by the rise of China, which is moving toward “economic primacy in Asia” and, like Russia, has “expansionist ambitions in its own neighborhood,” thus crossing American red lines.
President Obama’s recent Asia trip was to affirm the “long (and bipartisan) tradition,” in diplomatic language.
The near-universal Western condemnation of Putin includes citing the “emotional address” in which he complained bitterly that the U.S. and its allies had “cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presenting us with completed facts. With the expansion of NATO in the East, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They always told us the same thing: ‘Well, this doesn’t involve you.’ “
Putin’s complaints are factually accurate. When President Gorbachev accepted the unification of Germany as part of NATO—an astonishing concession in the light of history—there was a quid pro quo. Washington agreed that NATO would not move “one inch eastward,” referring to East Germany.
The promise was immediately broken, and when Gorbachev complained, he was instructed that it was only a verbal promise, so without force.
President Clinton proceeded to expand NATO much farther to the east, to Russia’s borders. Today there are calls to extend NATO even to Ukraine, deep into the historic Russian “neighborhood.” But it “doesn’t involve” the Russians, because its responsibility to “uphold peace and stability” requires that American red lines are at Russia’s borders.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea was an illegal act, in violation of international law and specific treaties. It’s not easy to find anything comparable in recent years—the Iraq invasion is a vastly greater crime.
But one comparable example comes to mind: U.S. control of Guantánamo Bay in southeastern Cuba. Guantánamo was wrested from Cuba at gunpoint in 1903 and not relinquished despite Cuba’s demands ever since it attained independence in 1959.
To be sure, Russia has a far stronger case. Even apart from strong internal support for the annexation, Crimea is historically Russian; it has Russia’s only warm-water port, the home of Russia’s fleet; and has enormous strategic significance. The United States has no claim at all to Guantánamo, other than its monopoly of force.
One reason why the United States refuses to return Guantánamo to Cuba, presumably, is that this is a major harbor and American control of the region severely hampers Cuban development. That has been a major U.S. policy goal for 50 years, including large-scale terror and economic warfare.
The United States claims that it is shocked by Cuban human rights violations, overlooking the fact that the worst such violations are in Guantánamo; that valid charges against Cuba do not begin to compare with regular practices among Washington’s Latin American clients; and that Cuba has been under severe, unremitting U.S. attack since its independence.
But none of this crosses anyone’s red lines or causes a crisis. It falls into the category of the U.S. invasions of Indochina and Iraq, the regular overthrow of parliamentary regimes and installation of vicious dictatorships, and our hideous record of other exercises of “upholding peace and stability.”
EDWARD J. SNOWDEN, THE WORLD’S “MOST WANTED CRIMINAL”
May 30, 2014
In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter, the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency.
The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of documents about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the courageous fighter for freedom, Edward J. Snowden, and expertly summarized and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book,
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The documents unveil a remarkable project to expose to state scrutiny vital information about every person who falls within the grasp of the colossus—in principle, every person linked to the modern electronic society.
Nothing so ambitious was imagined by the dystopian prophets of grim totalitarian worlds ahead.
It is of no slight import that the project is being executed in one of the freest countries in the world, and in radical violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, which protects citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and guarantees the privacy of their “persons, houses, papers and effects.”
Much as government lawyers may try, there is no way to reconcile these principles with the assault on the population revealed in the Snowden documents.
It is also well to remember that defense of the fundamental right to privacy helped spark the American Revolution. In the 18th century, the tyrant was the British government, which claimed the right to intrude freely into the homes and
personal lives of American colonists. Today it is American citizens’ own government that arrogates to itself this authority.
Britain retains the stance that drove the colonists to rebellion, though on a more restricted scale, as power has shifted in world affairs. The British government has called on the NSA “to analyse and retain any British citizens’ mobile phone and fax numbers, emails and IP addresses, swept up by its dragnet,” the
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reports on documents provided by Snowden.
British citizens (like other international customers) will also doubtless be pleased to learn that the NSA routinely receives, or intercepts, routers, servers and other computer network devices exported from the United States so that it can implant surveillance tools, as Greenwald reports in his book.
As the colossus fulfills its visions, in principle every keystroke might be sent to President Obama’s huge and expanding databases in Utah.
In other ways too, the constitutional lawyer in the White House seems determined to demolish the foundations of civil liberties. The principle of presumption of innocence, which dates back to the Magna Carta 800 years ago, has long been dismissed to oblivion.
Recently the
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reported the “anguish” of a federal judge who had to decide whether to allow the force-feeding of a Syrian prisoner who is on a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment.
No “anguish” was expressed over the fact that he has been held without trial for 12 years in Guantánamo Bay military prison, one of many victims of the leader of the Free World who claims the right to hold prisoners without charges and to subject them to torture.
These exposures lead us to inquire into state policy more generally and the factors that drive it. The received standard
version is that the primary goal of policy is security and defense against enemies.
The doctrine at once suggests a few questions: Security for whom, and defense against which enemies? The answers are highlighted dramatically by the Snowden revelations.
Policy must assure the security of state authority and concentrations of domestic power and defend them from a frightening enemy: the domestic population, which can become a great danger if not controlled.
It has long been understood that information about the enemy makes a critical contribution to controlling it. In that regard, President Obama has a series of distinguished predecessors, though his contributions have reached unprecedented levels, as we have learned from the work of Snowden, Greenwald and a few others.
To defend state power and private economic power from the domestic enemy, those two entities must be concealed—while in sharp contrast, the enemy must be fully exposed to state authority.
The principle was lucidly explained by the policy intellectual Samuel P. Huntington, who instructed us that “power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.”
Huntington added a crucial illustration. In his words, “you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine” at the outset of the Cold War.
Huntington’s insight into state power and policy was both accurate and prescient. As he wrote these words in 1981, the Reagan administration was launching its war on terror—which quickly became a murderous and brutal terrorist war,
primarily in Central America, but extending well beyond to southern Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
From that day forward, to carry out violence and subversion abroad, or repression and violation of fundamental rights at home, state power has regularly sought to create the misimpression that it is terrorists that you are fighting, though there are other options: drug lords, mad mullahs seeking nuclear weapons, and other ogres said to be seeking to attack and destroy us.
Throughout, the basic principle remains: Power must not be exposed to the sunlight. Edward Snowden has become the most wanted criminal in the world for failing to comprehend this essential maxim.
In brief, there must be complete transparency for the population, but none for the powers that must defend themselves from this fearsome internal enemy.
THE SLEDGEHAMMER WORLDVIEW
July 3, 2014
The front page of the
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on June 26 featured a photo of women mourning a murdered Iraqi.
He is one of the innumerable victims of the ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) campaign in which the Iraqi army, armed and trained by the U.S. for many years, quickly melted away, abandoning much of Iraq to a few thousand militants, hardly a new experience in imperial history.
Right above the picture is the newspaper’s famous motto: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
There is a crucial omission. The front page should display the words of the Nuremberg judgment of prominent Nazis—words that must be repeated until they penetrate general consciousness: Aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
And alongside these words there should be the admonition of the chief prosecutor for the United States, Robert Jackson: “The record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.”
The U.S.-U.K. invasion of Iraq was a textbook example of aggression. Apologists invoke noble intentions, which would be irrelevant even if the pleas were sustainable.
For the World War II tribunals, it mattered not a jot that Japanese imperialists were intent on bringing an “earthly paradise” to the Chinese they were slaughtering, or that Hitler sent troops into Poland in 1939 in self-defense against the “wild terror” of the Poles. The same holds when we sip from the poisoned chalice.
Those at the wrong end of the club have few illusions. Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of a Pan-Arab website, observes that “the main factor responsible for the current chaos [in Iraq] is the U.S./Western occupation and the Arab backing for it. Any other claim is misleading and aims to divert attention [away] from this truth.”
In a recent interview with
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, Iraq specialist Raed Jarrar outlines what we in the West should know. Like many Iraqis, he is half-Shiite, half-Sunni, and in pre-invasion Iraq he barely knew the religious identities of his relatives, because “sect wasn’t really a part of the national consciousness.”
Jarrar reminds us that “this sectarian strife that is destroying the country . . . clearly began with the U.S. invasion and occupation.”
The aggressors destroyed “Iraqi national identity and replaced it with sectarian and ethnic identities,” beginning immediately when the United States imposed a Governing Council based on sectarian identity, a novelty for Iraq.