What Chomsky gets right
America's record is actually pretty bad, especially in the Middle East.
This is the second in a series of posts on Chomsky, American foreign policy, and the question of hypocrisy. Read the introductory post here. Subscribe to receive future posts.
To go back to the beginning of my own political coming-of-age, the Iraq war exposed just how hollow our rhetoric about freedom and democracy actually was, particularly in the Middle East, where nearly every country was a dictatorship. All of a sudden, to justify an unprovoked invasion, we now believed in Arab democracy? But the Iraq War—clothed as it was in the deceptions of moral rightness—wasn’t unique. It was in keeping with a long foreign policy tradition of a kind of pretend innocence that hid darker impulses.
This is what Chomsky and other leftist critics skewered, and rightly so. In one especially memorable example during a debate over Vietnam, Henry Kissinger complained that what bothered him most was that his critics questioned not just his judgment but his motives, as if nothing could be so outrageous.
Chomsky also cites the ludicrous claim of Lyndon Johnson’s national security advisor McGeorge Bundy that “American democracy has no enduring taste for imperialism… [T]aken as a whole, the stock of American experience, understanding, sympathy, and simple knowledge is now much the most impressive in the world.” Bundy said this precisely as the U.S. was escalating its bombing of Vietnam, which took the lives of tens of thousands of civilians, including in infamous mass killings such as the My Lai massacre.
In his book Kill Anything That Moves, the journalist Nick Turse concludes based on interviews with veterans and declassified documents that he stumbled upon in the National Archives that the high body count “stemmed from deliberate policies that were dictated at the highest levels of the U.S. military.” For Chomsky, this feigned innocence “becomes increasingly distasteful as the power it serves grows more dominant in world affairs.” I tend to agree.
I won’t produce a long list of outrageously hypocritical things U.S. officials have said over the years. That would take some time. And others, foremost among them Chomsky, have documented these tragedies in considerable detail. The nearly 50 years of the Cold War—itself ostensibly a battle between democracy and dictatorship—provides much of the fodder. In the name of this fight, American officials not only backed right-wing dictators across the globe; they orchestrated a series of coups against democratically elected leaders in countries as varied as Chile, Guatemala, Iran, Congo, and Brazil. These were the days of CIA agents shuttling back and forth with suitcases of cash.
And sometimes those suitcases really did make the difference. Take Jordan for example. For most of the 1950s, U.S. aid to the kingdom was minimal. In 1957, Jordan held reasonably free elections. Then something changed. The newly elected socialist prime minister, Suleyman al-Nabulsi, clashed with King Hussein, then a young and relatively weak monarch. When Hussein moved to oust Nabulsi, U.S. support increased almost immediately. Just days after martial law was imposed, the Eisenhower administration sent $10 million in emergency funds. While this might not sound like much, at the time it was a lifeline. The government was nearly bankrupt. For the next 10 years, the amount of U.S. aid—averaging $50 million annually—exceeded Jordan’s entire domestic revenue nine years out of ten.
The kingdom also lacked a domestic intelligence service, and there too the United Stated was willing to lend a helping hand. Several CIA officers worked directly for Hussein. The U.S. also helped Hussein set up the dreaded mukhabarat, or secret police. Today, Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate (GID) is one of the most effective in the Middle East thanks to American support.
The era of coups, plots, and CIA agents propping up banana republics eventually came to an end. But that didn’t mean the hypocrisy ended with it.
A few questions:
1. There is not a single country on Earth that is not hypocritical. Would it be more moral for the United States to pursue the exact same policies but openly state, "We actually don't care about human rights and democracy"?
2. Foreign policy has always been defined by interests, not ideals. Why do the ends not justify the means? The world is much more free and democratic since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism, not to mention the infrastructure the US was able to set up to enable the free market, leading to the highest rates of human prosperity that have ever existed. Would the world be this free and prosperous if the US were not the hegemony after WWII and the sole superpower after the Cold War? The US might have committed some atrocities and was hypocritical at times, but it's foolish to act as though the unprecedented world peace that exists today isn't because of the United States.
3. Regarding your Jordan example, the 1952 constitution vested executive authority in the King, not the Prime Minister. It was an internal conflict that led to the King ousting Nabuli. What was the US supposed to do when the King asked for aid to stabilize the country after the ousting? What were they supposed to do when their choices were either to side with the anti-American/pro-Soviet Prime Minister who tried to expel the American ambassador or cooperate with the King who promised to align with the West and not seek conflicts with Israel? The US was looking for any sort of stability in the region and wanted to minimize Soviet influence; of course, they would choose the latter. It was not some nefarious scheme. Why would the US not collaborate with the intelligence agency when the purpose was to fight terrorism and maintain stability?