Imperial Ambition
David Barsamian interviews Noam Chomsky; Monthly Review; May 16, 2003

David Barsamian: What are the regional implications of the U.S. invasion and
occupation of Iraq?

Noam Chomsky: I think not only the region but the world in general perceives
it correctly as a kind of an easy test case to try to establish a norm for
use of military force, which was declared in general terms last September.
Last September, the National Security Strategy of the United States of
America was issued. It presented a somewhat novel and unusually extreme
doctrine on the use of force in the world. And it's hard not to notice that
the drumbeat for war in Iraq coincided with that. It also coincided with the
onset of the congressional campaign. All these are tied together.



The new doctrine was not one of preemptive war, which arguably falls within
some stretching of the U.N. Charter, but rather of something that doesn't
even begin to have any grounds in international law, namely, preventive war.
The doctrine, you recall, was that the United States would rule the world by
force, and that if there is any challenge perceived to its domination, a
challenge perceived in the distance, invented, imagined, whatever, then the
U.S. will have the right to destroy that challenge before it becomes a
threat. That's preventive war, not preemptive war.



And if you want to declare a doctrine, a powerful state has the capacity to
create what is called a new norm. So if India invades Pakistan to put an end
to monstrous atrocities, that's not a norm. But if the United States bombs
Serbia on dubious grounds, that's a norm. That's what power means.



So if you want to establish a new norm, you have to do something. And the
easiest way to do it is to select a completely defenseless target, which can
be completely overwhelmed by the most massive military force in human
history. However, in order to do that credibly, at least to your own
population, you have to frighten them. So the defenseless target has to be
turned into an awesome threat to survival which was responsible for
September 11 and is about to attack us again, and so on and so forth. And
that was indeed done. Beginning last September there was a massive effort
which substantially succeeded in convincing Americans, alone in the world,
that Saddam Hussein is not only a monster but a threat to their existence.
That was the content of the October congressional resolution and a lot of
things since. And it shows in the polls. And by now about half the
population even believes that he was responsible for September 11.



So all this falls together. You have the doctrine pronounced. You have a
norm established in a very easy case. The population is driven into a panic
and, alone in the world, believes fantasies of this kind and therefore is
willing to support military force in self-defense. And if you believe this,
then it really is self-defense. So it's kind of like a textbook example of
aggression, with the purpose of extending the scope of further aggression.
Once the easy case is handled, you can move on to think of harder cases.



Those are the main reasons why so much of the world is overwhelmingly
opposed to the war. It's not just the attack on Iraq. Many people perceive
it correctly as exactly the way it's intended, as a firm statement that you
had better watch out, we're on the way. That's why the United States is now
regarded as the greatest threat to peace in the world by probably the vast
majority of the population of the world. George Bush has succeeded within a
year in converting the United States to a country that is greatly feared,
disliked, and even hated.



DB: At the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in late January, you described
Bush and the people around him as "radical nationalists" engaging in
"imperial violence." Is this regime in Washington substantively different
from previous ones?



NC: It is useful to have some historical perspective. So let's go to the
opposite end of the political spectrum, the Kennedy liberals, about as far
as you can get. In 1963, they announced a doctrine which is not very
different from Bush's national security strategy report. This was in 1963.
Dean Acheson, a respected elder statesman, a senior adviser to the Kennedy
administration, delivered a lecture to the American Society for
International Law in which he instructed them that, no legal challenge
arises in the case of a U.S. response to a challenge to its position,
prestige, or authority. The wording was pretty much like that. What was he
referring to? He was referring to the U.S. terrorist war and economic
warfare against Cuba. And the timing is quite significant. This was shortly
after the missile crisis, which drove the world to the edge of nuclear war.
And that was largely a result of a major campaign of international terrorism
aimed at what's now called regime change, a major factor that led to the
missiles being sent. Right afterwards, Kennedy stepped up the international
terrorist campaign, and Acheson informed the Society for International Law
that we had the right of preventive war against a mere challenge to our
position and prestige, not even a threat to our existence. His wording, in
fact, was even more extreme than the Bush doctrine last September.



On the other hand, to put it in perspective, that was a proclamation by Dean
Acheson. It wasn't an official statement of policy. And it's obviously not
the first or last declaration of this kind. This one last September is
unusual in its brazenness and in the fact that it is a formal statement of
policy, not just a statement by a high official.



DB: A slogan we have all heard at peace rallies is "No Blood for Oil." The
whole issue of oil is often referred to as the driving force behind the U.S.
attack and occupation of Iraq. How central is oil to U.S. strategy?



NC: It's undoubtedly central. I don't think any sane person doubts that. The
Gulf region is the main energy-producing region of the world. It has been
since the Second World War. It's expected to be at least for another
generation. It's a huge source of strategic power, of material wealth. And
Iraq is absolutely central to it. It has the second largest oil reserves. It
's very easily accessible, cheap. To control Iraq is to be in a very strong
position to determine the price and production levels, not too high, not too
low, to probably undermine OPEC, and to swing your weight around throughout
the world. That's been true since the Second World War. It has nothing in
particular to do with access to the oil; the U.S. doesn't really intend to
access it. But it does have to do with control. So that's in the background.
If Iraq was somewhere in Central Africa, it wouldn't be chosen for this test
case. So that's certainly there in the background, just as it's there in
less crucial regions, like Central Asia. However, it doesn't account for the
specific timing of the operation, because that's a constant concern.



DB: A 1945 State Department document on Middle East oil described it as
"...a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material
prizes in world history." The U.S. imports 15 percent of its oil from
Venezuela. It also imports oil from Colombia and Nigeria. All three of those
states are perhaps, from Washington's perspective, somewhat problematic
right now, with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and serious internal conflicts,
literally civil war, in Colombia and uprisings in Nigeria threatening oil
supplies there. What do you think about all of those factors?



NC: That's very pertinent, and those are the regions where the U.S. actually
intends to have access. The Middle East it wants to control. But, at least
according to intelligence projections, the U.S. intends to rely on what they
regard as more stable Atlantic Basin resources-Atlantic Basin means West
Africa and the Western Hemisphere-which are more totally under U.S. control
than the Middle East, which is a difficult region. So the projections are:
control the Middle East, but maintain access to the Atlantic Basin,
including the countries you mentioned. It does, therefore, follow that lack
of conformity, disruption of one kind or another, in those areas is a
significant threat, and there is very likely to be another episode like
Iraq, if this one works the way the civilian planners at the Pentagon hope.
If it's an easy victory, no fighting, establish a new regime which you will
call democratic, and not too much catastrophe, if it works like that, they
are going to be emboldened on to the next step.



And the next step, you can think of several possibilities. One of them,
indeed, is the Andean region. The U.S. has military bases all around it now.
There are military forces right in there. Colombia and Venezuela are both,
especially Venezuela, substantial oil producers, and there is more
elsewhere, like Ecuador, and even Brazil. Yes, that's a possibility, that
the next step in the campaign of preventive wars, once the so-called norm is
established and accepted, would be to go on there. Another possibility is
Iran.



DB: Indeed, Iran. The U.S. was advised by none other than that, as Bush
called him, "man of peace," Sharon, to go after Iran "the day after" they
finish with Iraq. What about Iran? A designated axis-of-evil state and also
a country that has a lot of oil.



NC: As far as Israel is concerned, Iraq has never been much of an issue.
They consider it a kind of pushover. But Iran is a different story. Iran is
a much more serious military and economic force. And for years Israel has
been pressing the United States to take on Iran. Iran is too big for Israel
to attack, so they want the big boys to do it.



And it's quite likely that the war may already be under way. A year ago,
over 10 percent of the Israeli air force was reported to be permanently
based in eastern Turkey, that is, in these huge U.S. military bases in
eastern Turkey. And they are reported to be flying reconnaissance over the
Iranian border. In addition, there are credible reports, that there are
efforts, that the U.S. and Turkey and Israel are attempting to stir up Azeri
nationalist forces in northern Iran to move towards a kind of a linkage of
parts of Iran with Azerbaijan. There is a kind of an axis of
U.S.-Turkish-Israeli power in the region opposed to Iran that may
ultimately, perhaps, lead to the split-up of Iran and maybe military attack.
Although there will be a military attack only if it's taken for granted that
Iran would be basically defenseless. They're not going to invade anyone who
can fight back.



DB: With U.S. military forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, as well as bases
in Turkey and Central Asia, Iran is literally surrounded now. Might not that
objective reality on the ground push forces inside Iran to develop nuclear
weapons, if they don't already have them, in self-defense?



NC: Very likely. The little evidence we have-serious evidence-indicates that
the 1981 Israeli bombing of the Osirak reactor probably stimulated and may
have initiated the Iraqi nuclear weapons development program. They were
engaged in building a nuclear plant, but what it was nobody knew. It was
investigated on the ground after the bombing by a well-known nuclear
physicist from Harvard-I believe he was head of the Harvard physics
department at the time. He published his analysis in the leading scientific
journal, Nature. According to him, it was a power plant. He's an expert on
this topic. Other Iraqi sources, exiled, have indicated-we can't prove
it-that nothing much was going on. They may have been toying with the idea
of nuclear weapons, but that the bombing of it did stimulate the nuclear
weapons program. You can't prove this, but that's what the evidence looks
like. And it's very plausible. That doesn't have to be true. What you
described is highly likely. If you come out and say, "Look, we're going to
attack you," and countries know that they have no means of conventional
defense, you're virtually ordering them to develop weapons of mass
destruction and networks of terror. It's transparent. That's exactly why the
CIA and everyone else predicted it.



DB: What does the Iraq war and occupation mean for the Palestinians?



NC: Disaster.



DB: No roadmaps to peace?



NC: It's interesting to read it. One of the rules of journalism-I don't know
exactly how it got established, but it's held with absolute consistency-is
that when you mention George Bush's name in an article, the headline has to
speak of his vision and the article has to talk about his dreams. Maybe
there will be a photograph of him right next to it peering into the
distance. And one of George Bush's dreams and visions is to have a
Palestinian state somewhere, sometime, in some unspecified place, maybe in
the desert. And we are supposed to worship and praise that as a magnificent
vision. It has become a convention of journalists. There was a lead story in
the Wall Street Journal on March 21 which I think had the words "vision" and
"dream" about ten times.



The vision and the dream is that maybe the United States will stop
undermining totally the long-term efforts of the rest of the world,
virtually without exception, to create some kind of a viable political
settlement. Up until now, the U.S. has been blocking it, for the last
twenty-five to thirty years. The Bush administration went even further in
blocking it, sometimes in pretty extreme ways, so extreme that they weren't
even reported.



For example, last December at the U.N., for the first time the Bush
administration reversed U.S. policy on Jerusalem. Up until now, the U.S.
had, at least in principle, gone along with the 1968 Security Council
resolution ordering Israel to revoke its annexation and occupation and
settlement policies in East Jerusalem. And for the first time, last
December, the Bush administration reversed that. That's one of many cases
intended to undermine the possibility of any meaningful political
settlement. To disguise this, it's called a vision, and the effort to pursue
it is called a U.S. initiative, although in fact what it really is, as
anyone who pays the slightest attention to the history knows, is a U.S.
effort to catch up to long-standing European and Arab efforts and to try to
cut them down so they don't mean very much. The great praise for Sharon in
the United States, who is now considered a great statesman-he is after,
after all, one of the leading terrorist commanders in the world for the last
fifty years-that's an interesting phenomenon, and it reveals another
substantial achievement of propaganda, the whole story, and a dangerous one.



In mid-March, Bush made what was called his first significant pronouncement
on the Middle East, on the Arab/Israeli problem. He gave a speech. Big
headlines. First significant statement in years. If you read it, it was
boilerplate, except for one sentence. That one sentence, if you take a look
at it closely, gives his roadmap: as the peace process advances, Israel
should terminate new settlement programs. What does that mean? That means
until the peace process reaches a point that Bush endorses, which could be
indefinitely far in the future, until then Israel should continue to build
settlements. That's a change in policy. Up until now, officially at least,
the U.S. has been opposed to expansion of the illegal settlement programs
that make a political settlement impossible. But now Bush is saying the
opposite: Go on and settle. We'll keep paying for it, until we decide that
somehow the peace process has reached an adequate point. So, yes, it was a
significant change towards more aggression, undermining of international
law, and undermining of the possibilities of peace. That's not the way it
was portrayed. But take a look at the wording.



DB: You've described the level of public protest and resistance to the Iraq
war as "unprecedented"; never before has there been so much opposition
before a war began. Where is that resistance going?



NC: I don't know any way to predict human affairs. It will go the way people
decide it will go. There are many possibilities. It should intensify. The
tasks are now much greater and more serious than they were before. On the
other hand, it's harder. It's just psychologically easier to organize to
oppose a military attack than it is to oppose a long-standing program of
imperial ambition, of which this attack is one phase, and of which others
are going to come next. That takes more thought, more dedication, more
long-term engagement. It's the difference between deciding, okay, I'm in
this for the long haul and saying, okay, I'm going out to a demonstration
tomorrow and then back home. Those are choices, all of them. The same in the
civil rights movement, the women's movement, anything.



DB: Talk about threats to and intimidation of dissidents here inside the
United States, including roundups of immigrants, and citizens, for that
matter.



NC: Vulnerable people like immigrants, definitely have to be concerned. The
current government has claimed rights which go beyond any precedents. There
are some in wartime, but those are pretty ugly ones, like the 1942 round up
of Japanese, or, say, Wilson during the First World War, which was pretty
awful. But they're now claiming rights that are quite without precedent,
including even the right to arrest citizens, hold them in detention without
access to family or lawyers, and do so indefinitely, without charges.
Immigrants and other vulnerable people should certainly be cautious. On the
other hand, for people like us, citizens with any privileges, though there
are threats, as compared with what people face in most of the world, they
are so slight that it's hard to get very upset about them. I've just been
back from Turkey a couple of times and Colombia, and compared with the
threats that people face there, we're living in heaven. And they don't worry
about it. They do, obviously, but they don't let it stop them.



DB: Do you see Europe and East Asia emerging as counterforces to U.S. power
at some point?



NC: They're emerging all right. There is no doubt that Europe and Asia are
economic forces roughly on a par with North America, and have their own
interests. Their interests are not simply to follow U.S. orders. They're
tightly linked. So, for example, the corporate sector in Europe, the U.S.,
and most of Asia are linked in all kinds of ways and have common interests.
On the other hand, there are separate interests, and these are problems that
go way back, especially with Europe.



The U.S. has always had an ambivalent attitude towards Europe. It wanted
Europe to be unified, as a more efficient market for U.S. corporations,
great advantages of scale. On the other hand, it was always concerned about
the threat that Europe might move off in another direction. A lot of the
issues about the accession of the East European countries to the European
Union have a lot to do with that. The U.S. is strongly in favor of it,
because it's hoping that these countries will be more susceptible to U.S.
influence and will be able to undermine the core of Europe, which is France
and Germany, the big industrial countries, which might move in a somewhat
more independent direction.



Also in the background is a long-standing U.S. hatred of the European social
market system, which provides decent wages and working conditions and
benefits. It's very different from the U.S. system. And they don't want that
model to exist, because it's a dangerous one. People get funny ideas. And it
's very explicitly stated that with the accession of Eastern European
countries, with low wages and repression of labor and so on, it may help
undermine the social and worker standards in Western Europe, and that would
be a big benefit for the U.S.



DB: With the U.S. economy deteriorating and with more layoffs, how is the
Bush administration going to maintain what some are calling a garrison state
with permanent war and occupation of numerous countries? How are they going
to pull it off?



NC: They have to pull it off for about another six years. By that time they
hope they will have institutionalized highly reactionary programs within the
United States. They will have left the economy in a very serious state, with
huge deficits, pretty much the way they did in the 1980s. And then it will
be somebody else's problem to patch it together. Meanwhile, they will have,
they hope, undermined social programs, diminished democracy, which of course
they hate, by transferring decisions out of the public arena into private
hands. and they will have done it in a way that will be very hard to
disentangle. So they will have left a legacy internally that will be painful
and hard. But only for the majority of the population. The people they're
concerned about are going to be making out like bandits. Very much like the
Reagan years. It's the same people, after all.



And internationally, they hope that they will have institutionalized the
doctrines of imperial domination through force and preventive war as a
choice. The U.S. now in military spending probably exceeds the rest of the
world combined, and it's much more advanced and moving out into extremely
dangerous directions, like space. They assume, I suppose, that no matter
what happens to the American economy, that will give such overwhelming force
that people will just have to do what they say.



DB: What do you say to the peace activists who labored for so long trying to
prevent the invasion of Iraq and who are now feeling a sense of anger and
sadness?



NC: That they should be realistic. Abolitionism. How long did the struggle
go on before they made any progress? If you give up every time you don't
achieve the immediate gain you want, you're just guaranteeing that the worst
is going to happen. These are long, hard struggles. And, in fact, what
happened in the last couple of months should be seen quite positively. The
basis was created for expansion and development of a peace and justice
movement that will move on to much harder tasks. And that's the way these
things go. It isn't easy.