[Peace-discuss] We own the world (esp. the Mideast)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From an interview with Noam Chomsky January 23, 2008.]

Q: Is the leading Democrats’ policy vis-à-vis Iraq at all different from the 
Bush administration’s policy?

Noam Chomsky: It’s somewhat different. The situation is very similar to Vietnam. 
The opposition to the war today in elite sectors, including every viable 
candidate, is pure cynicism, completely unprincipled: “If we can get away with 
it, it’s fine. If it costs us too much, it’s bad.” That’s the way the Vietnam 
opposition was in the elite sectors.

Take, say, Anthony Lewis, who’s about as far to the critical extreme as you can 
find in the media. In his final words evaluating the war in The New York Times 
in 1975, he said the war began with “blundering efforts to do good” but by 1969, 
namely a year after the American business community had turned against the war, 
it was clear that the United States “could not impose a solution except at a 
price too costly to itself,” so therefore it was a “disastrous mistake.” Nazi 
generals could have said the same thing after Stalingrad and probably did. 
That’s the extreme position in the left liberal spectrum. Or take the 
distinguished historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger. When the war was 
going sour under LBJ, he wrote that “we all pray” that the hawks are right and 
that more troops will lead to victory. And he knew what victory meant. He said 
we’re leaving “a land of ruin and wreck,” but “we all pray” that escalation will 
succeed and if it does “we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of 
the American government.” But probably the hawks are wrong, so escalation is a 
bad idea.

You can translate the rhetoric almost word by word into the elite, including 
political elite, opposition to the Iraq war.

It’s based on two principles. The first principle is: “we totally reject 
American ideals.” The only people who accept American ideals are Iraqis. The 
United States totally rejects them. What American ideals? The principles of the 
Nuremburg decision. The Nuremburg tribunal, which is basically American, 
expressed high ideals, which we profess. Namely, of all the war crimes, 
aggression is the supreme international crime, which encompasses within it all 
of the evil that follows. It’s obvious that the Iraq invasion is a pure case of 
aggression and therefore, according to our ideals, it encompasses all the evil 
that follows, like sectarian warfare, al-Qaeda Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and everything 
else. The chief U.S. Prosecutor Robert Jackson, addressed the tribunal and said, 
“we should remember that we’re handing these Nazi war criminals a poisoned 
chalice. If we ever sip from it we must be subject to the same principles or 
else the whole thing is a farce.” Well, it seems that almost no one in the 
American elite accepts that or can even understand it. But Iraqis accept it.

The latest study of Iraqi opinion, carried out by the American military, 
provides an illustration. There is an interesting article about it by Karen 
DeYoung in the Washington Post. She said the American military is very excited 
and cheered to see the results of this latest study, which showed that Iraqis 
have “shared beliefs.” They’re coming together. They’re getting to political 
reconciliation. Well, what are the shared beliefs? The shared beliefs are that 
the Americans are responsible for all the horrors that took place in Iraq, as 
the Nuremberg principles hold, and they should get out. That’s the shared 
belief. So yes, they accept American principles. But the American government 
rejects them totally as does elite opinion. And the same is true in Europe, 
incidentally. That’s point number one.

The second point is that there is a shared assumption here and in the West that 
we own the world. Unless you accept that assumption, the entire discussion that 
is taking place is unintelligible. For example, you see a headline in the 
newspaper, as I saw recently in the Christian Science Monitor, something like 
“New Study of Foreign Fighters in Iraq.” Who are the foreign fighters in Iraq? 
Some guy who came in from Saudi Arabia. How about the 160,000 American troops? 
Well, they’re not foreign fighters in Iraq because we own the world; therefore 
we can’t be foreign fighters anywhere. Like, if the United States invades 
Canada, we won’t be foreign. And if anybody resists it, they’re enemy 
combatants, we send them to Guantanamo...

http://chomsky.info/bios/2004----.htm