Preventive
War 'the Supreme Crime'
By Noam Chomsky
12 August, 2003
September 2002 was
marked by three events of considerable importance, closely related.
The United States, 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 mobilise the population for an invasion of Iraq. 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 termed at once by John Ikenberry writing
in the leading establishment journal, presents the US as "a revisionist
state seeking to parlay its moment ary 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" (1). These policies are fraught with danger even
for the US itself, Ikenberry 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 concept. Within a few months studies revealed that fear
of the US had reached remarkable heights, along with distrust of the
political leadership. An international Gallup poll in December, which
was barely noticed in the US, found almost no support for Washington's
announced plans for a war in Iraq carried out unilaterally by America
and its allies - in effect, the US-United Kingdom coalition.
Washington told
the United Nations that it could be relevant by endorsing US plans,
or it could be a debating society. The US had the "sovereign right
to take military action", the administration's moderate Colin Powell
told the World Economic Forum, which also vigorously opposed the war
plans: "When we feel strongly about something we will lead, even
if no one is following us" (2).
President George
Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair underscored their contempt
for international law and institutions at their Azores summit meeting
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 (3). The crucial principle
is that the US must effectively rule Iraq.
President Bush declared
that the US "has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring
its own national security", threatened by Iraq with or without
Saddam, according to the Bush doctrine. The US will be happy to establish
an Arab facade, to borrow the term of the British during their days
in the sun, while US power is firmly implanted at the heart of the world's
major energy-producing region. Formal democracy will be fine, but only
if it is of a submissive kind accepted in the US's backyard, at least
if history and current practice are any guide.
The grand strategy
authorises the US to carry out preventive war: preventive, not pre-emptive.
Whatever the justifications for pre-emptive war might 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
that was condemned at Nuremberg.
That was understood
by those with some concern for their country. As the US invaded Iraq,
the historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote that Bush's grand strategy was
"alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed
at the time of Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American
president [Franklin D Roosevelt] said it would, lives in infamy".
It was no surprise, added Schlesinger, that "the global wave of
sympathy that engulfed the US after 9/11 has given way to a global wave
of hatred of American arrogance and militarism" and the belief
that Bush was "a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein"
(4).
For the political
leadership, mostly recycled from the more reactionary sectors of the
Reagan-Bush Senior administrations, the global wave of hatred is not
a particular problem. They want to be feared, not loved. It is natural
for the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, to quote the words of
Chicago gangster Al Capone: "You will get more with a kind word
and a gun than with a kind word alone." They understand just 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. Far higher in the scale of their
priorities are the goals of establishing global hegemony and implementing
their domestic agenda, which is to dismantle the progressive achievements
that have been won by popular struggle over the past century, and to
institutionalise their radical changes so that recovering the achievements
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 the 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 defenceless, important enough
to be worth the trouble, an imminent threat to our survival and an 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." 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 all those who joined them in the years when
they were supporting that man of ultimate evil, Saddam Hussein, long
after he had committed these terrible crimes, and after the first war
with Iraq. Supported him because of our duty to help US exporters, the
Bush Senior administration explained.
It is impressive
to see how easy it is for polit ical leaders, while recounting Saddam
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 Saddam committed his first authentic
crime, which was disobeying (or perhaps misunderstanding) orders, by
invading Kuwait. Punishment was severe - for his subjects. The tyrant
escaped unscathed, and was further strengthened by the sanctions regime
then imposed by his former allies.
Also easy to suppress
are the reasons why the US returned to support Saddam immediately after
the Gulf war, as he crushed rebellions that might have overthrown him.
The chief diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman,
explained that the best of all worlds for the US would be "an iron-fisted
Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein", but since that goal seemed
unattainable, we would have to be satisfied with second best (5). The
rebels failed because the US and its allies held the "strikingly
unanimous view [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" (6).
All of this was
suppressed in the commentary on the mass graves of the victims of the
US- authorised paroxysm of terror of Saddam Hussein, which commentary
was offered as a justification for the war on "moral grounds".
It was all known in 1991, but ignored for reasons of state.
A reluctant US population
had to be whipped to a proper mood of war fever. From September grim
warnings were issued about the dire threat that Saddam posed to the
US and his links to al-Qaida, with broad hints that he had been involved
in the 9/11 attacks. Many of the charges that had been "dangled
in front of [the media] failed the laugh test," commented the editor
of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, "but the more ridiculous
[they were,] the more the media strove to make whole-hearted swallowing
of them a test of patriotism" (7). The propaganda assault had its
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 was 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
a demonic enemy.
The brilliant success
of public diplomacy was revealed when Bush, in the words of one commentator,
"provided a powerful Reaganesque finale to a six-week war on the
deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on 1 May". This reference
is presumably to President Ronald Reagan's proud declaration that America
was "standing tall" after conquering Grenada, the nutmeg cap
ital of the world, in 1983, preventing the Russians from using it to
bomb the US. Bush, as Reagan's mimic, was free to declare - without
concern for sceptical comment at home - that he had won a "victory
in a war on terror [by having] removed an ally of al-Qaida" (8).
It has been 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
was 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-Qaida recruitment, as US officials concede
(9).
The Wall Street
Journal recognised that Bush's carefully staged aircraft carrier 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 (10).
Before the 2002
elections Rove had instructed party activists to stress security issues,
diverting attention from unpopular Republican domestic policies. All
of this is second-nature to the re cycled Reaganites now in office.
That is how they held on to political power during their first tenure
in office. They regularly pushed the panic button to avoid public opposition
to the policies that had left Reagan as the most disliked living president
by 1992, by which time he may have ranked even lower than Richard Nixon.
Despite its narrow
successes, the intensive propaganda campaign left the public unswayed
in fundamental respects. Most continue to prefer UN rather than US leadership
in international crises, and by two to one prefer that the UN, rather
than the US, should direct reconstruction in Iraq (11).
When the occupying
coalition army failed to discover WMD, the US 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" (12). Senior
officials then suggested a refinement in the concept of preventive war,
to entitle the US to attack a country that has "deadly weapons
in mass quantities". The revision "suggests that the administration
will act against a hostile regime that has nothing more than the intent
and ability to develop WMD" (13). Lowering the criteria for a resort
to force is the most significant consequence of the collapse of the
proclaimed argument for the invasion.
Perhaps the most
spectacular propaganda achievement was the praising of Bush's vision
to bring democracy to the Middle East in the midst of an extraordinary
display of hatred and contempt for democracy. This was illustrated by
the distinction that was made by Washington between Old and New Europe,
the former being reviled and the latter hailed for its courage. The
criterion was sharp: Old Europe consists of governments that took the
same position over the war on Iraq as most of their populations; while
the heroes of New Europe followed orders from Crawford, Texas, disregarding,
in most cases, an even larger majority of citizens who were against
the war. Political commentators ranted about disobedient Old Europe
and its psychic maladies, while Congress descended to low comedy.
At the liberal end
of the spectrum, the former US ambassador to the UN, 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, unless we succumb to the radical-left heresy that the public
might have some role in a democracy. Thomas Friedman then 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, at least judging by the polls (14).
Turkey was a particularly
instructive case. Its government resisted the heavy pressure from the
US to prove its democratic credentials by following US orders and overruling
95% of its population. Turkey did not cooperate. US 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 in what happened, although that was still
carefully concealed in the lamentations.
The crucial point
was expressed by the deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, who
condemned the Turkish military because they "did not play the strong
leadership role that we would have expected" - that is they did
not intervene to prevent the Turkish government from honouring near-unanimous
public opinion. Turkey had therefore to step up and say, "We made
a mistake - let's figure out how we can be as helpful as possible to
the Americans" (15). Wolfowitz's stand was particularly informative
because he had been portrayed as the leading figure in the administration's
crusade to democratise the Middle East.
Anger at Old Europe
has much deeper roots than just contempt for democracy. The US has always
regarded European unification with some ambivalence. 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 US". Europe must not pursue its own independent
course, based on its Franco-German industrial and financial heartland.
The US administration's
concerns now extend as well to Northeast Asia, the world's most dynamic
economic region, with ample resources and advanced industrial economies,
a potentially integrated region that might also flirt with challenging
the overall framework of world order, which is to be maintained permanently,
by force if necessary, Washington has declared. ________________________________________________________
* Noam Chomsky is
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(1) John Ikenberry,
Foreign Affairs, Sept.-Oct. 2002.
(2) Wall Street
Journal, 27 January 2003.
(3) Michael Gordon,
The New York Times, 18 March 2003.
(4) Los Angeles
Times, 23 March 2003.
(5) The New York
Times, 7 June 1991. Alan Cowell, The New York Times, 11 April 1991.
(6) The New York
Times, 4 June 2003.
(7) Linda Rothstein,
editor, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July 2003.
(8) Elisabeth Bumiller,
The New York Times, 2 May 2003; transcript, 2 May 2003.
(9) Jason Burke,
The Observer, London 18 May 2003.
(10) Jeanne Cummings
and Greg Hite, Wall Street Journal, 2 May 2003. Francis Clines, The
New York Times, 10 May 2003.
(11) Program on
International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland, April 18-22.
(12) Dana Milbank,
Washington Post, 1 June 2003
(13) Guy Dinmore
and James Harding, Financial Times, 3/4 May 2003.
(14) Lee Michael
Katz, National Journal, 8 February 2003; Friedman, The New York Times,
9 February 2003.
(15) Marc Lacey,
The New York Times, 7/8 May 2003.