Rogue States

by Noam Chomsky

  The US sanctions against Cuba are the harshest in the world, much harsher than the sanctions against Iraq, for example. There was a small item in the New York Times recently that said that Congress is passing legislation to allow US exporters to send food and medicine to Cuba. It explained that this was at the urging of US farmers. “Farmers” is a euphemism that means “US agribusiness”—it sounds better when you call them “farmers.” And it’s true that US agribusiness wants to get back into this market. The article didn’t point out that the restriction against the sale and export of food and medicines is in gross violation of international humanitarian law. It’s been condemned by almost every relevant body. Even the normally quite compliant Organization of American States, which rarely stands up against the boss, did condemn this as illegal and unacceptable (see Chapter 12).

  US policy towards Cuba is unique in a variety of respects, first of all because of the sustained attacks, and secondly because the US is totally isolated in the world—in fact, 100 percent isolated, because the one state that reflexively has to vote with the United States at the UN, Israel, also openly violates the embargo, contrary to its vote.

  The United States government is also isolated from its own population. According to the most recent poll I’ve seen, about two-thirds of the population in the United States is opposed to the embargo. They don’t take polls in the business world, but there’s pretty strong evidence that major sectors of the business world, major corporations, are strongly opposed to the embargo. So the isolation of the US government is another unusual element. The US government is isolated from its own population, from the major decision makers in this society, which largely control the government, and from international opinion, but is still fanatically committed to this policy, which goes right back to the roots of the American republic.

  Cuba has brought out real hysteria among planners. This was particularly striking during the Kennedy years. The internal records from the Kennedy administration, many of which are available now, describe an atmosphere of what was called “savagery” and “fanaticism” over the failure of the US to reconquer Cuba. Kennedy’s own public statements were wild enough. He said publicly that the United States would be swept away in the debris of history unless it reincorporated Cuba under its control.

  In 1997 at the World Trade Organization (WTO) when the European Union brought charges against the United States for blatant, flagrant violation of WTO rules in the embargo, the US rejected its jurisdiction, which is not surprising, because it rejects the jurisdiction of international bodies generally. But the reasons were interesting. It rejected its jurisdiction on the grounds of a national security reservation. The national security of the United States was threatened by the existence of Cuba, and therefore the US had to reject WTO jurisdiction. Actually, the US did not make that position official, because it would have subjected itself to international ridicule, but that was the position, and it was publicly stated, repeatedly. It’s a national security issue; we therefore cannot consider WTO jurisdiction.

  You’ll be pleased to know that the Pentagon recently downgraded the threat of Cuban conquest of the United States. It’s still there, but it’s not as serious as it was. The reason, they explained, is the deterioration of the awesome Cuban military forces after the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union stopped supplying them. So we can rest a little bit easier; we don’t have to hide under tables the way we were taught to do in first grade. This elicited no ridicule when it was publicly announced, at least here. I’m sure it did elsewhere; you might recall the response of the Mexican ambassador when John F. Kennedy was trying to organize collective security in defense against Cuba back in the early ‘60s in Mexico: the ambassador said he would regretfully have to decline because if he were to tell Mexicans that Cuba was a threat to their national security, 40 million Mexicans would die laughing.

  This hysteria and fanaticism is indeed unusual and interesting, and it deserves inquiry and thought. Where does it come from? The historical depth partly explains it, but there’s more to it than that in the current world. A good framework within which to think of it is what has now become the leading thesis in intellectual discourse, in serious journals especially. It’s what’s called the “new humanism,” which was proclaimed by Clinton and Blair and various acolytes with great awe and solemnity. According to this thesis, which you read over and over, we’re entering a glorious new era, a new millennium. It actually began 10 years ago when the two enlightened countries, as they call themselves, were freed from the shackles of the Cold War and were therefore able to rededicate themselves with full vigor to their historic mission of bringing justice and freedom to the suffering people of the world and protecting human rights everywhere, by force if necessary—something they were prevented from doing during the Cold War interruption.

  That renewal of the saintly mission is quite explicit; it’s not left to the imagination. Clinton gave a major speech at the Norfolk Air Station on April 1, 1999, explaining why we have to bomb everybody in sight in the Balkans. He was introduced by the secretary of defense, William Cohen, who opened his remarks by reminding the audience of some of the dramatic words that had opened the last century. He cited Theodore Roosevelt, later to be president, who said that “unless you’re willing to fight for great ideals, those ideals will vanish.” And just as Theodore Roosevelt opened the century with those stirring words, William Clinton, his successor, was closing the century with the same stand.

  That was an interesting introduction for anyone who had taken a course in American history, that is, a real course. Theodore Roosevelt, as they would have learned, was one of the most extraordinary racist, raving lunatics of contemporary history. He was greatly admired by Hitler, and for good reason. His writings are shocking to read. He won his fame through participation in the US invasion of Cuba. By 1898 Cuba had essentially liberated itself from Spain after a long struggle, but the US wasn’t having any of that, so it invaded to prevent the independence struggle from succeeding. Cuba was quickly turned into what two Harvard professors, the editors of the recent Kennedy Tapes, call “a virtual colony” of the United States, as it remained up until 1959. It’s an accurate description. Cuba was turned into a “virtual colony” after the invasion, which was described as a humanitarian intervention, incidentally.

  At that time, too, the United States was quite isolated. The United States government was isolated, of course, from the Cuban people, but it was also isolated from the American population, who were foolish enough to believe the propaganda and were overwhelmingly in favor of Cuba libre, not understanding that that was the last thing in the minds of their leaders—or, from another point of view, the first thing in their minds, because they had to prevent it.

  The noble ideals that Roosevelt was fighting for were in fact those, in part: to prevent independence through humanitarian intervention. However, at the time he actually spoke, in 1901 or so, the values that we had to uphold by force were being demonstrated far more dramatically elsewhere than in Cuba, namely in the conquest of the Philippines. That was one of the most murderous colonial wars in history, in which hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were slaughtered. The press recognized that it was a massive slaughter, but advised that we must continue to kill “the natives in English fashion,” until they come to “respect our arms” and ultimately to respect our good intentions. This was also a so-called humanitarian intervention.

  Fruits of Conquest

  There were a couple of problems. President McKinley did say that we can’t claim at this point to have the consent of the Filipinos, but that’s unimportant because we have the consent of our consciences in performing this great act of humanity, and after all, that’s what counts. A small number of people opposed the war pretty strongly—Mark Twain for example, who was silenced for 90 years, and whose anti-imperialist essays just came out in 1992. But McKinley pointed out that “it is not a good time for the liberator to submit important questions concerning liberty and governmen
t to the liberated while they are engaged in shooting down their rescuers.” So we’ll wait until they stop shooting down their rescuers, and then we’ll explain to them the issues of liberty. Those were the values that were being upheld, with hundreds of thousands of corpses and tremendous destruction, in the early part of the century, and those are the values we are now told we have to fight for and uphold, as the current inheritor of Theodore Roosevelt’s values proclaims.

  It takes a good deal of faith in the US doctrinal system to pronounce those words and expect people not to be outraged, and apparently that faith is merited. No outrage was recorded, to my knowledge, except in the usual marginal circles. That period was a turning point in modern history, certainly in US history, hence in world history. Up until that time, since the Revolution, the United States had been engaged in its primary task, namely, as one leading diplomatic historian put it in 1969, the task of “felling trees and Indians and of rounding out their natural boundaries.” One of the salutary effects of the activism of the 1960s is that not only a leading historian but even a jingoist lunatic could not pronounce those words today. Nobody would write that now. They might think it, but they would know not to say it.

  So, after “felling trees and Indians and rounding out [our] natural boundaries,” it was necessary to turn to new worlds to conquer. In 1888 Secretary of State James Blaine announced the next conquests. He said, there are three places of value enough to be taken quickly: Hawaii, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. A few years later, the US minister in Hawaii informed Washington that “the Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe,” ready to be plucked, and the US plucked it, taking Hawaii away from its people by a combination of overwhelming force and guile. That was one. The minister was in fact repeating the words of John Quincy Adams 70 years earlier, who had described Cuba as not yet a “ripe fruit,” but had said it will become a ripe fruit, and when it does become a ripe fruit it will fall into our hands “by the laws of political gravitation.” That was around 1820.

  The problem throughout the 19th century was the British deterrent. In the 1960s and ‘70s and ‘80s it was the Russian deterrent. But the great enemy in the 19th century, the enemy that had to be brought to its feet, as was pointed out over and over, was Britain. That’s why Canada and Cuba are still a different color on the map. And that deterrent set limits on the liberating zeal of the revolutionaries and their inheritors. But Adams pointed out quite correctly, as did Thomas Jefferson and others, that over time the balance of forces would change, the British deterrent would not be that effective, and the US would be able to take over Cuba, as it must do because of its transcendent importance to the United States, by the laws of political gravitation, meaning, by force. That happened in 1898. The United States invaded Cuba to prevent the ultimate threat, namely its liberation from Spain. Puerto Rico was taken over in the same year, and the Philippines came along as an extra bonus. It hadn’t been contemplated, but it turned out to be a ripe fruit, too, fertilized by plenty of corpses.

  These events were all related in planning. Actually the biggest fruit of all by a huge order was China. For 2,000 years China had been one of the most important countries in the world, a leading commercial and industrial power, but by the 19th century that had changed. By the end of the century the European powers and Japan were busy carving China up, and the United States wanted to get into the act as a rising power. The China trade was a great myth from the early days of New England: the New England merchants were going to make money from the China trade. In order to exploit the China trade and take our proper role in carving up China, it was necessary to turn the Caribbean and the Pacific into “American lakes,” as planners put it. That meant taking Cuba, controlling the Caribbean, stealing what was called Panama from Colombia (another one of Theodore Roosevelt’s achievements), building the canal, taking over Hawaii, taking over the Philippines as another base for trade with China, and in fact effectively turning those two seas, the Caribbean and the Pacific, into American lakes, as they remain today.

  Every one of these 1898 actions and what followed was connected in some fashion or another, usually quite explicitly, to this long-term objective. This includes the so-called Theodore Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which formally established the US right to rule the Caribbean. The repeated invasions of Nicaragua, Woodrow Wilson’s very bloody invasions of the Dominican Republic and Haiti—particularly ugly in Haiti because it was also suffused by extreme racism (Haiti will never recover from that and in fact may not be habitable in a couple of decades)—and many other actions in that region were all part of the new humanism, which we’re now reviving.

  Probably the major achievement was in Venezuela, where in 1920 Woodrow Wilson succeeded in kicking out the British enemy, at that time weakened by the First World War. Venezuela was extremely important. The world was shifting to an oil-based economy at the time. North America, mainly the US, was by far the major producer of oil, and remained so until about 1970, but Venezuela was an important oil resource, one of the biggest in the world—in fact, the biggest single exporter until 1970, and still the biggest exporter to the United States. So kicking the British out of there was very important. Venezuela also had other resources, such as iron, and US corporations enriched themselves in Venezuela for decades—and still do—while the US supported a series of murderous dictators to keep the people in line.

  The “Kennedy tapes,” the secret tapes of the Cuban missile crisis, are not all that revealing since almost everything in there had already come out in one way or another, but they do reveal a few new things. One of the new things is an explanation of one of the reasons the Kennedy brothers, Robert and John F., were concerned about missiles in Cuba. They were concerned that they might be a deterrent to a US invasion of Venezuela, which they thought might be necessary because the situation there was getting out of hand. Missiles in Cuba might deter an invasion. Noting that, John F. Kennedy said that the Bay of Pigs was right. We’re going to have to make sure we win; we can’t face any such deterrent to our benevolence in the region. After the missile crisis, contrary to what’s often said, the US made no pledge not to invade Cuba. It stepped up the terrorism, and of course the embargo was already in place and imposed more harshly, and so matters have essentially remained.

  The Castro Threat

  As I mentioned, Cuba was a virtual colony of the United States until January 1959; it didn’t take long before the wheels started turning again. By mid-1959—we now have a lot of declassified records from that period, so the picture’s pretty complete—the Eisenhower administration had determined informally to reconquer Cuba. By October 1959 planes based in Florida were already bombing Cuba. The US claimed not to be able to do anything about it, and has remained “helpless” throughout the most recent acts of terrorism, which are traceable to CIA-trained operatives, as usual.

  In March 1960 the Eisenhower administration secretly made a formal decision to conquer Cuba, but with a proviso: it had to be done in such a way that the US hand would not be evident. The reason for that was because they knew it would blow up Latin America if it were obvious that the US had retaken Cuba. Furthermore, they had polls indicating that in Cuba itself there was a high level of optimism and strong support for the revolution; there would obviously be plenty of resistance. They had to overthrow the government, but in such a way that the US hand would not be evident.

  Shortly after that, the Kennedy administration came in. They were very much oriented towards Latin America; just before taking office Kennedy had established a Latin American mission to review the affairs of the continent. It was headed by historian Arthur Schlesinger. His report is now declassified. He informed President Kennedy of the results of the mission with regard to Cuba. The problem in Cuba, he said, is “the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands.” He said, that is an idea that has a great deal of appeal throughout Latin America, where “the distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes . . . [
and] the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living.”1 That’s the threat of Castro. That’s correct. In fact, if you read through the record of internal planning over the years, that has always been the threat. The Cold War is a public pretext. Take a look at the record; in case after case, it’s exactly this. Cuba is what was called a “virus” that might infect others who might be stimulated by “the Castro idea of taking matters into [their] own hands” and believing that they too might have a decent living.

  It’s not that Russia wasn’t mentioned. Russia is mentioned in the Schlesinger report. He says, in the background, Russia is offering itself as “the model for achieving modernization in a single generation,” and is offering aid and development loans. So there was a Russian threat. We are instructed vigorously that when we inspect the new humanism, we’re not supposed to look at those musty old stories about the Cold War, when we were blocked by the Russians from doing wonderful things. It’s very important not to look, because the institutions have remained unchanged, the planning remains unchanged, the decisions are unchanged, and the policies are unchanged. It’s far better to ensure that people don’t know about them.

  The Kennedy administration took over, and so matters continued up until the end of the Cold War. It’s not that nothing changed at the end of the Cold War; it did. The main thing that changed was that there no longer was a Soviet deterrent. That meant that the US was much more free than before, along with its loyal attack dog, the UK. So the US and UK are now much more free to use force than they were when there was a deterrent. That was recognized right away. But new pretexts are needed. You can no longer say that everything we do is against the Russians.