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Doctrine of good intentions
Noam Chomsky
IT IS no easy task to gain some
understanding of human affairs. In some respects, it is harder than the
natural sciences. Mother Nature doesn’t readily provide the answers, but at
least she doesn’t go out of her way to set up barriers to understanding.
In human affairs, it is necessary to detect and dismantle barriers erected
by doctrinal systems, which adopt a range of devices that flow very
naturally from concentration of power.
To facilitate the marketing effort, doctrinal systems commonly portray the
current enemy as diabolical by its very nature. The characterisation is
sometimes accurate, but the crimes are rarely the source of the call for
forceful measures against some target that stands in the way of current
plans.
A recent illustration is Saddam Hussein — a defenceless target characterised
as an awesome threat to our survival who was responsible for Sept. 11 and
about to attack us again.
In 1982, the Reagan administration dropped Saddam from the list of states
supporting terrorism so that the flow of military and other aid to the
murderous tyrant could begin. It continued long after Saddam’s worst
atrocities and the end of the war with Iran, and included the means to
develop weapons of mass destruction. The record, hardly obscure, falls under
the “general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that
particular fact,” in Orwell’s phrase.
It is necessary to create misimpressions not only about the current “Great
Satan” but also about one’s own unique nobility. In particular, aggression
and terror must be portrayed as self-defence and dedication to inspiring
visions.
Emperor Hirohito of Japan, in his surrender declaration in August 1945, told
his people, “We declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere
desire to ensure Japan’s self-preservation and the stabilisation of East
Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty
of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandisement.”
The history of international crimes overflows with similar sentiments,
including the lowest depths. Writing in 1935, with the dark clouds of Nazism
settling, Martin Heidegger declared that Germany must now forestall “the
peril of world darkening” beyond the nation’s borders. With its “new
spiritual energies” revived under Nazi rule, Germany is at last able “to
take on its historic mission” of saving the world from “annihilation” by the
“indifferent mass” elsewhere, primarily America and Russia.
Even individuals of the highest intelligence and moral integrity succumb to
the pathology. At the peak of Britain’s crimes in India and China, of which
he had an intimate knowledge, John Stuart Mill wrote his classic essay on
humanitarian intervention, urging Britain to undertake the enterprise
vigorously — even though it will be “held up to obloquy” by backward
Europeans who can’t comprehend that England is “a novelty in the world,” a
nation that acts only “in the service of others,” selflessly bearing the
costs of bringing peace and justice to the world.
The image of righteous exceptionalism appears to be close to universal. For
the United States, one constant theme is the dedication to bring democracy
and independence to a suffering world.
The standard story in scholarship and in the media is that US foreign policy
contains two conflicting tendencies. One is what is called Wilsonian
idealism, which is based on noble intentions. The other is sober realism,
which says that we have to realise the limitations of our good intentions.
Those are the only two options.
Whatever the operative rhetoric, it takes discipline not to recognise the
elements of truth in historian Arno Mayer’s observation that since 1947,
America has been a major perpetrator of “state terror” and other ‘rogue
actions,’ causing immense harm, “always in the name of democracy, liberty
and justice.”
For the US the longtime enemy has been independent nationalism, particularly
when it threatens to become a “virus,” to borrow Henry Kissinger’s reference
to democratic socialism in Chile after Salvador Allende was elected
president in 1970. The virus therefore had to be extirpated, as it was, on
Tuesday, Sept. 11, 1973, a date often called “the first 9/ll” in Latin
America.
On that date, after years of US subversion, Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s forces
attacked the Chilean Presidential palace. Allende died, an apparent suicide,
unwilling to surrender to the assault that demolished Latin America’s oldest
and most vibrant democracy, and Pinochet established a brutal regime. The
official death toll of the first 9/11 is 3,200; the actual toll is commonly
estimated at about double that figure. In per capita terms, that would
amount to 50,000-100,000 killed in the US.
Washington firmly supported Pinochet’s regime, and had no slight role in its
initial triumph. Pinochet soon moved to integrate other US-backed Latin
American military dictatorships in the international state terrorist
network, Operation Condor, that wreaked havoc in Latin America.
This is one of all-too-many illustrations of “democracy promotion” in the
hemisphere and elsewhere. Now we are led to believe that the US mission in
Afghanistan and Iraq is to bring democracy there.
“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather they hate our policies,”
concludes a report last September by the Defence Science Board, a Pentagon
advisory panel, adding that “when American public diplomacy talks about
bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than
self-serving hypocrisy.” As Muslims see it, the report continues, “American
occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only
more chaos and suffering.”
In a Financial Times article in July, citing the DSB report, David Gardner
observes: “For the most part, Arabs plausibly believe it was Osama bin Laden
who smashed the status quo, not George W. Bush, (because) the 9/11 attacks
made it impossible for the West and its Arab despot clients to continue to
ignore a political set-up that incubated blind rage against them.”
It should come as no surprise that the US is very much like other powerful
states, past and present, pursuing strategic and economic interests of
dominant sectors to the accompaniment of rhetorical flourishes about its
exceptional dedication to the highest value.
Against the backdrop of the disaster unfolding in Iraq, an uncritical faith
in good intentions only delays a desperately needed redress of approach and
policy.
From Kyoto to New Orleans: What’s a superpower to do?
Tom Plate
BENEATH the endlessly horrific details surrounding the hurricane that
swamped parts of New Orleans and the southeast United States lurks a monster
question. Just how angry really is Mother Nature over the irreverent,
careless way we humans and our energy-hungry machines have been manhandling
our precious, precariously balanced planet?
The way this question is put may seem anthropomorphically fanciful, but the
issue of worldwide warming has been on the global table top long enough to
know that it’s high time we did something about it. Most people understand
that many scientists believe the issue to be nothing less than dire. It is
also a fact that many eminent scientific seers directly connect the
worldwide warming phenomenon with certain kinds of bad weather news, to wit,
the apparently growing severity of ‘natural’ catastrophes.
Consider, for example, an alarming recent paper in New Scientist, one of the
world’s most respected professional journals. In it, Judith Marquand of
Oxford University and Sergei Kirpotin of Tomsk State University in western
Siberia report their finding of an astonishing degree of global warming in
Siberia eating away at the permafrost over a land mass roughly equivalent to
the expanse of France and Germany.
For the first time since the last ice age (about 11,000 years ago)
‘permafrost’, as it is called, covering this entire sub-Artic area of
Siberia, is starting to melt. Underneath the frost is vast subterranean goo
(peat bog) that contains noxious methane, heretofore trapped beneath the
ice. Once in the atmosphere, substantial quantities of this greenhouse gas
will add to the earth’s warming.
Similarly, scientists believe that the oceanic warming, however slow but
steady, contributes to the increasing ferocity of severe atmospheric
meltdowns, such as hurricanes. Future environmental disasters are in
prospect. MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel wrote a few weeks ago in the
internationally respected journal Nature, “My results suggest that future
warming may lead to an upward trend in tropical cyclone destructive
potential and — taking into account an increasing coastal population — a
substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the 21st century.”
Right now, America’s attention is focused, understandably, on the crisis of
the moment. This calamity has become problem number-one for President George
Bush. In the end we may find that the human and economic damage from
hurricane Katrina will exceed that from September 11, 2001.
Life offers many lessons for us all; none of us is perfect, and the most
important lessons tend to be the most surprising ones. A few years ago the
Bush administration preemptively dropped out of participation in the
greenhouse-emission-reduction protocol named after one of the world’s most
beautiful cities Kyoto. The treaty had been negotiated thanks to the
determined and skilled orchestration of one of America’s most important
allies — Japan. To say that the Bush administration dumped Kyoto
unceremoniously would be to insult the word unceremonious. The White House
acted as if the treaty had been put together in a nasty conspiracy of
Communists working with Al Qaeda agents. The snarling disdain was insulting
to many of our best friends who favoured the Kyoto approach.
Global warming is a phenomenally important issue that can no longer be
denied unless you are in some kind of severe psychotic state of
transcendental delusion. To be sure, the Kyoto emissions-reduction approach
was at best an imperfect blueprint, but it was better than nothing. But
nothing was all that Washington offered in response until this June, when it
and some of the other biggest polluters put out a new plan to cut greenhouse
emissions.
There’s nothing wrong with alternative proposals, whether to cool global
warming or to the reform the United Nations, so long as they are presented
with mature intent, a sense of respect for the views of others, and modesty
about one’s own prescience and brilliance.
The world is clearly embarked on a worrisome environmental course that will
not and cannot be righted overnight. The evil-hurricane parable — of trouble
that crosses over many national boundaries and is fuelled from below by a
heated-up ocean —- illustrates what is at stake. The problem is enormous and
international.
Decision time in Egypt
Jonathan Power
IN WASHINGTON and other Western capitals there is a view gaining ground that
a popularly elected government in the Middle East is better than a shaky
autocratic client. Maybe there is some element of truth in this. Yet there
is still a marked reservation about going the extra mile and accepting that
a free and open poll might bring Islamist parties to power.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said a few measured things about
the need for next week’s Egyptian presidential election not to be a forgone
conclusion but the US is hardly keeping the pressure on, presumably fearing
an opening will be exploited by the Muslim Brotherhood with its “secret
agenda”. We have still not come far enough from the 1990 elections in
Algeria when France, the former colonial master, and the US, ignored the
fact that the Islamists had clearly won a majority and turned a blind eye
when the army overturned the result, sparking a bloody civil war.
Yet the truth is Islamist parties in many countries have faced enough
persecution, prosecution, imprisonment, torture and repression to form an
instinctive empathy for the calls and cause of democracy and human rights.
Human rights, if the West is clever, should be the wedge that keeps their
door open if and when they come to power.
The platform of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood calls for parliamentary rule,
separation of powers and the protection of minorities. In Lebanon the
militant Hizbullah has adopted progressive stands on both social and
religious issues. Both it and Hamas in Palestine are participating
vigorously in electoral politics. In Morocco, Islamists are four square
behind the government’s efforts to expand women’s rights.
As Reza Aslan wrote in a recent issue of Prospect magazine, “It is pluralism
that defines democracy not secularism. And Islam has had a long and historic
commitment to religious pluralism.” No other monotheistic religion can match
the reverence with which the Quran speaks of other religious traditions.
With terrorist bombs in July causing mayhem once again in Egypt I will told
I’m naïve. Yet there is no evidence that these latest terrorist acts are
linked to Gammaa Islamiya, the organisation founded and inspired by the
theologian Sayed Qutb, the intellectual godfather of Al Qaeda. Just three
years ago Gammaa’s jailed leaders confessed in a four-volume treatise that
they had been wrong to attack both fellow Muslims and tourists and said that
their members had been forbidden to join Al Qaeda.
Apart from some isolated terrorist cells this is the predominant view today
of all Egyptian Islamists. Of course, there is no doubting that all over the
Islamic world some “born again Muslims” have been seduced by the call of
violence. But the predominant trends in Islamic societies remain
non-violent, even more so following the havoc unleashed by Al Qaeda and
despite rising anti-Americanism brought on principally by the invasion of
Iraq. The important trends to watch in contemporary Islamist theology are
towards what Westerners call “human rights”. Islamist intellectuals like
Rashid Ghanoushi, the Tunisian leader, and Abdal-Wahhab el-Affendi, the
Sudanese writer, are now arguing that restoring Shariah law “from above” by
political action is a “recipe for tyranny and violence”.
Many Islamic scholars are now re-looking at the influential writings of the
eminent scholar, Jamal al-Din al-Afgani, who lived from 1838 to 1897. He
preached a message of reform that has been dubbed the “protestant Islam”. He
argued that just as Islam had been open to absorbing Greek philosophy in the
Middle Ages so it should be open to European ideas today. His protégé,
Mohammed Abduh, started the Salafiya movement, identifying with the salafi
(elders) of the early Muslim community. He preached the compatibility of
revelation and reason and condemned the blind following of tradition. He had
a great influence in Cairo as mufti (chief scholar) of al-Azhar University
(whose mufti today is still one of Islam’s most outspoken liberals and
influential preachers). |
