[Peace-discuss] Chomsky on US foreign policy

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From a radio interview 9 June 2009.]

The spectrum [of those who make US foreign policy] is pretty narrow. So whether 
you're talking about the technocratic elite of liberal intellectuals or the 
Straussian neo-cons, they share some fundamental ideas.

One idea that they share is that the public has to be kept out of influencing 
policy. These are elite decisions made by small groups who call themselves 'the 
responsible men' or 'experts' or something like that. And you've got to make 
sure the public doesn't interfere with them.

That's a very standard theme. In fact it goes back to James Madison and the 
framing of the constitution.

And they also think that it's their task, at the helm, is to ensure that what 
are called US 'interests', which means the interests of the state-corporate 
sector and those who dominate it, will be able to flourish around the world, 
which constantly means preventing dominoes from falling, preventing independent 
nationalist forces from breaking out of control.

Now during the Cold War it was indeed associated with the Soviet Union and China 
but it's done in a pretty comical way. Actually there's a wonderful book about 
it now by James Peck, a very good China scholar, called Washington's China. It's 
the first book to go through, carefully, the national security culture, the 
declassified documentary record of the national security council and those 
around it. And it's very similar all the way through from the '40's all the way 
through Nixon when the record runs dry. They had a conclusion. The conclusion 
was that China's an evil force, we've got to stop them. And then they shifted 
the argument, so, depending on the circumstances, so as to lead to that 
conclusion. And it's put in terms that sounds almost manic.

So, just to give you an example, in the case of Viet Nam when the US decided to 
support France, 1950, US intelligence was assigned a task. The task was to prove 
that Ho Chi Minh was a puppet of either Russia or China or the Sino-Soviet 
conspiracy, didn't really matter whom, just a puppet of one of them. Now they 
worked hard on it. You look through the internal record you see a very extensive 
effort to try to prove it. Finally US intelligence came up with a conclusion 
that's very odd, that the Viet Minh seem to be the only group in Southeast Asia 
that doesn't even seem to have contact with either China or Russia...

There was an article by Flint and Hillary Leverett, Iran specialists, in the New 
York Times, a couple weeks ago, in which they described Obama's policies as 
'prettified Bush'. I think that's fairly accurate. He's pulled back from the 
some of the more extreme stands of the Bush administration which were really off 
the spectrum and back more towards the normal centrist Democrat. But a lot of 
the rest is warmed-over Bush. So for example the speech in Cairo, the other day, 
if you put aside the style, which was different, the content Bush could have said.

[Full article at <http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20090609.htm>.]