"Hegemony or Survival": The Everything Explainer
Revered and reviled, Noam Chomsky is a global phenomenon. Indeed, if
book sales are any standard to go by, he may be the most widely read
American voice on foreign policy on the planet today. With the United
States increasingly suspect around the world -- a recent Gallup poll found
that 55 percent of citizens in Britain thought the United States ''posed a
threat to peace,'' while a June BBC survey found that 60 percent of
Indonesians, 71 percent of Jordanians and even 25 percent of Canadians
viewed the United States as a greater threat than Al Qaeda -- the appetite
for Chomsky's polemics is only increasing. It is but one testament to
America's diminished standing that his most recent book, ''9-11,'' a
slight collection of interviews (largely conducted via e-mail), was
published in 26 countries and translated into 23 languages, finding its
way onto best-seller lists in the United States, Canada, Germany, India,
Italy, Japan and New Zealand. And at home, as mainstream dissent
dissipated in the wake of 9/11, a new generation of disgruntled critics
has turned to Chomsky for guidance. ''Hegemony or Survival'' is a raging and often meandering assault on
United States foreign policy and the elites who shape it. Drawing upon
case after historical case of violent meddling (Iran, Cuba, Vietnam,
Nicaragua, Kosovo, etc.), Chomsky argues that the Bush administration's
war on terrorism builds upon a long tradition of foreign interventions
carried out in the name of ''liberation'' or ''counterterror,'' of special
interests run amok and of disdain for international institutions that dare
to challenge American hegemony. ''It is only natural,'' he writes, ''that
state policy should seek to construct a world system open to U.S. economic
penetration and political control, tolerating no rivals or threats.'' Chomsky finds the Bush administration new in only two ways: the
crassness of its motives is far more transparent, and it is now playing
for far higher stakes. ''Over the years, tactics have been refined and
modified,'' Chomsky writes, ''progressively ratcheting up the means of
violence and driving our endangered species closer to the edge of
catastrophe.'' Unless American statesmen stop ranking hegemony above
survival, he says, our 100,000-year-old experiment in human life may well
be doomed. For Chomsky, the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed.
America, the prime oppressor, can do no right, while the sins of those
categorized as oppressed receive scant mention. Because he deems American
foreign policy inherently violent and expansionist, he is unconcerned with
the motives behind particular policies, or the ethics of particular
individuals in government. And since he considers the United States the
leading terrorist state, little distinguishes American air strikes in
Serbia undertaken at night with high-precision weaponry from World Trade
Center attacks timed to maximize the number of office workers who have
just sat down with their morning coffee. It is inconceivable, in Chomsky's view, that American power could be
harnessed for good. Thus, the billions of dollars in foreign aid earmarked
each year for disaster relief, schools, famine prevention, AIDS treatment,
etc. -- and the interventions in Kosovo and East Timor -- have to be
explained away. The Kosovo and Timor operations' prime achievement, he
writes, was to establish the norm of resort to force without Security
Council authorization. On this both the Kosovars and the Timorese, whose
welfare Chomsky has heroically championed over the years, would strongly
disagree. ''Survival or Hegemony'' is not easy to read. Chomsky's glib and
caustic tone is distracting. He relies heavily upon quotations, but rarely
identifies the speaker or writer. The endnotes supply more frustration.
Bill Clinton's humanitarian rationale for the Kosovo war was ridiculed
''by leading military and political analysts'' in Israel, we are told, but
the citation leads only to an earlier book by Chomsky himself. When he
agrees with a claim, Chomsky introduces it with the word
''uncontroversially'' or credits it to ''distinguished authorities.''
Those who don't share his viewpoint don't simply disagree; they are the
''prevailing intellectual culture'' or the ''educated classes.'' This is a
thinker far too accustomed to preaching to an uncritical choir. Often he meets official falsehoods with exaggerations of his own.
President Clinton, he says, ''was flying Al Qaeda and Hezbollah operatives
to Bosnia to support the U.S. side in the ongoing wars.'' And ''radical
Islamists'' have taken over in Kosovo, leading to a ''Taliban
phenomenon.'' These are far-fetched claims that he doesn't adequately back
up. But for all that is wrong with ''Hegemony or Survival,'' reading
Chomsky today is sobering and instructive for two reasons. First, his
critiques have come to influence and reflect mainstream opinion elsewhere
in the world; and second, the radicalism of the Bush administration has
laid bare many of the structural defects in American foreign policy,
defects that Chomsky has long assailed. Much blood was shed in the last century by United States forces or
proxies in the name of righteous ends. Because every state justifies its
wars on the grounds of self-defense or altruism, Chomsky is correct that
any ''profession of noble intent is predictable, and therefore carries no
information.'' He is also right to object to the historical amnesia that
American statesmen bring to their dealings with other states. He seethes
at the hypocrisy of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell, who
invoked Saddam Hussein's 1988 gassing attacks in order to help justify the
recent war, but who did not see fit to explain why the Reagan
administration (which they served as senior officials) doubled its aid to
Hussein's regime after learning of the gassings. Chomsky also denounces the dependence of foreign policy elites on
special interests. With African agriculture ravaged by American farm
subsidies, with Israeli settlements unchallenged by Washington's elites
and with campaign contributors to both parties landing mammoth paybacks in
overseas contracts, it is certainly well past time to sound the alarm.
And it is essential to demand, as Chomsky does, that a country with the
might of the United States stop being so selective in applying its
principles. We will not allow our sovereignty to be infringed by
international treaty commitments in the areas of human rights or even arms
control, but we demand that others should. We rebuff the complaints of
foreigners about the 650 people who remain holed up in Guantanamo kennels,
denied access to lawyers and family members, with not even their names
released. Yet we expect others to take heed of our protests about due
process. We have ''official enemies'' -- those whose police abuses, arms
shipments and electoral thefts we eagerly expose (Zimbabwe, Burma, North
Korea, Iran). But the sins of our allies in the war on terror (Saudi
Arabia, Turkey, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, Uzbekistan) are met with
''intentional ignorance.'' Although he is typically thin on prescriptions,
Chomsky offers ''one simple way to reduce the threat of terror: stop
participating in it.'' Chomsky is wrong to think that individuals within the American
government are not thinking seriously about the costs of alliances with
repressive regimes; he is also wrong to suggest that it would be easy to
get the balance right between liberty and security, or democracy and
equality -- or to figure out what the hell to do about Pakistan. But he is
right to demand that officials in Washington devote themselves more
zealously to strengthening international institutions, curbing arms flows
and advancing human rights. ''It is easy to dismiss the world as
'irrelevant,' or consumed by 'paranoid anti-Americanism,' '' he writes,
''but perhaps not wise.''
Samantha Power is the author of '' 'A Problem From Hell': America and
the Age of Genocide,'' winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general
nonfiction.
America's Quest
for Global Dominance.
By Noam Chomsky.
278 pp. New
York: Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $22.
ince Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have been heard to exclaim -- with
varying degrees of shame, bewilderment and indignation -- ''Why do they
hate us?'' The response tends to fall between two extremes. Bush
administration officials say, in essence, they hate us for who we are. As
President Bush has put it, ''They hate progress, and freedom, and choice,
and culture, and music, and laughter, and women, and Christians, and Jews
and all Muslims who reject their distorted doctrines.'' At the opposite
end stands the M.I.T. professor Noam Chomsky. ''Why do they hate us?''
Chomsky asks in ''Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global
Dominance.'' ''Because of you and your associates, Mr. Bush, and what you
have done.''
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