FREED FROM INTERNATIONAL LAW

Review of Noam Chomsky’s “Failed States”

By Rudolf Walther

[The US encourages nuclear war and a global environmental disaster. So Noam Chomsky pointedly summarizes American policy since 1945 and substantiates his thesis with many facts. This book review published in: die tageszeitung, 10/4/2006 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, ]

The nearly 80-year old intellectual Noam Chomsky is one of the most productive and provocative intellectuals. His new book is not easy to read. His book is bristling with facts, theses, historical comparisons and political interpretations. Every cited expert cannot be accepted as such. On the whole, Chomsky offers a riveting presentation of American policy since 1945 and a convincing chain of evidence that the good is propagandistically invoked. “Evil” is not destroyed while wickedness and dangers increase.

The current reproaches against Chomsky are that he simplifies and is a conspiracy theorist. He refutes both through the copious facts that he presents. These facts are not false even if he polemically exaggerates their significance. The shallowest reproach against Chomsky is “anti-Americanism” as though he criticized “America” generally and not merely American government policy and its advertising agencies, think tanks and “research institutes.” The criticism of anti-Americanism is that government critics are “unpatriotic.”

Unlike his analysis, examples and comparisons, Chomsky’s basic thesis is concise and simple. Two things threaten humanity – a nuclear war and a global environmental disaster. American policy since 1945 has encouraged both. What the US contributes to the environmental disaster needs no references.

In Nuremberg 1946, the American judge Robert Jackson pointed to the Achilles’ heel in international law: “If certain actions are crimes, they are always crimes, regardless whether the United States or Germany commits them.” However the War Crimes Tribunal did not agree to that.

Chomsky argues the air war against civilians was not denounced because otherwise the allies would have been in the dock. Since then, American governments have respected the universal validity of the norms of international law less and less and interpret treaty obligations only as political confessions with authority changing according to the situation.

Article 51 of the UN Charter limits the use of state force against others to the approval of the Security Council. As Chomsky documents, the Clinton doctrine from 1995 already rejected this norm. The US is one of the “failed states” for dismissing international law, Chomsky says.

The Clinton doctrine legitimated “the unilateral use of military means” to secure “unhindered access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.” The current government expanded this doctrine in 2002 with a preemptive strike doctrine allowing the US “to influence events before dangers grow and become less and less controllable.” (Donald Rumsfeld)

The US has not been alone in justifying unilateral military preemptive- and punitive strikes according to the motto “illegal but legitimate,” judge Richard Goldstone said. Meanwhile, legions of sorcerer apprentices at American and European institutes and government-friendly agencies modernize international law according to the economic and political imperatives of the “West,” Chomsky explains. The conjuration of dangers through “weapons of mass destruction” and “Islamism” bristling with fantasy and the exorbitant apocalyptic exaggeration of “9/11” into a world-historical turning point haunt the priests of the “West sect.”

With this “new thinking,” an operation is performed on the international law of war. The treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons (3/5/1970) schedules inspections every five years. This treaty obligates signatory states to disarm and not spread nuclear weapons (Art. VI). At the 2000 inspections conference, the US committed itself to 13 concrete disarmament measures. Five years later, Bush unilaterally cancelled this commitment and in a solo effort made India its partner in nuclear teamwork.

At the same time North Korea and Iran came in the dock because of their nuclear policy. For Chomsky, this is delicate in the case of Iran since the former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger encouraged the Shah regime in 1979 to “introduce nuclear power” and offered to train engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 25 years later Kissinger said Iran had enough oil to renounce on nuclear power. For two years, the well-lubricated propaganda machine has been running at full steam against the cheerless Mullah-regime that unlike Israel signed the nuclear test ban treaty.

According to the US preemptive strike doctrine, Iran would only act rationally if it seeks nuclear weapons, Chomsky says. The risk for Iran of being attacked by the US or Israel with conventional or nuclear weapons is greater if it does not have nuclear weapons. The risk of being attacked is greater than Iran attacking the US or Israel. Without nuclear weapons, its situation would be hopeless and with nuclear weapons a certain suicide.

Chomsky does not plea for nuclear armaments. With the horror scenario, he only wants to demonstrate that the American self-exemption from central principles of international law is dangerous and without perspective.


‘THE FAILED STATE’ BY NOAM CHOMSKY

Book Review

[This book review is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, ]

“Being an intellectual is a calling for everyone. It means using your own intelligence to advance matters important for humanity,” says Noam Chomsky, America’s leading intellectual. Chomsky, who often stands up for the ideas of anarchism, publishes intelligent political analyses like a machine.

THE ANARCHIST LINGUIST

The 77-year-old Chomsky as a linguist still drives English students and German language students to the edge of despair with his dry academic texts. His political engagement began in the sixties activated by the Vietnam War and the sudden changes in American politics – at a time when the US stood at the edge of civil war.

Today this epoch is regarded as an important upheaval in the history of this nation. However a professed anarchist like Chomsky would draw another conclusion. From this moment – the war in Vietnam – he sees all American presidents as war criminals if the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Judgment are considered and applied exactly. However the victors write history.

THE END OF THE WORLD?

Thus Chomsky sets a negative conclusion – “The Failed State” – at the beginning of his latest work. In the year 1955 the two scholars Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein called the world to renounce on nuclear warheads that could wipe out humanity. Meanwhile the world is again near the abyss – after the Cuban Crisis and the end of the Cold War.

Chomsky formulates aggressively: “With deep conviction of self-righteousness, the United States demands observance of international law from other countries but deems it unimportant for itself.”

Starting from this conclusion, Chomsky analyzes how the world has slowly again reached the point of nuclear obliteration – thanks to pitiable leadership by the US government. Chomsky is not alone in underscoring this negative point. Conservative political figures and intellectuals like former American secretary of state Robert McNamara and Josh Friedman are also on the side of the most important US intellectual.

US AS A ROGUE STATE

On four hundred pages, Chomsky releases the world from its culpability but not from its responsibility for the present situation. His attention is focused on the US. The reader could rightly ask whether a government that declares “war on terror” while pardoning condemned foreign terrorists and recruiting them for “higher tasks” has international legitimation.