Who Rules the World? (American Empire Project)

by Noam Chomsky

“At least 57 percent of Gaza households are food insecure and about 80 percent are now aid recipients,” Gilbert reported. “Food insecurity and rising poverty also mean that most residents cannot meet their daily caloric requirements, while over 90 percent of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human consumption,” a situation that became even worse when Israel again attacked water and sewage systems, leaving over a million people with even more severe disruptions of the barest necessities of life.22

Gilbert further reported that “Palestinian children in Gaza are suffering immensely. A large proportion are affected by the man-made malnourishment regime caused by the Israeli imposed blockage. Prevalence of anaemia in children < 2yrs in Gaza is at 72.8 percent, while prevalence of wasting, stunting, underweight have been documented at 34.3 percent, 31.4 percent, 31.45 percent respectively.”23 And it gets worse as the report proceeds.

Weisglass explained that Gazans would remain “on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger” (which would not help Israel’s fading reputation).26 With their vaunted technical efficiency, Israeli experts determined precisely how many calories a day Gazans needed for bare survival, while also depriving them of medicines and other means of a decent life. Israeli military forces confined them by land, sea, and air to what British prime minister David Cameron accurately described as a prison camp. The Israeli withdrawal left them in total control of Gaza, hence the occupying power under international law. And to close the prison walls even more tightly, Israel excluded Palestinians from a large region along the border, including a third or more of Gaza’s scarce arable land. The justification was security for Israelis, which could have been just as well achieved by establishing the security zone on the Israeli side of the border, or by ending the savage siege and other punishments. The

A few weeks after Israeli troops withdrew, leaving the occupation intact, Palestinians committed a major crime. In January 2006, they voted the wrong way in a carefully monitored free election, handing control of their parliament to Hamas.

The Israeli media constantly intoned that Hamas was dedicated to the destruction of the country. In reality, Hamas’s leaders have repeatedly made it clear that they would accept a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus that has been blocked by the United States and Israel for forty years.

In contrast, Israel is dedicated to the destruction of Palestine, apart from some occasional meaningless words, and...

There should be no need to review again the horrendous record since. The relentless siege and savage attacks have been punctuated by episodes of “mowing the lawn,” to borrow Israel’s cheery expression for its periodic exercises of shooting fish in a pond in what it calls a “war of defense.”

The eighteen-day rampage did succeed in undermining the feared unity government and sharply increasing Israeli repression. According to Israeli military sources, Israeli soldiers arrested 419 Palestinians, including 335 affiliated with Hamas, and killed 6, while searching thousands of locations and confiscating $350,000.32 Israel also conducted dozens of attacks in Gaza, killing five Hamas members on July 7.33 Hamas finally reacted with its first rockets in nineteen months, Israeli officials reported, providing the pretext for Operation Protective Edge on July 8.

By the end of July, some fifteen hundred Palestinians had been killed, exceeding the toll of the Operation Cast Lead crimes of 2008–9. Seventy percent of them were civilians, including hundreds of women and children.

Gaza’s main power plant was attacked—not for the first time; this is an Israeli specialty—sharply curtailing the already limited electricity and, worse yet, reducing still further the minimal availability of fresh water—another war crime.

Four hospitals were attacked, each yet another war crime. The first was the Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City, attacked on the day Israeli ground forces invaded the prison.

Three working hospitals were then attacked, while patients and staff were left to their own devices to survive. One Israeli crime did receive wide condemnation: the attack on a UN school that was harboring 3,300 terrified refugees who had fled the ruins of their neighborhoods on the orders of the Israeli army.

There were at least three Israeli strikes at the refugee shelter, a site well-known to the Israeli army. “The precise location of the Jabalia Elementary Girls School and the fact that it was housing thousands of internally displaced people was communicated to the Israeli army seventeen times, to ensure its protection,” Krähenbühl said, “the last being at ten to nine last night, just hours before the fatal shelling.”39 The

Israeli officials laud the humanity of their army, which even goes so far as to inform residents that their homes will be bombed. The practice is “sadism, sanctimoniously disguising itself as mercy,” in the words of Israeli journalist Amira Hass: “A recorded message demanding hundreds of thousands of people leave their already targeted homes, for another place, equally dangerous, 10 kilometers away.”

“The church of Gaza has received an order to evacuate. They will bomb the Zeitun area and the people are already fleeing. The problem is that the priest Fr. George and the three nuns of Mother Teresa have 29 handicapped children and nine old ladies who can’t move. How will they manage to leave? If anyone can intercede with someone in power, and pray, please do it.”

Actually, it shouldn’t have been difficult. Israel already provided the instructions at the Al-Wafa Rehabilitation hospital. And fortunately, at least some states tried to intercede, as best they could. Five Latin American states—Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Peru—withdrew their ambassadors from Israel, following the course of Bolivia and Venezuela, which had broken relations in reaction to earlier Israeli crimes.

The hideous revelations elicited a different reaction from the Most Moral President in the World, the usual one: great sympathy for Israelis, bitter condemnation of Hamas, and calls for moderation on both sides. In his August press conference, President Obama did express concern for Palestinians “caught in the crossfire” (where?) while again vigorously supporting the right of Israel to defend itself, like everyone. Not quite everyone—not, of course, Palestinians. They have no right to defend themselves, surely not when Israel is on good behavior, keeping to the norm of quiet for quiet: stealing their land, driving them out of their homes, subjecting them to a savage siege, and regularly attacking them with weapons provided by their protector.

U.S. law requires that “no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Israel most certainly is guilty of such a consistent pattern.

The Clinton doctrine was encapsulated in the slogan “multilateral when we can, unilateral when we must.” In congressional testimony, the phrase “when we must” was explained more fully: the United States is entitled to resort to the “unilateral use of military power” to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.”

In their comprehensive history of settlement in the Occupied Territories, Israeli scholars Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar describe what actually happened when that country “disengaged”: the ruined territory was not released “for even a single day from Israel’s military grip or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day.” After the disengagement, “Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might.”

There are good reasons why Israel opposes the unification of Palestinians. One is that the Hamas-Fatah conflict has provided a useful pretext for refusing to engage in serious negotiations. How can one negotiate with a divided entity? More significantly, for more than twenty years, Israel has been committed to separating Gaza from the West Bank, in violation of the Oslo Accords, which declare Gaza and the West Bank to be an inseparable territorial unity. A look at a map explains the rationale: separated from Gaza, any West Bank enclaves left to Palestinians have no access to the outside world. Furthermore, Israel has been systematically taking over the Jordan Valley, driving out Palestinians, establishing settlements, sinking wells, and otherwise ensuring that the region—about one-third of the West Bank, including much of its arable land—will ultimately be integrated into Israel along with the other regions that Israel is taking over. Hence remaining Palestinian cantons will be completely imprisoned. Unification with Gaza would interfere with these plans, which trace back to the early days of the occupation and have had steady support from the major political blocs, including from figures usually portrayed as doves, like former president Shimon Peres, one of the architects of settlement deep in the West Bank.

The way to deal with a virus is to kill it and inoculate any potential victims. That sensible policy is just what Washington pursued, quite successfully. Cuba has survived, but without the ability to achieve its feared potential. And the region was “inoculated” with vicious military dictatorships, beginning with the Kennedy-inspired military coup that established a terror and torture regime in Brazil shortly after Kennedy’s assassination. The generals had carried out a “democratic rebellion,” Ambassador Lincoln Gordon cabled home. The revolution was “a great victory for free world,” which prevented a “total loss to West of all South American Republics” and should “create a greatly improved climate for private investments.” This democratic revolution was “the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century,” Gordon held, “one of the major turning points in world history” in this period, which removed what Washington saw as a Castro clone.

Opposition within the political class is so strong that public opinion has shifted quickly from significant support for the deal to an even split.2 Republicans are almost unanimously opposed to the agreement. The current Republican primaries illustrate the proclaimed reasons. Senator Ted Cruz, considered one of the intellectuals among the crowded field of presidential candidates, warns that Iran may still be able to produce nuclear weapons and could someday use one to set off an electromagnetic pulse that “would take down the electrical grid of the entire eastern seaboard” of the United States, killing “tens of millions of Americans.”3 Two other candidates, former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, battled over whether to bomb Iran immediately after being elected or after the first Cabinet meeting.4 The one candidate with some foreign policy experience, Lindsey Graham, describes the deal as “a death sentence for the state of Israel,” which will certainly come as a surprise to Israeli intelligence and strategic analysts—and which Graham knows to be utter nonsense, raising immediate questions about his actual motives for saying so.5

is important to bear in mind that the Republicans long ago abandoned the pretense of functioning as a normal parliamentary party. They have, as respected conservative political commentator Norman Ornstein of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute observed, become a “radical insurgency” that scarcely seeks to participate in normal congressional politics.

Since the days of President Ronald Reagan, the party leadership has plunged so far into the pockets of the very rich and the corporate sector that they can attract votes only by mobilizing parts of the population that have not previously been an organized political force. Among them are extremist evangelical Christians, now probably a majority of Republican voters; remnants of the former slaveholding states; nativists who are terrified that “they” are taking our white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon country away from us; and others who turn the Republican primaries into spectacles remote from the mainstream of modern society—though not from the mainstream of the most powerful country in world history.

In the United States, it is a virtual cliché among high officials and commentators that Iran wins that grim prize. There is also a world outside the United States, and although its views are not reported in the mainstream here, perhaps they are of some interest. According to the leading Western polling agencies (WIN/Gallup International), the prize for “greatest threat” is won by the United States, which the world regards as the gravest threat to world peace by a large margin. In second place, far below, is Pakistan, its ranking probably inflated by the Indian vote. Iran is ranked below those two, along with China, Israel, North Korea, and Afghanistan.

The CSIS report adds that “the Arab Gulf states have acquired and are acquiring some of the most advanced and effective weapons in the world [while] Iran has essentially been forced to live in the past, often relying on systems originally delivered at the time of the Shah.” In other words, they are virtually obsolete.17 When it comes to Israel, of course, the imbalance is even greater. Possessing the most advanced U.S. weaponry and a virtual offshore military base for the global superpower, it also has a huge stock of nuclear weapons.

These, of course, go back to the actual “regime change” of 1953, when the United States and Britain organized a military coup to overthrow Iran’s parliamentary government and install the dictatorship of the shah, who proceeded to amass one of the world’s worst human rights records.

None of this is a departure from the norm. The United States, as is well-known, holds the world championship title in regime change, and Israel is no laggard either.

Other concerns about the Iranian threat include its role as “the world’s leading supporter of terrorism,” which primarily refers to its support for Hizbollah and Hamas.21 Both of those movements emerged in resistance to U.S.-backed Israeli violence and aggression, which vastly exceeds anything attributed to these organizations. Whatever one thinks about them, or other beneficiaries of Iranian support, Iran hardly ranks high in support of terror worldwide, even within the Muslim world. Among Islamic states, Saudi Arabia is far in the lead as a sponsor of Islamic terror, not only through direct funding by wealthy Saudis and others in the Gulf but even more by the missionary zeal with which the Saudis promulgate their extremist Wahhabi-Salafi version of Islam through Koranic schools, mosques, clerics, and other means available to a religious dictatorship with enormous oil wealth. ISIS is an extremist offshoot of Saudi religious extremism and its fanning of jihadi flames.

In generation of Islamic terror, however, nothing can compare with the U.S. war on terror, which has helped to spread the plague from a small tribal area in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands to a vast region from West Africa to Southeast Asia. The invasion of Iraq alone escalated terror attacks by a factor of seven in the first year, well beyond even what had been predicted by intelligence agencies.22 Drone warfare against marginalized and oppressed tribal societies also elicits demands for revenge, as ample evidence indicates.

Wieseltier, contributing editor to the venerable liberal journal the Atlantic, who can barely conceal his visceral hatred for all things Iranian.28 With a straight face, this respected liberal intellectual recommends that Saudi Arabia, which makes Iran look like a virtual paradise, and Israel, with its vicious crimes in Gaza and elsewhere, should ally to teach that country good behavior.

It might also be useful to recall—as surely Iranians do—that not a day has passed since 1953 when the United States was not harming Iranians. As soon as Iranians overthrew the hated U.S.-imposed regime of the shah in 1979, Washington at once turned to supporting Saddam Hussein’s murderous attack on Iran. President Reagan went so far as to deny Saddam’s major crime, his chemical warfare assault on Iraq’s Kurdish population, which he blamed on Iran instead.29

President George H. W. Bush even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in weapons production, an extremely serious threat to Iran.31

In recent years the hostility has extended to sabotage, the murder of nuclear scientists (presumably by Israel), and cyberwar, openly proclaimed with pride.33 The Pentagon regards cyberwar as an act of war, justifying a military response, as does NATO, which affirmed in September 2014 that cyberattacks may trigger the collective defense obligations of the NATO powers—when we are the target, that is, not the perpetrators.

“The United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western hemisphere, much less on its borders.” In fact, the U.S. stand is far stronger. It does not tolerate what is officially called “successful defiance” of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared (but could not yet implement) U.S. control of the hemisphere. And a small country that carries out such successful defiance may be subjected to “the terrors of the earth” and a crushing embargo—as happened to Cuba. We need not ask how the United States would have reacted had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hint of the first tentative steps in that direction would have been “terminated with extreme prejudice,” to adopt CIA lingo.18

As Clarke describes the meeting, when informed that the attack would violate international law, “the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’” The attack was also bitterly opposed by the major aid organizations working in Afghanistan, who warned that millions were on the verge of starvation and that the consequences might be horrendous.20 The consequences for poor Afghanistan years later need hardly be reviewed.

The next target of the sledgehammer was Iraq. The U.S.-UK invasion, utterly without credible pretext, is the major crime of the twenty-first century. The invasion led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people in a country where the civilian society had already been devastated by American and British sanctions that were regarded as “genocidal” by the two distinguished international diplomats who administered them, and resigned in protest for this reason.

Careful studies of al-Qaeda and ISIS have shown that the United States and its allies are following their game plan with some precision. Their goal is to “draw the West as deeply and actively as possible into the quagmire” and “to perpetually engage and enervate the United States and the West in a series of prolonged overseas ventures” in which they will undermine their own societies, expend their resources, and increase the level of violence, setting off the dynamic that Polk reviews.

The best strategy, Polk advises, would be “a multinational, welfare-oriented and psychologically satisfying program … that would make the hatred ISIS relies upon less virulent. The elements have been identified for us: communal needs, compensation for previous transgressions, and calls for a new beginning.”33 He adds, “A carefully phrased apology for past transgressions would cost little and do much.” Such a project could be carried out in refugee camps or in the “hovels and grim housing projects of the Paris banlieues,” where, Atran writes, his research team “found fairly wide tolerance or support for ISIS’s values.” And even more could be done by true dedication to diplomacy and negotiations instead of reflexive resort to violence.

There are countries that generate refugees through massive violence, like the United States, secondarily Britain and France. Then there are countries that admit huge numbers of refugees, including those fleeing from Western violence, like Lebanon (easily the champion, per capita), Jordan, and Syria before it imploded, among others in the region. And partially overlapping, there are countries that both generate refugees and refuse to take them in, not only from the Middle East but also from the U.S. “backyard” south of the border. A strange picture, painful to contemplate.

Europe is also groaning under the burden of refugees from the countries it has devastated in Africa—not without U.S. aid, as Congolese and Angolans, among others, can testify. Europe is now seeking to bribe Turkey (with over 2 million Syrian refugees) to distance those fleeing the horrors of Syria from Europe’s borders, just as Obama is pressuring Mexico to keep U.S. borders free from miserable people seeking to escape the aftermath of Reagan’s GWOT along with those seeking to escape more recent disasters, including a military coup in Honduras that Obama almost alone legitimized, which created one of the worst horror chambers in the region.