Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2014 23:32:48 +0200
Noam Chomsky, America's Real Foreign Policy
Posted by <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/noamchomsky/> Noam Chomsky at
8:02am, July 3, 2014.
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The next new TomDispatch piece will be posted
on Tuesday, July 8th. There will be a “best of TomDispatch” (with some new
comments of mine) at the site this weekend. Tom]
It goes without saying that the honchos of the national security state
weren’t exactly happy with Edward Snowden’s
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files> NSA revelations. Still,
over the last year, the
<http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/367154/former-nsa-director-snowden-tra
itor-engaged-treason-andrew-stiles> comments of such figures,
<http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/10/king-defector-snowden-is-a-
danger-to-national-security/> politicians associated
<http://thehill.com/policy/defense/304573-sen-feinstein-snowdens-leaks-are-t
reason> with them, and retirees from their world clearly channeling their
feelings have had a striking quality: over-the-top vituperation. About the
nicest thing anyone in that crew has had to say about Snowden is that
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO70zK1wjHY> he’s a “
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/11/john-boehner-edward-snowden_n_3420
635.html> traitor” or -- shades of the Cold War era (and of absurdity, since
the State Department
<http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview/exclusive-edward-sn
owden-tells-brian-williams-u-s-stranded-him-n116096> trapped him in the
transit lounge of a Moscow airport by taking his passport away) -- a “
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/mike-rogers-edward-snowden-russia-102
355.html> Russian spy.” And that’s the mild stuff. Such figures have also
regularly called for his
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/edward-snowden-treason-fox-news_n_
3416078.html> execution, for quite literally
<http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/17/ex-cia-director-snowden-should-b
e-hanged-if-convicted-for-treason/> stringing him up from the old
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/17/john-bolton-edward-snowden_n_44611
96.html> oak tree and letting him dangle in the breeze. Theirs has been a
bloodcurdling collective performance that gives the word “visceral” new
meaning.
Such a response to the way Snowden released batches of NSA documents to
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175843/tomgram%3A_glenn_greenwald,_how_i_me
t_edward_snowden/> Glenn Greenwald, filmmaker Laura Poitras, and the
Washington Post’s <http://dewitt.sanford.duke.edu/gellmanarticles/> Barton
Gellman calls for explanation. Here's mine: the NSA’s goal in creating a
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175713/tomgram%3A_engelhardt,_you_are_our_s
ecret/> global surveillance state was either utopian or dystopian (depending
on your point of view), but in either case, breathtakingly totalistic. Its
top officials meant to sweep up every electronic or online way one human
being can communicate with others, and to develop the capability to surveil
and track every inhabitant of the planet. From German Chancellor
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/04/germany-inquiry-nsa-tapping-an
gela-merkel-phone> Angela Merkel and Brazilian President
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/24/brazil-president-un-speech-nsa
-surveillance> Dilma Rousseff to peasants with cell phones in the
<http://time.com/109853/wikileaks-afghanistan-under-nsa-surveillance/>
backlands of Afghanistan (not to speak of American citizens anywhere), no
one was to be off the hook. Conceptually, there would be no exceptions.
And the remarkable thing is how close the agency came to achieving this.
Whether consciously or not, however, the officials of the U.S. Intelligence
Community did imagine one giant exception: themselves. No one outside the
loop was supposed to know what they were doing. They alone on the planet
were supposed to be unheard,
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/27/surveillance-activists-launch-
135ft-airship-nsa> unspied upon, and unsurveilled. The shock of Snowden’s
revelations, I suspect, and the visceral reactions came, in part, from the
discovery that such a system really did have no exceptions, not even them.
In releasing the blueprint of their world, Snowden endangered nothing in the
normal sense of the term, but that made him no less of a traitor to their
exceptional world as they imagined it. What he ensured was that, as they
surveil us, we can now in some sense track them. His act, in other words,
dumped them in with the hoi polloi -- with us -- which, under the
circumstances, was the ultimate insult and they responded accordingly.
An allied explanation lurks in Noam Chomsky’s latest
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175605/tomgram%3A_noam_chomsky,_%22the_most
_dangerous_moment,%22_50_years_later/> TomDispatch post. If the “security”
in national security means not the security of the American people but, as
he suggests, of those who run the national security state, and if secrecy is
the attribute of power, then Edward Snowden broke their code of secrecy and
exposed power itself to the light in a devastating and deflating way. No
wonder the reaction to him was so bloodthirsty and vitriolic. Chomsky
himself has an unsettling way of
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175645/noam_chomsky_the_paranoia_of_the_sup
errich> exposing various worlds of power, especially American power, to the
light with similarly deflating results. He’s been doing it for half a
century and only gets better. Tom
Whose Security?
How Washington Protects Itself and the Corporate Sector
By <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/noamchomsky> Noam Chomsky
The question of how foreign policy is determined is a crucial one in world
affairs. In these comments, I can only provide a few hints as to how I
think the subject can be productively explored, keeping to the United States
for several reasons. First, the U.S. is unmatched in its global
significance and impact. Second, it is an unusually open society, possibly
uniquely so, which means we know more about it. Finally, it is plainly the
most important case for Americans, who are able to influence policy choices
in the U.S. -- and indeed for others, insofar as their actions can influence
such choices. The general principles, however, extend to the other major
powers, and well beyond.
There is a “received standard version,” common to academic scholarship,
government pronouncements, and public discourse. It holds that the prime
commitment of governments is to ensure security, and that the primary
concern of the U.S. and its allies since 1945 was the Russian threat.
There are a number of ways to evaluate the doctrine. One obvious question
to ask is: What happened when the Russian threat disappeared in 1989?
Answer: everything continued much as before.
The U.S. immediately invaded Panama, killing probably thousands of people
and installing a client regime. This was routine practice in U.S.-dominated
domains -- but in this case not quite as routine. For first time, a major
foreign policy act was not justified by an alleged Russian threat.
Instead, a series of fraudulent pretexts for the invasion were concocted
that collapse instantly on examination. The media chimed in
enthusiastically, lauding the magnificent achievement of defeating Panama,
unconcerned that the pretexts were ludicrous, that the act itself was a
radical violation of international law, and that it was bitterly condemned
elsewhere, most harshly in Latin America. Also ignored was the U.S. veto of
a unanimous Security Council resolution condemning crimes by U.S. troops
during the invasion, with Britain alone abstaining.
All routine. And all forgotten (which is also routine).
>From El Salvador to the Russian Border
The administration of George H.W. Bush issued a new national security policy
and defense budget in reaction to the collapse of the global enemy. It was
pretty much the same as before, although with new pretexts. It was, it
turned out, necessary to maintain a military establishment almost as great
as the rest of the world combined and far more advanced in technological
sophistication -- but not for defense against the now-nonexistent Soviet
Union. Rather, the excuse now was the growing “technological
sophistication” of Third World powers. Disciplined intellectuals understood
that it would have been improper to collapse in ridicule, so they maintained
a proper silence.
The U.S., the new programs insisted, must maintain its “defense industrial
base.” The phrase is a euphemism, referring to high-tech industry generally,
which relies heavily on extensive state intervention for research and
development, often under Pentagon cover, in what economists continue to call
the U.S. “free-market economy.”
One of the most interesting provisions of the new plans had to do with the
Middle East. There, it was declared, Washington must maintain intervention
forces targeting a crucial region where the major problems “could not have
been laid at the Kremlin’s door.” Contrary to 50 years of deceit, it was
quietly conceded that the main concern was not the Russians, but rather what
is called “radical nationalism,” meaning independent nationalism not under
U.S. control.
All of this has evident bearing on the standard version, but it passed
unnoticed -- or perhaps, therefore it passed unnoticed.
Other important events took place immediately after the fall of the Berlin
Wall, ending the Cold War. One was in El Salvador, the leading recipient of
U.S. military aid -- apart from Israel-Egypt, a separate category -- and
with one of the worst human rights records anywhere. That is a familiar and
very close correlation.
The Salvadoran high command ordered the Atlacatl Brigade to invade the
Jesuit University and murder six leading Latin American intellectuals, all
Jesuit priests, including the rector, Fr. Ignacio Ellacuría, and any
witnesses, meaning their housekeeper and her daughter. The Brigade had just
returned from advanced counterinsurgency training at the U.S. Army John F.
Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and
had already left a bloody trail of thousands of the usual victims in the
course of the U.S.-run state terror campaign in El Salvador, one part of a
broader terror and torture campaign throughout the region. All routine.
Ignored and virtually forgotten in the United States and by its allies,
again routine. But it tells us a lot about the factors that drive policy,
if we care to look at the real world.
Another important event took place in Europe. Soviet president Mikhail
Gorbachev agreed to allow the unification of Germany and its membership in
NATO, a hostile military alliance. In the light of recent history, this was
a most astonishing concession. There was a quid pro quo. President Bush
and Secretary of State James Baker agreed that NATO would not expand “one
inch to the East,” meaning into East Germany. Instantly, they expanded NATO
to East Germany.
Gorbachev was naturally outraged, but when he complained, he was instructed
by Washington that this had only been a verbal promise, a gentleman’s
agreement, hence without force. If he was naïve enough to accept the word
of American leaders, it was his problem.
All of this, too, was routine, as was the silent acceptance and approval of
the expansion of NATO in the U.S. and the West generally. President Bill
Clinton then expanded NATO further, right up to Russia’s borders. Today,
the world faces a serious crisis that is in no small measure a result of
these policies.
The Appeal of Plundering the Poor
Another source of evidence is the declassified historical record. It
contains revealing accounts of the actual motives of state policy. The
story is rich and complex, but a few persistent themes play a dominant role.
One was articulated clearly at a western hemispheric conference called by
the U.S. in Mexico in February 1945 where Washington imposed “An Economic
Charter of the Americas” designed to eliminate economic nationalism “in all
its forms.” There was one unspoken condition. Economic nationalism would be
fine for the U.S. whose economy relies heavily on massive state
intervention.
The elimination of economic nationalism for others stood in sharp conflict
with the Latin American stand of that moment, which State Department
officials described as “the philosophy of the New Nationalism [that]
embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth
and to raise the standard of living of the masses.” As U.S. policy analysts
added, “Latin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the
development of a country's resources should be the people of that country.”
That, of course, will not do. Washington understands that the “first
beneficiaries” should be U.S. investors, while Latin America fulfills its
service function. It should not, as both the Truman and Eisenhower
administrations would make clear, undergo “excessive industrial development”
that might infringe on U.S. interests. Thus Brazil could produce
low-quality steel that U.S. corporations did not want to bother with, but it
would be “excessive,” were it to compete with U.S. firms.
Similar concerns resonate throughout the post-World War II period. The
global system that was to be dominated by the U.S. was threatened by what
internal documents call “radical and nationalistic regimes” that respond to
popular pressures for independent development. That was the concern that
motivated the overthrow of the parliamentary governments of Iran and
Guatemala in 1953 and 1954, as well as numerous others. In the case of
Iran, a major concern was the potential impact of Iranian independence on
Egypt, then in turmoil over British colonial practice. In Guatemala, apart
from the crime of the new democracy in empowering the peasant majority and
infringing on possessions of the United Fruit Company -- already offensive
enough -- Washington’s concern was labor unrest and popular mobilization in
neighboring U.S.-backed dictatorships.
In both cases the consequences reach to the present. Literally not a day
has passed since 1953 when the U.S. has not been torturing the people of
Iran. Guatemala remains one of the world’s worst horror chambers. To this
day, Mayans are fleeing from the effects of near-genocidal government
military campaigns in the highlands backed by President Ronald Reagan and
his top officials. As the country director of Oxfam, a Guatemalan doctor,
reported recently,
“There is a dramatic deterioration of the political, social, and economic
context. Attacks against Human Rights defenders have increased 300% during
the last year. There is a clear evidence of a very well organized strategy
by the private sector and Army. Both have captured the government in order
to keep the status quo and to impose the extraction economic model, pushing
away dramatically indigenous peoples from their own land, due to the mining
industry, African Palm and sugar cane plantations. In addition the social
movement defending their land and rights has been criminalized, many leaders
are in jail, and many others have been killed.”
Nothing is known about this in the United States and the very obvious cause
of it remains suppressed.
In the 1950s, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles
explained quite clearly the dilemma that the U.S. faced. They complained
that the Communists had an unfair advantage. They were able to “appeal
directly to the masses” and “get control of mass movements, something we
have no capacity to duplicate. The poor people are the ones they appeal to
and they have always wanted to plunder the rich.”
That causes problems. The U.S. somehow finds it difficult to appeal to the
poor with its doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.
The Cuban Example
A clear illustration of the general pattern was Cuba, when it finally gained
independence in 1959. Within months, military attacks on the island began.
Shortly after, the Eisenhower administration made a secret decision to
overthrow the government. John F. Kennedy then became president. He
intended to devote more attention to Latin America and so, on taking office,
he created a study group to develop policies headed by the historian Arthur
Schlesinger, who summarized its conclusions for the incoming president.
As Schlesinger explained, threatening in an independent Cuba was “the Castro
idea of taking matters into one's own hands.” It was an idea that
unfortunately appealed to the mass of the population in Latin America where
“the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors
the propertied classes, and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the
example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a
decent living.” Again, Washington’s usual dilemma.
As the CIA explained, “The extensive influence of 'Castroism' is not a
function of Cuban power... Castro’s shadow looms large because social and
economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling
authority and encourage agitation for radical change,” for which his Cuba
provides a model. Kennedy feared that Russian aid might make Cuba a
“showcase” for development, giving the Soviets the upper hand throughout
Latin America.
The State Department Policy Planning Council warned that “the primary danger
we face in Castro is... in the impact the very existence of his regime has
upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries… The simple fact
is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the U.S., a negation of
our whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half” -- that is,
since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, when the U.S. declared its intention of
dominating the hemisphere.
The immediate goal at the time was to conquer Cuba, but that could not be
achieved because of the power of the British enemy. Still, that grand
strategist John Quincy Adams, the intellectual father of the Monroe Doctrine
and Manifest Destiny, informed his colleagues that over time Cuba would fall
into our hands by “the laws of political gravitation,” as an apple falls
from the tree. In brief, U.S. power would increase and Britain’s would
decline.
In 1898, Adams’s prognosis was realized. The U.S. invaded Cuba in the guise
of liberating it. In fact, it prevented the island’s liberation from Spain
and turned it into a “virtual colony” to quote historians Ernest May and
Philip Zelikow. Cuba remained so until January 1959, when it gained
independence. Since that time it has been subjected to major U.S. terrorist
wars, primarily during the Kennedy years, and economic strangulation. Not
because of the Russians.
The pretense all along was that we were defending ourselves from the Russian
threat -- an absurd explanation that generally went unchallenged. A simple
test of the thesis is what happened when any conceivable Russian threat
disappeared. U.S. policy toward Cuba became even harsher, spearheaded by
liberal Democrats, including Bill Clinton, who outflanked Bush from the
right in the 1992 election. On the face of it, these events should have
considerable bearing on the validity of the doctrinal framework for
discussion of foreign policy and the factors that drive it. Once again,
however, the impact was slight.
The Virus of Nationalism
To borrow Henry Kissinger’s terminology, independent nationalism is a
“virus” that might “spread contagion.” Kissinger was referring to Salvador
Allende’s Chile. The virus was the idea that there might be a parliamentary
path towards some kind of socialist democracy. The way to deal with such a
threat is to destroy the virus and to inoculate those who might be infected,
typically by imposing murderous national security states. That was achieved
in the case of Chile, but it is important to recognize that the thinking
holds worldwide.
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/160846363X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/160846363X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>
http://www.tomdispatch.com/images/managed/mastersmankind.jpg
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/160846363X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> It was,
for example, the reasoning behind the decision to oppose Vietnamese
nationalism in the early 1950s and support France’s effort to reconquer its
former colony. It was feared that independent Vietnamese nationalism might
be a virus that would spread contagion to the surrounding regions, including
resource-rich Indonesia. That might even have led Japan -- called the
“superdomino” by Asia scholar John Dower -- to become the industrial and
commercial center of an independent new order of the kind imperial Japan had
so recently fought to establish. That, in turn, would have meant that the
U.S. had lost the Pacific war, not an option to be considered in 1950. The
remedy was clear -- and largely achieved. Vietnam was virtually destroyed
and ringed by military dictatorships that kept the “virus” from spreading
contagion.
In retrospect, Kennedy-Johnson National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy
reflected that Washington should have ended the Vietnam War in 1965, when
the Suharto dictatorship was installed in Indonesia, with enormous massacres
that the CIA compared to the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. These were,
however, greeted with unconstrained euphoria in the U.S. and the West
generally because the “staggering bloodbath,” as the press cheerfully
described it, ended any threat of contagion and opened Indonesia’s rich
resources to western exploitation. After that, the war to destroy Vietnam
was superfluous, as Bundy recognized in retrospect.
The same was true in Latin America in the same years: one virus after
another was viciously attacked and either destroyed or weakened to the point
of bare survival. From the early 1960s, a plague of repression was imposed
on the continent that had no precedent in the violent history of the
hemisphere, extending to Central America in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, a
matter that there should be no need to review.
Much the same was true in the Middle East. The unique U.S. relations with
Israel were established in their current form in 1967, when Israel delivered
a smashing blow to Egypt, the center of secular Arab nationalism. By doing
so, it protected U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, then engaged in military conflict
with Egypt in Yemen. Saudi Arabia, of course, is the most extreme radical
fundamentalist Islamic state, and also a missionary state, expending huge
sums to establish its Wahhabi-Salafi doctrines beyond its borders. It is
worth remembering that the U.S., like England before it, has tended to
support radical fundamentalist Islam in opposition to secular nationalism,
which has usually been perceived as posing more of a threat of independence
and contagion.
The Value of Secrecy
There is much more to say, but the historical record demonstrates very
clearly that the standard doctrine has little merit. Security in the normal
sense is not a prominent factor in policy formation.
To repeat, in the normal sense. But in evaluating the standard doctrine we
have to ask what is actually meant by “security”: security for whom?
One answer is: security for state power. There are many illustrations.
Take a current one. In May, the U.S. agreed to support a U.N. Security
Council resolution calling on the International Criminal Court to
investigate war crimes in Syria, but with a proviso: there could be no
inquiry into possible war crimes by Israel. Or by Washington, though it was
really unnecessary to add that last condition. The U.S. is uniquely
self-immunized from the international legal system. In fact, there is even
congressional legislation authorizing the president to use armed force to
“rescue” any American brought to the Hague for trial -- the “Netherlands
Invasion Act,” as it is sometimes called in Europe. That once again
illustrates the importance of protecting the security of state power.
But protecting it from whom? There is, in fact, a strong case to be made
that a prime concern of government is the security of state power from the
population. As those who have spent time rummaging through archives should
be aware, government secrecy is rarely motivated by a genuine need for
security, but it definitely does serve to keep the population in the dark.
And for good reasons, which were lucidly explained by the prominent liberal
scholar and government adviser Samuel Huntington, the professor of the
science of government at Harvard University. In his words: “The architects
of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not
seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the
sunlight it begins to evaporate.”
He wrote that in 1981, when the Cold War was again heating up, and he
explained further that “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.”
These simple truths are rarely acknowledged, but they provide insight into
state power and policy, with reverberations to the present moment.
State power has to be protected from its domestic enemy; in sharp contrast,
the population is not secure from state power. A striking current
illustration is the radical attack on the Constitution by the Obama
administration’s massive surveillance program. It is, of course, justified
by “national security.” That is routine for virtually all actions of all
states and so carries little information.
When the NSA’s surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden’s
revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented 54 terrorist acts.
On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen. A high-level government
panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had
sent $8,500 to Somalia. That was the total yield of the huge assault on the
Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world.
Britain’s attitude is interesting. In 2007, the British government called
on Washington’s colossal spy agency “to analyze and retain any British
citizens’ mobile phone and fax numbers, emails, and IP addresses swept up by
its dragnet,” the Guardian reported. That is a useful indication of the
relative significance, in government eyes, of the privacy of its own
citizens and of Washington’s demands.
Another concern is security for private power. One current illustration is
the huge trade agreements now being negotiated, the Trans-Pacific and
Trans-Atlantic pacts. These are being negotiated in secret -- but not
completely in secret. They are not secret from the hundreds of corporate
lawyers who are drawing up the detailed provisions. It is not hard to guess
what the results will be, and the few leaks about them suggest that the
expectations are accurate. Like NAFTA and other such pacts, these are not
free trade agreements. In fact, they are not even trade agreements, but
primarily investor rights agreements.
Again, secrecy is critically important to protect the primary domestic
constituency of the governments involved, the corporate sector.
The Final Century of Human Civilization?
There are other examples too numerous to mention, facts that are
well-established and would be taught in elementary schools in free
societies.
There is, in other words, ample evidence that securing state power from the
domestic population and securing concentrated private power are driving
forces in policy formation. Of course, it is not quite that simple. There
are interesting cases, some quite current, where these commitments conflict,
but consider this a good first approximation and radically opposed to the
received standard doctrine.
Let us turn to another question: What about the security of the population?
It is easy to demonstrate that this is a marginal concern of policy
planners. Take two prominent current examples, global warming and nuclear
weapons. As any literate person is doubtless aware, these are dire threats
to the security of the population. Turning to state policy, we find that it
is committed to accelerating each of those threats -- in the interests of
the primary concerns, protection of state power and of the concentrated
private power that largely determines state policy.
Consider global warming. There is now much exuberance in the United States
about “100 years of energy independence” as we become “the Saudi Arabia of
the next century” -- perhaps the final century of human civilization if
current policies persist.
That illustrates very clearly the nature of the concern for security,
certainly not for the population. It also illustrates the moral calculus of
contemporary Anglo-American state capitalism: the fate of our grandchildren
counts as nothing when compared with the imperative of higher profits
tomorrow.
These conclusions are fortified by a closer look at the propaganda system.
There is a huge public relations campaign in the U.S., organized quite
openly by Big Energy and the business world, to try to convince the public
that global warming is either unreal or not a result of human activity. And
it has had some impact. The U.S. ranks lower than other countries in public
concern about global warming and the results are stratified: among
Republicans, the party more fully dedicated to the interests of wealth and
corporate power, it ranks far lower than the global norm.
The current issue of the premier journal of media criticism, the Columbia
Journalism Review, has an interesting article on this subject, attributing
this outcome to the media doctrine of “fair and balanced.” In other words,
if a journal publishes an opinion piece reflecting the conclusions of 97% of
scientists, it must also run a counter-piece expressing the viewpoint of the
energy corporations.
That indeed is what happens, but there certainly is no “fair and balanced”
doctrine. Thus, if a journal runs an opinion piece denouncing Russian
President Vladimir Putin for the criminal act of taking over the Crimea, it
surely does not have to run a piece pointing out that, while the act is
indeed criminal, Russia has a far stronger case today than the U.S. did more
than a century ago in taking over southeastern Cuba, including the country’s
major port -- and rejecting the Cuban demand since independence to have it
returned. And the same is true of many other cases. The actual media
doctrine is “fair and balanced” when the concerns of concentrated private
power are involved, but surely not elsewhere.
On the issue of nuclear weapons, the record is similarly interesting -- and
frightening. It reveals very clearly that, from the earliest days, the
security of the population was a non-issue, and remains so. There is no
time here to run through the shocking record, but there is little doubt that
it strongly supports the lament of General Lee Butler, the last commander of
the Strategic Air Command, which was armed with nuclear weapons. In his
words, we have so far survived the nuclear age “by some combination of
skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest
proportion.” And we can hardly count on continued divine intervention as
policymakers play roulette with the fate of the species in pursuit of the
driving factors in policy formation.
As we are all surely aware, we now face the most ominous decisions in human
history. There are many problems that must be addressed, but two are
overwhelming in their significance: environmental destruction and nuclear
war. For the first time in history, we face the possibility of destroying
the prospects for decent existence -- and not in the distant future. For
this reason alone, it is imperative to sweep away the ideological clouds and
face honestly and realistically the question of how policy decisions are
made, and what we can do to alter them before it is too late.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among
his recent books are Hegemony or Survival,
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082840/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> Failed
States, <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805096159/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>
Power Systems, Occupy, and Hopes and Prospects. His latest book,
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/160846363X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> Masters
of Mankind, will be published soon by Haymarket Books, which is also
reissuing twelve of his classic books in new editions over the coming year.
His website is <http://www.chomsky.info/> www.chomsky.info.
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