by Noam Chomsky
The US proceeded to define “aggression” to include “political warfare, or subversion” (by someone else, that is)—what Adlai Stevenson called “internal aggression” while defending JFK’s escalation to a full-scale attack against South Vietnam. When the US bombed Libyan cities in 1986, the official justification was “self-defense against future attack.” New York Times legal specialist Anthony Lewis praised the administration for relying “on a legal argument that violence [in this case] is justified as an act of self-defense” under this creative interpretation of Article 51 of the Charter, which would have embarrassed a literate high school student. The US invasion of Panama was defended in the Security Council by Ambassador Thomas Pickering by appeal to Article 51, which, he declared, “provides for the use of armed force to defend a country, to defend our interests and our people,” and entitles the US to invade Panama to prevent its “territory from being used as a base for smuggling drugs into the United States.” Educated opinion nodded sagely in assent.
In June 1993, Clinton ordered a missile attack on Iraq, killing civilians and greatly cheering the president, congressional doves, and the press, who found the attack “appropriate, reasonable, and necessary.” Commentators were particularly impressed by Ambassador Albright’s appeal to Article 51. The bombing, she explained, was in “self-defense against armed attack”—namely, an alleged attempt to assassinate former president Bush two months earlier, an appeal that would have scarcely risen to the level of absurdity even if the US had been able to demonstrate Iraqi involvement; “administration officials, speaking anonymously,” informed the press “that the judgment of Iraq’s guilt was based on circumstantial evidence and analysis rather than ironclad intelligence,” the New York Times reported, dismissing the matter. The press assured elite opinion that the circumstances “plainly fit” Article 51 (Washington Post). “Any president has a duty to use military force to protect the nation’s interests” (New York Times, while expressing some skepticism about the case in hand). “Diplomatically, this was the proper rationale to invoke,” and “Clinton’s reference to the UN Charter conveyed an American desire to respect international law” (Boston Globe). Article 51 “permits states to respond militarily if they are threatened by a hostile power” (Christian Science Monitor). Article 51 entitles a state to use force “in self-defense against threats to one’s nationals,” British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd instructed Parliament, supporting Clinton’s “justified and proportionate exercise of the right of self-defense.” There would be a “dangerous state of paralysis” in the world, Hurd continued, if the US were required to gain Security Council approval before launching missiles against an enemy that might—or might not—have ordered a failed attempt to kill an ex-president two months earlier.11
The record lends considerable support to the concern widely voiced about “rogue states” that are dedicated to the rule of force, acting in the “national interest” as defined by domestic power—most ominously, rogue states that anoint themselves global judge and executioner.
Rogue States: The Narrow Construction
It is also interesting to review the issues that did enter the non-debate on the Iraq crisis. But first a word about the concept “rogue state.”
The basic conception is that although the Cold War is over, the US still has the responsibility to protect the world—but from what? Plainly it cannot be from the threat of “radical nationalism”—that is, unwillingness to submit to the will of the powerful. Such ideas are fit only for internal planning documents, not the general public. From the early 1980s, it was clear that the conventional techniques for mass mobilization—the appeal to JFK’s “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy,” Reagan’s “evil empire”—were losing their effectiveness: New enemies were needed.
At home, fear of crime—particularly drugs—was stimulated by “a variety of factors that have little or nothing to do with crime itself,” the National Criminal Justice Commission concluded, including media practices and “the role of government and private industry in stoking citizen fear,” “exploiting latent racial tension for political purposes” with racial bias in enforcement and sentencing that is devastating black communities, creating a “racial abyss,” and putting “the nation at risk of a social catastrophe.” The results have been described by criminologists as “the American Gulag,” “the new American Apartheid,” with African Americans now a majority of prisoners for the first time in US history, imprisoned at well over seven times the rate of whites, completely out of the range of arrest rates, which themselves target blacks far out of proportion to drug use or trafficking.12
Abroad, the threats were to be “international terrorism,” “Hispanic narcotraffickers,” and most serious of all, “rogue states.” A secret 1995 study of the Strategic Command, which is responsible for the strategic nuclear arsenal, outlines the basic thinking. Released through the Freedom of lnformation Act, the study, Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, “shows how the United States shifted its deterrent strategy from the defunct Soviet Union to so-called rogue states such as Iraq, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea,” the Associated Press reports. The study advocates that the US exploit its nuclear arsenal to portray itself as “irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked.” That “should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries,” in particular the “rogue states.” “It hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed,” let alone committed to such silliness as international law and treaty obligations. “The fact that some elements” of the US government “may appear to be potentially ‘out of control ‘ can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary’s decision-makers.” The report resurrects Nixon’s “madman theory”: our enemies should recognize that we are crazed and unpredictable, with extraordinary destructive force at our command, so they will bend to our will in fear. The concept was apparently devised in Israel in the 1950s by the governing Labor Party, whose leaders “preached in favor of acts of madness,” Prime Minister Moshe Sharett records in his diary, warning that “we will go crazy” (“nishtagea”) if crossed, a “secret weapon” aimed in part against the US, not considered sufficiently reliable at the time. In the hands of the world’s sole superpower, which regards itself as an outlaw state and is subject to few constraints from elites within, that stance poses no small problem for the world.13
Libya was a favorite choice as “rogue state” from the earliest days of the Reagan administration. Vulnerable and defenseless, it is a perfect punching bag when needed: for example, in 1986, when the first bombing in history orchestrated for prime-time TV was used by the Great Communicator’s speechwriters to muster support for Washington’s terrorist forces attacking Nicaragua, on grounds that the “archterrorist” Qaddafi “has sent $400 million and an arsenal of weapons and advisors into Nicaragua to bring his war home to the United States,” which was then exercising its right of self-defense against the armed attack of the Nicaraguan rogue state.
Immediately after the Berlin Wall fell, ending any resort to the Soviet threat, the Bush administration submitted its annual call to Congress for a huge Pentagon budget. It explained that “in a new era, we foresee that our military power will remain an essential underpinning of the global balance, but . . . the more likely demands for the use of our military forces may not involve the Soviet Union and may be in the Third World, where new capabilities and approaches may be required,” as “when President Reagan directed American naval and air forces to return to [Libya] in 1986” to bombard civilian urban targets, guided by the goal of “contributing to an international environment of peace, freedom, and progress within which our democracy—and other free nations—can flourish.” The primary threat we face is the “growing technological sophistication” of the Third World. We must therefore strengthen “the defense industrial base”—a.k.a. high-tech industry—creating incentives “to invest in new facilities and equipment as well as in research and development
.” And we must maintain intervention forces, particularly those targeting the Middle East, where the “threats to our interests” that have required direct military engagement “could not be laid at the Kremlin ‘s door”—contrary to endless fabrication, now put to rest. As had occasionally been recognized in earlier years, sometimes in secret, the “threat” is now conceded officially to be indigenous to the region, the “radical nationalism” that has always been a primary concern, not only in the Middle East.14
At the time, the “threats to our interests” could not be laid at Iraq’s door either. Saddam was then a favored friend and trading partner. His status changed only a few months later, when he misinterpreted US willingness to allow him to modify the border with Kuwait by force as authorization to take the country over—or, from the perspective of the Bush administration, to duplicate what the US had just done in Panama. At a high-level meeting immediately after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, President Bush articulated the basic problem: “My worry about the Saudis is that they’re . . . going to bug out at the last minute and accept a puppet regime in Kuwait.” Chair of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell posed the problem sharply: “[In] the next few days Iraq will withdraw,” putting “his puppet in,” and “everyone in the Arab world will be happy.”15
Historical parallels are never exact, of course. When Washington partially withdrew from Panama after putting its puppet in, there was great anger throughout the hemisphere, including Panama—indeed, throughout much of the world—compelling Washington to veto two Security Council resolutions and to vote against a General Assembly resolution condemning Washington’s “flagrant violation of international law and of the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of states” and calling for the withdrawal of the “US armed invasion forces from Panama.” Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was treated differently, in ways remote from the standard version, but readily discovered in print.
The inexpressible facts shed interesting light on the commentary of political analysts: Ronald Steel, for example, who muses on the “conundrum” faced by the US, which, “as the world’s most powerful nation, faces greater constraints on its freedom to use force than does any other country”—hence Saddam’s success in Kuwait as compared with Washington’s inability to exert its will in Panama.16
It is worth recalling that debate was effectively foreclosed in 1990-91 as well. There was much discussion of whether sanctions would work, but none of whether they already had worked, perhaps shortly after Resolution 660 was passed. Fear that sanctions might have worked animated Washington’s refusal to test Iraqi withdrawal offers from August 1990 to early January 1991. With the rarest of exceptions, the information system kept tight discipline on the matter. Polls a few days before the January 1991 bombing showed 2 to 1 support for a peaceful settlement based on Iraqi withdrawal along with an international conference on the Israel-Arab conflict. Few among those who expressed this position could have heard any public advocacy of it; the media had loyally followed the president’s lead, dismissing “linkage” as unthinkable—in this unique case. It is unlikely that any respondents knew that their views were shared by the Iraqi democratic opposition, barred from mainstream media. Or that an Iraqi proposal in the terms they advocated had been released a week earlier by US officials, who found it reasonable, and had been flatly rejected by Washington. Or that an Iraqi withdrawal offer had been considered by the National Security Council as early as mid-August but dismissed, and effectively suppressed, apparently because it was feared that unmentioned Iraqi initiatives might “defuse the crisis,” as the New York Times diplomatic correspondent obliquely reported administration concerns.
Since then, Iraq has displaced Iran and Libya as the leading “rogue state.” Others have never entered the ranks. Perhaps the most relevant case is Indonesia, which shifted from enemy to friend when General Suharto took power in 1965, presiding over a Rwanda-style slaughter that elicited great satisfaction in the West. Since then Suharto has been “our kind of guy,” as the Clinton administration described him, while carrying out murderous aggression and endless atrocities against his own people—killing 10,000 Indonesians just in the 1980s, according to the personal testimony of “our guy,” who wrote that “the corpses were left lying around as a form of shock therapy.”17 In December 1975 the UN Security Council unanimously ordered Indonesia to withdraw its invading forces from East Timor “without delay” and called upon “all States to respect the territorial integrity of East Timor as well as the inalienable right of its people to self-determination.” The US responded by (secretly) increasing shipments of arms to the aggressors; Carter accelerated the arms flow once again as the attack reached near-genocidal levels in 1978. In his memoirs, UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan takes pride in his success in rendering the UN “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook,” following the instructions of the State Department, which “wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about.” The US also happily accepts the robbery of East Timor’s oil (with participation of a US company), in violation of any reasonable interpretation of international agreements.18
The analogy to Iraq/Kuwait is close, though there are differences: to mention only the most obvious, US-sponsored atrocities in East Timor were vastly beyond anything attributed to Saddam Hussein in Kuwait.
There are many other examples, though some of those commonly invoked should be treated with caution, particularly concerning Israel. The civilian toll of Israel’s US-backed invasion of Lebanon in 1982 exceeded Saddam’s in Kuwait, and it remains in violation of a 1978 Security Council resolution ordering it to withdraw forthwith from Lebanon, along with numerous other resolutions regarding Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and other matters; and there would be far more such resolutions if the US did not regularly veto them. But the common charge that Israel, particularly its current government, is violating UN 242 and the Oslo accords, and that the US exhibits a “double standard” by tolerating those violations, is dubious at best, based on serious misunderstanding of these agreements. From the outset, the Madrid-Oslo process was designed and implemented by US-Israeli power to impose a Bantustan-style settlement. The Arab world has chosen to delude itself about the matter, as have many others, but it is clear in the actual documents, and particularly in the US-supported projects of the Rabin-Peres governments, including those for which Netanyahu’s Likud government has been denounced.19
It is clearly untrue to claim that “Israel is not demonstrably in violation of Security Council decrees,”20 but the reasons often given should be examined carefully.
Returning to Iraq, it surely qualifies as a leading criminal state. Defending the US plan to attack Iraq at a televised public meeting on February 18, 1998, Secretaries Albright and Cohen repeatedly invoked the ultimate atrocity: Saddam was guilty of “using weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors as well as his own people,” his most awesome crime. “It is very important for us to make clear that the United States and the civilized world cannot deal with somebody who is willing to use those weapons of mass destruction on his own people, not to speak of his neighbors,” Albright emphasized in an angry response to a questioner who asked about US support for Suharto. Shortly after, Senator Lott condemned Kofi Annan for seeking to cultivate a “human relationship with a mass murderer,” and denounced the administration for trusting a person who would sink so low.
Ringing words. Putting aside their evasion of the question raised, Albright and Cohen only forgot to mention—and commentators have been kind enough not to point out—that the acts that they now find so horrifying did not turn Iraq into a “rogue state.” And Lott failed to note that his heroes Reagan and Bush forged unusually warm relations with the “mass murderer.” There were no passionate calls for a military strike after Saddam’s gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March 1988; on the contrary, the US and UK extended their strong support for the mass murderer, then also “our kind of guy.” When ABC TV correspondent Charles Glass revealed the si
te of one of Saddam’s biological warfare programs 10 months after Halabja, the State Department denied the facts, and the story died; the department “now issues briefings on the same site,” Glass observes.
The two guardians of global order also expedited Saddam’s other atrocities—including his use of cyanide, nerve gas, and other barbarous weapons—with intelligence, technology, and supplies, joining with many others. The Senate Banking Committee reported in 1994 that the US Commerce Department had traced shipments of “biological materials” identical to those later found and destroyed by UN inspectors, Bill Blum recalls. These shipments continued at least until November 1989. A month later, Bush authorized new loans for his friend Saddam, to achieve the “goal of increasing US exports and [to] put us in a better position to deal with Iraq regarding its human rights record,” the State Department announced with a straight face, facing no criticism (or even report) in the mainstream.
Britain’s record was exposed, at least in part, in an official inquiry (the Scott Inquiry). The British government has just now been compelled to concede that it continued to grant licenses to British firms to export materials usable for biological weapons after the Scott Inquiry Report was published, at least until December 1996.
In a February 28, 1998, review of Western sales of materials usable for germ warfare and other weapons of mass destruction, the New York Times mentions one example of US sales in the 1980s that included “deadly pathogens,” with government approval—some from the army’s center for germ research in Fort Detrick. Just the tip of the iceberg, however.21
A common current pretense is that Saddam’s crimes were unknown, so we are now properly shocked at the discovery and must “make clear” that we civilized folk “cannot deal with” the perpetrator of such crimes (in Albright’s words). The posture is cynical fraud. UN reports of 1986 and 1987 condemned Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. US Embassy staffers in Turkey interviewed Kurdish survivors of chemical warfare attacks, and the CIA reported them to the State Department. Human rights groups reported the atrocities at Halabja and elsewhere at once. Secretary of State George Shultz conceded that the US had evidence on the matter. An investigative team sent by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1988 found “overwhelming evidence of extensive use of chemical weapons against civilians,” charging that Western acquiescence in Iraqi use of such weapons against Iran had emboldened Saddam to believe—correctly—that he could use them against his own people with impunity—actually against Kurds, hardly “the people” of this tribal-based thug. The chair of the committee, Claiborne Pell, introduced the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988, denouncing silence “while people are gassed” as “complicity,” much as when “the world was silent as Hitler began a campaign that culminated in the near extermination of Europe’s Jews,” and warning that “we cannot be silent to genocide again.” The Reagan administration strongly opposed sanctions and insisted that the matter be silenced, while extending its support for the mass murderer. In the Arab world, “the Kuwait press was amongst the most enthusiastic of the Arab media in supporting Baghdad’s crusade against the Kurds,” journalist Adel Darwish reports.