💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › noam-chomsky-understanding-the-bush-doctrine.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:00:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Understanding the Bush Doctrine Author: Noam Chomsky Date: October 2, 2004 Language: en Topics: George W Bush, US foreign interventions Source: Retrieved on 7th September 2021 from https://chomsky.info/20041002/ Notes: Published by Information Clearing House,
Perhaps the most most threatening document of our time is the U.S.
National Security Strategy of September 2002. Its implementation in Iraq
has already taken countless lives and shaken the international system to
the core.
In the fallout from the war on terror is a revived Cold War, with more
nuclear players than ever, across even more dry-tinder landscapes around
the world.
As Colin Powell explained, the NSS declared that Washington has a
“sovereign right to use force to defend ourselves” from nations that
possess weapons of mass destruction and cooperate with terrorists, the
official pretexts for invading Iraq.
The obvious reason for invading Iraq is still conspicuously evaded:
establishing the first secure US military bases in a client state at the
heart of the world’s major energy resources.
As old pretexts collapsed, President Bush and his colleagues adaptively
revised the doctrine of the NSS to enable them to resort to force even
if a country does not have WMD or programmes to develop them. The
“intent and ability” to do so is sufficient.
Just about every country has the ability, and intent is in the eye of
the beholder. The official doctrine, then, is that anyone is subject to
attack.
In September 2003, Bush assured Americans that “the world is safer today
because our coalition ended an Iraqi regime that cultivated ties to
terror while it built weapons of mass destruction.” The president’s
handlers know that lies can become Truth, if repeated insistently
enough.
The war in Iraq incited terror worldwide. In November 2003, Middle East
expert Fawaz Gerges found it “simply unbelievable how the war has
revived the appeal of a global jihadi Islam that was in real decline
after 9–11.” Iraq itself became a “terrorist haven” for the first time,
and suffered its first suicide attacks since the 13^(th) century CK
assassins.
Recruitment for Al Qaeda networks has risen. “Every use of force is
another small victory for bin Laden,” who “is winning,” writes British
journalist Jason Burke in Al-Qaida, his 2003 study of this loose array
of radical Islamists, now mostly independent.
For them, bin Laden is hardly more than a symbol. He may be even more
dangerous after he is killed, becoming a martyr who will inspire others
to join his cause. Burke sees the creation of “a whole new cadre of
terrorists,” enlisted in what they see as a “cosmic struggle between
good and evil,” a vision shared by bin Laden and Bush.
The proper reaction to terrorism is two-pronged: directed at the
terrorists themselves, and at the reservoir of potential support. The
terrorists see themselves as a vanguard, seeking to mobilise others.
Police work, an appropriate response, has been successful worldwide.
More important is the broad constituency that the terrorists seek to
reach, including many who hate and fear them but nevertheless see them
as fighting for a just cause.
We can help the terrorist vanguard mobilise this reservoir of support,
by violence. Or we can address the “myriad grievances,” many legitimate,
that are “the root causes of modern Islamic militancy,” Burke writes.
That basic effort can significantly reduce the threat of terror, and
should be undertaken independently of this goal.
Violent actions provoke reactions that risk catastrophe. US analysts
estimate that Russian military expenditures have tripled during the
Bush-Putin years, in large measure a predicted response to Bush
administration bellicosity. On both sides, nuclear warheads remain on
hair-trigger alert. The Russian control systems, however, have
deteriorated. The dangers ratchet up with the threat and use of force.
As anticipated, US military plans have provoked a Chinese reaction as
well. China has announced plans to “transform its military into a
technology-driven force capable of projecting power globally by 2010,”
Boston Globe correspondent Jehangir Pocha reported last month,
“replacing its land-based nuclear arsenal of about 20 1970s-era
intercontinental ballistic missiles with 60 new multiple-warhead
missiles capable of reaching the United States.”
China’s actions are likely to touch off a ripple effect through India,
Pakistan and beyond. Nuclear developments in Iran and North Korea, also
in part at least a response to US threats, are exceedingly ominous. The
unthinkable becomes thinkable.
In 2003, at the UN General Assembly, the United States voted alone
against implementation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and alone
with its new ally India against steps toward the elimination of nuclear
weapons.
The United States also voted alone against “observance of environmental
norms” in disarmament and arms control agreements, and alone with Israel
and Micronesia against steps to prevent nuclear proliferation in the
Middle East — the pretext for invading Iraq. Presidents commonly have
“doctrines,” but Bush II is the first to have “visions” as well,
possibly because his handlers recall the criticism of his father as
lacking “the vision thing.”
The most exalted of these, conjured up after all pretexts for invasion
of Iraq had to be abandoned, was the vision of bringing democracy to
Iraq and the Middle East. By November 2003, this vision was taken to be
the real motive for the war.
The evidence for faith in the vision consists of little more than
declarations of virtuous intent. To take the declarations seriously, we
would have to assume that our leaders are accomplished liars: While
mobilising their countries for war, they were declaring that the reasons
were entirely different. Mere sanity dictates scepticism about what they
produce to replace pretexts that have collapsed.