The mighty reach of the super-rogue

Noam Chomsky is an eminent scholar, now in his 70s, revered by an army of admiring students in every continent, dismissed as …

Noam Chomsky is an eminent scholar, now in his 70s, revered by an army of admiring students in every continent, dismissed as an ideologue by their professors. Though personally charming and modest, he exercises his teaching function with a pugnaciousness at times bordering on the dogmatic. One of the world's leading theorists in the obscure discipline of transformational grammar, Chomsky found a second vocation after the Vietnam War, pouring out a torrent of criticism of the conduct of national relations across an astonishing spread of political crises and the global economy.

What unites the strands of his different enquiries are his singular focus on the foreign policy of his native America and his method of debunking the moral grandiloquence of states and their institutions.

In this latest book, Chomsky examines the concept of the "rogue state" and its political function for western (primarily American) policy in the post-Cold War era. Although the book is compiled from lectures and articles - and suffers some repetitiousness as a result - the cases are judiciously chosen to exemplify the author's general thesis. There are chapters on Yugoslavia, Cuba, East Timor, a fascinating account of the crisis in Colombia and a vigorous onslaught on the double standards applied in the creation of Third World debt.

Throughout his dissection of the sources of conflict, the author measures the empirical evidence against the twin moral principles of world order to which the great powers - and Chomsky - subscribe. "There is a regime of international law and international order, binding on all states, based on the UN Charter and subsequent resolutions and World Court decisions," he writes. But these rules stand in some tension with the second pillar, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. From this tension arises the question of "humanitarian intervention" - an ideal which cannot be reduced to its militaristic expression.

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A rogue state is an "outlaw nation" which demonstrates its rejection of these pillars of international order and becomes thereby "a threat to its neighbours and to the entire world", to cite the American and British condemnation of Iraq in 1998. In every case-study in the book Chomsky argues that, by its own declared standards of behaviour, the US has become the super-rogue, contemptuous of international law and order while seeking to legitimise its global reach by constructing a "Rogues Gallery" of small states which challenge it. With relentless citation of documents and of past and current Washington policymakers, Chomsky illustrates the double standards of rhetoric and self-interest. On the UN order for Indonesia to withdraw from East Timor after the massacre of 1975, Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan explains that it was his job to ensure that the UN "prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook". More recently, President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Defence Secretary Bill Cohen have each publicly vowed that the US would not be bound by international norms in its foreign policy unless they coincided with American interests.

Chomsky's knowledge of the factual data of international conflict is awesome, and his skill in exposing the gap between moral rhetoric and the pursuit of material interests on the part of the major powers is a rare quality. At times his passion strains his persuasiveness - Theodore Roosevelt may well have been "a racist fanatic and raving jingoist" but there is a less acid prose for making a passing comment more congenial to the moderate palate.

There will be no shortage of journalists and academics to sneer at what they regard as the right-on conclusions of Chomsky's latest vapours, on the principle that rigorous political analysis and commitment to moral ideals are incompatible. They are unlikely to be disabused of this silliness, for reasons that Chomsky makes clear to those who read the evidence.

Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics