"Good News," Iraq & Beyond,

Part 1
Both Parties well to the right of the population on major issues

April 2008

By Noam Chomsky

N ot long ago, it was taken for granted

that the Iraq war would be the central issue
in the presidential campaign, as it was in the
mid-term election of 2006. But it has
virtually disappeared, eliciting some
puzzlement. There should be none.
Iraq remains a significant concern for the
population, but that is a matter of little
moment in a modern democracy. The
important work of the world is the domain
of the "responsible men," who must "live free of the trampling and the roar of a
bewildered herd," the general public, "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders"
whose "function" is to be "spectators," not "participants." And spectators are not
supposed to bother their heads with issues. The Wall Street Journal came close
to the point in a major front-page article on Super Tuesday, under the heading
"Issues Recede in '08 Contest As Voters Focus on Character." To put it more
accurately, issues recede as candidates, party managers, and their PR agencies
focus on character (qualities, etc.). As usual. And for sound reasons. Apart from
the irrelevance of the population to them, they can also be dangerous. The
participants in action are surely aware that on a host of major issues, both
political parties are well to the right of the general population and that their
positions are quite consistent over time, a matter reviewed in a useful study by
Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton, The Foreign Policy Disconnect; the same
is true on domestic policy (see my Failed States, on both domains). It is
important, then, for the attention of the herd to be diverted elsewhere.
The quoted admonitions, taken from highly regarded essays by the leading
public intellectual of the 20th century, Walter Lippmann, capture well the
perceptions of progressive intellectual opinion, shared across the narrow elite
spectrum. The common understanding is revealed more in practice than in
words, though some, like Lippmann, do articulate it: President Wilson, for
example, who held that an elite of gentlemen with "elevated ideals" must be
empowered to preserve "stability and righteousness," essentially the perspective
of the Founding Fathers. In more recent years the "gentlemen" are transmuted
into the "technocratic elite" and "action intellectuals" of Camelot, "Straussian"
neocons, or other configurations.

For the vanguard who uphold the elevated ideals and are charged with
managing the society and the world, the reasons for Iraq's drift off the radar
screen should not be obscure. They were cogently explained by the
distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger, articulating the position of the doves
40 years ago when the U.S. invasion of South Vietnam was in its fourth year
and Washington was preparing to add another 100,000 troops to the 175,000
already tearing South Vietnam to shreds. By then the invasion launched by
Kennedy was facing difficulties and imposing difficult costs on the United
States, so Schlesinger and other Kennedy liberals were reluctantly beginning to
shift from hawks to doves. That even included Robert Kennedy, who a year
earlier, after the vast intensification of the bombing and combat operations in the
South and the first regular bombing of the North, had condemned withdrawal as
"a repudiation of commitments undertaken and confirmed by three
administrations," which would "gravely—perhaps irreparably—weaken the
democratic position in Asia." But by the time that Schlesinger was writing in
1966, RFK and other Camelot hawks began to call for a negotiated settlement
—though not withdrawal, never an option, just as withdrawal without victory
was never an option for JFK, contrary to many illusions.

Schlesinger wrote that of course "we all pray" that the hawks are right in
thinking that the surge of the day will be able to "suppress the resistance," and if
it does, "we may all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American
government" in winning victory while leaving "the tragic country gutted and
devastated by bombs, burned by napalm, turned into a wasteland by chemical
defoliation, a land of ruin and wreck," with its "political and institutional fabric"
pulverized. But escalation probably won't succeed, and will prove to be too
costly for ourselves, so perhaps strategy should be rethought.
Attitudes towards the war at the liberal extreme were well illustrated by the
concerns of the Massachusetts branch of Americans for Democratic Action
(ADA), in Cambridge, the liberal stronghold. In late 1967 the ADA leadership
undertook considerable (and quite comical) efforts to prevent applications for
membership from people they feared would speak in favor of an anti-war
resolution sponsored by a local chapter that had fallen out of control (Howard
Zinn and I were the terrifying applicants). A few months later came the Tet
offensive, leading the business world to turn against the war because of its costs
to us, while the more perceptive were coming to realize that Washington had
already achieved its major war aims. It soon turned out that everyone had always
been a strong opponent of the war (in deep silence). The Kennedy memoirists
revised their accounts to fit the new requirement that JFK was a secret dove,
consigning the rich documentary record (including their own version of events at
the time) to the dustbin of history where the wrong facts wither away. Others
preferred silence, assuming correctly that the truth would disappear. The
preferred version soon took hold: that the radical and self-indulgent anti-war
movement had disrupted the sober efforts of the responsible "early opponents of
the war" to bring it to an end.
At the war's end, in 1975, the position of the extreme doves was expressed by
Anthony Lewis, the most critical voice in the New York Times. He observed that
the war began with "blundering efforts to do good"—which is close to tautology
within the doctrinal system—though by 1969 it had become "clear to most of the
world (and most Americans) that the intervention had been a disastrous
mistake." The argument against the war, Lewis explained, "was that the United
States had misunderstood the cultural and political forces at work in Indochina
—that it was in a position where it could not impose a solution except at a price
too costly to itself."
By 1969, "most Americans" had a radically different view. Some 70 percent
regarded the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral," not "a mistake." But
they are just "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders," whose voices can be
dismissed—or on the rare occasions when they are noticed, explained away
without evidence by attributing to them self-serving motives lacking any moral
basis.

Elite reasoning, and the accompanying attitudes, carry over with little change to
critical commentary on the U.S. invasion of Iraq today. Although criticism of the
Iraq War is far greater and far-reaching than in the case of Vietnam at any
comparable stage, nevertheless the principles that Schlesinger articulated remain
in force in media and commentary.

It is of some interest that Schlesinger took a very different position on the Iraq
invasion, virtually alone in his circles. When the bombs began to fall on
Baghdad, he wrote that Bush's policies are "alarmingly similar to the policy that
imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier
American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was
right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy." It would be instructive
to determine how Schlesinger's principled objection to U.S. war crimes fared in
the tributes to him that appeared when he died and in the many reviews of his
journals (which do not mention Vietnam until the Johnson years, consistent with
the early version of his memoirs of Camelot).

That Iraq is "a land

of ruin and wreck" is
not in question. There
is no need to review
the facts in any detail.
The British polling
agency Oxford
Research Bureau
recently updated its
estimate of extra
deaths resulting from
the war to 1.3 million
—that's excluding
Karbala and Anbar
provinces, two of the
worst regions. Whether that is correct, or the true numbers are much lower as
some claim, there is no doubt that the toll is horrendous. There are several
million internally deplaced. Thanks to the generosity of Jordan and Syria, the
millions of refugees fleeing the wreckage of Iraq, including most of the
professional classes, have not been simply wiped out. But that welcome is
fading, for one reason because Jordan and Syria receive no meaningful support
from the perpetrators of the crimes in Washington and London. The idea that
they might admit these victims, beyond a trickle, is too outlandish to consider.
Sectarian warfare has devastated the country. Baghdad and other areas have
been subjected to brutal ethnic cleansing and left in the hands of warlords and
militias, the primary thrust of the current counterinsurgency strategy developed
by General Petraeus, who won his fame by pacifying Mosul, now the scene of
some of the most extreme violence.

One of the most dedicated and informed journalists who has been immersed in
the shocking tragedy, Nir Rosen, recently published an epitaph entitled "The
Death of Iraq," in Current History. He writes that "Iraq has been killed, never to
rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the
Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century"—a common
perception of Iraqis as well. "Only fools talk of ‘solutions' now. There is no
solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained."

Though the wreckage of Iraq today is too visible to try to conceal, the assault of
the new barbarians is carefully circumscribed in the doctrinal system so as to
exclude the horrendous effects of the Clinton sanctions—including their crucial
role in preventing the threat that Iraqis would send Saddam to the same fate as
Ceasescu, Marcos, Suharto, Chun, and other monsters supported by the U.S.
and UK until they could no longer be maintained. Information about the effect of
the sanctions is hardly lacking, in particular about the humanitarian phase of the
sanctions regime, the oil-for-peace program initiated when the early impact
became so shocking that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had to mumble
on TV that the price was right whatever the parents of hundreds of thousands of
dead Iraqi children might think. The humanitarian program, which graciously
permitted Iraq to use some of its oil revenues for the devastated population, was
administered by respected and experienced UN diplomats who had teams of
investigators all over the country and surely knew more about the situation in
Iraq than any other Westerners. The first, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest
because the policies were "genocidal." His successor, Hans von Sponeck,
resigned two years later when he concluded that the sanctions violated the
Genocide Convention. The Clinton administration barred him from providing
information about the impact to the Security Council, which was technically
responsible. As Albright's spokesperson James Rubin explained, "this man in
Baghdad is paid to work, not to speak."
Von Sponeck does, however, speak in extensive detail in his muted but
horrifying book A Different Kind of War. But the State Department ruling
prevails. One will have to search diligently to find even a mention of these
revelations or what they imply. Knowing too much, Halliday and von Sponeck
were also barred from the media during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq.

It is true, however, that Iraq is now a marginal issue in the presidential

campaign. That is natural, given the spectrum of hawk-dove elite opinion. The
liberal doves adhere to their traditional reasoning and attitudes, praying that the
hawks will be right and that the U.S. will win a victory in the land of ruin and
wreck, establishing "stability," a code word for subordination to Washington's
will. By and large hawks are encouraged and doves silenced by the "good
news" about Iraq.

And there is good news. The U.S. occupying army in Iraq (euphemistically
called the Multi-National Force-Iraq) carries out regular studies of popular
attitudes, a crucial component of population control measures. In December
2007, it released a study of focus groups, which was uncharacteristically upbeat.
The survey "provides very strong evidence" that national reconciliation is
possible and anticipated, contrary to prevailing voices of hopelessness and
despair. The survey found that a sense of "optimistic possibility permeated all
focus groups... and far more commonalities than differences are found among
these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis." This discovery of "shared beliefs"
among Iraqis throughout the country is "good news, according to a military
analysis of the results," Karen de Young reported in the Washington Post
(December 19, 2007).
The "shared beliefs" were identified in the report. To quote de Young, "Iraqis of
all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the
primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of
‘occupying forces' as the key to national reconciliation." So, according to Iraqis,
there is hope of national reconciliation if the invaders, who are responsible for
the internal violence, withdraw and leave Iraq to Iraqis.
The conclusions are credible, consistent with earlier polls and also with the
apparent reduction in violence when the British finally withdrew from Basra a
few months ago, having "decisively lost the south—which produces over 90 per
cent of government revenues and 70 per cent of Iraq's proven oil reserves" by
2005, according to Anthony Cordesman, the most prominent U.S. specialist on
military affairs in the Middle East.
The December 2007 report did not mention other good news: Iraqis appear to
accept the highest values of Americans, which should be gratifying. Specifically,
they accept the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal that sentenced Nazi war
criminals to hanging for such crimes as supporting aggression and preemptive
war—the main charge against Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, whose position
in the Nazi regime corresponded to that of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
The Tribunal defined aggression clearly enough: "invasion of its armed forces"
by one state "of the territory of another state." The invasion of Iraq and
Afghanistan are textbook examples, if words have meaning. The Tribunal went
on to define aggression as "the supreme international crime differing only from
other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the
whole." In the case of Iraq, the murderous sectarian violence and ethnic
cleansing, the destruction of the national culture and the irreplaceable treasures
of the origins of Western civilization under the eyes of "stuff happens"-Rumsfeld
and his associates, and every other crime and atrocity as the inheritors of the
Mongols have followed the path of imperial Japan.

Since Iraqis attribute the accumulated evil of the whole primarily to the invasion,
it follows that they accept the core principle of Nuremberg. Presumably, they
were not asked whether their acceptance of American values extended to the
conclusion of the chief prosecutor for the United States, U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Robert Jackson, who forcefully insisted that the Tribunal would be mere
farce if we do not apply its principles to ourselves.
Needless to say, U.S. elite opinion, shared with the West generally, flatly rejects
the lofty American values professed at Nuremberg, indeed regards them as
bordering on obscene. All of this provides an instructive illustration of some of
the reality that lies behind the famous "clash of civilizations."

A January poll by World Learning/Aspen Institute found that "75 percent of

Americans believe U.S. foreign policy is driving dissatisfaction with America
abroad and more than 60 percent believe that dislike of American values (39
percent) and of the American people (26 percent) is also to blame." The
perception is inaccurate, fed by propaganda. There is little dislike of Americans,
and dissatisfaction abroad does not derive from "dislike of American values,"
but rather from acceptance of these values and recognition that they are rejected
by the U.S. government and elite opinion.
Other "good news" had been reported by General Petraeus and Ambassador
Ryan Crocker during the extravaganza staged on 9/11/07. Perhaps we should
call the commander "Lord Petraeus," in the light of the reverence displayed by
the media and commentators on this occasion. Parenthetically, only a cynic
might imagine that the timing was intended to insinuate the Bush-Cheney claims
of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, so that by committing
the "supreme international crime" they were defending the world against terror,
which increased sevenfold as a result of the invasion, according to an analysis by
terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, using data of the
government-linked Rand Corporation.
Petraeus and Crocker
provided figures to show
that the Iraqi government
had greatly accelerated
spending on reconstruction,
reaching a quarter of the
funding set aside for that
purpose. Good news
indeed—until it was
investigated by the
Government
Accountability Office,
which found that the actual
figure was one-sixth what
Petraeus and Crocker
reported, a 50 percent
decline from the preceding
year.
More good news is the
decline in sectarian
violence, attributable in part to the success of the ethnic cleansing that Iraqis
blame on the invasion; there are simply fewer people to kill in the cleansed areas.
But it is also attributable to Washington's decision to support the tribal groups
that had organized to drive out Iraqi al-Qaeda, to an increase in U.S. troops, and
to the decision of the Mahdi army to stand down and consolidate its gains—what
the press calls "halting aggression." By definition, only Iraqis can commit
aggression in Iraq (or Iranians, of course).
It is possible that Petraeus's strategy might approach the success of the Russians
in Chechnya where fighting is now "limited and sporadic and Grozny is in the
midst of a building boom" after having been reduced to rubble by the Russian
attack, C.J. Chivers reports in the New York Times, also on September 11.
Perhaps some day Baghdad and Falluja too will enjoy "electricity restored in
many neighborhoods, new businesses opening and the city's main streets
repaved," as in booming Grozny. Possible, but dubious, in light of the likely
consequence of creating warlord armies that may be the seeds of even greater
sectarian violence, adding to the "accumulated evil" of the aggression.

If Russians rise to the moral level of liberal intellectuals in the West, they must
be saluting Putin's "wisdom and statesmanship" for his achievements in
Chechnya.
A few weeks after the Pentagon's "good news" from Iraq, New York Times
military-Iraq expert Michael Gordon wrote a reasoned and comprehensive
review of the options on Iraq policy facing the candidates for the presidential
election. One voice is missing: Iraqis. Their preference is not rejected. Rather, it
is not worthy of mention. And it seems that there was no notice of the fact. That
makes sense on the usual tacit assumption of almost all discourse on international
affairs: we own the world, so what does it matter what others think? They are
"unpeople," to borrow the term used by British diplomatic historian Mark Curtis
in his work on Britain's crimes of empire—very illuminating work, therefore
deeply hidden. Routinely, Americans join Iraqis in un-peoplehood. Their
preferences too provide no options.
To cite another instructive example, consider Gerald Seib's reflections in the
Wall Street Journal on "Time to Look Ahead in Iraq." Seib is impressed that
debate over Iraq is finally beginning to go beyond the "cartoon-like
characteristics" of what has come before and is now beginning to confront "the
right issue." "The more profound questions are the long-term ones. Regardless
of how things evolve in a new president's first year, the U.S. needs to decide
what its lasting role should be in Iraq. Is Iraq to be a permanent American
military outpost and will American troops need to be on hand in some fashion to
help defend Iraq's borders for a decade or more, as some Iraqi officials
themselves have suggested? Will the U.S. see Iraq more broadly as a base for
exerting American political and diplomatic influence in the broader Middle East,
or is that a mistake? Is it better to have American troops just over the horizon, in
Kuwait or ships in the Persian Gulf? Driving these military considerations is the
political question of what kind of government the U.S. can accept in Iraq...."

No soft-headed nonsense here about Iraqis having a voice on the lasting role of
the U.S. in Iraq or on the kind of government they would prefer. Seib should not
be confused with the columnists in the Journal's "opinion pages." He is a
rational centrist analyst, who could easily be writing in the liberal media or
journals of the Democratic Party like the New Republic. And he grasps quite
accurately the fundamental principles guiding the political class.

Such reflections of the imperial mentality are deeply rooted. To pick examples
almost at random, in December 2007 Panama declared a Day of Mourning to
commemorate the U.S. invasion of 1989, which killed thousands of poor people
—so Panamanian human rights groups concluded—when Bush I bombed the El
Chorillo slums and other civilian targets. The Day of Mourning of the unpeople
scarcely merited a flicker of an eyelid here. It is also of no interest that Bush's
invasion of Panama, another textbook example of aggression, appears to have
been more deadly than Saddam's invasion of Kuwait a few months later. An
unfair comparison of course; after all, we own the world, and he didn't. It is also
of no interest that Washington's greatest fear was that Saddam would imitate its
behavior in Panama, installing a client government and then leaving, the main
reason why Washington blocked diplomacy with almost complete media
cooperation; the sole serious exception I know of was Knut Royce in Long
Island Newsday. Though the December Day of Mourning passed with little
notice, there was a lead story when the Panamanian National Assembly was
opened by president Pedro Gonzalez, who is charged by Washington with
killing U.S. soldiers during a protest against President Bush's visit two years
after his invasion, charges dismissed by Panamanian courts, but still upheld by
the owner of the world.
To take another illustration of the depth of the imperial mentality, New York
Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino writes that "Iran's intransigence [about
nuclear enrichment] appears to be defeating attempts by the rest of the world to
curtail Tehran's nuclear ambitions." The rest of the world happens to exclude the
large majority of the world: the non-aligned movement, which forcefully
endorses Iran's right to enrich uranium, in accord with the non-proliferation
treaty (NPT). But they are not part of the world, since they do not reflexively
accept U.S. orders.
We might tarry for a moment to ask whether there is any solution to the U.S.-
Iran confrontation over nuclear weapons. Here are some ideas: (1) Iran should
have the right to develop nuclear energy, but not weapons, in accord with the
NPT; (2) a nuclear weapons-free zone should be established in the region,
including Iran, Israel, and U.S. forces deployed there; (3) the U.S. should accept
the NPT; (4) the U.S. should end threats against Iran, and turn to diplomacy.
The proposals are not original. These are the preferences of the overwhelming
majority of Americans and also Iranians in polls by World Public Opinion,
which found that Americans and Iranians agree on basic issues. At a forum at
the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies when the polls
were released a year ago, Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for National
Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress, said the
polls showed "the common sense of both the American people and the Iranian
people, [who] seem to be able to rise above the rhetoric of their own leaders to
find common sense solutions to some of the most crucial questions" facing the
two nations, favoring pragmatic, diplomatic solutions to their differences. The
results suggest that if the U.S. and Iran were functioning democratic societies,
this very dangerous confrontation could probably be resolved peaceably.

The opinions of Americans on this issue too are not regarded as worthy of
consideration; they are not options for candidates or commentators. They were
apparently not even reported, perhaps considered too dangerous because of what
they reveal about the "democratic deficit" in the United States and about the
extremism of the political class across the spectrum. If public opinion were to be
mentioned as an option, it would be ridiculed as "politically impossible"; or
perhaps offered as another reason why "The public must be put in its place," as
Lippmann sternly admonished.
There is more to say about the preference of Americans on Iran. Point one
above, as noted, happens to accord with the stand of the large majority of the
world. With regard to point two, the U.S. and its allies have accepted it, formally
at least. UN Security Council Resolution 687 commits them to "the goal of
establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction
and all missiles for their delivery and the objective of a global ban on chemical
weapons" (Article 14). The U.S. and UK have a particularly strong commitment
to this principle, since it was this Resolution that they appealed to in their efforts
to provide a thin legal cover for their invasion of Iraq, claiming that Iraq had not
lived up to the conditions in 687 on disarmament. As for point three, 80 percent
of Americans feel that Washington should live up to its commitment under the
NPT to undertake "good faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely, a
legal commitment as the World Court determined, explictly rejected by the Bush
administration. Turning to point four, Americans are calling on the government
to adhere to international law, under which the threats of violence that are voiced
by all current candidates are a crime, in violation of the UN Charter. The call for
negotiations and diplomacy on the part of the American unpeople extends to
Cuba and has for decades, but is again dismissed by both political parties.

The likelihood that a functioning democracy might alleviate severe dangers is

regularly illustrated. To take another current example, of great importance, there
is now justified concern about Russian reactions to U.S. aggressive militarism.
That includes the extension of NATO to the East by Clinton in violation of
solemn pledges to Gorbachev, but particularly the vast expansion of offensive
military capacity under Bush, and more recently, the plans to place "missile
defense" installations in Eastern Europe. Putin is ridiculed for claiming that they
are a threat to Russia. But U.S. strategic analysts recognize that he has a point.
The programs are designed in a way that Russian planners would have to regard
as a threat to the Russian deterrent, hence calling for more advanced and lethal
offensive military capacity to neutralize them (see George Lewis and Theodore
Postol, "European Missile Defense: The Technological Basis of Russian
Concerns," Arms Control Today, October 2007). A new arms race is feared.
Recent polls under the direction of strategic analysts John Steinbrunner and
Nancy Gallagher "reveal a striking disparity between what U.S. and Russian
leaders are doing and what their publics desire," and again indicate that if these
countries were functioning democracies, in which the ignorant and meddlesome
outsiders had a voice, the increasingly fragile U.S.-Russian strategic relationship
could be repaired, a matter of species survival in this case.

In a free press, all of these matters, and many more like them, would merit
regular prominent headlines and in-depth analysis.

Noam Chomsky is a linguist, speaker, social critic, and author of numerous books and
articles. Part II covers elite policy regarding North Korea, Israel, Pakistan, and the
Palestinians.

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