Rogue States

by Noam Chomsky

  The Cuba sanctions are the harshest in the world. They have been in force since 1960, but became much more severe, with a heavy human toll, when the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” finally faded away and it was impossible any longer to appeal to the grave national security threat posed by Cuba—far short of the threat posed by Denmark or Luxembourg to the USSR. These unilateral coercive measures do not count as a “sanctions regime,” however. They are “strictly a matter of bilateral trade policy and not a matter appropriate for consideration by the UN General Assembly,” so the US explained in response to the UN vote (Deputy US Representative to the UN Peter Burleigh, speaking to the General Assembly, reiterated by the State Department). Repeating almost verbatim Washington’s reaction to the seven previous years’ votes, Philip Reeker, a State Department spokesman, said that “the trade embargo is US law which we will enforce.” It makes no difference what the world might think or decide.25

  So there is no contradiction between the stance on Chechnya and on Cuba, and no counterexample to Clinton’s firm adherence to international law and practice with regard to the propriety of “a sanctions regime.” And furthermore, the latest UN vote condemning the US, and Washington’s reaction, was yet another non-event, at least for those who receive their information from the national press, which did not report them.

  Let’s defer the two convincing illustrations of the “new doctrine” and turn to other tests of our dedication to the high ideals proclaimed, more instructive ones than the Russian assault in Chechnya, which does not pose “the harshest test” for the “new doctrine” or much of a test at all—perhaps the reason why it is constantly adduced, in preference to significant and instructive tests. However outrageous the Russian crimes, it is understood that very little can be done about them, just as little could be done to deter the US terrorist wars in Central America in the 1980s or its destruction of South Vietnam, then all Indochina, in earlier years. When a military superpower goes on the rampage, the costs of interference are too high to contemplate: deterrence must largely come from within. Such efforts had some success in the case of Indochina and Central America, though only very limited success as the fate of the victims clearly reveals—or would, if it were conceivable to look at the consequences honestly and draw the appropriate conclusions.

  More Serious Tests

  Let’s tum, then, to more serious tests of the “new doctrine”: the reaction to atrocities that are easily ended, not by intervention, but simply by withdrawing participation. Evidently, these cases provide the clearest and most informative tests of the “new doctrine,” as of the old. The end of 1999 offered several such tests. One, which requires separate treatment, is the move to escalate US-backed terror in Colombia, with ominous prospects (see Chapter 5). Several others illustrate with much clarity the content of the “new doctrine,” as interpreted in practice.

  In December 1999, there were many articles on the death of Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, a Milosevic clone who enjoyed generally warm relations with the West, though his authoritarian style and corruption “drew scathing criticism from American and Western European officials.” Nevertheless, he will be remembered as “the father of independent Croatia,” whose “crowning achievement came in military operations in May and August 1995,” when his armies succeeded in recapturing Croatian territory held by Serbs, “sparking a mass exodus of Croatian Serbs to Serbia.”26 The “crowning achievement” also received a few words in a lengthy New York Times story by David Binder, who has reported on the region with much distinction for many years: Tudjman reluctantly agreed to take part in the US-run Dayton negotiations in late 1995, after “he had all but accomplished his goal of driving ethnic Serbs from what he viewed as purely Croatian land [Krajina].”27

  The August phase of the military campaign, Operation Storm, was the largest single ethnic cleansing operation of the Yugoslav wars of secession. The UN reports that “approximately 200,000 Serbs fled their homes in Croatia during and immediately after the fighting,” while “the few that remained were subjected to violent abuse.” A few weeks afterwards, Richard Holbrooke, who directed Clinton’s diplomacy, “told Tudjman that the [Croatian] offensive had great value to the negotiations” and “urged Tudjman” to extend it, he writes in his memoir, To End a War, driving out another 90,000 Serbs. Secretary of State Warren Christopher explained that “we did not think that kind of attack could do anything other than create a lot of refugees and cause a humanitarian problem. On the other hand, it always had the prospect of simplifying matters” in preparation for Dayton. Clinton commented that Croatia’s ethnic cleansing operation could prove helpful in resolving the Balkan conflict, though it was problematic because of the risk of Serbian retaliation. As reported at the time, Clinton approved a “yellow-light approach” or “an amber light tinted green,” which Tudjman took to be tacit encouragement for the “crowning achievement.” The massive ethnic cleansing was unproblematic, merely a “humanitarian problem,” apart from the risk of reaction.28

  Reviewing the Croatian operations in a scholarly journal, Binder observes that “what struck me again and again. . . was the almost total lack of interest in the US press and in the US Congress” about the US involvement: “Nobody, it appears, wanted even a partial accounting” of the role of “MPRI mercenaries” (retired US generals sent to train and advise the Croatian army under State Department contract) or “the participation of US military and intelligence components.”29 Direct participation included: bombardment of Krajina Serbian surface-to-air missile sites by US naval aircraft to eliminate any threat to Croatian attack planes and helicopters, Binder reports, citing US military journals; the supply of sophisticated US technology and intelligence; a “key role” in arranging the transfer to Croatia of 30 percent of the Iranian weapons secretly sent to Bosnia; and apparently the planning of the entire operation.

  The International War Crimes Tribunal did investigate the offensive, producing a 50-page report with a section headed: “The Indictment. Operation Storm, A Prima Facie Case.”30 The tribunal concluded that the “Croatian Army carried out summary executions, indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations, and ‘ethnic cleansing,’” but the inquiry was hampered by Washington’s “refusal to provide critical evidence requested by the tribunal,” and appears to have languished. The “almost total lack of interest” in ethnic cleansing and other atrocities committed by the right hands persists, illustrated once again at Tudjman’s death, while we ponder the problem of our consistency in upholding the “new doctrine,” revealed by the Chechnya quandary.

  One of those allegedly under investigation by the International War Crimes Tribunal for Operation Storm atrocities is Agim Ceku, “a former brigadier in the Croatian army who emerged as commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)” during the NATO bombings and was then designated by the occupying forces (KFOR) as “commander of the Kosovo Protection Force (TMK),” set up in September 1999 “to help police the war-torn province.” UN and Western sources confirmed that Ceku is under investigation and “could be indicted for war crimes allegedly committed during the ethnic cleansing of Serbs by Croatian soldiers.” “Sources familiar with the investigation into Ceku said the most serious crimes with which he had been linked were committed” in Krajina in 1993, when he “was commanding the fledgling Croatian army’s 9th Brigade.” “Boosted by notorious mercenaries, the brigade was feared as one of the most ruthless in an area where Croatian nationalism was combined with the thuggish corruption of a mafia underworld.” Ceku was also “one of the commanders trained by American forces before the infamous Operation Storm of August 1995, which pushed most of Croatia’s rebellious Serbs from Krajina and into Serbia proper,” an operation in which “about 300,000 Serbs were ‘cleansed’” with unknown numbers killed and hundreds “still missing.” “American diplomats, who have been the most supportive of the creation of the TMK, have suggested any indictment of Ceku would most likely be ‘sealed’ and thereby kept out of the public domain.”
31

  Ceku also “comes in for fierce criticism” in a confidential UN report that covers the period January 21-February 29, 2000, and accuses the force that he commands of “criminal activities—killings, ill-treatment/torture, illegal policing, abuse of authority, intimidation, breaches of political neutrality, and hate-speech.” Set up by NATO to provide “disaster response services,” and drawn primarily from the KLA, the TMK is instead “murdering and torturing people” while the UN is “paying the salaries of many of the gangsters.” It has also “been running protection rackets across Kosovo . . . demanding ‘contributions’ from shopkeepers, businessmen, and contractors,” and perhaps prostitution rackets, resorting to terror and death threats and forcing the release of arrested criminals.32

  It seems likely that Ceku’s role here too will be “sealed.” “‘If we lose him it will be a disaster,’ said a diplomat close to Bernard Kouchner, the UN’s special representative. ‘When you get to the second level of the TMK, you’re down to a bunch of local thugs.’”33

  A still “harsher test” of the new doctrine was the reaction to the acceptance of Turkey as a candidate for membership in the European Union in December 1999. The ample coverage succeeded in overlooking the obvious issue: the huge terror operations, including massive ethnic cleansing, conducted with decisive US aid and training, increasing under Clinton as atrocities peaked to a level vastly beyond the crimes that allegedly provoked the NATO bombing of Serbia. True, some questions were raised: a New York Times headline read: “First Question for Europe: Is Turkey Really European?”34 The US-backed atrocities merit a phrase: Turkey’s “war against Kurdish rebels has subsided”—just as Serbia’s far lesser pre-bombing “war against Albanian rebels” would have “subsided” had the US provided Belgrade with a flood of high-tech weapons and diplomatic support while the press and the intellectual community looked the other way. Shortly before, Stephen Kinzer had described how “Clinton Charm Was on Display in Turkey”(as the headline put it) as he visited earthquake victims, staring soulfully into the eyes of an infant he held tenderly, and demonstrating in other ways too his “legendary ability to connect with people”—revealed so graphically in the huge terror operations that continue to elicit “almost total lack of interest” while we admire ourselves for a dedication to human rights that is unique in history.35

  An explanatory footnote was added quietly in mid-December. Turkish and Israeli naval forces, accompanied by a US warship, undertook maneuvers in the Eastern Mediterranean, a none-too-subtle warning to “prod Syria to negotiate with Israel” under US auspices.36

  Appropriately, the president of Turkey was one of the few heads of state who attended Tudjman’s funeral. Others stayed away because of objections to “Mr. Tudjman’s authoritarian rule and his reluctance to cooperate” with UN war crimes tribunals,37 but ethnic cleansing and other atrocities conducted by Tudjman and his Turkish friends do not reach the radar screen. That makes good sense when events are perceived “through the prism of our own values,” given that the crimes of the Turkish and Croatian governments were sponsored by the Clinton administration.

  Another test of the “new doctrine” was offered in mid-November, the 10th anniversary of the assassination of six leading Latin American intellectuals (along with many others), including the rector of El Salvador’s leading university, in the course of yet another murderous rampage by an elite battalion of the US-run terrorist forces (called “the Salvadoran army”), fresh from another training session by Green Berets, capping a decade of horrendous atrocities. The names of the murdered Jesuit intellectuals did not appear in the US press. Few would even recall their names, or would have read a word they had written, in sharp contrast to dissidents in the domains of the monstrous enemy—who suffered severe repression, but, in the post-Stalin era, nothing remotely like that meted out regularly under US control. Like the events themselves, the contrast raises questions of no slight import, but these too are off the agenda.

  Little need be said about the two examples offered as the demonstration of our commitment to high principles: East Timor and Kosovo. As for the Portuguese-administered territory of East Timor, there was no “intervention”; rather, dispatch of an Australian-led UN force after Washington at last agreed to signal to the Indonesian generals that the game was over, having supported them through 24 years of slaughter and repression, continuing through the atrocities of 1999—again far beyond anything attributed to Milosevic in Kosovo before the NATO bombings. After finally withdrawing his support for Indonesian atrocities under mounting domestic and international (mainly Australian) pressure, with the country mostly destroyed, 85 percent of the population expelled from their homes, and unknown numbers killed, Clinton continued to stand aside. There were no air-drops of food to hundreds of thousands of refugees starving in the mountains, nor anything more than occasional rebukes to the Indonesian military, who continued to hold hundreds of thousands more in captivity in Indonesian territory, where many still remain. Clinton also refuses to provide meaningful aid, let alone the huge reparations that would be called for if the fine principles were meant at all seriously.38

  That performance is now presented as one of Clinton’s great moments and a prime example of the stirring “new doctrine” of intervention in defense of human rights, ignoring sovereignty (which did not exist). Here amnesia is not really selective: “total” would be closer to accurate.

  On Kosovo, the current version in the media and much of scholarship is that NATO “reacted to the deportation of more than a million Kosovars from their homeland” by bombing so as to save them “from horrors of suffering, or from death.”39 The timing is crucially reversed in a manner that has been routine from the outset. In a detailed year-end review, the Wall Street Journal dismisses the stories of “killing fields” that were crafted to prevent “a fatigued press corps [from] drifting towards the contrarian story [of] civilians killed by NATO’s bombs,” but concludes nonetheless that the expulsions and other atrocities that did take place “may well be enough to justify the [NATO] bombing campaign” that precipitated them, as anticipated.40

  The reasoning is by now standard: the US and its allies had to abandon the options that remained available (and were later pursued) and bomb, with the expectation—quickly fulfilled—that the result would be a major humanitarian catastrophe, which retrospectively justifies the bombing. Furthermore, it was necessary for the CIA to assist KLA guerrillas in their openly declared effort to elicit a harsh and brutal Serb response to the killing of Serb police and civilians, thus arousing Western opinion to support the planned bombing; the CIA, it seems, operated under the cover of the international monitors, thus subverting their mission, as in the case of Iraqi weapons monitors at the same time.41 A further justification is that if NATO hadn’t bombed, maybe something similar would have happened anyway.42 That is the “new doctrine” in its most admired form, and perhaps the most exotic justification for state violence on record—even putting aside other consequences, including the effects of the bombardment of civilian targets in Serbia, the “cleansing” of Kosovo under the eyes of the NATO occupying forces, and the refusal of the US to help clear the more than 25,000 unexploded cluster bombs that are killing survivors in Kosovo,43 with worse to come, very possibly.

  The record does seem to reveal remarkable consistency, as one might expect. Why should we expect inconsistency when the institutional factors that undergird policy remain intact and unchanged, to bring up the forbidden question? Talk of a “double standard” is simply evasion; in fact, cowardly evasion when we consider what is omitted under the principle of selective amnesia.

  13

  Power in the Domestic Arena

  The focus on the United States is distorting, and we should compensate for it: the US is powerful, but not all-powerful. It is the richest country in the world, it has unparalleled advantages, and has had for several hundred years, but the global economy has been what is called tripolar for almost 30 years, with intricate alliance
s and conflicts, and there are other power centers.

  In 1945 the structure of world power was unusually clear by historical standards. A half-century before that, the United States had become by far the world’s greatest economic power, but it was a relatively small player on the world scene. By 1945 that had radically changed, for obvious reasons: the industrial societies had been seriously damaged or destroyed, while the US economy had flourished through the war; the US had literally half the world’s wealth, incomparable military power, and security; and it was in a position to organize much of the world, and did so with the assistance of its “junior partner,” as the British Foreign Office ruefully described the new reality of the time.

  The general point was put accurately enough by a leading diplomatic historian, Gerald Haines (also the senior historian of the CIA), in a recent book.1 He observes that after World War II the United States “assumed, out of self-interest, responsibility for the welfare of the world capitalist system,” which is a fair enough formula, but to understand it we have to carry out a few translations. The first is that the word “capitalist” doesn’t mean capitalist. Rather, what it refers to are state-subsidized and protected private power centers—“collectivist legal entities,” as they are called by legal historians—internally tyrannical, unaccountable to the public, granted extraordinary rights by US courts in radical violation of classical liberal ideals. That’s why the corporatization of America, as it’s called, early in this century was bitterly condemned by conservatives, a breed that has since vanished, aside from the name. The corporatization was condemned as “a form of communism,” a return to “feudalistic” structures, and not without reason. Progressive intellectuals, who generally supported the process, gave a rather similar assessment, among them Woodrow Wilson.2 Apart from their “power and control over the wealth and business opportunities of the country,” he wrote, they are becoming “rivals of the government itself.” More accurately, these corporations were casting over society the shadow that we call politics, as John Dewey put it a little later, making obvious points about the extreme limitations on democracy when “the life of the country,” the production and information systems and so on, are ruled by private tyrannies, in a system that he described as industrial “feudalism”—the contemporary system.3