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Title: The Crimes of ‘Intcom’
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: September 2002
Language: en
Topics: US foreign interventions
Source: Retrieved on 2nd July 2021 from https://chomsky.info/200209__/
Notes: Published in Foreign Policy.

Noam Chomsky

The Crimes of ‘Intcom’

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein readers to attend to the use of a

phrase in order to determine its meaning. Adopting that suggestion, one

regularly discovers that terms of political discourse are used with a

doctrinal meaning that is crucially different from the literal one. The

term “terrorism,” for example, is not used in accord with the official

definition but is restricted to terrorism (as officially defined)

carried out by them against us and our clients. Similar conventions hold

for “war crime,” “defense,” “peace process,” and other standard terms.

One such term is “the international community.” The literal sense is

reasonably clear; the U.N. General Assembly, or a substantial majority

of it, is a fair first approximation. But the term is regularly used in

a technical sense to describe the United States joined by some allies

and clients. (Henceforth, I will use the term “Intcom,” in this

technical sense.) Accordingly, it is a logical impossibility for the

United States to defy the international community. These conventions are

illustrated well enough by cases of current concern.

One does not read that for 25 years the United States has barred the

efforts of the international community to achieve a diplomatic

settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict along the lines repeated,

in essence, in the Saudi proposal adopted by the Arab League in March

2002. That initiative has been widely acclaimed as a historic

opportunity that can only be realized if Arab states agree at last to

accept the existence of Israel. In fact, Arab states (along with the

Palestine Liberation Organization) have repeatedly done so since January

1976, when they joined the rest of the world in backing a U.N. Security

Council resolution calling for a political settlement based on Israeli

withdrawal from the occupied territories with “appropriate arrangements

… to guarantee … the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political

independence of all states in the area and their right to live in peace

within secure and recognized borders”—in effect, U.N. Security Council

Resolution 242 expanded to include a Palestinian state. The United

States vetoed the resolution. Since then, Washington has regularly

blocked similar initiatives. A majority of Americans support the

political settlement reiterated in the Saudi plan. Yet it does not

follow that Washington is defying the international community or

domestic opinion. Under prevailing conventions, that cannot be since, by

definition, the U.S. government cannot defy Intcom, and as a democratic

state, it naturally heeds domestic opinion.

Similarly, one does not read that the United States defies the

international community on terrorism, even though it voted virtually

alone (with Israel; Honduras alone abstaining) against the major U.N.

resolution in December 1987 harshly condemning this plague of the modern

age and calling on all states to eradicate it. The reasons are

instructive and highly relevant today. But all of that has disappeared

from history, as is customary when Intcom opposes the international

community (in the literal sense).

At the time, Washington was undermining Latin American efforts to bring

about a peaceful settlement in Central America and had been condemned

for international terrorism by the International Court of Justice, which

ordered the United States to terminate such crimes. The U.S. response

was escalation. Again, none of this history nor similar episodes since

bear on Intcom’s attitude toward terrorism.

Occasionally, Intcom’s isolation is noticed, leading to perplexed

inquiries into the psychic maladies of the world. Richard Bernstein’s

January 1984 New York Times Magazine article “The U.N. versus the U.S.”

(not the converse) is an apt example. Further evidence that the world is

out of step is that after the early years of the United Nations, when

Washington’s writ was law, the United States has been far in the lead in

vetoing Security Council resolutions, with Great Britain second and the

Soviet Union (later Russia) a distant third. The record in the General

Assembly is similar—but no conclusions follow about the international

community.

A major contemporary theme is the normative revolution that Intcom

allegedly underwent in the 1990s, at last accepting its duty of

humanitarian intervention to end terrible crimes. But one never reads

that the international community “reject[s] the so-called ‘right’ of

humanitarian intervention” along with other forms of coercion that it

perceives as traditional imperialism in a new guise, particularly the

version of economic integration called globalization in Western

doctrine. Such conclusions were elaborated in the declaration of the

South Summit in April 2000, the first meeting of the heads of state of

the G-77 (the descendant of the former nonaligned countries), which

accounts for nearly 80 percent of the world’s population. The

declaration merited a few disparaging words in elite media.

The 1990s are widely considered the decade of humanitarian intervention,

not the 1970s, even though the latter decade was bounded by the two most

significant cases of intervention to terminate horrendous crimes: India

in East Pakistan and Vietnam in Cambodia. The reason is clear. Intcom

did not carry out these interventions. In fact, it bitterly opposed

them, imposing sanctions and making threatening gestures toward India

and harshly punishing Vietnam for the crime of terminating Pol Pot’s

atrocities as they were peaking. In contrast, the U.S.-led bombing of

Serbia stands as the great moment of the new international

enlightenment—no matter that such action was strongly opposed by India,

China, and much of the rest of the world. Here is not the place to

review the humanitarian intervention undertaken to preserve Intcom’s

“credibility” and, for public relations purposes, to terminate the

crimes that it precipitated. Nor is this the place to examine Intcom’s

refusal to withdraw from its long-standing participation in comparable

or worse crimes and what that implies about Intcom’s operative values.

Such topics do not enter the extensive literature on the

responsibilities of the self-declared enlightened states. Instead, there

is a highly regarded literary genre inquiring into the cultural defect

of Intcom that keeps it from responding properly to the crimes of

others. An interesting question no doubt, though by any reasonable

measure it ranks well below a different one that remains unasked: Why

does Intcom persist in its own substantial crimes, either directly or

through crucial support for murderous clients?

It is all too easy for me to continue, though it should be recognized

that such practices are no innovation of Intcom. They are close to

historical universals, including analogues that are not pleasant to

recall.