Politics: Noam Chomsky's latest assault against the US fails to fully convince, writes Hugh Linehan
It's just a few months since Noam Chomsky was attracting thousands of admirers to his public appearances in Ireland. Thousands more were unable to secure tickets to hear the man voted, in a Prospect magazine poll, "the greatest public intellectual alive today". Around the same time, this newspaper ran a two-page-long interview with Prof Chomsky, a privilege usually reserved for major heads of state on momentous political occasions.
The 77-year-old professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology is quoted approvingly by movie stars and rock musicians. His new book, Failed States, carries some of the most fawning blurbs committed to dustjacket: "Arguably the most important intellectual alive" (New York Times); "Chomsky has an authority granted by brilliance" (Sunday Times). "One of the radical heroes of our age" (Guardian).
Failed States takes as its notional starting point the doctrine, promulgated by US administrations since the end of the Cold War, of so-called "rogue" or "failed" states - North Korea, Iraq, etc - and turns that analysis around, on to the US itself.
Dealing in the first part of the book with what he describes as "the increasing threat of destruction caused by US state power, in violation of international law", Chomsky then turns to "democratic institutions, how they are conceived in the elite culture and how they perform in reality". Ranging from the conquest of Spanish-held Florida in 1818 to the assault on Fallujah two years ago, by way of Indonesia, Guatemala, Haiti and many others, he argues that US strategic thinking has always been defined by John Quincy Adams's dictum: "Expansion . . . is the path to security". Over the course of two centuries, claiming a spurious moral authority, it has engaged in wars of extermination against its own indigenous peoples, supported genocides in countries such as East Timor, trained, equipped and directed death squads to kill tens of thousands across central America, and committed countless other crimes against humanity.
All this is conveyed in dense, quotation-heavy paragraphs, with footnotes aplenty. Chomsky is a master of the quotation, although his tendency to slip in and out of them rather than quoting entire extracts may make the conscientious reader uneasy. But how many are likely to go back to trace the hundreds of different sources? More troubling is the manner in which not one quotation is permitted to deviate from the book's thesis, except when deployed as the subject of Chomsky's withering if rather heavy-handed sarcasm.
Context is not necessarily a defence against any of Chomsky's charges, but its complete absence here is breathtaking. Thus the Cold War is framed exclusively as a "pretext" for US power elites to extend and maintain their economic and strategic interests, by brutal force when necessary. The idea that the Soviet bloc ever constituted a real threat to the democratic liberties enjoyed by US (and Irish) citizens is nowhere to be found. This certainty of tone applied to the hegemonic US contrasts with the ambiguity and complexity deployed when considering other regimes. Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia have all, at one time or another over the course of Chomsky's career as a political activist, benefited from a more "nuanced" analysis.
So what, some may argue. Chomsky is a polemicist; his target is US global hegemony, which is clearly the single most powerful factor in the world today. And he's writing first and foremost for an American audience, to alert them to the immoral behaviour of their own government.
But if we truly seek to understand the political, economic and military dynamics of power in the 21st century, we are ill-served by a narrative which so aggressively occludes huge swathes of that story. Chomskyites would argue that we are served equally skewed narratives every day by a corporate media subservient to the interests of the powerful. The point is worthy of debate but, as Chomsky's recent reception in this country demonstrates, the thesis laid out in Failed States will be greeted enthusiastically and acclaimed as the whole, unvarnished truth in many places outside the US.
It's on Iraq that the deficiencies of Chomsky's analysis become most apparent. Having made clear that he sees little or no difference between the actions of the US and the worst totalitarian regimes of the last century, he therefore finds it a "remarkable fact that Washington planners have had more trouble controlling Iraq than Russia had in its satellites or Germany in occupied Europe". Perhaps if the US had done what the Soviets did to the Polish army at Katyn in 1940 by secretly murdering thousands of Iraqi army officers, or if Heinrich Himmler had been in charge of Abu Ghraib, the results might have been different. But you don't need to be a supporter of this neo-colonial disaster to see that the comparison is at best ill-considered, at worst infantile.
So how stands the American Empire these days? As Chomsky himself points out approvingly, Latin America (the part of the world where the US writ has run longest), is becoming increasingly restive, electing outspoken leftist leaders such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. In Asia, the growing economic superpowers of China and India threaten dangerous new competition for American corporations. And in the Middle East, recent events hardly suggest that the neo-conservative project of regime change is running smoothly.
All this spells danger and conflict ahead, argues Chomsky. The current administration's aggressive development of space-based first-strike nuclear weaponry, and the contempt for international agreements displayed by administration ideologues such as current ambassador to the UN John Bolton, mean that the world is at risk as never before from nuclear proliferation and a new arms race between the US and China.
Perhaps he's right, although his record as a prophet of apocalypse is not particularly impressive (in 2001 he suggested that the US invasion of Afghanistan could lead to the "silent genocide" of several million Afghans).
The pity here is that there are truly incisive passages in Failed States. Chomsky is excellent on the mock-theatrics of Israel's "withdrawal" from Gaza last year, and on the state-supported corporations which give the lie to the US's claim to be the home of free enterprise. He is on shakier ground when attempting to analyse the crisis in his own country's electoral system - a combination, apparently, though hardly surprisingly, of media manipulation, big business lobbying and the power of the Christian Right.
The sad irony is that Chomsky owes his current prominence to no one more than George W Bush. Both men are exemplars of a debased political discourse in the US, where the most complex moral issues are reduced to black hats and white hats. The two may have more in common than they think. In a recent online discussion hosted by the Washington Post, when asked why he chose to remain living in the US, Chomsky replied in words remarkably reminiscent of the current president: "This is the best country in the world." This writer begs to disagree.
Hugh Linehan is an Irish Times journalist
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. By Noam Chomsky, Hamish Hamilton, 311pp. £16.99