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Title: Humanitarian Intervention
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: January 1994
Language: en
Topics: humanitarianism, US foreign interventions
Source: Retrieved on 19th June 2021 from https://chomsky.info/199401__02/
Notes: Published in Boston Review.

Noam Chomsky

Humanitarian Intervention

The first question that comes to mind about “humanitarian intervention”

is whether the category exists. Are states moral agents? Or were

Machiavelli, Adam Smith, and a host of others correct in concluding that

they commonly act in the interests of domestic power – in Smith’s day,

the “merchants and manufacturers” who were “by far the principal

architects” of policy and whose interests were “most peculiarly attended

to,” whatever the effects on others; in ours, corporate and financial

power centers, increasingly transnational in scale? A second obvious

question has to do with those who are to be in charge: what do their

institutions and record lead us to expect?

There is ample documentary material supporting the belief that states

are moral agents, in fact uniformly so. Without having read the texts, I

presume that when the invasion of Afghanistan began to go sour,

pre-Gorbachev Pravda portrayed it as having begun with “blundering

efforts to do good” though most people now recognize it to have been a

“disastrous mistake” because Russia “could not impose a solution except

at a price too costly to itself;” it was an “error” based on

misunderstanding and naiveté, yet another example of “our excess of

righteousness and disinterested benevolence.” The quoted phrases are

those used to describe Kennedy’s invasion of South Vietnam, later

expanded to all of Indochina, at the dissident extreme, well after the

Tet offensive convinced US business leaders that the enterprise should

be liquidated (Anthony Lewis, John King Fairbank). There is no need to

sample the harsher parts of the spectrum.

Furthermore, these examples generalize, though it is true that only in

cultures with a deeply totalitarian strain do we find such notions as

“anti-Soviet” or “anti-American,” applied to the miscreants who see

something other than righteousness and benevolence in the actions of

their noble leaders; imagine the reaction to a book on “anti-Italianism”

in Milan or Rome, or any society with a functioning democratic culture.

The pattern is familiar since biblical days. But the conventional

pronouncements plainly do not suffice to refute skepticism about the

morality of states. It is necessary to review the record, which reveals,

unequivocally, that the category of “humanitarian intervention” is

vanishingly small.

One might take the heroic stand that in the special case of the United

States, facts are irrelevant. Thus the Eaton Professor of the Science of

Government at Harvard instructs us that the United States must maintain

its “international primacy” for the benefit of the world, because its

“national identity is defined by a set of universal political and

economic values,” namely “liberty, democracy, equality, private

property, and markets” (Samuel Huntington). Since this is a matter of

definition, so the Science of Government teaches, it would be an error

of logic to bring up the factual record. What may have happened in

history is merely “the abuse of reality,” an elder statesman of the

“realist” school explained 30 years ago; “reality itself” is the

unachieved “national purpose” revealed by “the evidence of history as

our minds reflect it,” and that shows that the “transcendent purpose” of

the United States is “the establishment of equality in freedom in

America,” and indeed throughout the world, since “the arena within which

the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become

world-wide” (Hans Morgenthau).

Assuming these doctrines, it would be an elementary error, in evaluating

Washington’s promotion of human rights, to consider the close

correlation between US aid and torture, running right through the Carter

years, including military aid and independent of need, an inquiry that

would be pointless to undertake as Shultz, Abrams, et al. took the

reins. And our love of democracy is also immune to empirical evaluation.

We may put aside the conclusions of years of scholarship, recently

updated for the 1980s by Reagan State Department official Thomas

Carothers: democratization in Latin America was uncorrelated (in fact,

negatively correlated) with US influence, and the United States

continued “to adopt prodemocracy policies as a means of relieving

pressure for more radical change, but inevitably sought only limited,

top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the

traditional structures of power with which the United States has long

been allied.” We need not waste words on the nature of these

“traditional structures.” In practice, “democracy” has been defined in

terms of outcome, not conditions and process. But that cannot affect

what is true by definition of our “national identity.”

Those who are still not satisfied can be offered the doctrine of “change

of course,” soberly invoked whenever the stance of noble intent becomes

impossible to sustain. True, bad things have been done in the past for

understandable reasons, but now all will be different. So our terrorist

wars against the church and other deviants in Central America in the

1980s, leaving the region littered with hundreds of thousands of

tortured and mutilated victims and ruining its countries perhaps beyond

recovery, was really a war with the Russians. Now we will “change

course” and lead the way to a bright future. The same line of argument

had been used to dismiss as irrelevant the enthusiastic support for

“that admirable Italian gentleman” Mussolini (FDR, 1933) and for the

moderate Hitler, both barring the Bolshevik threat; the resurrection of

fascist collaborators and destruction of the anti-fascist resistance

worldwide after the World War; the overthrow of democracies and support

for neo-Nazi monsters throughout the world in subsequent years; and on,

and on. Similarly, the second superpower invoked the threat of the Evil

Empire as it carried out its atrocities at home and in the region.

To evaluate these useful doctrines, we must again investigate cases,

impossible here. What such inquiry reveals is that for both superpowers,

the threat of the other served primarily as a device of population

control, providing pretexts for actions taken on quite different

grounds. Furthermore, we discover that policies were hardly different

before and after the Cold War. True, Woodrow Wilson needed different

pretexts. He was protecting the country from the Huns, not the Russians,

when he invaded Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where his warriors –

as viciously racist as the Administration in Washington – murdered and

destroyed, reinstituted virtual slavery, dismantled the constitutional

system because the backward Haitians could not see the merits of turning

their country into a US plantation, and established the National Guards

that ran the countries by violence and terror after the Marines finally

left.

The story has been the same since the origins of the Republic. The first

great massacre, of the Pequots, was imposed upon us by “base Canadian

fiends,” the President of Yale University explained. Thomas Jefferson

attributed the failure of “the benevolent plan we were pursuing here for

the happiness of the aboriginal inhabitants of our vicinities” to the

English enemy, who forced upon us “the confirmed brutalization, if not

the extermination of this race in our America....” And on through the

conquest of the national territory, the Philippines, the marauding in

our “backyard,” and the rest of the disgraceful history, continuing

through the Cold War without essential change – though as a global

power, the United States by then placed Third World intervention in a

much broader context of domination and control.

As the Cold War ended, new pretexts had to be devised. George Bush

celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall by invading Panama, installing

the regime of a tiny minority of bankers and narcotraffickers who, as

predicted, have turned Panama into the second most active center for

cocaine money laundering in the Western Hemisphere, the State Department

concedes, the United States still holding first place. The Red Menace

having disappeared, he was protecting us from Hispanic narcotraffickers

led by the arch-demon Noriega, transmuted from valued friend to

reincarnation of Attila the Hun, in standard fashion, when he began to

disobey orders. And we were soon to learn that in the Middle East, long

the major target of our intervention forces, the “threats to our

interests ... could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door” (Bush National

Security Strategy Report, March 1990); after decades of deception, the

Soviet pretext can no longer be dredged up to justify traditional

Pentagon-based industrial policy and intervention forces, so it is “the

growing technological sophistication” of the Third World that requires

us to strengthen the “defense industrial base” (AKA high tech industry)

and maintain the world’s only massive intervention forces – a shift of

rhetoric that at least has the merit of edging closer to the reality:

that independent nationalism has been the prime target throughout.

The end of the Cold War has broader effects on intervention policy than

change of pretext. As US forces bombarded slums in Panama, Elliott

Abrams noted that for the first time, the United States could intervene

without concern for a Soviet reaction anywhere. Many have observed that

the disappearance of the Soviet deterrent “makes military power more

useful as a United States foreign policy instrument ... against those

who contemplate challenging important American interests” (Dimitri

Simes, Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International

Peace, Dec. 1988). Such considerations aside, a rational person will

recognize that policy flows from institutions, institutions remain

stable, and thus intervention is likely to be undertaken, when deemed

necessary, for much the same reasons as before.

It is in this light that a reasonable person will evaluate policy

pronouncements. Suppose that Brezhnev had announced that the USSR would

no longer be content with containing the Evil Empire; rather, it would

move to a policy of “enlargement” of the community of free and

democratic societies. If they did not merely collapse in ridicule,

rational people would ask just how the USSR had been defending freedom

and democracy before. And they would react exactly the same way when

Clinton’s National Security Adviser explains that we can now go beyond

containment to “enlargement – enlargement of the world’s free community

of market democracies,” adding that we are “of course” unlike others in

that “we do not seek to expand the reach of our institutions by force,

subversion or repression.” A reasonable person will ask just how we have

been protecting democracy and markets, and will quickly discover our

antagonism to democracy (unless “top-down” rule by the traditional

gentle hands can be assured) and to markets (for us, that is; they are

fine, indeed obligatory, for the weak, who are not entitled to the

massive state intervention and protection that has always been a leading

feature of policy, as in every successful developed society). As for our

distaste for “force, subversion or repression” – again, no words need be

wasted.

It is a useful exercise to compare the actual reaction to Anthony Lake’s

announcement of the new Clinton foreign policy with the reaction that

minimal rationality would dictate. We can learn a good deal about our

political and intellectual culture by carrying it out.

It is not that the reaction lacked honesty. Thus The New York Times‘s

chief diplomatic correspondent, Thomas Friedman, outlined “the

Administration’s foreign policy vision” quite accurately: its “essence”

is “that in a world in which the United States no longer has to worry

daily about a Soviet nuclear threat, where and how it intervenes abroad

is increasingly a matter of choice”; the insight of Simes and others,

when we understand the “nuclear threat” appropriately. The “essence” of

policy was clarified further the following day in a report on the

conclusions of the White House panel on intervention, announcing the end

of the era of altruism. No more “nice guy,” as in the days when we

turned much of the world into graveyards and deserts. Henceforth

intervention will be where and how US power chooses, the guiding

consideration being: “What is in it for us?” – the words highlighted in

the Times report. To be sure, the “vision” is cloaked in appropriate

rhetoric about “democracy” and all good things, the standard

accompaniment whatever is being implemented, and by whom, hence

meaningless – carrying no information, in the technical sense.

The declared intent, the record of planning, and the actual policies

implemented, with their persistent leading themes, will not be

overlooked by someone seriously considering “humanitarian intervention,”

which, in this world, means intervention authorized or directed by the

United States.

Consider, for example, the torture of Cubans, intensified with Cold War

pretexts removed. It has two major elements: first, to ensure that the

island is returned to its status as a US economic dependency and haven

for rich tourists, drug traffickers, and the like, perhaps under a

facade of democracy (with outcome controlled). Second, to punish Cubans

for the crime of disobedience. Servants elsewhere must be taught the

heavy cost of standing up to the Enforcer.

Since these are natural policy imperatives, we find them quite

generally. It was not enough to slaughter millions of people in

Indochina and destroy three countries; two decades later, its people

must still be ground to dust by economic warfare to teach the proper

lessons, while in our peculiarly American way we whimper piteously about

the tragic fate we have suffered at the hands of our Vietnamese

tormentors, setting “guidelines” that they must follow for entry into

our “civilized world” – and relaxing our grip only when the business

community comes to fear that substantial profits are being sacrificed.

Or consider Nicaragua, now reduced by US violence and economic warfare

to virtually the level of Haiti, with thousands of children starving to

death on the streets of Managua and far worse conditions in the

countryside. Its people must suffer much more; the United States is

nowhere near satisfied. In October 1993, the US-run international

economic institutions (IMF, World Bank) presented new demands to the

government of Nicaragua. It must reduce its debt to zero; eliminate

credits from the national bank; privatize everything to ensure that poor

people really feel the pain – losing water, for example, if they cannot

pay. Nicaragua must cut public expenditures by $60 million, virtually

eliminating much of what remains of health and welfare services, while

infant mortality rises along with disease, malnutrition, and starvation,

offering new opportunities to condemn the “economic mismanagement” of

the despised enemy.

The $60 million figure was perhaps selected for its symbolic value. Last

year the already privatized banks shipped $60 million abroad, following

sound economic principles: playing the New York stock market is a far

more efficient use of resources than giving credits to poor bean

farmers. The bean harvest was lost, a catastrophe for the population,

though the sophisticated understand that such considerations are

irrelevant to economic rationality. Nicaragua has now been ordered to

fully privatize banks, to ensure that what capital there is will be

efficiently used, with consequences that are evident.

On Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, 100,000 people are now starving to death,

with aid only from Europe and Canada. Most are Miskito Indians. Nothing

was more inspiring than the laments about the Miskitos after a few dozen

were killed and many forcibly moved by the sandinistas in the course of

the US terrorist war, a “campaign of virtual genocide” (Reagan), the

most “massive” human rights violation in Central America (Jeane

Kirkpatrick), far outweighing the slaughter, torture, and mutilation of

tens of thousands of people by the neo-Nazi gangsters they were

directing and arming, and lauding as stellar democrats, at the very same

time. What has happened to the laments, now that 100,000 are starving to

death? The answer is simplicity itself. Human rights have purely

instrumental value in the political culture; they provide a useful tool

for propaganda, nothing more. Ten years ago the Miskitos were “worthy

victims,” their suffering attributable to official enemies; now they

have joined the vast category of “unworthy victims” whose far worse

suffering can be added to our considerable account. The pattern is

remarkably uniform in time and place, along with the impressive

inability to perceive it.

Not surprisingly, terrorism has the same status. When the State

Department confirmed that its Honduran-based terrorist forces were

authorized to attack agricultural cooperatives, Michael Kinsley, again

at the liberal dovish extreme, cautioned against thoughtless

condemnation of this official policy. Such international terrorist

operations cause “vast civilian suffering,” he agreed, but they may

nevertheless be “sensible,” even “perfectly legitimate,” if they

“undermine morale and confidence in the government” that Washington

seeks to overthrow. Terror is to be evaluated by “cost-benefit

analysis,” which we are authorized to conduct to determine whether “the

amount of blood and misery that will be poured in” yields “democracy,”

in the special sense of US political culture. Our wholesale terrorism

need satisfy only the pragmatic criterion; retail terrorism by others,

who lack our innate perfection, is the “plague of the modern age” to be

punished with arbitrary harshness by the same judge and executioner,

amidst a chorus of praise for his unparalleled virtue.

As in the case of Vietnam and Cuba, so we now stand in judgment over

Nicaragua for its crimes against us. In September, the Senate voted

94p;4 to ban any aid if Nicaragua fails to return or give adequate

compensation (as determined by Washington) for properties of US citizens

seized when Somoza fell – assets of US participants in the crushing of

the beasts of burden by the tyrant who had long been a US favorite, and

whose murderous National Guard was supported by the Carter

Administration right through its massacre of tens of thousands of people

in July 1979 – and beyond. Shortly before, the Senate had cut off aid

until Nicaragua proves that it is not engaged in international

terrorism, the stern judges being those who were condemned by the World

Court for the “unlawful use of force” against Nicaragua, and ordered to

pay compensation, which would have amounted to billions of dollars;

naturally Washington, with the applause of intellectual opinion,

dismissed the Court with contempt as a “hostile forum” (New York Times).

US threats finally compelled Nicaragua to withdraw the claims for

reparations after a US-Nicaragua agreement “aimed at enhancing economic,

commercial and technical development to the maximum extent possible,”

Nicaragua’s agent informed the Court. The withdrawal of just claims

having been achieved by force, Washington has now abrogated the

agreement, suspending its trickle of aid with demands of increasing

depravity and gall. The press maintains its familiar deafening silence.

Torture of Vietnamese, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Iraqi children, and others,

is a policy priority for the reasons already mentioned, which are

understood in the Third World, though excluded from our well-insulated

political culture. The prevailing mood was captured by a leading

Brazilian theologian, Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of São Paulo:

throughout the South “there is hatred and fear: When will they decide to

invade us,” and on what pretext?

The Nicaraguan case raises another issue that will not be overlooked by

serious people considering the prospects for “humanitarian

intervention.” The leader of such intervention will be a state that is

remarkable not only for its violence, impudence, and moral cowardice,

but also for its lawlessness, not only in recent years. Washington’s

dismissal of the World Court decision had its counterpart when Woodrow

Wilson effectively disbanded the Central American Court of Justice after

it had the audacity to uphold Costa Rican and Salvadoran claims that the

United States was violating their sovereignty by imposing on Nicaragua,

safely occupied by Wilson’s troops, a treaty granting the United States

perpetual rights over any canal. The United States has sought to

undermine the UN ever since it fell “out of control” in the 1960s.

Washington is far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions in

these years, followed by Britain, with France a distant third and the

USSR fourth. The record in the General Assembly is similar on a wide

range of issues concerning human rights, observance of international

law, aggression, disarmament, and so on, though the facts are rarely

reported, being useless for power interests. The United States record at

the 1989p;90 Winter session of the UN, right after the Berlin Wall fell,

is particularly informative in this respect; I have reviewed it

elsewhere, and there is no space to do so here. Such facts, available in

abundance, have yet to disrupt the chorus of self-praise.

The standard rendition of the unreported facts is that “the Soviet veto

and the hostility of many Third World nations made the United Nations an

object of scorn to many American politicians and citizens,” though with

these disruptive elements gone and the UN safely under US rule, “it has

proved to be an effective instrument of world leadership, and,

potentially, an agency that can effect both peace and the rule of law in

troubled regions” (David Broder, Washington Post). The same message has

resounded through the doctrinal system with scarcely a discordant note –

yet another achievement that any dictator would admire.

Nothing changes as we move to the new Administration. Clinton won great

praise for his courage in launching missiles at a defenseless enemy

without loss of American lives (only expendable Iraqi civilians). In a

typical reaction, the Washington Post praised him for “confronting

foreign aggression,” relieving the fear that he might not be willing to

resort to violence as freely as his predecessors; the bombing refuted

the dangerous belief that “American foreign policy in the post-Cold War

era was destined to be forever hogtied by the constraints of

multilateralism” – that is, by international law and the UN charter. At

the Security Council, Clinton’s Ambassador defended the resort to force

with an appeal to Article 51 of the UN Charter, which authorizes the use

of force in self-defense against armed attack until the Security Council

takes action, such self-defense being authorized when its necessity is

“instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means and no moment for

deliberation,” according to standard interpretations. To invoke Article

51 in bombing Baghdad two months after an alleged attempt to assassinate

a former president scarcely rises to the level of absurdity, a matter of

little concern to commentators.

The prospective leader of “humanitarian intervention” is also notorious

for its ability to maintain a self-image of benevolence whatever it

does, a trait that impressed de Tocqueville 150 years ago. Observing one

of the great atrocities, he was struck that Americans could deprive

Indians of their rights and exterminate them “with singular felicity,

tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and

without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of

the world.” It was impossible to destroy people with “more respect for

the laws of humanity,” he wrote. So it has always been, to this day.

Several qualifications must be added. The United States is not

significantly different from others in its history of violence and

lawlessness. Rather, it is more powerful, therefore more dangerous, a

danger magnified by the capacity of the elite culture to deny and evade

the obvious.

A second qualification is that intervention undertaken on the normal

grounds of power interests might, by accident, be helpful to the

targeted population. Such examples exist. The most obvious recent one is

Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 after years of murderous

Khmer Rouge attacks on Vietnamese border areas; under comparable

conditions, the United States would probably have nuked Phnom Penh. The

Vietnamese invasion removed Pol Pot, terminating major atrocities,

though that was not the motivating factor. And we recall the response in

the West to the prime example of “humanitarian intervention” in recent

years. The United States and its allies at once reconstituted the

defeated Khmer Rouge at the Thai border so that they could resume their

depredations. There was furious denunciation of the “Prussians of Asia”

who had dared to remove Pol Pot (New York Times). The doctrinal system

shifted gears: instead of invoking the issue of MIAs, we would

henceforth punish Vietnam for the crime of ridding Cambodia of the Khmer

Rouge. When it became impossible to deny that Vietnamese troops had

withdrawn, the system shifted smoothly back to the old pretext – which

remains unsullied by any notice of the lack of interest about MIAs from

earlier wars, the atrocious US treatment of POWs in Vietnam, Korea, and

the Pacific War, or the obscenity of the entire enterprise of holding

Vietnamese to account for what they have done to us.

Furthermore, unlike states, people are moral agents. Occasionally, the

population has compelled the state to undertake humanitarian efforts. I

need not discuss the Somalian intervention, transparently cynical from

its first days. But consider a real example: the protection zone that

the Bush Administration reluctantly extended to the Kurds in northern

Iraq, after tacitly supporting Saddam Hussein as he crushed the Shiite

and Kurdish uprisings. Here public opinion played a decisive role,

overcoming the Administration’s commitment to the rule of a unified Iraq

by an “iron fist,” whether wielded by Saddam or some clone, as

Washington explained by way of the Times chief diplomatic correspondent.

The sincerity of the concern for the Kurds is demonstrated by what

happened as public attention waned. They are subject to Iraqi embargo in

addition to the sanctions against Iraq. The West refuses to provide the

piddling sums required to satisfy their basic needs and keep them from

Saddam’s hideous embrace. The UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs

prepared a 1/2 billion dollar relief and rehabilitation program for

Kurds, Shiites, and poverty-stricken Sunnis in central Iraq. The Clinton

Administration – “haunted by the pictures of Kurdish women and children

cut down by poison gas,” the President assured the UN – offered $15

million, “money left over from contributions to a previous UN program in

northern Iraq,” the director of Middle East Watch reports.

Finally, the conclusions that a rational observer will draw about US-led

“humanitarian intervention” do not answer the question whether such

intervention should nevertheless be undertaken. That is a separate

matter, to be faced without illusions about our unique nobility. We can,

in short, ask whether the pursuit of self-interest might happen to

benefit others in particular cases, or whether unremitting public

pressure might overcome the demands of the “principal architects” of

policy and the interests they serve.

There is also a more fundamental question: Can our political and

intellectual culture, our society and institutions, undergo the radical

transformations that would be required for an American citizen to use

such phrases as “American humanitarian intervention” or “enlargement of

the world’s free community of market democracies” without shame? The

fate of much of the world depends on the answer we give to that

question.