They do not call him Bad News Chomsky for nothing. In his latest book, Noam Chomsky continues the polemic he began in 1969 with the publication of American Power and the New Mandarins, his first collection of political writings. His withering criticism of American foreign policy has spanned three decades and five US presidents. From his perspective, America has proudly maintained its moral bankruptcy throughout. Chomsky is an eclectic and fascinating figure. Born in 1928 to a Jewish scholar who fled Tsarist Russia, and his wife, a Lithuanian immigrant, he was raised in Philadelphia in a working-class neighbourhood that was similar to many American cities at the time. It was whiteethnic, comprising Irish and German immigrants. Chomsky's Jewish family was in the minority, an experience that gave him a front-row seat to anti-semitism.
He studied linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, then moved to Harvard and eventually the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he remains today, aged 72, as professor of linguistics and philosophy. In 1957, at the age of 29, he published Syntactic Structures, a 120-page book that revolutionised the study of languages. Once an isolated discipline, linguistics became a major social science as Chomsky postulated the idea that humans share a universal language or grammar. The New York Times has called him "arguably the most important intellectual alive today."
But politics became Chomsky's next passion, and his name is better known in non-academic circles for his left-leaning and anarchist views, what he calls libertarian socialism. Over the course of 30 years and 70 books, Chomsky has argued that America is a propaganda-driven democracy, corrupted and compromised by amoral capitalist excesses. There are no true differences between the Republican and Democratic parties he contends, just degrees of wrong-headedness.
There is much in Chomsky's new book that seems inarguable to any objective observer of US foreign policy. The US is in the grip of arrogance and unilateralism; its foreign aid is miserly, "a pittance" even when factoring in that a sizeable portion of it goes to a rich country, Israel, and to Egypt because of its association with Israel. Its foreign policy doctrine that has abandoned notions of sovereignty when, arguably, human rights are at stake, is a sham. Violations of human rights are only important to the US if certain economic interests and national prestige are at stake.
Chomsky is not wrong in many of his arguments, but the book does not make for easy or pleasant reading, even if you agree with him. His rhetoric is over-arching, his tone embittered, his language sarcastic. Those who sided with the US and NATO in its bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999, such as Vaclav Havel, are ridiculed and dismissed. Havel, for example, showed a ". . . welcome appreciation for the high moral purpose of Western leaders", sneers Chomsky. The US is neither altruistic nor humanitarian. But its attitude is also neither neglectful nor ignorant. The US and NATO were not merely wrong in the bombing campaign against Serbia. It was not simply a political or military miscalculation that led NATO to begin bombing, thus speeding up the Serbian ethnic-cleansing and killing in Kosovo; it was state-sponsored terrorism. The same goes for the failure of the US to stop Turkey's brutal atrocities against its Kurdish population. By supplying arms to Turkey, and failing to intervene - because Turkey holds an important and geographically strategic perch for the US - America bears responsibility for the humanitarian catastrophe there. The same analysis applies to East Timor. In a chapter entitled `Green Light for War Crimes', Chomsky contends that the US could have stopped human rights abuses there by simply saying to Indonesia, essentially, "Now, don't you dare do it".
This all seems just a little too simplistic. Chomsky often keenly and accurately observes and analyses what the US is actually doing in its foreign policy approach; what he fails to do is give us any insight as to why. Other than a blanket condemnation of an entire nation's political and social sensibility - one is reminded of former president, Ronald Reagan's absurd dismissal of the Soviet Union as the evil empire - Chomsky never bothers to explain why he believes the US is so inherently terrible. This failure, unfortunately, weakens his entire thesis.
Elaine Lafferty is an Irish Times journalist who covered the war in Kosovo