[Marxism] A nearly sympathetic review of Chomsky's latest

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Book Review, June 25, 2006
'Failed States,' by Noam Chomsky
Homeland Insecurity
Review by JONATHAN FREEDLAND

THIS latest philippic from Noam Chomsky sets out to overturn every belief 
about their country Americans hold dear. The self-image of the United 
States as a beacon of freedom and democracy, lighting the way for the rest 
of the world, is a lie, Chomsky says, and it always has been. "Failed 
States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy" aims to expose the 
rot of the shining city on a hill, from its foundations to its steeples.

At the book's center is the avowed American mission to spread democracy 
throughout the world. Chomsky concedes that, rhetorically at least, this 
has been the nation's goal since Woodrow Wilson, but he insists the words 
are utterly at odds with American deeds. In its many foreign interventions, 
Washington has acted to frustrate the will of the people, often by 
supporting those engaged in the most chilling violence. The United States 
has overthrown democratic governments in Iran, Chile, Guatemala "and a long 
list of others." Elsewhere it has paid lip service to procedural democracy 
while doing all it could to rig the outcome. There is, Chomsky says, a 
"rational consistency" to this inconsistency between words and actions. The 
record shows that the United States does indeed back democracy abroad ? "if 
and only if it is consistent with strategic and economic interests."

These are not, Chomsky insists, the interests of the American people, but 
of the corporate elite that dominates the country and its policy making. 
For, he says, the United States is not a democracy, if that word is 
reserved for a society where the people's will is done.

Take health care. Chomsky has the data to show that the American system is 
economically inefficient, much costlier than more socialized models abroad 
and deeply unpopular with a majority of Americans, who are ready to pay for 
increased government intervention even if that means higher taxes. That 
democratic majority remains unheard, however, because "the pharmaceutical 
and financial industries and other private powers are strongly opposed." 
That is why the mainstream news media, a perennial Chomsky target, say 
publicly funded health care lacks political support: the majority might 
back it, but not the people who count.

Chomsky employs the same linguistic deconstruction for media definitions of 
prosperity. The experts may say the economy is healthy, as it is for the 
top 1 percent, whose wealth rose by 42 percent from 1983 to 1998. But it is 
not healthy for the majority, whose wages have stagnated or declined in 
real terms, nor for those going hungry in America because they cannot 
afford to buy food.

Much of this will be familiar to veteran Chomsky readers, but in this book 
he supplies a new twist. What, he asks, is a failed state? It is one that 
fails "to provide security for the population, to guarantee rights at home 
or abroad, or to maintain functioning (not merely formal) democratic 
institutions." On that definition, Chomsky argues, the United States is the 
world's biggest failed state. This sounds like a hyperbolic charge, 
ludicrously overblown ? but he goes far toward substantiating it. He is 
especially strong on pointing up Washington's woeful efforts to protect 
Americans from terror attacks, in one instance lavishing more resources on 
the imaginary threat from Cuba than on the all-too-real menace of Al Qaeda.

And if a rogue state is defined by its defiance of international law, then 
the United States, Chomsky says, has long been the rogues' rogue. It has 
ignored the Geneva Conventions by its treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo 
and of Iraqi civilians in Falluja; violated the Nuclear Nonproliferation 
Treaty by its development of new weapons when it should be making 
good-faith efforts to get rid of the old ones; flouted the United Nations 
Charter, which allows the use of force only when the "necessity of 
self-defense" is "instant" and "overwhelming," standards hardly met by the 
2003 invasion of Iraq; and defied the World Court, which in the 1980's held 
Washington guilty of "unlawful use of force" against Nicaragua, a ruling 
the United States simply rejected. Scholars like to speak of American 
exceptionalism, but with Chomsky the phrase takes on new meaning: America 
exempts itself from the rules it demands for everyone else. This is not a 
double standard, but flows from what Chomsky, quoting Adam Smith, calls the 
single standard: the "vile maxim of the masters of mankind: . . . All for 
ourselves, and nothing for other people."

Throughout "Failed States" Chomsky writes in this vein of fierce 
excoriation. No one is exempt, according to him. The whole system is 
rotten, including traditional liberal heroes. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry 
Truman and John Kennedy are all faulted for their pursuit of international 
dominance, from Roosevelt's plans to firebomb Japanese cities more than a 
year before Pearl Harbor to Kennedy's war in Vietnam. Even the framers of 
the Constitution are condemned. Chomsky disapprovingly quotes James 
Madison's insistence that the new Republic should "protect the minority of 
the opulent against the majority." He doesn't much like The New York Times 
either.

If there is a crumb of comfort for his readers, it is this: Americans are 
not a uniquely evil people. On the contrary, imperialists throughout 
history have behaved in the same way, from the Greeks to the British, 
always telling themselves they were driven by noble purpose ? even as their 
elites wreaked havoc for their own material gain.

There are flaws in this book. It is dense, with almost every paragraph 
broken up by extensive quotations. And it is unrelenting, the invective 
interrupted only by the occasional flash of bitter wit. Like any 
polemicist, Chomsky is selective in his material: for example, he cites 
rulings by the Israeli Supreme Court that have injured Palestinians rights, 
but ignores those that have respected them.

Too often Chomsky fails to cast those outside the United States as active 
moral agents in their own right. He argues, with justification, that the 
American invasion of Iraq has unleashed a wave of terrorism in that country 
? but he has little interest in the bombers and beheaders themselves. Their 
actions are merely the inevitable products of decisions taken in 
Washington. He is also too airily dismissive of liberal interventionists, 
those who would like to see American power deployed to thwart genocide; in 
Chomsky's eyes, they are mere patsies for imperialism.

Similarly, his view of politics can be too mechanistic; sometimes he writes 
as if whole national debates are mere staged distractions, planned by the 
powers that be. And while he spends 260-odd pages presenting his critique, 
he offers only two paragraphs of solutions (an imbalance, it should be 
said, he is aware of).

Still, maybe it's sufficient for a prophet to tell the people they are in a 
wilderness; he shouldn't be expected to point the exact way out. Chomsky's 
ambitions, after all, are high enough. It's hard to imagine any American 
reading this book and not seeing his country in a new, and deeply 
troubling, light.

Jonathan Freedland is an editorial page columnist for The Guardian of London.


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