[Peace-discuss] Chomsky on the US and Iran

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Z Magazine Online
	October 2007 Volume 20 Number 10
	Cold War II: Will the U.S. response to Iran’s
	supposed threat heat up Cold War II?
	By Noam Chomsky

These are exciting days in Washington, as the government directs its 
energies to the demanding task of “containing Iran” in what Washington 
Post correspondent Robin Wright, joining others, calls “Cold War II.”

During Cold War I, the task was to contain two awesome forces. The 
lesser and more moderate force was “an implacable enemy whose avowed 
objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.” 
Hence “if the United States is to survive,” it will have to adopt a 
“repugnant philosophy” and reject “acceptable norms of human conduct” 
and the “long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’” that had been 
exhibited with such searing clarity in the conquest of the national 
territory, the Philippines, Haiti, and other beneficiaries of “the 
idealistic new world bent on ending inhumanity,” as the newspaper of 
record describes our noble mission. The judgments about the nature of 
the super-Hitler and the necessary response are those of General Jimmy 
Doolittle, in a critical assessment of the CIA commissioned by President 
Eisenhower in 1954. They are quite consistent with those of Truman 
administration liberals, the “wise men” who were “present at the 
creation,” notoriously in NSC 68 but in fact quite consistently.

In the face of the Kremlin’s unbridled aggression in every corner of the 
world, it is perhaps understandable that the U.S. resisted in defense of 
human values with a savage display of torture, terror, subversion, and 
violence while doing “everything in its power to alter or abolish any 
regime not openly allied with America,” as Tim Weiner summarizes the 
doctrine of the Eisenhower administration in his recent history of the 
CIA. And just as the Truman liberals easily matched their successors in 
fevered rhetoric about the implacable enemy and its campaign to rule the 
world, so did John F. Kennedy, who bitterly condemned the “monolithic 
and ruthless conspiracy,” and dismissed the proposal of its leader 
(Khrushchev) for sharp mutual cuts in offensive weaponry, then reacted 
to his unilateral implementation of these proposals with a huge military 
build-up. The Kennedy brothers also quickly surpassed Eisenhower in 
violence and terror, as they “unleashed covert action with an 
unprecedented intensity” (Wiener), doubling Eisenhower’s annual record 
of major CIA covert operations, with horrendous consequences worldwide, 
even a close brush with terminal nuclear war.

But at least it was possible to deal with Russia, unlike the fiercer 
enemy, China. The more thoughtful scholars recognized that Russia was 
poised uneasily between civilization and barbarism. As Henry Kissinger 
later explained in his academic essays, only the West has undergone the 
Newtonian revolution and is therefore “deeply committed to the notion 
that the real world is external to the observer,” while the rest still 
believe “that the real world is almost completely internal to the 
observer,” the “basic division” that is “the deepest problem of the 
contemporary international order.” But Russia, unlike third word 
peasants who think that rain and sun are inside their heads, was perhaps 
coming to the realization that the world is not just a dream, Kissinger 
felt.

Not so the still more savage and bloodthirsty enemy, China, which for 
liberal Democrat intellectuals at various times rampaged as a “a Slavic 
Manchukuo,” a blind puppet of its Kremlin master, or a monster utterly 
unconstrained as it pursued its crazed campaign to crush the world in 
its tentacles, or whatever else circumstances demanded. The remarkable 
tale of doctrinal fanaticism from the 1940s to the 1970s, which makes 
contemporary rhetoric seem rather moderate, is reviewed by James Peck in 
his highly revealing study of the national security culture, 
Washington’s China.

In later years, there were attempts to mimic the valiant deeds of the 
defenders of virtue from the two villainous global conquerors and their 
loyal slaves—for example, when the Gipper strapped on his cowboy boots 
and declared a National Emergency because Nicaraguan hordes were only 
two days from Harlingen Texas, though, as he courageously informed the 
press, despite the tremendous odds, “I refuse to give up. I remember a 
man named Winston Churchill who said, ‘Never give in. Never, never, 
never.’ So we won’t.” With consequences that need not be reviewed.

Even with the best of efforts, however, the attempts never were able to 
recapture the glorious days of Cold War I. But now, at last, those 
heights might be within reach, as another implacable enemy bent on world 
conquest has arisen, which we must contain before it destroys us all: Iran.

Perhaps it’s a lift to the spirits to be able to recover those heady 
Cold War days when at least there was a legitimate force to contain, 
however dubious the pretexts and disgraceful the means. But it is 
instructive to take a closer look at the contours of Cold War II as they 
are being designed by “the former Kremlinologists now running U.S. 
foreign policy, such as Rice and Gates” (Wright).

The task of containment is to establish “a bulwark against Iran’s 
growing influence in the Middle East,” Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper 
explain in the New York Times (July 31). To contain Iran’s influence we 
must surround Iran with U.S. and NATO ground forces, along with massive 
naval deployments in the Persian Gulf and of course incomparable air 
power and weapons of mass destruction. And we must provide a huge flow 
of arms to what Condoleezza Rice calls “the forces of moderation and 
reform” in the region, the brutal tyrannies of Egypt and Saudi Arabia 
and, with particular munificence, Israel, by now virtually an adjunct of 
the militarized high-tech U.S. economy. All to contain Iran’s influence. 
A daunting challenge indeed.

And daunting it is. In Iraq, Iranian support is welcomed by much of the 
majority Shi’ite population. In an August visit to Teheran, Iraqi Prime 
Minister Nouri al-Maliki met with the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, 
President Ahmadinejad, and other senior officials, and thanked Tehran 
for its “positive and constructive” role in improving security in Iraq, 
eliciting a sharp reprimand from President Bush, who “declares Teheran a 
regional peril and asserts the Iraqi leader must understand,” to quote 
the headline of the Los Angeles Times report on al-Maliki’s intellectual 
deficiencies. A few days before, also greatly to Bush’s discomfiture, 
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Washington’s favorite, described Iran as 
“a helper and a solution” in his country. Similar problems abound beyond 
Iran’s immediate neighbors. In Lebanon, according to polls, most 
Lebanese see Iranian-backed Hezbollah “as a legitimate force defending 
their country from Israel,” Wright reports. And in Palestine, 
Iranian-backed Hamas won a free election, eliciting savage punishment of 
the Palestinian population by the U.S. and Israel for the crime of 
voting “the wrong way,” another episode in “democracy promotion.”

But no matter. The aim of U.S. militancy and the arms flow to the 
moderates is to counter “what everyone in the region believes is a 
flexing of muscles by a more aggressive Iran,” according to an unnamed 
senior U.S. government official—“everyone” being the technical term used 
to refer to Washington and its more loyal clients. Iran’s aggression 
consists in its being welcomed by many within the region, and allegedly 
supporting resistance to the U.S. occupation of neighboring Iraq.

It’s likely, though little discussed, that a prime concern about Iran’s 
influence is to the East, where in mid-August, “Russia and China today 
host Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at a summit of a Central Asian 
security club designed to counter U.S. influence in the region,” the 
business press reports. The “security club” is the Shanghai Cooperation 
Organization (SCO), which has been slowly taking shape in recent years. 
Its membership includes not only the two giants Russia and China, but 
also the energy-rich Central Asian states Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, 
Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan. Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was a guest of 
honor at the August meeting. “In another unwelcome development for the 
Americans, Turkmenistan’s President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov also 
accepted an invitation to attend the summit,” another step in its 
improvement of relations with Russia, particularly in energy, reversing 
a long-standing policy of isolation from Russia. “Russia in May secured 
a deal to build a new pipeline to import more gas from Turkmenistan, 
bolstering its dominant hold on supplies to Europe and heading off a 
competing U.S.-backed plan that would bypass Russian territory.”

Along with Iran, there are three other official observer states: India, 
Pakistan, and Mongolia. Washington’s request for similar status was 
denied. In 2005 the SCO called for a timetable for termination of any 
U.S. military presence in Central Asia. The participants at the August 
meeting flew to the Urals to attend the first joint Russia-China 
military exercises on Russian soil.

Association of Iran with the SCO extends its inroads into the Middle 
East, where China has been increasing trade and other relations with the 
jewel in the crown, Saudi Arabia. There is an oppressed Shi’ite 
population in Saudi Arabia that is also susceptible to Iran’s 
influence—and happens to sit on most of Saudi oil. About 40 percent of 
Middle East oil is reported to be heading East, not West. As the flow 
Eastward increases, U.S. control declines over this lever of world 
domination, a “stupendous source of strategic power,” as the State 
Department described Saudi oil 60 years ago.

In Cold War I, the Kremlin had imposed an iron curtain and built the 
Berlin Wall to contain Western influence. In Cold War II, Wright 
reports, the former Kremlinologists framing policy are imposing a “green 
curtain” to bar Iranian influence. In short, government-media doctrine 
is that the Iranian threat is rather similar to the Western threat that 
the Kremlin sought to contain, and the U.S. is eagerly taking on the 
Kremlin’s role in the thrilling new Cold War.

All of this is presented without noticeable concern. Nevertheless, the 
recognition that the U.S. government is modeling itself on Stalin and 
his successors in the new Cold War must be arousing at least some 
flickers of embarrassment. Perhaps that is how we can explain the 
ferocious Washington Post editorial announcing that Iran has escalated 
its aggressiveness to a Hot War: “the Revolutionary Guard, a radical 
state within Iran’s Islamic state, is waging war against the United 
States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible.” The 
U.S. must therefore “fight back,” the editors thunder, finding quite 
“puzzling...the murmurs of disapproval from European diplomats and 
others who say they favor using diplomacy and economic pressure, rather 
than military action, to rein in Iran,” even in the face of its outright 
aggression. The evidence that Iran is waging war against the U.S. is now 
conclusive. After all, it comes from an Administration that has never 
deceived the American people, even improving on the famous stellar 
honesty of its predecessors.

Suppose that for once Washington’s charges happen to be true, and Iran 
really is providing Shi’ite militias with roadside bombs that kill U.S. 
forces, perhaps even making use of some of the advanced weaponry 
lavishly provided to the Revolutionary Guard by Ronald Reagan in order 
to fund the illegal war against Nicaragua, under the pretext of arms for 
hostages (the number of hostages tripled during these endeavors). If the 
charges are true, then Iran could properly be charged with a minuscule 
fraction of the iniquity of the Reagan administration, which provided 
Stinger missiles and other high-tech military aid to the “insurgents” 
seeking to disrupt Soviet efforts to bring stability and justice to 
Afghanistan, as they saw it. Perhaps Iran is even guilty of some of the 
crimes of the Roosevelt administration, which assisted terrorist 
partisans attacking peaceful and sovereign Vichy France in 1940-41, and 
had thus declared war on Germany even before Pearl Harbor.

One can pursue these questions further. The CIA station chief in 
Pakistan in 1981, Howard Hart, reports that “I was the first chief of 
station ever sent abroad with this wonderful order: ‘Go kill Soviet 
soldiers.’ Imagine! I loved it.” Of course “the mission was not to 
liberate Afghanistan,” Tim Wiener writes in his history of the CIA, 
repeating the obvious. But “it was a noble goal,” he writes. Killing 
Russians with no concern for the fate of Afghans is a “noble goal,” but 
support for resistance to a U.S. invasion and occupation would be a vile 
act and declaration of war.

Without irony, the Bush administration and the media charge that Iran is 
“meddling” in Iraq, otherwise presumably free from foreign interference. 
The evidence is partly technical. Do the serial numbers on the 
Improvised Explosive Devices really trace back to Iran? If so, does the 
leadership of Iran know about the IEDs, or only the Iranian 
Revolutionary Guard. Settling the debate, the White House plans to brand 
the Revolutionary Guard as a “specially designated global terrorist” 
force, an unprecedented action against a national military branch, 
authorizing Washington to undertake a wide range of punitive actions. 
Watching in disbelief, much of the world asks whether the U.S. military, 
invading and occupying Iran’s neighbors, might better merit this 
charge—or its Israeli client, now about to receive a huge increase in 
military aid to commemorate 40 years of harsh occupation and illegal 
settlement, and its fifth invasion of Lebanon a year ago.

It is instructive that Washington’s propaganda framework is reflexively 
accepted, apparently without notice, in U.S. and other Western 
commentary and reporting, apart from the marginal fringe of what is 
called “the loony left.” What is considered “criticism” is skepticism as 
to whether all of Washington’s charges about Iranian aggression in Iraq 
are true. It might be an interesting research project to see how closely 
the propaganda of Russia, Nazi Germany, and other aggressors and 
occupiers matched the standards of today’s liberal press and commentators.

The comparisons are of course unfair. Unlike German and Russian 
occupiers, American forces are in Iraq by right, on the principle, too 
obvious even to enunciate, that the U.S. owns the world. Therefore, as a 
matter of elementary logic, the U.S. cannot invade and occupy another 
country. The U.S. can only defend and liberate others. No other category 
exists. Predecessors, including the most monstrous, have commonly sworn 
by the same principle, but again there is an obvious difference: they 
were wrong and we are right. QED.

Another comparison comes to mind, which is studiously ignored when we 
are sternly admonished of the ominous consequences that might follow 
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. The preferred analogy is Indochina, 
highlighted in a shameful speech by the president on August 22. That 
analogy can perhaps pass muster among those who have succeeded in 
effacing from their minds the record of U.S. actions in Indochina, 
including the destruction of much of Vietnam and the murderous bombing 
of Laos and Cambodia as the U.S. began its withdrawal from the wreckage 
of South Vietnam. In Cambodia, the bombing was in accord with 
Kissinger’s genocidal orders: “anything that flies on anything that 
moves”—actions that drove “an enraged populace into the arms of an 
insurgency [the Khmer Rouge] that had enjoyed relatively little support 
before the Kissinger- Nixon bombing was inaugurated,” as Cambodia 
specialists Owen Taylor and Ben Kiernan observe in a highly important 
study that passed virtually without notice, in which they reveal that 
the bombing was five times the incredible level reported earlier, 
greater than all allied bombing in World War II. Completely suppressing 
all relevant facts, it is then possible for the president and many 
commentators to present Khmer Rouge crimes as a justification for 
continuing to devastate Iraq.

But although the grotesque Indochina analogy receives much attention, 
the obvious analogy is ignored: the Russian withdrawal from Afganistan, 
which, as Soviet analysts predicted, led to shocking violence and 
destruction as the country was taken over by Reagan’s favorites, who 
amused themselves by such acts as throwing acid in the faces of women in 
Kabul they regarded as too liberated, and who then virtually destroyed 
the city and much else, creating such havoc and terror that the 
population actually welcomed the Taliban. That analogy could indeed be 
invoked without utter absurdity by advocates of “staying the course,” 
but evidently it is best forgotten.

Under the heading “Secretary Rice’s Mideast mission: contain Iran,” the 
press reports Rice’s warning that Iran is “the single most important 
single-country challenge to...U.S. interests in the Middle East.” That 
is a reasonable judgment. Given the long-standing principle that 
Washington must do “everything in its power to alter or abolish any 
regime not openly allied with America,” Iran does pose a unique 
challenge, and it is natural that the task of containing Iranian 
influence should be a high priority.

As elsewhere, Bush administration rhetoric is relatively mild in this 
case. For the Kennedy administration, “Latin America was the most 
dangerous area in the world” when there was a threat that the 
progressive Cheddi Jagan might win a free election in British Guiana, 
overturned by CIA shenanigans that handed the country over to the 
thuggish racist Forbes Burnham. A few years earlier, Iraq was “the most 
dangerous place in the world” (CIA director Allen Dulles) after General 
Abdel Karim Qassim broke the Anglo-American condominium over Middle East 
oil, overthrowing the pro-U.S. monarchy, which had been heavily 
infiltrated by the CIA. A primary concern was that Qassim might join 
Nasser, then the supreme Middle East devil, in using the incomparable 
energy resources of the Middle East for the domestic population. The 
issue for Washington was not so much access as control. At the time and 
for many years after, Washington was purposely exhausting domestic oil 
resources in the interests of “national security,” meaning security for 
the profits of Texas oil men, like the failed entrepreneur who now sits 
in the Oval Office. But as high-level planner George Kennan had 
explained well before, we cannot relax our guard when there is any 
interfence with “protection of our resources” (which accidentally happen 
to be somewhere else).

Unquestionably, Iran’s government merits harsh condemnation, though it 
has not engaged in worldwide terror, subversion, and aggression, 
following the U.S. model—which extends to today’s Iran as well, if ABC 
news is correct in reporting that the U.S. is supporting Pakistan-based 
Jundullah, which is carrying out terrorist acts inside Iran. The sole 
act of aggression attributed to Iran is the conquest of two small 
islands in the Gulf—under Washington’s close ally the Shah. In addition 
to internal repression—heightened, as Iranian dissidents regularly 
protest, by U.S. militancy—the prospect that Iran might develop nuclear 
weapons also is deeply troubling. Though Iran has every right to develop 
nuclear energy, no one—including the majority of Iranians—wants it to 
have nuclear weapons. That would add to the threat to survival posed 
much more seriously by its near neighbors Pakistan, India, and Israel, 
all nuclear armed with the blessing of the U.S., which most of the world 
regards as the leading threat to world peace, for evident reasons.

Iran rejects U.S. control of the Middle East, challenging fundamental 
policy doctrine, but it hardly poses a military threat. On the contrary, 
it has been the victim of outside powers for years: in recent memory, 
when the U.S. and Britain overthrew its parliamentary government and 
installed a brutal tyrant in 1953, and when the U.S. supported Saddam 
Hussein’s murderous invasion, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of 
Iranians, many with chemical weapons, without the “international 
community” lifting a finger—something that Iranians do not forget as 
easily as the perpetrators. And then under severe sanctions as a 
punishment for disobedience.

Israel regards Iran as a threat. Israel seeks to dominate the region 
with no interference, and Iran might be some slight counterbalance, 
while also supporting domestic forces that do not bend to Israel’s will. 
It may, however, be useful to bear in mind that Hamas has accepted the 
international consensus on a two-state settlement on the international 
border, and Hezbollah, along with Iran, has made clear that it would 
accept any outcome approved by Palestinians, leaving the U.S. and Israel 
isolated in their traditional rejectionism.

But Iran is hardly a military threat to Israel. And whatever threat 
there might be could be overcome if the U.S. would accept the view of 
the great majority of its own citizens and of Iranians and permit the 
Middle East to become a nuclear-weapons free zone, including Iran and 
Israel, and U.S. forces deployed there. One may also recall that UN 
Security Council Resolution 687 of April 3, 1991, to which Washington 
appeals when convenient, calls for “establishing in the Middle East a 
zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their 
delivery.”

It is widely recognized that use of military force in Iran would risk 
blowing up the entire region, with untold consequences beyond. We know 
from polls that in the surrounding countries, where the Iranian 
government is hardly popular—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan—nevertheless 
large majorities prefer even a nuclear-armed Iran to any form of 
military action against it.

The rhetoric about Iran has escalated to the point where both political 
parties and practically the whole U.S. press accept it as legitimate 
and, in fact, honorable, that “all options are on the table,” to quote 
Hillary Clinton and everybody else, possibly even nuclear weapons. “All 
options on the table” means that Washington threatens war.

The UN Charter outlaws “the threat or use of force.” The United States, 
which has chosen to become an outlaw state, disregards international 
laws and norms. We’re allowed to threaten anybody we want—and to attack 
anyone we choose.

Washington’s feverish new Cold War “containment” policy has spread to 
Europe. Washington intends to install a “missile defense system” in the 
Czech Republic and Poland, marketed to Europe as a shield against 
Iranian missiles. Even if Iran had nuclear weapons and long-range 
missiles, the chances of its using them to attack Europe are perhaps on 
a par with the chances of Europe’s being hit by an asteroid, so perhaps 
Europe would do as well to invest in an asteroid defense system. 
Furthermore, if Iran were to indicate the slightest intention of aiming 
a missile at Europe or Israel, the country would be vaporized.

Of course, Russian planners are gravely upset by the shield proposal. We 
can imagine how the U.S. would respond if a Russian anti-missile system 
were erected in Canada. The Russians have good reason to regard an 
anti-missile system as part of a first-strike weapon against them. It is 
generally understood that such a system could never block a first 
strike, but it could conceivably impede a retaliatory strike. On all 
sides, “missile defense” is therefore understood to be a first-strike 
weapon, eliminating a deterrent to attack. A small initial installation 
in Eastern Europe could easily be a base for later expansion. More 
obviously, the only military function of such a system with regard to 
Iran, the declared aim, would be to bar an Iranian deterrent to U.S. or 
Israel aggression.

Not surprisingly, in reaction to the “missile defense” plans, Russia has 
resorted to its own dangerous gestures, including the recent decision to 
renew long-range patrols by nuclear-capable bombers after a 15-year 
hiatus, in one recent case near the U.S. military base on Guam. These 
actions reflect Russia’s anger “over what it has called American and 
NATO aggressiveness, including plans for a missile-defense system in the 
Czech Republic and Poland, analysts said” (Andrew Kramer, NYT).

The shield ratchets the threat of war a few notches higher, in the 
Middle East and elsewhere, with incalculable consequences, and the 
potential for a terminal nuclear war. The immediate fear is that by 
accident or design, Washington’s war planners or their Israeli surrogate 
might decide to escalate their Cold War II into a hot one—in this case a 
real hot war.

Z

Noam Chomsky is a linguist, lecturer, social critic, and author of 
numerous articles and books.