Who Rules the World? (American Empire Project)

by Noam Chomsky

The opinion of the world has not been sampled on the subject, but it is possible that there might be some hesitancy about calling an attack on a military base in a foreign country a “terrorist attack,” particularly when U.S. and French forces were carrying out heavy naval bombardments and air strikes in Lebanon, and shortly after the United States provided decisive support for the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed some twenty thousand people and devastated the southern part of the country while leaving much of Beirut in ruins.

In the United States, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is regularly described as a reaction to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist attacks on northern Israel from their Lebanese bases, making our crucial contribution to these major war crimes understandable. In the real world, the Lebanese border area had been quiet for a year, apart from repeated Israeli attacks, many of them murderous, in an effort to elicit some PLO response that could be used as a pretext for the already planned invasion. Its actual purpose was not concealed at the time by Israeli commentators and leaders: to safeguard the Israeli takeover of the occupied West Bank.

After the murder of the family, Hizbollah “changed the rules of the game,” Yitzhak Rabin informed the Israeli Knesset.30 Previously, no rockets had been launched at Israel. Until then, the rules of the game had been that Israel could launch murderous attacks anywhere in Lebanon at will, and Hizbollah would respond only within Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.

After the murder of its leader (and his family), Hizbollah began to respond to Israeli crimes in Lebanon by rocketing northern Israel. The latter is, of course, intolerable terror, so Rabin launched an invasion that drove some five hundred thousand people out of their homes and killed well over a hundred. The merciless Israeli attacks reached as far as northern Lebanon.

The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill civilians, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral depravity of their adversaries.

The same line of defense is common with regard to some of Washington’s past peccadilloes, like the missile attack that in 1998 destroyed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.36 The attack apparently led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but without intent to kill them, hence it was not a crime on the order of intentional killing.

Since Vietnam, “the US has mainly seen its torture done for it by proxy—paying, arming, training and guiding foreigners doing it, but usually being careful to keep Americans at least one discreet step removed.”

Not surprisingly, U.S. aid tends to correlate with a favorable climate for business operations, commonly improved by the murder of labor and peasant organizers and human rights activists and other such actions, yielding a secondary correlation between aid and egregious violation of human rights.

Support for democracy is the province of ideologists and propagandists. In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported only insofar as it contributes to social and economic objectives, a conclusion reluctantly conceded by the more serious scholarship. Elite contempt

There was also a sharp change in the U.S. economy in the 1970s, toward financialization and export of production. A variety of factors converged to create a vicious cycle of radical concentration of wealth, primarily in the top fraction of one percent of the population—mostly CEOs, hedge-fund managers, and the like. That leads to the concentration of political power, hence state policies to increase economic concentration: fiscal policies, rules of corporate governance, deregulation, and much more. Meanwhile the costs of electoral campaigns skyrocketed, driving the parties into the pockets of concentrated capital, increasingly financial: the Republicans reflexively, the Democrats—by now what used to be moderate Republicans—not far behind.

While wealth and power have narrowly concentrated, for most of the population real incomes have stagnated and people have been getting by with increased work hours, debt, and asset inflation, regularly destroyed by the financial crises that began as the regulatory apparatus was dismantled starting in the 1980s.

All of this, and much more, can proceed as long as the Muasher doctrine prevails. As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, and diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

The costs of the Bush-Obama wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now estimated to run as high as $4.4 trillion—a major victory for Osama bin Laden, whose announced goal was to bankrupt America by drawing it into a trap.

Though the deficit crisis has been manufactured for reasons of savage class war, the long-term debt crisis is serious, and has been ever since Ronald Reagan’s fiscal irresponsibility turned the United States from the world’s leading creditor to the world’s leading debtor, tripling the national debt and raising threats to the economy that were rapidly escalated by George W. Bush.

Not even mentioned is the possibility, discussed by economist Dean Baker, that the deficit might be eliminated if the dysfunctional privatized health care system were replaced by one similar to those in other industrial societies, which have half the per capita costs and at least comparable health outcomes.23 The financial institutions and the pharmaceutical industry, however, are far too powerful for such options even to be considered,

The basic viewpoint was outlined with admirable frankness in a major state paper of 1948. The author was one of the architects of the new world order of the day: the chair of the State Department’s policy planning staff, respected statesman and scholar George Kennan, a moderate dove within the planning spectrum. He observed that the central policy goal of the United States should be to maintain the “position of disparity” that separated our enormous wealth from the poverty of others. To achieve that goal, he advised, “We should cease to talk about vague and … unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization,” and must “deal in straight power concepts” and not be “hampered by idealistic slogans” about “altruism and world-benefaction.”15

the United States supports democracy if, and only if, the outcomes accord with its strategic and economic objectives—the rueful conclusion of neo-Reaganite Thomas Carothers, the most careful and respected scholarly analyst of “democracy promotion” initiatives.

At the end of World War II, the United States held a position of unprecedented global power. Not surprisingly, careful and sophisticated plans were developed for organizing the world. Each region was assigned its “function” by State Department planners, headed by the distinguished diplomat George Kennan. He determined that the United States had no special interest in Africa, so it should be handed over to Europe to “exploit”—his word—for its reconstruction.

It should be unnecessary to dwell on the extreme dangers posed by one central element of the predatory obsessions that are producing calamities all over the world: the reliance on fossil fuels, which courts global disaster, perhaps in the not-too-distant future. Details may be debated, but there is little doubt that the problem is serious, if not awesome, and that the longer we delay in addressing it, the more awful will be the legacy left to generations to come. There are some efforts afoot to face reality, but they are far too minimal.

The media cooperate by barely reporting the increasingly dire climate change forecasts of international agencies and even the U.S. Department of Energy. The standard presentation is a debate between alarmists and skeptics: on one side virtually all qualified scientists, on the other a few holdouts. Not part of the debate are a very large number of experts, including those in the climate change program at MIT, among others, who criticize the scientific consensus because it is too conservative and cautious, arguing that the truth when it comes to climate change is far more dire.

The PNC declaration, which accepted the overwhelming international consensus on a diplomatic settlement, was virtually the same as the two-state resolution brought to the Security Council in January 1976 by the Arab “confrontation states” (Egypt, Syria, and Jordan). It was vetoed by the United States then, and again in 1980. For forty years the United States has blocked the international consensus, and it still does, diplomatic pleasantries aside.

At the extreme critical end of the mainstream, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote that until that moment Palestinians had always “rejected compromise” but now at last they were willing to “make peace possible.”8 Of course, it was the United States and Israel that had rejected diplomacy and the PLO that had been offering compromise for years, but Lewis’s reversal of the facts was quite normal and unchallenged in the mainstream.

Though the timing of the Intifada was a surprise, the uprising itself was not, at least to those who paid any attention to Israel’s U.S.-backed operations within the territories. Something was bound to happen; there is only so much that people can endure. For the preceding twenty years, Palestinians under military occupation had been subjected to harsh repression, brutality, and cruel humiliation while watching what remained of their country disappear before their eyes as Israel conducted its programs of settlement, implemented huge infrastructure developments designed to integrate valuable parts of the territories within Israel, robbed them of resources, and put into place other measures to bar independent development—always with crucial U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support, as well as ideological backing in shaping how the issues were framed.

To take just one of the many cases that elicited no notice or concern in the West: shortly before the outbreak of the Intifada, a Palestinian girl, Intissar al-Atar, was shot and killed in a school yard in Gaza by a resident of a nearby Jewish settlement.10 He was one of the several thousand Israelis who settled in Gaza with substantial state subsidies, protected by a huge army presence as they took over much of the land and the scarce water of the Strip while living “lavishly in twenty-two settlements in the midst of 1.4 million destitute Palestinians,” as the crime is described by Israeli scholar Avi Raz.11

And so it was: as Yifrah was freed, the Israeli press reported that an army patrol fired into the yard of a school in a West Bank refugee camp, wounding five children, likewise intending only “to shock them.” There were no charges, and the event again attracted no attention. It was just another episode in a program of “illiteracy as punishment,” as the Israeli press termed it, including the closing of schools, the use of gas bombs, the beating of students with rifle butts, and the barring of medical aid for victims. Beyond the schools, a reign of even more severe brutality that became yet more savage during the Intifada was enacted under the orders of Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin. After two years of violent and sadistic repression, Rabin informed Peace Now leaders that “the inhabitants of the territories are subject to harsh military and economic pressure. In the end, they will be broken,” and would accept Israel’s terms—as they did, when Arafat restored control through the Oslo process.12

Article I of the DOP states that the end result of the process is to be “a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.” Those familiar with the diplomacy concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict should have had no difficulty understanding what this meant. Resolutions 242 and 338 say nothing at all about Palestinian rights, apart from a vague reference to a “just settlement of the refugee problem.”26 Later resolutions referring to Palestinian national rights were ignored in the DOP. If the culmination of the “peace process” is implemented along such lines, then Palestinians could kiss goodbye their hopes for some limited degree of national rights in the former Palestine.

Meanwhile, the United States, the richest and most powerful country in world history, is the only nation among perhaps a hundred relevant ones that doesn’t have a national policy for restricting the use of fossil fuels, that doesn’t even have renewable energy targets. It’s not because the population doesn’t want it; Americans are pretty close to the international norm in their concern about global warming. It’s institutional structures that block change. Business interests don’t want it, and they’re overwhelmingly powerful in determining policy, so you get a big gap between opinion and policy on lots of issues, including this one.

In Northeast Asia, it’s the same sort of thing. North Korea may be the craziest country in the world; it’s certainly a good competitor for that title. But it does make sense to try to figure out what’s in the minds of people when they’re acting in crazy ways. Why would they behave the way they do? Just imagine ourselves in their position. Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled—everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.

Meanwhile, Israel is incorporating the territory on the Israeli side of the illegal “separation wall” (in reality an annexation wall), taking arable land and water resources and many villages, strangling the town of Qalqilya, and separating Palestinian villagers from their fields. In what Israel calls “the seam” between the wall and the border, close to 10 percent of the West Bank, anyone is permitted to enter—except Palestinians. Those who live in the region have to go through an intricate bureaucratic procedure to gain temporary entry. Exiting—for example, in order to receive medical care—is hampered in the same way. The result, predictably, has been severe disruption of Palestinian lives and, according to UN reports, a decrease of more than 80 percent in the number of farmers who routinely cultivate their lands and a decline of 60 percent in the total yield of olive orchards, among other harmful effects.5 The pretext for the wall was security, but that means security for illegal Jewish settlers; about 85 percent of the wall runs through the occupied West Bank.

Israel is also taking over the Jordan Valley, thus fully imprisoning the cantons that remain. Huge infrastructure projects link settlers to Israel’s urban centers, ensuring that they will see no Palestinians. Following a traditional neocolonial model, a modern center remains for Palestinian elites in Ramallah, while the remainder of the population mostly languishes.

There are regular expulsions of Palestinians. In the Jordan Valley alone, the population has been reduced from three hundred thousand in 1967 to sixty thousand today, and similar processes are under way elsewhere.

The second precondition is that illegal settlement expansion must be allowed to continue, as has happened without a break during the twenty years following the Oslo Accords.

American labor history is unusually violent. One scholarly study concludes that “the United States had more deaths at the end of the nineteenth century due to labor violence—in absolute terms and in proportion to population size—than any other country except Czarist Russia.”

For propaganda purposes, NAFTA was labeled a “free-trade agreement.” It was nothing of the sort. Like other such agreements, it had strong protectionist elements and much of it was not about trade at all; it was an investors’ rights agreement. And like other such “free-trade agreements,” this one predictably proved harmful to working people in the participating countries. One effect was to undermine labor organizing: a study conducted under NAFTA auspices revealed that successful organizing declined sharply, thanks to such practices as management warnings that if an enterprise were unionized, it would be transferred to Mexico.7 Such practices are, of course, illegal, but that is irrelevant as long as business can count on the “indispensable government support” to which Montgomery referred.

In many respects, the condition of working people when Ware wrote was similar to what we see today as inequality has again reached the astonishing heights of the late 1920s. For a tiny minority, wealth has accumulated beyond the dreams of avarice. In the past decade, 95 percent of growth has gone into the pockets of 1 percent of the population—mostly a fraction of these.9 Median real income is below its level of twenty-five years ago. For males, median real income is below what it was in 1968.10 The labor share of output has fallen to its lowest level since World War II.11 This is not the result of the mysterious workings of the market or economic laws but, again, largely of the “indispensable” support and initiative of a government that is significantly in corporate hands.

The concept that productive enterprises should be owned by the workforce was common coin in the mid-nineteenth century, not just by Marx and the left but also by the most prominent classical liberal figure of the day, John Stuart Mill. Mill held that “the form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected to predominate is … the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers electable and removable by themselves.”

The United States, the new policy insisted, must maintain its “defense industrial base.” The phrase is a euphemism, referring to high-tech industry generally, which relies heavily on extensive state intervention for research and development, often under Pentagon cover, in what many economists continue to call the U.S. “free-market economy.”

There was one unspoken exception: economic nationalism would be fine for the United States, whose economy relies heavily on massive state intervention.

The elimination of economic nationalism for others stood in sharp conflict with the Latin American stand of that moment, which State Department officials described as “the philosophy of the New Nationalism [that] embraces policies designed to bring about a broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses.”7 As U.S. policy analysts added, “Latin Americans are convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of that country.”8

That, of course, will not do. Washington understands that the “first beneficiaries” should be U.S. investors, while Latin Ame...

In both cases the consequences reach to the present. Literally not a day has passed since 1953 when the United States has not been torturing the people of Iran. Guatemala remains one of the world’s worst horror chambers; to this day, Mayans are fleeing from the effects of near-genocidal government military campaigns in the highlands backed by President Ronald Reagan and his top officials. As the country director of Oxfam, a Guatemalan doctor, reported in 2014, “There is a dramatic deterioration of the political, social and economic context. Attacks against [human rights] defenders have increased 300 percent during the last year. There is a clear evidence of a very well organized strategy by the private sector and Army, both have captured the government in order to keep the status quo and to impose the extraction economical model, pushing away dramatically Indigenous peoples from their own land, due to the mining industry, African Palm and sugar cane plantations. In addition the social movement defending their land and rights has been criminalized, many leaders are in jail and many others have been killed.”10

That causes problems. The United States somehow finds it difficult to appeal to the poor with its doctrine that the rich should plunder the poor.

The pretense all along was that we were defending ourselves from the Russian threat—an absurd explanation that generally went unchallenged. A simple test of the thesis, again, is what happened when any conceivable Russian threat disappeared: U.S. policy toward Cuba became even harsher, spearheaded by liberal Democrats, including Bill Clinton, who outflanked Bush from the right in the 1992 election.

Henry Kissinger caught the essence of the real foreign policy of the United States when he termed independent nationalism a “virus” that might “spread contagion.”18 Kissinger was referring to Salvador Allende’s Chile; the virus was the idea that there might be a parliamentary path toward some kind of socialist democracy.

It was, for example, the reasoning behind the decision to oppose Vietnamese nationalism in the early 1950s and support France’s effort to reconquer its former colony. It was feared that independent Vietnamese nationalism might be a virus that would spread contagion to the surrounding regions, including resource-rich Indonesia. That might even have led Japan to become the industrial and commercial center of an independent new order of the kind imperial Japan had so recently fought to establish. The remedy was clear—and largely achieved. Vietnam was virtually destroyed and ringed by military dictatorships that kept the “virus” from spreading contagion.

Much the same was true in the Middle East. The unique U.S. relations with Israel were established in their current form in 1967 when Israel delivered a smashing blow to Egypt, the center of secular Arab nationalism. By doing so, it protected U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, then engaged in military conflict with Egypt in Yemen. Saudi Arabia, of course, is the most extreme radical fundamentalist Islamic state, and also a missionary state, expending huge sums to establish its Wahhabi-Salafi doctrines beyond its borders. It is worth remembering that the United States, like England before it, has tended to support radical fundamentalist Islam in opposition to secular nationalism, which has until recently been perceived as posing more of a threat of independence and contagion.

In May 2014, for example, the United States agreed to support a UN Security Council resolution calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes in Syria, but with a proviso: there could be no inquiry into possible war crimes by Israel.19 Or by Washington, though it was unnecessary to add that last condition; the United States is uniquely self-immunized from the international legal system.

There is a huge public relations campaign in the United States, organized quite openly by Big Energy and the business world, to try to convince the public that global warming is either unreal or not a result of human activity. And it has had some impact. The United States ranks lower than other countries in public concern about global warming, and the results are stratified: among Republicans, the party more fully dedicated to the interests of wealth and corporate power, it ranks far lower than the global norm.25

It is worth remembering the extent of Washington’s devotion to its friend Saddam. Reagan removed him from the State Department’s terrorist list so that aid could be sent to expedite his assault on Iran, and later both denied his terrible crimes against the Kurds, including the use of chemical weapons, and blocked congressional condemnations of those crimes. He also accorded Saddam a privilege otherwise granted only to Israel: there was no serious reaction when Iraq attacked the USS Stark with Exocet missiles, killing thirty-seven crewmen, much like the case of the USS Liberty, attacked repeatedly by Israeli jets and torpedo ships in 1967, killing thirty-four crewmen.

For the West Bank, the norm has been that Israel carries forward its illegal construction of settlements and infrastructure, so that whatever might be of value can be integrated into Israel, while the Palestinians are consigned to unviable cantons and subjected to intense repression and violence. For the past fourteen years, the norm has been that Israel kills more than two Palestinian children a week. One such recent Israeli rampage was set off on June 12, 2014, by the brutal murder of three Israeli boys from a settler community in the occupied West Bank. A month before, two Palestinian boys had been shot dead in the West Bank city of Ramallah. That elicited no attention, which is understandable, since it is routine. “The institutionalised disregard for Palestinian life in the West helps explain not only why Palestinians resort to violence,” the respected Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani reports, “but also Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip.”