💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › noam-chomsky-it-s-imperialism-stupid.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:57:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: It’s Imperialism, Stupid
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: July 4, 2005
Language: en
Topics: Imperialism, US foreign interventions, Iraq War
Source: Retrieved on 11th September 2021 from https://www.khaleejtimes.com/article/20050704/ARTICLE/307049968/1098
Notes: Published in the Khaleej Times

Noam Chomsky

It’s Imperialism, Stupid

In his June 28 speech, President Bush asserted that the invasion of Iraq

was undertaken as part of “a global war against terror” that the United

States is waging. In reality, as anticipated, the invasion increased the

threat of terror, perhaps significantly.

Half-truths, misinformation and hidden agendas have characterised

official pronouncements about US war motives in Iraq from the very

beginning. The recent revelations about the rush to war in Iraq stand

out all the more starkly amid the chaos that ravages the country and

threatens the region and indeed the world.

In 2002 the US and United Kingdom proclaimed the right to invade Iraq

because it was developing weapons of mass destruction. That was the

“single question,” as stressed constantly by Bush, Prime Minister Blair

and associates. It was also the sole basis on which Bush received

congressional authorisation to resort to force.

The answer to the “single question” was given shortly after the

invasion, and reluctantly conceded: The WMD didn’t exist. Scarcely

missing a beat, the government and media doctrinal system concocted new

pretexts and justifications for going to war.

“Americans do not like to think of themselves as aggressors, but raw

aggression is what took place in Iraq,” national security and

intelligence analyst John Prados concluded after his careful, extensive

review of the documentary record in his 2004 book “Hoodwinked.”

Prados describes the Bush “scheme to convince America and the world that

war with Iraq was necessary and urgent” as “a case study in government

dishonesty … that required patently untrue public statements and

egregious manipulation of intelligence.” The Downing Street memo,

published on May 1 in The Sunday Times of London, along with other newly

available confidential documents, have deepened the record of deceit.

The memo came from a meeting of Blair’s war cabinet on July 23, 2002, in

which Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, made

the now-notorious assertion that “the intelligence and facts were being

fixed around the policy” of going to war in Iraq.

The memo also quotes British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that

“the US had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the

regime.”

British journalist Michael Smith, who broke the story of the memo, has

elaborated on its context and contents in subsequent articles. The

“spikes of activity” apparently included a coalition air campaign meant

to provoke Iraq into some act that could be portrayed as what the memo

calls a “casus belli.”

Warplanes began bombing in southern Iraq in May 2002 — 10 tons that

month, according to British government figures. A special “spike”

started in late August (for a September total of 54.6 tons).

“In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as

everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before

Congress approved military action against Iraq,” Smith wrote.

The bombing was presented as defensive action to protect coalition

planes in the no-fly zone. Iraq protested to the United Nations but

didn’t fall into the trap of retaliating. For US-UK planners, invading

Iraq was a far higher priority than the “war on terror.” That much is

revealed by the reports of their own intelligence agencies. On the eve

of the allied invasion, a classified report by the National Intelligence

Council, the intelligence community’s center for strategic thinking,

“predicted that an American-led invasion of Iraq would increase support

for political Islam and would result in a deeply divided Iraqi society

prone to violent internal conflict,” Douglas Jehl and David E. Sanger

reported in The New York Times last September. In December 2004, Jehl

reported a few weeks later, the NIC warned that “Iraq and other possible

conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds,

technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists

who are ‘professionalised’ and for whom political violence becomes an

end in itself.” The willingness of top planners to risk increase of

terrorism does not of course indicate that they welcome such outcomes.

Rather, they are simply not a high priority in comparison with other

objectives, such as controlling the world’s major energy resources.

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the more

astute of the senior planners and analysts, pointed out in the journal

National Interest that America’s control over the Middle East “gives it

indirect but politically critical leverage on the European and Asian

economies that are also dependent on energy exports from the region.” If

the United States can maintain its control over Iraq, with the world’s

second largest known oil reserves, and right at the heart of the world’s

major energy supplies, that will enhance significantly its strategic

power and influence over its major rivals in the tripolar world that has

been taking shape for the past 30 years: US-dominated North America,

Europe, and Northeast Asia, linked to South and Southeast Asia

economies.

It is a rational calculation, on the assumption that human survival is

not particularly significant in comparison with short-term power and

wealth. And that is nothing new. These themes resonate through history.

The difference today in this age of nuclear weapons is only that the

stakes are enormously higher.