by Noam Chomsky
With Russian support for Cuba ending, the US stepped up its economic warfare, hoping to move in for the kill.
Meanwhile within US domains, matters continued routinely. A week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War, six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, were murdered by an elite Salvadoran battalion, armed and trained by the US, and fresh from renewed US training, acting on direct orders of the High Command. There was little notice, in accord with the Orwellian principle. They were not honored dissidents, just more unpeople, in Orwellian parlance.
A few weeks later the US invaded Panama killing unknown numbers of people in the slums that were heavily bombarded, thousands according to Central American human rights organizations. The purpose of the invasion was to kidnap Manuel Noriega, who was brought to the US and sentenced for crimes, most of them committed when he was on the CIA payroll. His crimes in those years were well known, sometimes lavishly praised by high officials. US Ambassador Thomas Pickering informed the Security Council that the invasion was legal under Article 51 of the UN Charter, because Noriega had been sending drugs to the US—a claim that merits comparison with the one that impressed legal specialist Anthony Lewis when Reagan bombed Libya “in self-defense against future attack,” discussed below (chapter 2).
All routine, differing from the norm only in that new pretexts were invoked, the Russians having lost their utility in this regard. Hispanic narcotraffickers came to the rescue temporarily. But they plainly would not do as a general justification for future military intervention, with the “Communist threat” no longer available. More was needed, and, as Moyn relates, “liberal internationalism” was invoked with new passion. We then move on to “the idealism so powerful during Bill Clinton’s presidency,” which merits a closer look.
It was indeed common to praise Clinton for having brought foreign policy to a “noble phase” with a “saintly glow.”6 Those words were uttered in 1997, an important year in the annals of Clintonian idealism. Throughout the Clinton years, NATO ally Turkey had been carrying out shocking atrocities against its Kurdish population, killing tens of thousands of people, destroying thousands of towns and villages, generating hundreds of thousands of refugees. Clinton was generously providing 80 percent of the arms, the flow increasing as atrocities mounted. In the single year 1997, as we were basking in the noble phase, Clinton sent more arms to Turkey than in the entire Cold War period combined up to the onset of the counterinsurgency operations.
Meanwhile there were impassioned laments about how NATO could not tolerate crimes near its borders, in the Balkans. Only within its borders, without comment and virtually no reporting. Another triumph of Orwellian nationalism.
At the same time, Clinton’s sanctions on Iraq (in theory, UN sanctions) had become so murderous that the distinguished international diplomats who administered them, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, successively resigned in protest, charging that they were “genocidal.”
In the western hemisphere, the leading human rights violator in the Clinton years was Colombia, also the leading recipient of US arms. See chapters 3 and 5 on Clinton’s contributions.
In Haiti, a military coup in 1991 ended a few months of democracy and hope, initiating a reign of horrific terror and torture. The Organization of American States imposed an embargo, but the Bush administration evaded it by exempting US firms—“fine tuning” the embargo for the benefit of the Haitian people, as the New York Times interpreted the move. Clinton undermined the embargo further, increasing trade and even secretly authorizing Texaco oil company to supply the murderous military junta in violation of presidential directives. That fact could not be missed. It was the lead story on the AP wires on a day when all attention was focused on Haiti because of the impending marine intervention. It was scarcely reported outside the business press, and remains unknown.
Clinton is greatly praised for the intervention, which placed the elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide back in power after years of terror effectively backed by the US. Aristide’s return, however, was conditional on his accepting the economic program of the US-backed candidate whom he had handily defeated in Haiti’s one free election. The program ensured the collapse of Haiti’s weak economy by compelling it to accept US exports without restriction, a great benefit to agribusiness in Clinton’s Arkansas while it wiped out Haiti’s rice production and even small industries like production of chicken parts, dumped in Haiti though blocked in independent countries. Clinton later apologized, claiming that he was unable to foresee what was widely understood, indeed predicted by US government agencies. Haiti sought extradition of Benjamin Constant, the leader of the junta militias that had murdered thousands of Haitians. Clinton refused. He also refused to return to Haiti 160,000 pages of documents stolen by the marines—for fear that they would implicate US participation in junta crimes, Human Rights Watch and other informed analysts speculated.
One of the worst crimes of the post–World War II era was the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, discussed in chapter 4.7 It was carried out with strong and unwavering US support, continuing through the Clinton years while the chief perpetrator, Indonesian president Suharto, was welcomed by the Clinton administration as “our kind of guy” on a visit to Washington. Indonesian atrocities escalated through 1999, peaking in August. Clinton continued to support the Indonesian invasion, but finally, under substantial international and domestic pressure he called the war off, as could have been done for 25 years.
There is more, but perhaps this is sufficient evidence of the saintly glow of radiant Clintonian idealism.
Throughout this period, the expanded Orwellian principle continued to be upheld with vigor and dedication, and with some creative innovations: adherence to the principle along with passionate denunciation of the US for its failure to respond to terrible crimes—crimes of others.
The most impressive contribution to this literary genre was the Samantha Power’s lavishly praised study “A Problem from Hell” (2002), which helped propel her to the position of US ambassador to the United Nations among other awards.8 Power bitterly condemns “our unreadiness to fulfill the commitment implied by ‘never again,’” to quote a typical accolade by Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute and former executive-director of Human Rights Watch.
The many similar accolades for this work are understandable, as far as they go. There is, however, the standard omission of the nationalist: our own crimes are denied or ignored. The book contains no reference to the crimes of the preceding years: no El Salvador, Guatemala, Turkey, Colombia, Iraqi sanctions, Haiti, or other massive US crimes. One indeed is mentioned: East Timor, where the US “looked away,” in this useful version of history. In fact, as in the other cases, the US looked right there, with eyes open, as it authorized the invasion and took pride in rendering the UN “utterly ineffective” in inhibiting the resulting crimes (Power’s predecessor at the UN, ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan) and supported the invasion fully as it approached genocidal levels, indeed qualified as genocide as the term is currently used with regard to enemies.
Power does bring up “lessons of Vietnam,” where, it will be recalled, already by 1967—eight years before the war’s end—“Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity . . . is threatened with extinction [as] the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.” The Vietnam dilemma is how “Americans of noble character could have allowed themselves to wage the Vietnam War, which had such immoral consequences.” The answer, citing Anthony Lake, is that the noble Americans adopted “a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions” which encouraged “easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end,” many millions of them. The inattention remains easy.
Castigation of Washington in this manner elegantly serves the dual tasks of state power, demanding that we march on to pursue the noble ideals th
at define our national identity while condemning and punishing those who lack our dedication to humanity’s highest values.
Another feature of rogue states is defiance of international law. Many examples are discussed below, among them, the Clinton doctrine that the US will act “multilaterally when possible, but unilaterally when necessary” and will do so for “ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.” One can, of course, bring such principles into conformity with international law by creative interpretations, as, for example, when the UN Security Council unambiguously barred Clinton’s threatened use of force against Iraq, to which he reacted by stating that the resolution “provides authority” to resort to force as he chooses (p. 18).
Clinton’s casual dismissal of international law is, of course, nothing new in contemporary US history, as often frankly declared, for example, by the respected statement Dean Acheson, quoted on p. 2.
Still another feature of rogue states is rejection of international conventions, a topic discussed in chapters 9 and 10. The topic is of great current concern because of President Obama’s much contested decision to restore relations with Cuba—partially, the crushing embargo and other punishments remain. The official tale is that the benign US effort to protect the civil and human rights of the Cuban people has failed, so that a new approach must be undertaken.9
“President Obama’s decision to restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba will face an early test next year as the White House tries to make good on its contention that the policy shift will lead to a gradual improvement in the Cuban government’s dismal record on human rights,” Michael Gordon reports in the New York Times.10 “Obama administration officials are calculating that they can enlist support from European and Latin American countries to persuade Cuba to accede to a major treaty protecting political freedom—the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—and, ultimately, to improve its legal system.”
A serious problem, no doubt. In obedience to the Orwellian principle, there is, however, a small omission: the United States does not “accede to the ICCPR.” To be sure, the US signed and ratified it, but in the usual cynical style: with “reservations, declarations, and understandings” that eviscerate it. In particular, the Senate determined that “the provisions of Articles 1 through 27 of the Covenant are not self-executing,” that is, are effectively inapplicable to the US. Articles 1 through 27 are the only ones with any content.11
The ICCPR is described by the American Civil Liberties Union as “a key international human rights treaty, providing a range of protections for civil and political rights. The ICCPR, together with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UD] and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights [ICESCR], are considered the International Bill of Human Rights.”
The US rejects the ICESCR with disdain, as discussed below, along with the UD quite generally. The normal stance of a rogue state.
One of Washington’s grand hopes for Cuba is that it will accept US initiatives to improve the use of the Internet, permitting US telecom companies to provide Internet infrastructure and services to Cuba. Even in the current state of deprivation and tyranny depicted in US coverage, Cubans are likely to have heard of a gentleman named Edward Snowden, and might therefore be pardoned if they are skeptical about this munificent offer.12
The stream of denunciations of Cuban human rights violations consistently manages to ignore the fact that the worst of these are clearly in Guantánamo, which the US stole from Cuba at gunpoint a century ago, rejecting Cuban requests for its return since Cuba attained its independence in 1959; and the fact that Cuban human rights violations, while real and meriting censure, pale into insignificance in comparison with the crimes of US dependencies in the region, which elicit substantial aid and diplomatic support, not sanctions.
As Moyn describes, during the Clinton years “the American school of thought known as ‘liberal internationalism’ was close to realizing its fondest dreams,” at least in its own estimation. The exuberant self-admiration of American (and other western) intellectuals during those years is a phenomenon of much interest,13 unfortunately “disappeared” since, perhaps again out of embarrassment. The military component of liberal internationalism, “humanitarian intervention,” also achieved near exalted status. The jewel in the crown was to be intervention in Kosovo, discussed in chapter 3. Much more was learned later when a rich trove of western documents was released, including two State Department collections designed to justify the US-run NATO bombing of Serbia, the valuable reports of the UN monitors on the ground in Kosovo prior to the bombing, reports by NATO and the UN, and much else.14 The rich documentary evidence explains further why western self-praise was not echoed among the traditional victims.
It most definitely was not. The reaction to the NATO attack was delivered at the South Summit of the non-aligned movement—the governments of 80 percent of the world’s population—in April 2000. With the attack very clearly in mind, they rejected “the so-called ‘right’ of humanitarian intervention.” The stand was reiterated in the summit of non-aligned countries in Malaysia in February 2003.
The same stand was reiterated again by a December 2004 high-level UN panel that included such prominent figures as Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser for George Bush I. The panel reaffirmed the basic principle of the UN Charter, banning the use of force with two exceptions: when authorized by the UN Security Council, or under Article 51, in defense against armed attack until the Security Council acts. Plainly neither condition holds for the NATO war against Serbia, or the US-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003, presumably what the panel had in mind specifically. Both therefore are acts of aggression, “the supreme international crime” under the Nuremberg judgment. The UN World Summit in September 2005 reaffirmed “that the relevant provisions of the Charter are sufficient to address the full range of threats to international peace and security.” The UN panel specifically warned “those impatient with” resort to Article 51 that “the risk to the global order and the norm of nonintervention on which it continues to be based is simply too great for the legality of unilateral preventive action, as distinct from collectively endorsed action, to be accepted. Allowing one to so act is to allow all.”
The International Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Kosovo war, headed by the distinguished South African jurist Richard Goldstone, agreed that the NATO bombing was illegal, but concluded that it was legitimate all the same “because all diplomatic avenues had been exhausted and there was no other way to stop the killings and atrocities in Kosovo.” In reality, diplomatic avenues were quite open, and in fact the final diplomatic resolution, after 78 days of bombing, was a compromise between the NATO and Serbian proposals on the table when the assault began. The claim that the bombing was undertaken “to stop the killings and atrocities in Kosovo” is the standard inversion of the chronology: the killings and atrocities were not the cause but rather the consequence of the bombing, the predictable consequence, as NATO commander General Wesley Clark informed the Clinton Administration in advance, and informed the press as the bombing began. On that fact, the record is very clear, and is tacitly conceded by NATO. The NATO-inspired indictment of Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic kept to crimes committed after the NATO attack, with one (dubious) exception.
With “humanitarian intervention” having lost its luster, again something new was needed, and just in time, a new doctrine was created: Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The patron saint, greatly lauded for this contribution to liberal internationalism, is Australian diplomat Gareth Evans.15 The doctrine has two versions: one, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005, breaks little new ground, basically reaffirming the stand of the high-level UN panel a year earlier. The second, authored by Evans, is the same with one change: it authorizes regional groupings (which in effect means NATO) to intervene by force in violation of the UN Charter. The second version is the operative one; the first is invoked to demonstrate the universa
l endorsement of the right of NATO to intervene.16
Throughout, the guiding principle of the Orwellian nationalist prevails. The less we are responsible for some crime and the less we can do about it, the greater the attention and outrage. The greater our responsibility and the more we can do to mitigate or end the crime, the less the attention or even concern—and, not untypically, the more extreme and desperate the attempts at exculpation or even glorification of the crime as a “noble cause.”
For prominent rogue states, nothing could be more natural and appropriate.
1
Rogues’ Gallery: Who Qualifies?
Like many other terms of political discourse, the term “rogue state” has two uses: a propagandistic use, applied to assorted enemies, and a literal use that applies to states that do not regard themselves as bound by international norms. Logic suggests that the most powerful states should tend to fall into the latter category unless internally constrained, an expectation that history confirms.
Though international norms are not rigidly determined, there is a measure of agreement on general guidelines. In the post-World War II period, these norms are partially codified in the UN Charter, International Court of Justice decisions, and various conventions and treaties. The US regards itself as exempt from these conditions, increasingly so since the Cold War ended, leaving US dominance so overwhelming that pretense can be largely dropped. The fact has not gone unnoticed. The newsletter of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) observed in March 1999 that “international law is today probably less highly regarded in our country than at any time” in the century; the editor of its professional journal had warned shortly before of the “alarming exacerbation” of Washington ‘s dismissal of treaty obligations.1
The operative principle was articulated by Dean Acheson in 1963 when he informed the ASIL that the “propriety” of a response to a “challenge . . . [to the] . . . power, position, and prestige of the United States . . . is not a legal issue.” International law, he had observed earlier, is useful “to gild our positions with an ethos derived from very general moral principles which have affected legal doctrines.” But the US is not bound by it.2