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Title: Simple Truths, Hard Problems
Author: Noam Chomsky
Date: May 19, 2004
Language: en
Topics: terrorism, justice, self-defense, speech
Source: Retrieved on 11th September 2021 from http://www.ditext.com/chomsky/st.html
Notes: Talk at Royal Institute of Philosophy, London, May 19, 2004. Published in Philosophy 80 2005.

Noam Chomsky

Simple Truths, Hard Problems

To dispel any false expectations, I really am going to keep to very

simple truths, so much so that I toyed with suggesting the title ‘In

Praise of Platitudes,’ with an advance apology for the elementary

character of these remarks. The only justification for proceeding along

this course is that the truisms are widely rejected, in some crucial

cases almost universally so. And the human consequences are serious, in

particular, with regard to the hard problems I have in mind. One reason

why they are hard is that moral truisms are so commonly disdained by

those with sufficient power to do so with impunity, because they set the

rules.

We have just witnessed a dramatic example of how they set the rules. The

last millennium ended, and the new one opened, with an extraordinary

display of self-adulation on the part of Western intellectuals, who

praised themselves and their leaders for introducing a ‘noble phase’ of

foreign policy with a ‘saintly glow,’ as they adhered to ‘principles and

values’ for the first time in history, acting from ‘pure altruism,’

following the lead of the ‘idealistic new world bent on ending

inhumanity,’ joined by its loyal partner who alone comprehends the true

nobility of the mission, which has now evolved even further into the

‘Bush messianic mission to graft democracy onto the rest of the world’ —

all quoted from the elite press and intellectuals. I am not sure there

is any counterpart in the non-too-glorious history of modern

intellectual elites. The noblest achievement was a ‘normative

revolution’ in the 1990s, which established a ‘new norm in international

affairs’: the right of the self-designated ‘enlightened states’ to

resort to force to protect suffering people from evil monsters.[1]

As anyone familiar with history knows, the normative revolution is not

at all new; it was a constant refrain of European imperialism, and the

rhetorical flights of Japanese fascists, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and

other grand figures were no less noble, and quite possibly just as

sincere, so internal documents reveal.

The examples given to justify the chorus of self-acclaim collapse on the

slightest examination, but I would like to raise a different question,

bearing on how rules are established: why was the ‘normative revolution’

in the decade of the 1990s, not the 1970s, a far more reasonable

candidate?

The decade of the 1970s opened with the Indian invasion of East

Pakistan, saving probably millions of lives. It closed with Vietnam’s

invasion of Cambodia, ousting the Khmer Rouge just as their atrocities

were peaking; before that, State Department intelligence, by far the

most knowledgeable source, was estimating deaths in the tens or hundreds

of thousands, not from ‘mass genocide’ but from ‘brutal rapid change,’

awful enough, but not yet approaching the predictions of high US

officials in 1975 that a million might die as a result of the carnage of

the earlier years of bombing and atrocities. Their effects have been

discussed in the scholarly literature, but perhaps the simplest account

is the orders that Henry Kissinger transmitted, in the usual manner of

the obedient bureaucrat, from President Nixon to the military

commanders: ‘A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies

on anything that moves.’[2] It is rare for a call for war crimes to be

so stark and explicit, though it is normal for it to be considered

entirely insignificant among the perpetrators, as in this case;

publication elicited no reaction. By the time of the Vietnamese

invasion, however, the charges of genocide that had aroused mass fury

from the moment of the Khmer Rouge takeover in April 1975, with a level

of fabrication that would have impressed Stalin, were finally becoming

plausible. So the decade of the 1970s was indeed framed by two authentic

cases of military intervention that terminated awesome crimes.

Even if we were to accept the most extreme claims of the chorus of

adulation for the leaders of the ‘enlightened states’ in the 1990s,

there was nothing that comes close to the humanitarian consequences of

the resort to force that framed the decade of the 1970s. So why did that

decade not bring about a ‘normative revolution’ with the foreign policy

of the saviours basking in a ‘saintly glow’? The answer is simplicity

itself, but apparently unstateable; at least, I have never seen a hint

of it in the deluge of literature on this topic. The interventions of

the 1970s had two fundamental flaws: (1) They were carried out by the

wrong agents, them, not us; (2) Both were bitterly denounced by the

leader of the enlightened states, and the perpetrators of the crime of

terminating genocide were harshly punished, particularly Vietnam,

subjected to a US-backed Chinese invasion to teach the criminals a

lesson for bringing Pol Pot’s crimes to an end, then severe sanctions,

and direct US-UK support for the ousted Khmer Rouge. It follows that the

1970s could not have brought about a ‘normative revolution,’ and no one

has ever suggested that it did.

The guiding principle is elementary. Norms are established by the

powerful, in their own interests, and with the acclaim of responsible

intellectuals. These may be close to historical universals. I have been

looking for exceptions for many years. There are a few, but not many.

Sometimes the principle is explicitly recognized. The norm for

post-World War II international justice was established at Nuremberg. To

bring the Nazi criminals to justice, it was necessary to devise

definitions of ‘war crime’ and ‘crime against humanity.’ Telford Taylor,

chief counsel for the prosecution and a distinguished international

lawyer and historian, has explained candidly how this was done:

Since both sides in World War II had played the terrible game of urban

destruction — the Allies far more successfully — there was no basis for

criminal charges against Germans or Japanese, and in fact no such

charges were brought... Aerial bombardment had been used so extensively

and ruthlessly on the Allied side as well as the Axis side that neither

at Nuremberg nor Tokyo was the issue made a part of the trials.[3]

The operative definition of ‘crime’ is: ‘Crime that you carried out but

we did not.’ To underscore the fact, Nazi war criminals were absolved if

the defence could show that their US counterparts carried out the same

crimes.

Taylor concludes that ‘to punish the foe — especially the vanquished foe

— for conduct in which the enforcer nation has engaged, would be so

grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves.’ That is

correct, but the operative definition also discredits the laws

themselves, along with all subsequent tribunals. Taylor provides this

background as part of his explanation of why US bombing in Vietnam was

not a war crime. His argument is plausible, further discrediting the

laws themselves. Some of the subsequent tribunals are discredited in

perhaps even more extreme ways, such as the Yugoslavia vs. NATO case now

being adjudicated by the International Court of Justice. The US was

excused, correctly, on the basis of its argument that it is not subject

to the jurisdiction of the Court in this case. The reason is that the US

signed the Genocide Convention (which is at issue here) with a

reservation stating that it is inapplicable to the United States.

In an outraged comment on the efforts of Justice Department lawyers to

demonstrate that the president has the right to authorize torture, Yale

Law School Dean Howard Koh — who, as Assistant Secretary of State, had

presented Washington’s denunciation of all forms of torture to the

international community — said that ‘The notion that the president has

the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the

constitutional power to commit genocide.’[4] The same legal advisers

should have little difficulty arguing that the president does indeed

have that right.

The Nuremberg Tribunal is commonly described by distinguished figures in

the field of international law and justice as ‘the birth of universal

jurisdiction.’[5] That is correct only if we understand ‘universality’

in accord with the practice of the enlightened states, which defines

‘universal’ as ‘applicable to others only,’ particularly enemies.

The proper conclusion at Nuremberg and since would have been to punish

the victors as well as the vanquished foe. Neither at the postwar trials

nor subsequently have the powerful been subjected to the rules, not

because they have not carried out crimes — of course they have — but

because they are immune under prevailing standards of morality. The

victims appear to understand well enough. Wire services report from Iraq

that ‘If Iraqis ever see Saddam Hussein in the dock, they want his

former American allies shackled beside him.’[6] That inconceivable event

would be a radical revision of the fundamental principle of

international justice: tribunals must be restricted to the crimes of

others.

There is a marginal exception, which in fact underscores the force of

the rule. Punishment is permissible when it is a mere tap on the wrist,

evading the real crimes, or when blame can be restricted to minor

figures, particularly when they are not like us. It was, for example,

considered proper to punish the soldiers who carried out the My Lai

massacre, half-educated half-crazed GPs in the field, not knowing who

was going to shoot at them next. But it was inconceivable that

punishment could reach as far as those who planned and implemented

Operation Wheeler Wallawa, a mass murder operation to which My Lai was a

very minor footnote.[7] The gentlemen in the air-conditioned offices are

like us, therefore immune by definition. We are witnessing similar

examples right now in Iraq.

We might return in this connection to Kissinger’s transmission of

Nixon’s orders on bombing Cambodia. In comparison, the widely reported

admission by Serbia of involvement in the Srebrenica massacre does not

merit much attention. The prosecutors at the Milosevic Tribunal face

difficulties in proving the crime of genocide because no document has

been discovered in which the accused directly orders such a crime, even

lesser ones. The same problem has been faced by Holocaust scholars, who

of course have no doubt of Hitler’s responsibility, but lack conclusive

direct documentation. Suppose, however, that someone were to unearth a

document in which Milosevic orders the Serbian air force to reduce

Bosnia or Kosovo to rubble, with the words ‘Anything that flies on

anything that moves.’ The prosecutors would be overjoyed, the trial

would end, and Milosevic would be sent off to many successive life

sentences for the crime of genocide — a death sentence, if it followed

US conventions. One would, in fact, be hard put to find such an explicit

order to carry out genocide — as the term is currently employed with

regard to crimes of enemies — anywhere in the historical record. In this

case, after casual mention in the world’s leading newspaper, there was

no detectable interest, even though the horrendous consequences are

well-known. And rightly, if we adopt, tacitly, the overriding principle

that we cannot — by definition — carry out crimes or have any

responsibility for them.

One moral truism that should be uncontroversial is the principle of

universality: we should apply to ourselves the same standards we apply

to others — in fact, more stringent ones. This should be uncontroversial

for everyone, but particularly so for the world’s most important

citizens, the leaders of the enlightened states, who declare themselves

to be devout Christians, devoted to the Gospels, hence surely familiar

with its famous condemnation of the Hypocrite. Their devotion to the

commandments of the Lord is not in question. George Bush reportedly

proclaims that ‘God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and

then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did,’ and ‘now I am

determined to solve the problem of the Middle East,’[8] also at the

command of the Lord of Hosts, the War God, whom we are instructed by the

Holy Book to worship above all other Gods. And as I mentioned, the elite

press dutifully refers to his ‘messianic mission’ to solve the problem

of the Middle East, in fact the world, following our ‘responsibility to

history to rid the world of evil,’ in the president’s words, the core

principle of the ‘vision’ that Bush shares with Osama bin Laden, both

plagiarizing ancient epics and children’s fairy tales.

I am not sufficiently familiar with the sayings of Tony Blair to know

how closely he approaches this ideal — which is quite familiar in

Anglo-American history. The early English colonists in North America

were following the word of the Lord as they slaughtered the Amalekites

in the ‘New Israel’ that they were liberating from the native blight.

Those who followed them, also Bible-waving God-fearing Christians, did

their religious duty by conquering and possessing the promised land,

ridding it of millions of Canaanites, and proceeding to war against the

Papists in Florida, Mexico, and California. Throughout they were

defending themselves from the ‘merciless Indian savages’ — unleashed

against them by George III, as the Declaration of Independence proclaims

— at other times from the ‘runaway negroes’ and ‘lawless Indians’ who

were attacking innocent Americans according to John Quincy Adams in one

of the most celebrated State Papers in American history, written to

justify Andrew Jackson’s conquest of Florida in 1818, and the opening of

the murderous Seminole wars. The event was of some significance for

other reasons: it was the first executive war in violation of the

constitutional requirement that only Congress can declare war, by now so

fully the norm that it is scarcely noted — norms being established in

the conventional way.

In his later years, long after his own grisly contributions were past,

Adams did deplore the fate of ‘that hapless race of native Americans who

we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty.’ This

is ‘among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will

one day bring [it] to judgement,’ Adams believed. The first US Secretary

of War had warned many years earlier that ‘a future historian may mark

the causes of this destruction of the human race in sable colours.’ But

they were wrong. God and the historians are slow in fulfilling this

task. Unlike Bush and Blair, I cannot speak for God, but historians

speak to us in mortal tongues. In a typical example, two months ago one

of the most distinguished American historians referred in passing to

‘the elimination of hundreds of thousands of native people’ in the

conquest of the national territory — off by a factor of ten, apart from

the interesting choice of words. The reaction was null; it would be

somewhat different if we were to read a casual comment in Germany’s

leading newspaper that hundreds of thousands of Jews were eliminated

during World War II. There is also no reaction when a highly regarded

diplomatic historian explains in a standard work that after their

liberation from English rule, the colonists ‘concentrated on the task of

felling trees and Indians and of rounding out their natural

boundaries.’[9] It is all too easy to multiply examples in scholarship,

media, school texts, cinema, and elsewhere. Sports teams use victims of

genocide as mascots, usually with caricatures. Weapons of destruction

are casually given similar names: Apache, Blackhawk, Comanche

helicopters; Tomahawk missiles; and so on. How would we react if the

Luftwaffe named its lethal weapons ‘Jew’ and ‘Gypsy’?

The British record is much the same. Britain pursued its divine mission

in the evangelization of Africa, while exercising in India ‘a

trusteeship mysteriously placed in their hands by Providence,’ easy to

comprehend in a country ‘where God and Mammon seemed made for each

other.’[10] Figures of the highest moral integrity and intelligence gave

a secular version of the creed, strikingly John Stuart Mill in his

extraordinary apologetics for British crimes, written just as they

peaked in India and China, in an essay now taken to be a classic of the

literature of ‘humanitarian intervention.’ It is only fair to note that

there were different voices. Richard Cobden denounced Britain’s crimes

in India and expressed his hope that the ‘national conscience, which has

before averted from England, by timely atonement and reparation, the

punishment due for imperial crimes, will be roused ere it be too late

from its lethargy, and put an end to the deeds of violence and injustice

which have marked every step of our progress in India’ — echoing Adam

Smith, who had bitterly condemned ‘the savage injustice of the

Europeans,’ particularly the British in India. Cobden hoped in vain It

is hardly much of a relief to recognize that their continental

counterparts were even worse, in deed, denial, and self-adulation.

While quoting Cobden we might recall another of his maxims, highly

pertinent today, and also qualifying as a moral truism: ‘no man had a

right to lend money if he knows it to be applied to the cutting of

throats’[11] or, a fortiori, to sell the knives. It does not take an

extensive research project to draw the appropriate conclusions with

regard to the regular practice of the leading enlightened states.

The common response of the intellectual culture, some memorable

exceptions aside, is entirely natural if we abandon the most elementary

of moral truisms, and declare ourselves to be uniquely exempt from the

principle of universality. And so we do, constantly. Every day brings

new illustrations. The US Senate has just lent its consent to the

appointment of John Negroponte as Ambassador to Iraq, heading the

world’s largest diplomatic mission, with the task of handing over

sovereignty to Iraqis to fulfill Bush’s ‘messianic vision’ to bring

democracy to the Middle East and the world, so we are solemnly informed.

The appointment bears directly on the principle of universality, but

before turning to that, we might raise some questions about other

truisms, regarding evidence and conclusions.

That the goal of the Iraq invasion is to fulfill the president’s

messianic vision is simply presupposed in news reporting and commentary,

even among critics, who warn that the ‘noble’ and ‘generous’ vision may

be beyond our reach. As the London Economist poses the problem a few

weeks ago, ‘America’s mission’ of turning Iraq into ‘an inspiring

example [of democracy] to its neighbours’ is facing obstacles.[12] With

considerable research, I have not been able to find exceptions in the US

media, and with much less research, elsewhere, apart from the usual

margins.

One might inquire into the basis for the apparently near universal

acceptance of this doctrine in Western intellectual commentary.

Examination will quickly reveal that it is based on two principles.

First, our leaders have proclaimed it, so it must be true, a principle

familiar in North Korea and other stellar models. Second, we must

suppress the fact that by proclaiming the doctrine after other pretexts

have collapsed, our leaders are also declaring that they are among the

most accomplished liars in history, since in leading their countries to

war they proclaimed with comparable passion that the ‘sole question’ was

whether Saddam had disarmed. But now we must believe them. Also

obligatory is the dispatch deep into the memory hole of the ample record

of professed noble efforts to bring democracy, justice, and freedom to

the benighted.

It is, again, the merest truism that pronouncements of virtuous intent

by leaders carry no information, even in the technical sense: they are

completely predictable, including the worst monsters. But this truism

also fades when it confronts the overriding need to reject the principle

of universality.

The doctrine presupposed by Western commentary is accepted by some

Iraqis too: one percent agreed that the goal of the invasion is to bring

democracy to Iraq according to US-run polls in Baghdad last October —

long before the atrocities in April and the revelations of torture.

Another five percent felt that the goal is to help Iraqis. Most of the

rest took for granted that the goal is to gain control of Iraq’s

resources and use Iraq as a base for reorganizing the Middle East in US

interests[13] — a thought virtually inexpressible in enlightened Western

commentary, or dismissed with horror as ‘anti-Americanism,’ ‘conspiracy

theory,’ ‘radical and extremist,’ or some other intellectual equivalent

of four-letter words among the vulgar.

In brief, Iraqis appear to take for granted that what is unfolding is a

scenario familiar from the days of Britain’s creation of modern Iraq,

accompanied by the predictable and therefore uninformative professions

of virtuous intent, but also by secret internal documents in which Lord

Curzon and the Foreign Office developed the plans to establish an ‘Arab

facade’ that Britain would rule behind various ‘constitutional

fictions.’ The contemporary version is provided by a senior British

official quoted in the Daily Telegraph: ‘The Iraqi government will be

fully sovereign, but in practice it will not exercise all its sovereign

functions.’[14]

Let us return to Negroponte and the principle of universality. As his

appointment reached Congress, the Wall Street Journal praised him as a

‘Modern Proconsul,’ who learned his trade in Honduras in the 1980s,

during the Reaganite phase of the current incumbents in Washington. The

veteran Journal correspondent Carla Anne Robbins reminds us that in

Honduras he was known as ‘the proconsul,’ as he presided over the second

largest embassy in Latin America, with the largest CIA station in the

world — perhaps to transfer full sovereignty to this centrepiece of

world power.[15]

Robbins observes that Negroponte has been criticized by human rights

activists for ‘covering up abuses by the Honduran military’ — a

euphemism for large-scale state terror — ‘to ensure the flow of US aid’

to this vital country, which was ‘the base for Washington’s covert war

against Nicaragua.’ The main task of proconsul Negroponte was to

supervise the bases in which the terrorist mercenary army was armed,

trained, and sent to do its work, including its mission of attacking

undefended civilian targets, so the US military command informed

Congress. The policy of attacking such ‘soft targets’ while avoiding the

Nicaraguan army was confirmed by the State Department and defended by

leading American liberal intellectuals, notably New Republic editor

Michael Kinsley, who was the designated spokesman for the left in

television commentary. He chastised Human Rights Watch for its

sentimentality in condemning US international terrorism and failing to

understand that it must be evaluated by ‘pragmatic criteria.’ A

‘sensible policy,’ he urged, should ‘meet the test of cost-benefit

analysis,’ an analysis of ‘the amount of blood and misery that will be

poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other

end’ — ‘democracy’ as US elites determine, their unquestionable right.

Of course, the principle of universality does not apply: others are not

authorized to carry out large-scale international terrorist operations

if their goals are likely to be achieved.

In this case the experiment was a grand success, and is indeed highly

praised. Nicaragua was reduced to the second-poorest country in the

hemisphere, with 60% of children under two afflicted with anaemia from

severe malnutrition and probable permanent brain damage,[16] after the

country suffered casualties during the terrorist war that in per capita

terms would be comparable to 2.5 million dead in the US — a death toll

‘significantly higher than the number of US persons killed in the US

Civil War and all the wars of the twentieth century combined,’ in the

words of Thomas Carothers, the leading historian of the democratization

of Latin America, who writes from the standpoint of an insider as well

as a scholar, having served in Reagan’s State Department in the

programmes of ‘democracy enhancement.’ Describing himself as a

‘neo-Reaganite,’ he regards these programmes as ‘sincere,’ though a

‘failure,’ because the US would tolerate only ‘top-down forms of

democracy’ controlled by traditional elites with firm ties to the US.

This is a familiar refrain in the history of pursuit of visions of

democracy, which Iraqis apparently comprehend, even if we choose not to.

It is worth stressing the word ‘choose,’ because there is no shortage of

evidence.

Negroponte’s primary task as proconsul in Honduras was to supervise the

international terrorist atrocities for which the US was condemned by the

World Court in a judgment that reached well beyond Nicaragua’s narrow

case, shaped by its Harvard legal team to avoid factual debate, since

the facts were conceded. The Court ordered Washington to terminate the

crimes and pay substantial reparations — all ignored on the official

grounds that other nations do not agree with us so we must ‘reserve to

ourselves the power to determine’ how we will act and which matters fall

‘essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States, as

determined by the United States,’ in this case the actions that the

Court condemned as the ‘unlawful use of force’ against Nicaragua; in lay

terms, international terrorism. All consigned to the ashcan of history

by the educated classes in the usual manner of unwanted truths, along

with the two supporting Security Council resolutions vetoed by the US,

with Britain loyally abstaining. The international terrorist campaign

received passing mention during Negroponte’s confirmation hearings, but

is considered of no particular significance, thanks to the exemption of

our glorious selves from the principle of universality.

On the wall of my office at MIT, I have a painting given to me by a

Jesuit priest, depicting the Angel of Death standing over the figure of

Salvadoran Archbishop Romero, whose assassination in 1980 opened that

grim decade of international state terrorist atrocities, and right

before him the six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests,

whose brains were blown out in 1989, bringing the decade to an end. The

Jesuit intellectuals, along with their housekeeper and her daughter,

were murdered by an elite battalion armed and trained by the current

incumbents in Washington and their mentors. It had already compiled a

bloody record of massacres in the US-run international terrorist

campaign that Romero’s successor described as a ‘war of extermination

and genocide against a defenseless civilian population.’ Romero had been

killed by much the same hands, a few days after he pleaded with

President Carter not to provide the junta with military aid, which ‘will

surely increase injustice here and sharpen the repression that has been

unleashed against the people’s organizations fighting to defend their

most fundamental human rights.’ The repression continued with US aid

after his assassination, and the current incumbents carried it forward

to a ‘war of extermination and genocide.’

I keep the painting there to remind myself daily of the real world, but

it has turned out to serve another instructive purpose. Many visitors

pass through the office. Those from Latin America almost unfailingly

recognize it. Those from north of the Rio Grande virtually never do.

From Europe, recognition is perhaps 10 percent. We may consider another

useful thought experiment. Suppose that in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s,

security forces armed and trained by the Kremlin had assassinated an

Archbishop who was known as ‘the voice of the voiceless,” then proceeded

to massacre tens of thousands of people, consummating the decade with

the brutal murder of Vaclav Havel and half a dozen other leading Czech

intellectuals. Would we know about it? Perhaps not, because the Western

reaction might have gone as far as nuclear war, so there would be no one

left to know. The distinguishing criterion is, once again, crystal

clear. The crimes of enemies take place; our own do not, by virtue of

our exemption from the most elementary of moral truisms.

The murdered Jesuits were, in fact, doubly assassinated: brutally

killed, and unknown in the enlightened states, a particularly cruel fate

for intellectuals. In the West, only specialists or activists even know

their names, let alone have any idea of what they wrote. Their fate is

quite unlike that of dissident intellectuals in the domains of official

enemies, who are well-known, widely published and read, and highly

honoured for their courageous resistance to repression — which was

indeed harsh, though it did not begin to compare with what was endured

by their counterparts under Western rule in the same years. Again, the

differential treatment makes good sense, given our principled exemption

from moral truisms.

Let us move on to some hard problems. Perhaps none is more prominent

today than ‘the evil scourge of terrorism,’ particularly state-backed

international terrorism, a ‘plague spread by depraved opponents of

civilization itself’ in a ‘return to barbarism in the modern age.’ So

the plague was described when the ‘war on terror’ was declared — not in

September 2001 when it was re-declared, but 20 years earlier, by the

same people and their mentors. Their ‘war on terror’ instantly turned

into a murderous terrorist war, with horrifying consequences in Central

America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and elsewhere, but that is

only history, not the history crafted by its custodians in the

enlightened states. In more useful accepted history, the 1980s are

described by scholarship as the decade of ‘state terrorism,’ of

‘persistent state involvement, or “sponsorship,” of terrorism,

especially by Libya and Iran.’ The US merely responded with ‘a

“proactive” stance toward terrorism,’[17] and the same was true of its

allies: Israel, South Africa, the clandestine terror network assembled

by the Reaganites, and others. I will put to the side the radical

Islamists organized and trained for the cause — not to defend

Afghanistan, which would have been a legitimate goal, but to bloody the

official enemy, probably prolonging the Afghan war and leaving the

country in ruins, soon to become much worse as Western clients took

over, with subsequent consequences that we need not mention. Gone from

acceptable history are millions of victims of the real ‘war on terror’

of the 1980s, and those seeking to survive in what is left of their

devastated lands. Also out of history is the residual ‘culture of

terror,’ which ‘domesticates the aspirations of the majority,’ to quote

the survivors of the Jesuit intellectual community in El Salvador, in a

conference surveying the actual but unacceptable history.

Terrorism poses a number of hard problems. First and foremost, of

course, the phenomenon itself, which really is threatening, even keeping

to the subpart that passes through the doctrinal filters: their

terrorism against us. It is only a matter of time before terror and WMD

are united, perhaps with horrendous consequences, as has been discussed

in the specialist literature long before the 11 September atrocities.

But apart from the phenomenon, there is the problem of definition of

‘terror.’ That too is taken to be a hard problem, the subject of

scholarly literature and international conferences. At first glance, it

might seem odd that it is regarded as a hard problem. There are what

seem to be satisfactory definitions — not perfect, but at least as good

as others regarded as unproblemat-ic: for example, the official

definitions in the US Code and Army Manuals in the early 1980s when the

‘war on terror’ was launched, or the quite similar official formulation

of the British government, which defines ‘terrorism’ as ‘the use, or

threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and is

intended to influence the government or intimidate the public and is for

the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause.’

These are the definitions that I have been using in writing about

terrorism for the past twenty years, ever since the Reagan

administration declared that the war on terror would be a prime focus of

its foreign policy, replacing human rights, the proclaimed ‘soul of our

foreign policy’ before.[18]

On closer look, however, the problem becomes clear, and it is indeed

hard. The official definitions are unusable, because of their immediate

consequences. One difficulty is that the definition of terrorism is

virtually the same as the definition of the official policy of the US,

and other states, called ‘counter-terrorism’ or ‘low-intensity warfare’

or some other euphemism. That again is close to a historical universal,

to my knowledge. Japanese imperialists in Manchuria and North China, for

example, were not aggressors or terrorists, but were protecting the

population and the legitimate governments from the terrorism of ‘Chinese

bandits.’ To undertake this noble task, they were compelled,

reluctantly, to resort to ‘counter-terror,’ with the goal of

establishing an ‘earthly paradise’ in which the people of Asia could

live in peace and harmony under the enlightened guidance of Japan. The

same is true of just about every other case I have investigated. But now

we do face a hard problem: it will not do to say that the enlightened

states are officially committed to terrorism. And it takes little effort

to demonstrate that the US engages in large-scale international

terrorism according to its own definition of the term, quite

uncontroversially in a number of crucial cases.

There are related problems. Some arose when the UN General Assembly, in

response to Reaganite pressures, passed its strongest condemnation of

terrorism in December 1987, with a call on all states to destroy the

plague of the modern age. The resolution passed 153 to 2, with only

Honduras abstaining. The two states that opposed the resolution

explained their reasons in the UN debate. They objected to a passage

recognizing ‘the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence,

as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of people forcibly

deprived of that right..., particularly peoples under colonial and

racist regimes and foreign occupation.’ The term ‘colonial and racist

regimes’ was understood to refer to South Africa, a US ally, resisting

the attacks of Nelson Mandela’s ANC, one of the world’s ‘more notorious

terrorist groups,’ as Washington determined at the same time. And

‘foreign occupation’ was understood to refer to Washington’s Israeli

client. So, not surprisingly, the US and Israel voted against the

resolution, which was thereby effectively vetoed — in fact, subjected to

the usual double veto: inapplicable, and vetoed from reporting and

history as well, though it was the strongest and most important UN

resolution on terrorism.

There is, then, a hard problem of defining ‘terrorism,’ rather like the

problem of defining ‘war crime.’ How can we define it in such a way as

to violate the principle of universality, exempting ourselves but

applying to selected enemies? And these have to be selected with some

precision. The US has had an official list of states sponsoring

terrorism ever since the Reagan years. In all these years, only one

state has been removed from the list: Iraq, in order to permit the US to

join the UK and others in providing badly needed aid for Saddam Hussein,

continuing without concern after he carried out his most horrifying

crimes. There has also been one near-example. Clinton offered to remove

Syria from the list if it agreed to peace terms offered by the US and

Israel. When Syria insisted on recovering the territory that Israel

conquered in 1967, it remained on the list of states sponsoring

terrorism, and continues to be on the list despite the acknowledgment by

Washington that Syria has not been implicated in sponsoring terror for

many years and has been highly cooperative in providing important

intelligence to the US on al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups. As

a reward for Syria’s cooperation in the ‘war on terror,’ last December

Congress passed legislation calling for even stricter sanctions against

Syria, nearly unanimously (the Syria Accountability Act). The

legislation was recently implemented by the president, thus depriving

the US of a major source of information about radical Islamist terrorism

in order to achieve the higher goal of establishing in Syria a regime

that will accept US-Israeli demands — not an unusual pattern, though

commentators continually find it surprising no matter how strong the

evidence and regular the pattern, and no matter how rational the choices

in terms of clear and understandable planning priorities.

The Syria Accountability Act offers another striking illustration of the

rejection of the principle of universality. Its core demand refers to UN

Security Council Resolution 520, calling for respect for the sovereignty

and territorial integrity of Lebanon, violated by Syria because it still

retains in Lebanon forces that were welcomed there by the US and Israel

in 1976 when their task was to carry out massacres of Palestinians. The

congressional legislation, and news reporting and commentary, overlook

the fact that Resolution 520, passed in 1982, was explicitly directed

against Israel, not Syria, and also the fact that while Israel violated

this and other Security Council resolutions regarding Lebanon for 22

years, there was no call for any sanctions against Israel, or even any

call for reduction in the huge unconditional military and economic aid

to Israel. The silence for 22 years includes many of those who now

signed the Act condemning Syria for its violation of the Security

Council resolution ordering Israel to leave Lebanon. The principle is

accurately formulated by a rare scholarly commentator, Steven Zunes: it

is that ‘Lebanese sovereignty must be defended only if the occupying

army is from a country the United States opposes, but is dispensable if

the country is a US ally.’[19] The principle, and the news reporting and

commentary on all of these events, again make good sense, given the

overriding need to reject elementary moral truisms, a fundamental

doctrine of the intellectual and moral culture.

Returning to Iraq, when Saddam was removed from the list of states

supporting terrorism, Cuba was added to replace it, perhaps in

recognition of the sharp escalation in international terrorist attacks

against Cuba in the late 1970s, including the bombing of a Cubana

airliner killing 73 people and many other atrocities. These were mostly

planned and implemented in the US, though by that time Washington had

moved away from its former policy of direct action in bringing ‘the

terrors of the earth’ to Cuba — the goal of the Kennedy administration,

reported by historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger in his

biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility for the

terror campaign and regarded it as a top priority. By the late 1970s

Washington was officially condemning the terrorist acts while harbouring

and protecting the terrorist cells on US soil in violation of US law.

The leading terrorist, Orlando Bosch, regarded as the author of the

Cubana airline bombing and dozens of other terrorist acts according to

the FBI, was given a presidential pardon by George Bush Number 1, over

the strong objections of the Justice Department. Others like him

continue to operate with impunity on US soil, including terrorists

responsible for major crimes elsewhere as well for whom the US refuses

requests for extradition (from Haiti, for example).

We may recall one of the leading components of the ‘Bush doctrine’ — now

Bush Number 2: ‘Those who harbour terrorists are as guilty as the

terrorists themselves,’ and must be treated accordingly, the president’s

words when announcing the bombing of Afghanistan because of its refusal

to turn over suspected terrorists to the US, without evidence, or even

credible pretext as later quietly conceded. Harvard International

Relations specialist Graham Allison describes this as the most important

component of the Bush Doctrine. It ‘unilaterally revoked the sovereignty

of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists,’ he wrote approvingly in

Foreign Affairs, adding that the doctrine has ‘already become a de facto

rule of international relations.’ That is correct, in the technical

sense of ‘rule of international relations.’

Unreconstructed literalists might conclude that Bush and Allison are

calling for the bombing of the United States, but that is because they

do not comprehend that the most elementary moral truisms must be

forcefully rejected: there is a crucial exemption to the principle of

universality, so deeply entrenched in the reigning intellectual culture

that it is not even perceived, hence not mentioned.

Again, we find illustrations daily. The Negroponte appointment is one

example. To take another, a few weeks ago the Palestinian leader Abu

Abbas died in a US prison in Iraq. His capture was one of the most

heralded achievements of the invasion. A few years earlier he had been

living in Gaza, participating in the Oslo ‘peace process’ with

US-Israeli approval, but after the second Intifida began, he fled to

Baghdad, where he was arrested by the US army and imprisoned because of

his role in the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. The

year 1985 is regarded by scholarship as the peak year of terrorism in

the 1980s; Mideast terrorism was the top story of the year, in a poll of

editors. Scholarship identifies two major crimes in that year: the

hijacking of the Achille Lauro, in which one person, a crippled

American, was brutally murdered; and an airplane hijacking with one

death, also an American. There were, to be sure, some other terrorist

crimes in the region in 1985, but they do not pass through the filters.

One was a car-bombing outside a mosque in Beirut that killed 80 people

and wounded 250 others, timed to explode as people were leaving, killing

mostly women and girls; but this is excluded from the record because it

was traced back to the CIA and British intelligence. Another was the

action that led to the Achille Lauro hijacking in retaliation, a week

later: Shimon Peres’s bombing of Tunis with no credible pretext, killing

75 people, Palestinians and Tunisians, expedited by the US and praised

by Secretary of State Shultz, then unanimously condemned by the UN

Security Council as an ‘act of armed aggression’ (US abstaining). But

that too does not enter the annals of terrorism (or perhaps the more

severe crime of ‘armed aggression’), again because of agency. Peres and

Shultz do not die in prison, but receive Nobel prizes, huge taxpayer

gifts for reconstruction of what they helped destroy in occupied Iraq,

and other honours. Again, it all makes sense once we comprehend that

elementary moral truisms must be sent to the flames.

Sometimes denial of moral truisms is explicit. A case in point is the

reaction to the second major component of the ‘Bush Doctrine’, formally

enunciated in the National Security Strategy of September 2002, which

was at once described in the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs

as a ‘new imperial grand strategy’ declaring Washington’s right to

resort to force to eliminate any potential challenge to its global

dominance. The NSS was widely criticized among the foreign policy elite,

including the article just cited, but on narrow grounds: not that it was

wrong, or even new, but that the style and implementation were so

extreme that they posed threats to US interests. Henry Kissinger

described ‘The new approach [as] revolutionary,’ pointing out that it

undermines the 17^(th) century Westphalian system of international

order, and of course the UN Charter and international law. He approved

of the doctrine but with reservations about style and tactics, and with

a crucial qualification: it cannot be ‘a universal principle available

to every nation.’ Rather, the right of aggression must be reserved to

the US, perhaps delegated to chosen clients. We must forcefully reject

the most elementary of moral truisms: the principle of universality.

Kissinger is to be praised for his honesty in forthrightly articulating

prevailing doctrine, usually concealed in professions of virtuous intent

and tortured legalisms.

To add just one last example that is very timely and significant,

consider ‘just war theory,’ now undergoing a vigorous revival in the

context of the ‘normative revolution’ proclaimed in the 1990s. There has

been debate about whether the invasion of Iraq satisfies the conditions

for just war, but virtually none about the bombing of Serbia in 1999 or

the invasion of Afghanistan, taken to be such clear cases that

discussion is superfluous. Let us take a quick look at these, not asking

whether the attacks were right or wrong, but considering the nature of

the arguments.

The harshest criticism of the Serbia bombing anywhere near the

mainstream is that it was ‘illegal but legitimate,’ the conclusion of

the International Independent Commission of Inquiry headed by Justice

Richard Goldstone. ‘It was illegal because it did not receive approval

from the UN Security Council,’ the Commission determined, ‘but it was

legitimate because all diplomatic avenues had been exhausted and there

was no other way to stop the killings and atrocities in Kosovo.’[20]

Justice Goldstone observed that the Charter may need revision in the

light of the report and the judgments on which it is based. The NATO

intervention, he explains, ‘is too important a precedent’ for it to be

regarded ‘an aberration.’ Rather, ‘state sovereignty is being redefined

in the face of globalization and the resolve by the majority of the

peoples of the world that human rights have become the business of the

international community.’ He also stressed the need for ‘objective

analysis of human rights abuses.’[21]

The last comment is good advice. One question that an objective analysis

might address is whether the majority of the peoples of the world accept

the judgment of the enlightened states. In the case of the bombing of

Serbia, review of the world press and official statements reveals little

support for that conclusion, to put it rather mildly. In fact, the

bombing was bitterly condemned outside the NATO countries, facts

consistently ignored.[22] Furthermore, it is hardly likely that the

principled self-exemption of the enlightened states from the

‘universalization’ that traces back to Nuremberg would gain the approval

of much of the world’s population. The new norm, it appears, fits the

standard pattern.

Another question that objective analysis might address is whether indeed

‘all diplomatic avenues had been exhausted.’ That conclusion is not easy

to maintain in the light of the fact that there were two options on the

table when NATO decided to bomb — a NATO proposal and a Serbian proposal

— and that after 78 days of bombing, a compromise was reached between

them.[23]

A third question is whether it is true that ‘there was no other way to

stop the killings and atrocities in Kosovo,’ clearly a crucial matter.

In this case, objective analysis happens to be unusually easy. There is

vast documentation available from impeccable Western sources: several

compilations of the State Department released in justification of the

war, detailed records of the OSCE, NATO, the UN, a British Parliamentary

Inquiry, and other similar sources.

There are several remarkable features of the unusually rich

documentation. One is that the record is almost entirely ignored in the

vast literature on the Kosovo war, including the scholarly

literature.[24] The second is that the substantive contents of the

documentation are not only ignored, but consistently denied. I have

reviewed the record elsewhere, and will not do so here, but what we

discover, characteristically, is that the clear and explicit chronology

is reversed. The Serbian atrocities are portrayed as the cause of the

bombing, whereas it is uncontroversial that they followed it, virtually

without exception, and were furthermore its anticipated consequence, as

is also well documented from the highest NATO sources.

The British government, the most hawkish element of the alliance,

estimated that most of the atrocities were attributable not to the

Serbian security forces, but to the KLA guerrillas attacking Serbia from

Albania — with the intent, as they frankly explained, to elicit a

disproportionate Serbian response that could be used to mobilize Western

support for the bombing. The British government assessment was as of

mid-January, but the documentary record indicates no substantial change

until late March, when the bombing was announced and initiated. The

Milosevic indictment, based on US and UK intelligence, reveals the same

pattern of events.

The US and UK, and commentators generally, cite the Racak massacre in

mid-January as the decisive turning point, but that plainly cannot be

taken seriously. First, even assuming the most extreme condemnations of

the Racak massacre to be accurate, it scarcely changed the balance of

atrocities. Second, much worse massacres were taking place at the same

time elsewhere but aroused no concern, though some of the worst could

have easily been terminated merely by withdrawing support. One notable

case in early 1999 is East Timor, under Indonesian military occupation.

The US and UK continued to provide their military and diplomatic support

for the occupiers, who had already slaughtered perhaps one-fourth of the

population with unremitting and decisive US-UK support, which continued

until well after the Indonesian army virtually destroyed the country in

a final paroxysm of violence in August-September 1999. That is only one

of many such cases, but it alone more than suffices to dismiss the

professions of horror about Racak.

In Kosovo, Western estimates are that about 2000 were killed in the year

prior to the invasion. If the British and other assessments are

accurate, most of these were killed by the KLA guerrillas. One of the

very few serious scholarly studies even to consider the matter estimates

that 500 of the 2000 were killed by the Serbs. This is the careful and

judicious study by Nicholas Wheeler, who supports the NATO bombing on

the grounds that there would have been worse atrocities had NATO not

bombed.[25] The argument is that by bombing with the anticipation that

it would lead to atrocities, NATO was preventing atrocities, maybe even

a second Auschwitz, many claim. That such arguments are taken seriously,

as they are, gives no slight insight into Western intellectual culture,

particularly when we recall that there were diplomatic options and that

the agreement reached after the bombing was a compromise between them

(formally at least).

Justice Goldstone appears to have reservations on this matter as well.

He recognizes — as few do — that the NATO bombing was not undertaken to

protect the Albanian population of Kosovo, and that its ‘direct result’

was a ‘tremendous catastrophe’ for the Kosovars — as was anticipated by

the NATO command and the State Department, followed by another

catastrophe particularly for Serbs and Roma under NATO-UN occupation.

NATO commentators and supporters, Justice Goldstone continues, ‘have had

to console themselves with the belief that “Operation Horseshoe,” the

Serb plan of ethnic cleansing directed against the Albanians in Kosovo,

had been set in motion before the bombing began, and not in consequence

of the bombing.’ The word ‘belief’ is appropriate: there is no evidence

in the voluminous Western record of anything having been set in motion

before the international monitors were withdrawn in preparation for the

bombing, and very little in the few days before the bombing began, and

‘Operation Horseshoe’ has since been exposed as an apparent intelligence

fabrication, though it can hardly be in doubt that Serbia had

contingency plans, at present unknown, for such actions in response to a

NATO attack.

It is difficult, then, to see how we can accept the conclusions of the

International Commission, a serious and measured effort to deal with the

issues, on the legitimacy of the bombing.

The facts are not really controversial, as anyone interested can

determine. I suppose that is why the voluminous Western documentary

record is so scrupulously ignored. Whatever one’s judgment about the

bombing, not at issue here, the standard conclusion that it was an

uncontroversial example of just war and the decisive demonstration of

the ‘normative revolution’ led by the ‘enlightened states’ is, to say

the least, rather startling — unless, of course, we return to the same

principle: moral truisms must be cast to the flames, when applied to us.

Let us turn to the second case, the war in Afghanistan, considered such

a paradigm example of just war that there is scarcely even any

discussion about it. The respected moral-political philosopher Jean

Bethke Elshtain summarizes received opinion fairly accurately when she

writes approvingly that only absolute pacifists and outright lunatics

doubt that this was uncontroversially a just war. Here, once again,

factual questions arise. First, recall the war aims: to punish Afghans

until the Taliban agree to hand over Osama bin Laden without evidence.

Contrary to much subsequent commentary, overthrowing the Taliban regime

was an afterthought, added after several weeks of bombing. Second, there

is quite good evidence bearing on the belief that only lunatics or

absolute pacifists did not join the chorus of approval. An international

Gallup poll after the bombing was announced but before it began found

very limited support for it, almost none if civilians were targeted, as

they were from the first moment. And even that tepid support was based

on the presupposition that the targets were known to have been

responsible for the 11 September attacks. They were not. Eight months

later, the head of the FBI testified to the Senate that after the most

intensive international intelligence inquiry in history, the most that

could be said was that the plot was ‘believed’ to have been hatched in

Afghanistan, while the attacks were planned and financed elsewhere. It

follows that there was no detectable popular support for the bombing,

contrary to confident standard claims, apart from a very few countries;

and of course Western elites. Afghan opinion is harder to estimate, but

we do know that after several weeks of bombing, leading anti-Taliban

figures, including some of those most respected by the US and President

Karzai, were denouncing the bombing, calling for it to end, and charging

the US with bombing just to ‘show off its muscle’ while undermining

their efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within.

If we also adopt the truism that facts matter, some problems arise, but

there is little fear of that.

Next come the questions of just war. At once, the issue of universality

arises. If the US is unquestionably authorized to bomb another country

to compel its leaders to turn over someone it suspects of involvement in

a terrorist act, then, a fortiori, Cuba, Nicaragua, and a host of others

are entitled to bomb the US because there is no doubt of its involvement

in very serious terrorist attacks against them: in the case of Cuba

going back 45 years, extensively documented in impeccable sources, and

not questioned; in the case of Nicaragua, even condemned by the World

Court and the Security Council (in vetoed resolutions), after which the

US escalated the attack. This conclusion surely follows if we accept the

principle of universality. The conclusion of course is utterly

outrageous, and advocated by no one. We therefore conclude, once again,

that the principle of universality has a crucial exception, and that

rejection of elementary moral truisms is so deeply entrenched that even

raising the question is considered an unspeakable abomination. That is

yet another instructive comment on the reigning intellectual and moral

culture, with its principled rejection of unacceptable platitudes.

The Iraq war has been considered more controversial, so there is an

extensive professional literature debating whether it satisfies

international law and just war criteria. One distinguished scholar,

Michael Glennon of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, argues

forthrightly that international law is simply ‘hot air’ and should be

abandoned, because state practice does not conform to it: meaning, the

US and its allies ignore it. A further defect of international law and

the UN Charter, he argues, is that they limit the capacity of the US to

resort to force, and such resort is right and good because the US leads

the ‘enlightened states’ (his phrase), apparently by definition: no

evidence or argument is adduced, or considered necessary. Another

respected scholar argues that the US and UK were in fact acting in

accord with the UN Charter, under a ‘communitarian interpretation’ of

its provisions: they were carrying out the will of the international

community, in a mission implicitly delegated to them because they alone

had the power to carry it out.[26] It is apparently irrelevant that the

international community vociferously objected, at an unprecedented level

— quite evidently, if people are included within the international

community, but even among elites.

Others observe that law is a living instrument its meaning determined by

practice, and practice demonstrates that new norms have been established

permitting ‘anticipatory self-defense,’ another euphemism for aggression

at will. The tacit assumption is that norms are established by the

powerful and that they alone have the right of anticipatory

self-defence. No one, for example, would argue that Japan exercised this

right when it bombed military bases in the US colonies of Hawaii and the

Philippines, even though the Japanese knew very well that B-17 Flying

Fortresses were coming off the Boeing production lines, and were surely

familiar with the very public discussions in the US explaining how they

could be used to incinerate Japan’s wooden cities in a war of

extermination, flying from Hawaiian and Philippine bases.[27] Nor would

anyone accord that right to any state today, apart from the

self-declared enlightened states, which have the power to determine

norms and to apply them selectively at will, basking in praise for their

nobility, generosity, and messianic visions of righteousness.

There is nothing particularly novel about any of this, apart from one

aspect. The means of destruction that have been developed are by now so

awesome, and the risks of deploying and using them so enormous, that a

rational Martian observer would not rank the prospects for survival of

this curious species very high, as long as contempt for elementary moral

truisms remains so deeply entrenched among educated elites.

[1] For sources, see my New Military Humanism (Common Courage, 1999), A

New Generation Draws the Line (Verso, 2000), and Hegemony or Survival

(Metropolitan, 2003, updated 2004). I will keep here to citations not

easy to locate in fairly standard work, or in recent books of mine,

including these.

[2] Elizabeth Becker, ‘Kissinger Tapes Describe Crises, War and Stark

Photos of Abuse,’ New York Times, May 27, 2004.

[3] Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam: an American Tragedy (Times Books,

1970).

[4] Edward Alden, ‘US INTERROGATION DEBATE: Dismay at attempt to find

legal justification for torture,’ Financial Times, 10 June 2004.

[5] Justice Richard Goldstone, ‘Kosovo: An Assessment in the Context of

International Law,’ Nineteenth Morgenthau Memorial Lecture, Carnegie

Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 2000.

[6] Michael Georgy, ‘Iraqis want Saddam’s old U.S. friends on trial,’

Reuters, Jan 20, 2004.

[7] On this and other such operations, based in part on unpublished

investigations of Newsweek Saigon bureau chief Kevin Buckley, see

Chomsky and Edward Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. I

(South End, 1979).

[8] Arnon Regular, Ha’aretz, 24 May 2003, based on minutes of a meeting

between Bush and his hand-picked Palestinian Prime Minister, Mahmoud

Abbas, provided by Abbas. See also Newsweek, ‘Bush and God,’ March 10,

2003, with a cover story on the beliefs and direct line to God of the

man with his finger on the button. Also ‘The Jesus Factory,’ PBS

Frontline documentary, on the ‘religious ideals’ that Bush has brought

to the White House, ‘relevant to the Bush messianic mission to graft

democracy onto the rest of the world’; Sam Allis, ‘A timely look at how

faith informs Bush presidency,’ Boston Globe, 29 April 2004. White House

aides report concern over Bush’s ‘increasingly erratic behavior’ as he

‘declares his decisions to be “God’s will”’; Doug Thompson, publisher,

Capitol Hill Blue, 4 June 2004.

[9] Gordon Wood, ‘“Freedom Just Around the Corner”: Rogue Nation,’ New

York Times Book Review, March 28, 2004; Thomas Bailey, A Diplomatic

History of the American People (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969).

[10] Historians Thomas Pakenham and David Edwards , cited by Clifford

Langley, ‘The Religious Roots of American Imperialism,’ Global Dialogue,

Winter-Spring 2003.

[11] Cited by Pier Francesco Asso, ‘The “Home Bias” Approach in the

History of Economic Thought,’ in J. Lorentzen and M. de Cecco, (eds.),

Markets and Authorities (Elgar: UK, 2002).

[12] ‘Another intifada in the making,’ ‘Bloodier and sadder,’ Economist,

April 17, 2004.

[13] Walter Pincus, ‘Skepticism About U.S. Deep, Iraq Poll Shows, Motive

for Invasion Is Focus of Doubts,’ Washington Post, Nov. 12, 2003.

Richard Burkholder, ‘Gallup Poll of Baghdad: Gauging U.S. Intent,’

Government & Public Affairs, Oct. 28, 2003.

[14] Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor, ‘Handover still on course as

UN waits for new leader to emerge,’ Daily Telegraph, May 18, 2004.

[15] Robbins, ‘Negroponte Has Tricky Mission: Modern Proconsul,’ Wall

Street Journal, April 27, 2004.

[16] Envío (UCA, Jesuit University, Managua), Nov. 2003.

[17] Martha Crenshaw, Current History, America at War, Dec. 2001.

[18] See, inter alia, my Pirates and Emperors (1996; updated edition.

South End-Pluto, 2002). For review of the first phase of the ‘war on

terror,’ see Alexander George, (ed.), Western State Terrorism (Polity,

Blackwell, 1991).

[19] Zunes, ‘U.S. Policy Towards Syria and the Triumph of

Neoconservatism,’ Middle East Policy, Spring 2004.

[20] The Independent International Commission on Kosovo, ‘The Kosovo

Report,’ 23 October, 2000,

www.palmecenter.se

. Oxford University Press, 2000.

[21] Goldstone, op. cit.

[22] For review see New Military Humanism.

[23] For details, see my A New Generation Draws the Line (Verso, 2000),

which also reviews how NATO instantly overturned the Security Council

resolution it had initiated. Goldstone, op. cit., recognizes that the

resolution was a compromise, but does not go into the matter, which

aroused no interest in the West.

[24] The only detailed reviews I know of are in my books cited in the

two preceding notes, with some additions from the later British

parliamentary inquiry in Hegemony or Survival.

[25] Nicholas Wheeler. Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention and

International Society (Oxford 2000).

[26] Carston Stahn, ‘Enforcement of the Collective Will after Iraq,’

American Journal of International Law, Symposium, ‘Future Implications

of the Iraq Conflict,’ 97:804–23, 2003. For more on these matters,

including Glennon’s influential ideas and his rejection of other moral

truisms, see my article and several others in Review of International

Studies 29.4, October 2003, and Hegemony or Survival.

[27] See Bruce Franklin, War Stars (Oxford, 1988).