Dominance And
Its Dilemmas
By Noam Chomsky
Znet
13 October, 2003
The
past year has been a momentous one in world affairs. In the normal rhythm,
the pattern was set in September, a month marked by several important
and closely related events. The most powerful state in history announced
a new National Security Strategy asserting that it will maintain global
hegemony permanently: any challenge will be blocked by force, the dimension
in which the US reigns supreme. At the same time, the war drums began
to beat to mobilize the population for an invasion of Iraq, which would
be "the first test [of the doctrine], not the last," the New
York Times observed after the invasion, "the petri dish in which
this experiment in pre-emptive policy grew." And the campaign opened
for the mid-term congressional elections, which would determine whether
the administration would be able to carry forward its radical international
and domestic agenda.
The new "imperial
grand strategy," as it was aptly termed at once by John Ikenberry,
presents the US as "a revisionist state seeking to parlay its momentary
advantages into a world order in which it runs the show," a "unipolar
world" in which "no state or coalition could ever challenge"
it as "global leader, protector, and enforcer. These policies are
fraught with danger even for the US itself, he warned, joining many
others in the foreign policy elite.
What is to be "protected"
is US power and the interests it represents, not the world, which vigorously
opposed the conception. Within a few months, polls revealed that fear
of the United States had reached remarkable heights, along with distrust
of the political leadership, or worse. As for the test case, an international
Gallup poll in December, barely noted in the US, found virtually no
support for Washington's announced plans for a war carried out "unilaterally
by America and its allies": in effect, the US-UK "coalition."
The basic principles
of the imperial grand strategy trace back to the early days of World
War II, and have been reiterated frequently since. Even before the US
entered the war, planners and analysts concluded that in the postwar
world the US would seek "to hold unquestioned power," acting
to ensure the "limitation of any exercise of sovereignty"
by states that might interfere with its global designs. They outlined
"an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy
for the United States" in a "Grand Area," to include
at a minimum the Western Hemisphere, the former British empire, and
the Far East, later extended to as much of Eurasia as possible when
it became clear that Germany would be defeated.
Twenty years later,
elder statesman Dean Acheson instructed the American Society of International
Law that no "legal issue" arises when the US responds to a
challenge to its "power, position, and prestige." He was referring
specifically to Washington's post-Bay of Pigs economic warfare against
Cuba, but was surely aware of Kennedy's terrorist campaign aimed at
"regime change," a significant factor in bringing the world
close to nuclear war only a few months earlier, and resumed immediately
after the Cuban missile crisis was resolved.
A similar doctrine
was invoked by the Reagan administration when it rejected World Court
jurisdiction over its attack against Nicaragua. State Department Legal
Adviser Abraham Sofaer explained that most of the world cannot "be
counted on to share our view" and "often opposes the United
States on important international questions." Accordingly, we must
"reserve to ourselves the power to determine" which matters
fall "essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United
States" -- in this case, the actions that the Court condemned as
the "unlawful use of force" against Nicaragua; in lay terms,
international terrorism.
Their successors
continued to make it clear that the US reserved the right to act "unilaterally
when necessary," including "unilateral use of military power"
to defend such vital interests as "ensuring uninhibited access
to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources."
Even this small
sample illustrates the narrowness of the planning spectrum. Nevertheless,
the alarm bells sounded in September 2002 were justified. Acheson and
Sofaer were describing policy guidelines, and within elite circles.
Other cases may be regarded as worldly-wise reiterations of the maxim
of Thucydides that "large nations do what they wish, while small
nations accept what they must." In contrast, Cheney-Rumsfeld-Powell
and their associates are officially declaring an even more extreme policy.
They intend to be heard, and took action at once to put the world on
notice that they mean what they say. That is a significant difference.
The imperial grand
strategy is based on the assumption that the US can gain "full
spectrum dominance" by military programs that dwarf those of any
potential coalition, and have useful side effects. One is to socialize
the costs and risks of the private economy of the future, a traditional
contribution of military spending and the basis of much of the "new
economy." Another is to contribute to a fiscal train wreck that
will, it is presumed, "create powerful pressures to cut federal
spending, and thus, perhaps, enable the Administration to accomplish
its goal of rolling back the New Deal," a description of the Reagan
program that is now being extended to far more ambitious plans.
As the grand strategy
was announced on September 17, the administration "abandoned an
international effort to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention
against germ warfare," advising allies that further discussions
would have to be delayed for four years. A month later, the UN Committee
on Disarmament adopted a resolution that called for stronger measures
to prevent militarization of space, recognizing this to be "a grave
danger for international peace and security," and another that
reaffirmed "the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of poisonous
gases and bacteriological methods of warfare." Both passed unanimously,
with two abstentions: the US and Israel. US abstention amounts to a
veto: typically, a double veto, banning the events from reporting and
history.
A few weeks later,
the Space Command released plans to go beyond US "control"
of space for military purposes to "ownership," which is to
be permanent, in accord with the Security Strategy. Ownership of space
is "key to our nation's military effectiveness," permitting
"instant engagement anywhere in the world
A viable prompt
global strike capability, whether nuclear or non-nuclear, will allow
the US to rapidly strike high-payoff, difficult-to-defeat targets from
stand-off ranges and produce the desired effect
[and] to provide
warfighting commanders the ability to rapidly deny, delay, deceive,
disrupt, destroy, exploit and neutralize targets in hours/minutes rather
than weeks/days even when US and allied forces have a limited forward
presence," thus reducing the need for overseas bases that regularly
arouse local antagonism.
Similar plans had
been outlined in a May 2002 Pentagon planning document, partially leaked,
which called for a strategy of "forward deterrence" in which
missiles launched from space platforms would be able to carry out almost
instant "unwarned attacks." Military analyst William Arkin
comments that "no target on the planet or in space would be immune
to American attack. The US could strike without warning whenever and
wherever a threat was perceived, and it would be protected by missile
defenses." Hypersonic drones would monitor and disrupt targets.
Surveillance systems are to provide the ability "to track, record
and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city." The
world is to be left at mercy of US attack at will, without warning or
credible pretext. The plans have no remote historical parallel. Even
more fanciful ones are under development.
These moves reflect
the disdain of the administration for international law and institutions,
or arms control measures, dismissed with barely a word in the National
Security Strategy; and its commitment to an extremist version of long-standing
doctrine.
In accord with these
principles, Washington informed the UN that it can be "relevant"
by endorsing Washington's plans for invading Iraq, or it can be a debating
society. The US has the "sovereign right to take military action,"
Colin Powell informed the January 2003 Davos meeting of the World Economic
Forum, which also strenuously opposed Washington's war plans. "When
we feel strongly about something we will lead," Powell informed
them, even if no one is following us.
Bush and Blair underscored
their contempt for international law and institutions at their Azores
Summit on the eve of the invasion. They issued an ultimatum - not to
Iraq, but to the Security Council: capitulate, or we will invade without
your meaningless seal of approval. And we will do so whether or not
Saddam Hussein and his family leave the country. The crucial principle
is that the US must effectively rule Iraq.
Since the mid-1940s,
Washington has regarded the Gulf as "a stupendous source of strategic
power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history"
- in Eisenhower's words, the "most strategically important area
of the world" because of its "strategic position and resources."
Control over the region and its resources remains a policy imperative.
After taking over a core oil producer, and presumably acquiring its
first reliable military bases at the heart of the world's major energy-producing
system, Washington will doubtless be happy to establish an "Arab
façade," to borrow the term of the British during their
day in the sun. Formal democracy will be fine, but only if it is of
the submissive kind tolerated in Washington's "backyard,"
at least if history and current practice are any guide.
To fail in this
endeavor would take real talent. Even under far less propitious circumstances,
military occupations have commonly been successful. It would be hard
not to improve on a decade of murderous sanctions that virtually destroyed
a society that was, furthermore, in the hands of a vicious tyrant who
ranked with others supported by the current incumbents in Washington:
Romania's Ceausescu, to mention only one of an impressive rogues gallery.
Resistance in Iraq would have no meaningful outside support, unlike
Nazi-occupied Europe or Eastern Europe under the Russian yoke, to take
recent examples of unusually brutal states that nevertheless assembled
an ample array of collaborators and achieved substantial success within
their domains.
The grand strategy
authorizes Washington to carry out "preventive war": Preventive,
not pre-emptive. Whatever the justifications for pre-emptive war may
sometimes be, they do not hold for preventive war, particularly as that
concept is interpreted by its current enthusiasts: the use of military
force to eliminate an invented or imagined threat, so that even the
term "preventive" is too charitable. Preventive war is, very
simply, the "supreme crime" condemned at Nuremberg.
That is widely understood.
As the US invaded Iraq, Arthur Schlesinger wrote that Bush's grand strategy
is "alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed
at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president said
it would, lives in infamy." FDR was right, he added, "but
today it is we Americans who live in infamy." It is no surprise
that "the global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States
after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance
and militarism," and the belief that Bush is "a greater threat
to peace than Saddam Hussein."
For the political
leadership, mostly recycled from more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush
I administrations, "the global wave of hatred" is not a particular
problem. They want to be feared, not loved. They understand as well
as their establishment critics that their actions increase the risk
of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terror. But
that too is not a major problem. Higher in the scale of priorities are
the goals of establishing global hegemony and implementing their domestic
agenda: dismantling the progressive achievements that have been won
by popular struggle over the past century, and institutionalizing these
radical changes so that recovering them will be no easy task.
It is not enough
for a hegemonic power to declare an official policy. It must establish
it as a "new norm of international law" by exemplary action.
Distinguished commentators may then explain that law is a flexible living
instrument, so that the new norm is now available as a guide to action.
It is understood that only those with the guns can establish "norms"
and modify international law.
The selected target
must meet several conditions. It must be defenseless, important enough
to be worth the trouble, and an imminent threat to our survival and
ultimate evil. Iraq qualified on all counts. The first two conditions
are obvious. For the third, it suffices to repeat the orations of Bush,
Blair, and their colleagues: the dictator "is assembling the world's
most dangerous weapons [in order to] dominate, intimidate or attack";
and he "has already used them on whole villages leaving thousands
of his own citizens dead, blind or transfigured
.If this is not
evil then evil has no meaning."
President Bush's
eloquent denunciation surely rings true. And those who contributed to
enhancing evil should certainly not enjoy impunity: among them, the
speaker of these lofty words and his current associates, and those who
joined them in the years when they were supporting the man of ultimate
evil long after he had committed these terrible crimes and won the war
with Iran, with decisive US help. We must continue to support him because
of our duty to help US exporters, the Bush I administration explained.
It is impressive to see how easy it is for political leaders, while
recounting the monster's worst crimes, to suppress the crucial words:
"with our help, because we don't care about such matters."
Support shifted to denunciation as soon as their friend committed his
first authentic crime: disobeying (or perhaps misunderstanding) orders
by invading Kuwait. Punishment was severe -- for his subjects. The tyrant
escaped unscathed, and his grip on the tortured population was further
strengthened by the sanctions regime then imposed by his former allies.
Also easy to suppress
are the reasons why Washington returned to support for Saddam immediately
after the Gulf war as he crushed rebellions that might have overthrown
him. The chief diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times explained
that "the best of all worlds" for Washington would be "an
iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein," but since that
goal seems unattainable, we must be satisfied with second best. The
rebels failed because Washington and its allies held that "whatever
the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better
hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his
repression." All of this is suppressed in the commentary on the
mass graves of the victims of Saddam's US-authorized paroxysm of terror,
crimes that are now offered as justification for the war on "moral
grounds." It was all known in 1991, but ignored for reasons of
state: successful rebellion would have left Iraq in the hands of Iraqis.
Within the US, a
reluctant domestic population had to be whipped to a proper mood of
war fever, another traditional problem.. From early September 2002,
grim warnings were issued about the threat Saddam posed to the United
States and his links to al-Qaeda, with broad hints that he was involved
in the 9-11 attacks. Many of the charges "dangled in front of [the
media] failed the laugh test," the editor of the Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists commented, "but the more ridiculous [they were,] the
more the media strove to make whole-hearted swallowing of them a test
of patriotism."
As often in the
past, the propaganda assault had at least short-term effects. Within
weeks, a majority of Americans came to regard Saddam Hussein as an imminent
threat to the US. Soon almost half believed that Iraq was behind the
9/11 terror. Support for the war correlated with these beliefs. The
propaganda campaign proved just enough to give the administration a
bare majority in the mid-term elections, as voters put aside their immediate
concerns and huddled under the umbrella of power in fear of the demonic
enemy.
The brilliant success
of "public diplomacy" was revealed when the President "provided
a powerful Reaganesque finale to a six-week war" on the deck of
the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1. The reference, presumably,
is to Reagan's proud declaration that America was "standing tall"
after conquering the nutmeg capital of the world in 1983, preventing
the Russians from using it to bomb the US. Reagan's mimic was free to
declare -- without concern for skeptical comment at home - that he had
won a "victory in a war on terror [by having] removed an ally of
Al Qaeda." It is immaterial that no credible evidence was provided
for the alleged link between Saddam Hussein and his bitter enemy Osama
bin Laden and that the charge was dismissed by competent observers.
Also immaterial is the only known connection between the victory and
terror: the invasion appears to have been a "huge setback in the
`war on terror'," by sharply increasing al-Qaeda recruitment, as
US official concede.
More astute observers
recognized that Bush's carefully-staged Abraham Lincoln extravaganza
"marks the beginning of his 2004 re-election campaign," which
the White House hopes "will be built as much as possible around
national-security themes." The electoral campaign will focus on
"the battle of Iraq, not the war," chief Republican political
strategist Karl Rove explained" : the "war" must continue,
if only to control the population at home. Before the 2002 elections,
he had instructed Party activists to stress security issues, diverting
attention from unpopular Republican domestic policies. All of this is
second-nature to the recycled Reaganites now in office. That is how
they held on to political power during their first tenure in office,
regularly pushing the panic button to evade public opposition to the
policies that left Reagan the most unpopular living President by 1992,
ranking alongside Nixon.
Despite its narrow
successes, the intensive propaganda campaign left the public unswayed
in more fundamental respects. Most continue to prefer UN rather than
US leadership in international crises, and by 2-1, prefer that the UN,
rather than the United States, should direct reconstruction in Iraq.
When the occupying
army failed to discover WMD, the administration's stance shifted from
"absolute certainty" that Iraq possessed WMD to the position
that the accusations were "justified by the discovery of equipment
that potentially could be used to produce weapons." Senior officials
suggested a "refinement" in the concept of preventive war
that entitles the US to attack "a country that has deadly weapons
in mass quantities." The revision "suggests instead that the
administration will act against a hostile regime that has nothing more
than the intent and ability to develop [WMD]." The bars for resort
to force are significantly lowered. This modification of the doctrine
of "preventive war" may prove to be the most significant consequence
of the collapse of the declared argument for the invasion.
Perhaps the most
spectacular propaganda achievement was the lauding of the president's
"vision" to bring democracy to the Middle East in the midst
of a display of hatred and contempt for democracy for which no precedent
comes to mind. One illustration was the distinction between Old and
New Europe, the former reviled, the latter hailed for its courage. The
criterion was sharp: Old Europe consists of governments that took the
same position as the vast majority of their populations; the heroes
of New Europe followed orders from Crawford Texas, disregarding an even
larger majority, in most cases. Political commentators ranted about
disobedient Old Europe and its psychic maladies, while Congress descended
to low comedy.
At the liberal end
of the spectrum, Richard Holbrooke stressed "the very important
point" that the population of the eight original members of New
Europe is larger than that of Old Europe, which proves that France and
Germany are "isolated." So it does, if we reject the radical
left heresy that the public might have some role in a democracy. Thomas
Friedman urged that France be removed from the permanent members of
the Security Council, because it is "in kindergarten," and
"does not play well with others." It follows that the population
of New Europe must still be in nursery school, judging by polls.
Turkey was a particularly
instructive case. The government resisted heavy US pressure to prove
its "democratic credentials" by overruling 95% of its population
and following orders. Commentators were infuriated by this lesson in
democracy, so much so that some even reported Turkey's crimes against
the Kurds in the 1990s, previously a taboo topic because of the crucial
US role -- though that was still carefully concealed in the lamentations.
The crucial point
was expressed by Paul Wolfowitz, who condemned the Turkish military
because they "did not play the strong leadership role that we would
have expected" and did not intervene to prevent the government
from respecting near-unanimous public opinion. Turkey must therefore
step up and say "We made a mistake
Let's figure out how we
can be as helpful as possible to the Americans." Wolfowitz's stand
is particularly instructive because he is portrayed as the leading figure
in the crusade to democratize the Middle East.
Anger at Old Europe
has much deeper roots than contempt for democracy. The US has always
regarded European unification with some ambivalence, because Europe
might become an independent force in world affairs. Thus senior diplomat
David Bruce was a leading advocate for European unification in the Kennedy
years, urging Washington to "treat a uniting Europe as an equal
partner," -- but following America's lead. He saw "dangers"
if Europe "struck off on its own, seeking to play a role independent
of the United States." In his "Year of Europe" address
30 years ago, Henry Kissinger advised Europeans to keep to their "regional
responsibilities" within the "overall framework of order"
managed by the United States. Europe must not pursue its own independent
course, based on its Franco-German industrial and financial heartland.
In the tripolar
world that was taking shape at that time, these concerns extend to Asia
as well. Northeast Asia is now the world's most dynamic economic region,
accounting for almost 30% of global GDP, far more than the US, and holding
about half of global foreign exchange reserves. It is a potentially
integrated region, with advanced industrial economies and ample resources.
All of this raises the threat that it too might flirt with challenging
the overall framework of order, which the US is to manage permanently,
by force if necessary, Washington has declared.
Violence is a powerful
instrument of control, as history demonstrates. But the dilemmas of
dominance are not slight.