Does the USA Intend to Dominate the World?

Excerpted transcript from a recent Andy Clark interview with Noam Chomsky for the Amsterdam Forum, a Radio Netherlands interactive discussion program

CLARK: Professor Chomsky, once described by the New York Times as arguably the most important intellectual alive, is an outspoken critic of US foreign policy. He says, following the war in Iraq, the US is seeking to dominate the world by force, a dimension in which it rules supreme. And he warns this policy will lead to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terror attacks based on a loathing of the US administration. He says the very survival of the species may be at stake.

Well professor Chomsky joins us to take questions from our listeners around the world. Welcome professor Chomsky.

The first e-mail is from Norberto Silva, from the Cape Verde islands, and he says: "Could the USA and president Bush lead the world into a nuclear war with their policy of pre-emptive attacks?"

CHOMSKY: They very definitely could. First of all we should be clear: it is not a policy of pre-emptive attacks. Pre-emption means something in international law. A pre-emptive attack is one that is taken in the case of an imminent, on-going threat. For example, if planes were flying across the Atlantic to bomb New York, it would be legitimate for the US Air Force to shoot them down. That's a pre-emptive attack. This is what is sometimes called preventive war. That's a new doctrine that was announced last September in the National Security Strategy. It declares the right to attack any potential challenge to the global dominance of the United States. The potential is in the eye of the observer, so that, in effect, gives the authorisation to attack essentially anyone.

Could that lead to a nuclear war? Very definitely. We've come very close in the past. Just last October, for example, it was discovered, to the shock and horror of those who paid attention, that, during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the world was literally one word away from probably terminal nuclear war. Russian submarines with nuclear weapons were under attack by US destroyers. Several commanders thought a nuclear war was on, and gave the order to shoot nuclear missiles. It was countermanded by one officer. That's why we're around to talk. There have been plenty of such cases since.

CLARK: This email is from Don Rhodes, from Melbourne, in Australia, and he says: "I do not believe that the US wants to dominate the world. The Americans have been attacked on several fronts, 9/11 being only one of them. Someone has to bring into line rogue states and it is the USA alone that has the capability to do this. Without such a 'world policeman' the world would just disintegrate into warring factions. Look at history for examples of this." What do you make of that sort of statement?

CHOMSKY: The first sentence is simply factually incorrect. The National Security Strategy states fairly explicitly that the US intends to dominate the world by force, which is the dimension in which it rules supreme, and to ensure that there is never any potential challenge to this domination.

The person who sent the email may believe that the US has some unique right to run the world by force. I don't believe that, and contrary to what was stated I don't think history supports that at all. In fact the US record, incidentally with the support of Australia, since the period of its global dominance in the 1940s, is one of instigating war and violence and terror on a very substantial scale. The Indochina War, just to take one example in which Australia participated, was basically a war of aggression. The United States attacked South Vietnam in 1962. The war then spread to the rest of Indochina. The end result was several million people killed, the countries devastated, and that's only one example. So history does not support the conclusion and the principle that one state should have a unique right to rule the world by force. That's an extremely hazardous principle, no matter who the country is.

CLARK: OK, another email. This is from Rijswijk, in The Netherlands, from M.J. "Bob" Groothand. This message says: "Throughout history some nations have always tried to rule the world. Most recently Germany, Japan and Russia come to mind. If the US is now the latest 'would-be conqueror' then we can thank our lucky stars. It would be done with decency and honour for all mankind. The fact is that nothing like this is being considered by Bush or the American government. You forget that the US has a constitution and, unlike Stalin, Hitler, Hussein and other despots, Bush is up for re-election in two years and American voters are not dumb nor are they oppressed or intimidated. It's a secret ballot."

Will electoral accountability rein in the US government, do you think, as this listener suggests?

CHOMSKY: First of all, the account of history is mostly fanciful, but let's put that aside. The fact that a country has a constitution and is internally democratic does not mean that it does not carry out violence and aggression. There is a long history of this. England, for example, was perhaps the most free country in the world in the 19th century and was carrying out horrifying atrocities throughout much of the world, and the case of the United States is similar. The record goes back very far.

The United States was a democratic country, for example, when it invaded the Philippines a century ago, killing several hundred thousand people and leaving it devastated. It was a democratic country in the 1980s, when the current incumbents in Washington carried out a devastating war of terror in Nicaragua, leaving tens of thousands dead and the country practically ruined, an attack for which they incidentally were condemned by the World Court and the Security Council in a vetoed resolution. As to the democratic election, yes, true, there is an election, and the Republicans have explained very clearly how they intend to overcome the fact that their policies are pretty strongly opposed by the majority of the population.

They intend to overcome it by driving the country into fear and panic, so that they will huddle under the umbrella of a powerful figure who will protect them. In fact, we've just seen that last September when the Security Strategy was announced and the drumbeat of propaganda for war began. There was a government media propaganda campaign, which was quite spectacular. It succeeded in convincing the majority of the [American] population that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of the United States. No one else believed that. Even Kuwait and Iran, where they despise him, didn't regard him as a threat. They knew he was the weakest country in the region. It also succeeded in convincing probably the majority of the population that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Again, there isn't a particle of evidence for this, and there is no intelligence agency or security analyst in the world who believes it.

CLARK: Where is the political opposition in the US then--the Democrats? Why don't they seek to make inroads into the Republican camp? Obviously, there is a substantial peace movement--we saw hundreds of thousands of people on the streets in the US who were opposed to the military action. Where is the political opposition in the US now?

CHOMSKY: The Democratic political opposition is very tepid. There has been very little debate, traditionally, over foreign policy issues. Political figures are reluctant to put themselves in a position where they can be condemned for supporting enemies. Politicians are unwilling to subject themselves to that, and the result is that the voice of a large portion of the population simply is barely represented, and the Republicans recognise it. Karl Rove, the Republican campaign manager, made it clear before the last election in 2002 that the Republicans would have to try to run the election on a security issue, because if they faced it on issues of domestic policy they would lose. So they frightened the population into obedience, and he has already announced that they are going to have to do the same thing next time in the 2004 election.

They are going to have to present it as voting for a war president who will defend you from destruction. Incidentally, they are simply rehearsing a script that runs right through the 1980s, the first time they were in office--the same people, approximately. If you look, the policies they implemented were unpopular. The population was opposed, but they kept pressing the panic button, and it worked. In 1981 Libya was going to attack us. In 1983 Grenada was going to set up an airbase from which the Russians would bomb us. In 1985 Reagan declared a national emergency because the security of the United States was threatened by the government of Nicaragua. Somebody watching from Mars would have collapsed in laughter.

And so it went on through the 1980s. They managed to keep the population intimidated and frightened enough so that they could maintain a thin grasp on political power, and that's the effort since. They didn't invent that tactic, incidentally, but it unfortunately has its effects, and political figures and others are reluctant to stand up and face the torrent of abuse and hysteria that will immediately come from trying to bring matters back to the level of fact.

CLARK: Do you think there is a point where force can be justified? We heard a lot of arguments about the Iraq war--that this was the lesser of two evils. The recent history of Iraq was well-known, but now it was a stage whereby something had to be done to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Lots of Iraqi people themselves--within the country--seemed to support that argument.

CHOMSKY: First of all, we don't know that Iraqis were calling out to be invaded, but if that was the goal, what was the point of all the lying? What you are saying is that Tony Blair, George Bush, Colin Powell and the rest are fanatic liars--they were pretending until the last minute that the goal was to get rid of weapons of mass destruction. If the goal was to liberate the Iraqi people, why not say so? Why the lies?

CLARK: President Bush did say that in the very last weeks [before the war]. He started talking about a war of liberation.

CHOMSKY: At the last minute, at the Azores summit, he said that, even if Saddam Hussein and his associates leave the country, the United States is going to invade anyway--meaning the US wants to control it. Now, in fact, there is a serious issue behind this. It has nothing to do with liberating the Iraqi people. You might ask the question why Iraqis did not overthrow Saddam the way, say, Romanians overthrew Ceausescu. Well, you know it's pretty well understood. The westerners who know Iraq best--Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the heads of the UN oil for food programme--they had hundreds of investigators running through the country. They knew the country intimately, and they have been pointing out, as have plenty of others, that what prevented any kind of uprising in Iraq was the murderous sanctions regime, which killed hundreds of thousands of people by conservative estimates, strengthened Saddam Hussein, and made the population completely reliant on him for survival.

So the first step in allowing Iraqis to liberate themselves would have been to stop preventing it, by permitting the society to reconstruct, so that then they could take care of their own affairs. If that failed, if Iraqis were unable to do what other populations have done under the rule of comparable tyrants, at that point the question of the use of force might arise, but until they have been at least given an opportunity, and haven't been prevented by US-British action from undertaking it, we can't seriously raise that question, and in fact it was not raised by Britain and the United States during the build-up to war. The focus was on weapons of mass destruction. Just look at the record.

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