<n>Standard disclaimer<fn></n> <img attachment="the_withdrawal_book_cover.webp" align="right" title="The Withdrawal Book Cover">This book is a 200-page, tightly edited, tour-de-force summary of many of Noam Chomsky's writings, liberally sprinkled with Vijay Prashad's interpretations and some of his own writings. It is structured as a conversation between the two authors, with some parts of Noam's conversation being new and other parts being citations from his incredibly voluminous past work. Despite a deep familiarity with the material, I very much enjoyed this book and just couldn't stop highlighting pithy and succinct formulations of historical and political fact. The book is broken up into chapters on Vietnam and Laos, 9/11 and Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Fragilities of U.S. Power. There is no separate chapter on Yugoslavia, but they discuss it in the Iraq and Libya chapters. <bq caption="Page 190">it is important to point out that NATO's war on Yugoslavia in 1999 might be the real turning point for Russia with Europe in thrall to the United States as it pursued an unprovoked aggression, an aggression covered up with incredible lying, which persists to the present.</bq> They also discuss some of the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, but only in the context of NATO involvement. They're not covering invasions in general---they're discussing the invasions, machinations, and aims of history's most powerful empire. <bq caption="Page 191">Russia will likely drift further into China's orbit, becoming even more of a declining kleptocratic raw materials producer than it is now. China is likely to persist in its programs of incorporating more and more of the world into the development-and-investment system based on the Belt and Road Initiative, the "maritime silk road" that passes through the UAE into the Middle East, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.</bq> The overarching thesis is that we really do have to think of the global situation in 2022 in pretty much the same way as we thought of it at any time post-war: the U.S. is the overarching superpower in the world and exercises and cements that power primarily with military force and propaganda (as opposed to, say, humanitarian aid or equal partnerships). The level of violence has been increasing as the level of control has been decreasing. Hence the title of the book. Chomsky and Prashad use the metaphor of the <i>Godfather</i>, in the sense that there is no balance in the relationship: what the Godfather says, goes. Any player expressing an attitude other than total subservience is treated as an enemy. Even total subservience won't save a country if it has something that the U.S. wants, be it natural resources or cheap labor. These are not opinions. These are the only conclusions to which anyone would logically come, based on the publicly available facts, mostly those published by the empire itself. It doesn't need to hide the information and it has the added benefit that it can cloak itself in the guise of democracy and freedom, because it knows that its loyal media arm will simply propagandize 99% of the population from not paying attention. And those 1% who do don't matter enough to bother about. In fact, it's better to let a Chomsky spout off for 70 years than to try to subdue him. As Chomsky has written (or said): <iq>You have to the right to free speech, but no-one is listening.</iq><fn> <hr> <ft>Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you.</ft> <ft>I'd written that entire summary quite a long time ago---I think about two years ago, when I read the book---and absolutely nothing has changed. The picture the book paints and that my summary reflects is the same, if not already much worse. The withdrawal predicted in the title is accelerating.</ft> <h>Citations</h> <bq caption="Page 1">The Afghan Ministry of Public Health estimates that two-thirds of Afghans suffer from war-induced mental health troubles. Half of the population lives below the poverty line, and about 60 percent of the population remains illiterate. Few gains were made on these fronts.</bq> <bq caption="Page 2">[...] the United Nations estimates that by the end of 2022 the country’s per capita income may decline to nearly half of 2012 levels. It is estimated that 97 percent of the Afghan people will fall below the poverty line, with mass starvation a real possibility</bq> <bq caption="Page 10">Two kinds of economic threat occasionally appear: the first is the movement of workers and peasants in countries that produce key raw materials who refuse to accept subhuman, suppressed wages that enable the entire commodity chain to keep costs down and profits up; and the second is when countries where technological advances take place threaten the monopoly power of European, Japanese, and U.S. multinational companies. The United States either uses violence itself or sanctions violence through its authorized agents (dictators and police chiefs) against the workers and peasants who rebel, and against the governments that they might create to fashion a different path forward. The United States pushes trade policies—particularly intellectual property rights laws—that prevent countries from advancing their scientific and technological capacity.</bq> <bq caption="Page 12">[...] this weakness should not be interpreted as the demise of U.S. power or the end of the “American Century.” The United States has great reservoirs of power—financial, military, diplomatic, cultural—which it will continue to wield for a long time yet. But the relative weakness of the United States made room for the emergence of China as an important world power.</bq> <bq caption="Page 13">In the long view, China has not “emerged” as a world power but is merely returning to a situation that prevailed two hundred years ago. Then, in 1820, China’s economy was six times the size of Great Britain’s, at the time the largest economy in Europe and a dominant maritime and imperial power, and it was twenty times the size of the United States’ economy.</bq> <bq caption="Page 13">The harsh edge of European imperialism, particularly British military aggression, destroyed China’s economic strength and depleted its power within a generation. China struggled with conflict from the first Opium War of 1839 to the end of its civil war in 1949, over a hundred years of violence and despair.</bq> <bq caption="Page 14">It is this China, with technological advances that are well ahead of the West’s firms, that poses not a military or security threat to the West but a threat to the idea that only the West can lead in certain sectors (telecommunications,</bq> <bq caption="Page 14">It is this China, with technological advances that are well ahead of the West’s firms, that poses not a military or security threat to the West but a threat to the idea that only the West can lead in certain sectors (telecommunications, robotics, high-speed rail, non-carbon energy). China, meanwhile, has exported its developments through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is a frontal challenge to the International Monetary Fund and its debt-driven forms of engagement with the Global South (through the Paris Club and the London Club, both of which now acknowledge that poorer countries prefer to borrow from Chinese banks than from them).</bq> <bq caption="Page 15">The United States will not tolerate the existence of a state that cannot be intimidated the way Europe can be intimidated, a state that therefore does not follow U.S. orders the way Europe does. China, which has developed its own powerful economy, pursues its own course. That’s the “China threat.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 16">One of the undercurrents of this book is our insistence on measuring the behavior of the Godfather according to international law, which is typically informed by the UN Charter. We are not naïve about the limitations of the UN Charter or of the UN system, but it is important to acknowledge that 193 countries have signed on to the charter, which is a binding treaty and the basis for much of the international law that follows it.</bq> Yeah, the U.S. Signed it, but it's lying. It never intended to hold to it. It just signed it to fool others into signing it. It has always done what it wants---if that happens to align with an agreement it signed, all the better, but honoring treaties and agreements is absolutely not a prohibition to action. <bq caption="Page 24">The essay dazzles, with Noam piercing the hypocrisies of the intellectual world of the United States, where professors rest smugly on the ideals of American civilization but rarely confront its reality. “Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions,” wrote Noam, in essence laying out the methodology for the critical intellectual.</bq> <bq caption="Page 29">You can’t raise the question of courage about people as privileged as I am. You want to look at courage, go to the peasants fighting for their lives in southern Colombia, or the courage of the Kurds in eastern Turkey, or the Palestinians in the refugee camps and in the occupied territories.</bq> <bq caption="Page 30">An aunt of mine said, “Noam Chomsky is a long-distance runner.” I feel that this is an accurate statement. Why have you not given up the race? NOAM: It probably goes back to an unattractive personal trait: arrogance. If I’m going to be bitterly condemned by the whole intellectual community, but if I think I’m right, I don’t care.</bq> <bq caption="Page 31">The Tet Offensive took place in January 1968. You don’t discuss it much in the West, but this was the most amazing uprising in human history. I mean, the South Vietnamese countryside was saturated with about six hundred thousand U.S. troops and another seven hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand troops of the Saigon army. Every village was penetrated with informants from Saigon and the United States everywhere. No one had a clue that this uprising was going to take place all across the country. I don’t think that there is anything in history that comes anywhere close to this. It was an amazing shock in the United States. The U.S. leadership was listening to the generals say, “It’s all under control. We will win any time.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 31">[...] you take a look at the last part of the Pentagon Papers, the part that nobody reads that comes right after the Tet Offensive, it says that there was a discussion about sending more troops. But the joint chiefs were not eager. They said, “If you send more troops, we’re going to need them for civil disorder control in the United States. Women, young people: they’re going to be revolting all over the place. We can’t send more troops abroad.” That’s the last couple of pages of the Pentagon Papers.</bq> <bq caption="Page 34">For comparison, the United States dropped three times as many bombs by weight on Vietnam than were dropped in both the European and Pacific theaters of World War II; the explosive impact of the ordinance dropped on Vietnam was a hundred times the combined impact of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs.</bq> <bq caption="Page 36">The United States conducted a “secret” bombing campaign against Laos from 1964 to 1973 to support the Royal Lao regime against the Pathet Lao and to prevent the alleged use of Laos by the Vietnamese to resupply lines in the south of Vietnam. The United States conducted 580,000 bombing missions, dropping a full payload of bombs every eight minutes around the clock for nine years. The country is considered the most bombed on the planet.</bq> <bq caption="Page 47">As even the most ardent supporters of the Contras now concede, this is what they call a proxy army, which is attacking Nicaragua from foreign bases, is entirely dependent on its masters for directions and support, has never put forth a political program, has created no base of political support within the country, and almost its entire top military command is Somozist officers [officers of the regime of Anastasio Somoza, who was overthrown by the Nicaraguan Revolution]. Its military achievements so far consist of a long and horrifying series of very well-documented torture, mutilation, and atrocities, and essentially nothing else. U.S. administration officials are now openly conceding in public that the main function of the Contras is to retard or reverse the rate of social reform in Nicaragua and to try to terminate the openness of that society.</bq> Devastating eloquence. <bq caption="Page 50">Was the twenty-year war that the United States prosecuted against the Afghan people a criminal war, as you called the war on Vietnam? First, was it criminal in that it was a case of conscious and premeditated aggression? Second, was the conduct of the war itself an indescribable atrocity? NOAM: It was not criminal on the scale of Indochina, which was an incredible crime. But yet, it was unprovoked, it was an illegitimate aggression, and it was a severe atrocity.</bq> <bq caption="Page 52">[...] the United States had been interested in getting hold of al-Qaeda and bin Laden, at that time a small group probably on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, they could have carried it out with a small police operation, probably with the cooperation of the Taliban, who had every reason to get rid of this irritant.</bq> <bq caption="Page 53">A couple of weeks after 9/11, the United States cut off aid supplies from Pakistan. Afghanistan was suffering then under severe humanitarian threat. Millions of people were facing potential starvation. The United States cut off all truck traffic from Pakistan to Afghanistan, the main source of aid, just to starve the Afghan people.</bq> <bq caption="Page 57">[...] under the Russian occupation in the major urban centers, like Kabul, there had been enormous gains in the rights of women. In Kabul, young women were wearing whatever clothes they wanted; they were going to the university; they had plenty of jobs; literacy had sharply increased. This was largely because the men were out fighting somewhere. There were problems, she said. The problems were the U.S.-backed Mujahideen. The United States picked the most vicious and brutal of them to support, namely the Gulbuddin Hekmatyar group. They would throw acid in the faces of the women who were wearing what they thought were the wrong clothes or something or the other. But apart from that, Rasil Basu said, there were tremendous improvements. Rasil Basu wrote several articles about all this, sent them to the major U.S. media outlets, but these publications did not even answer. She sent them to Ms. magazine, the leading feminist journal; no answer. She was finally able to publish them in the Asian press, in Asia Times, but not in the United States. Her story was the wrong story. Her story was the Soviets protecting women, while the United States supported the murderous gangsters who throw acid in the faces of women. That’s not a story that the U.S. press wanted to publish, however factual. In fact, to this day, I don’t think there has been any reporting about these matters. It is just the wrong story, it seems.</bq> <bq caption="Page 59">He talked to people from all walks of life—pro-government, former Mujahideen, women and men from different social backgrounds. Nostalgia seemed to be the main theme. They looked back fondly at the Soviet period. The person they respected most was Mohammad Najibullah, the last communist head of government.</bq> <bq caption="Page 58">Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who wrote the main book in English on the Soviets in Afghanistan (Afghantsy, 2012), was the British ambassador to the USSR and then to Russia. During the years of the withdrawal, he followed closely every detail of what was happening. He visited Afghanistan in 2008 and wrote about it in the Financial Times, the world’s leading business journal, not a communist paper. He just described his impressions of Kabul and reported what people he met told him. He talked to people from all walks of life—pro-government, former Mujahideen, women and men from different social backgrounds. Nostalgia seemed to be the main theme. They looked back fondly at the Soviet period. The person they respected most was Mohammad Najibullah, the last communist head of government.</bq> <bq caption="Page 60">Most preferred Mohammad Najibullah, the last communist president, who attempted to reconcile the nation within an Islamic state and was butchered by the Taliban in 1996: DVDs of his speeches are being sold on the streets. Things were, they said, better under the Soviets. Kabul was secure, women were employed, the Soviets built factories, roads, schools and hospitals, Afghan children played safely in the streets. The Russian soldiers fought bravely on the ground like real warriors, instead of killing women and children from the air.</bq> <bq caption="Page 66">Is anybody in the U.S. courts asking for reparations for the Afghans and the Iraqis, or even the people of Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador or Nicaragua? Untold numbers of Central Americans tortured, their societies devastated, their lives broken. Are there people pressing claims in U.S. courts for them? These questions are unimaginable. Nobody can demand anything from the mafia don, since the don just determines what happens in the world, taking what is needed. If U.S. citizens say, Starving Afghans paying reparations to us is necessary, then this is what is going to happen. The courts say, Yes, that’s right. We’re the rulers of the world. We determine what happens. If any of the huge number of victims of U.S. crimes request even an investigation of the crimes, the answer is, Sorry, the mafia don doesn’t do that. That’s not the job of the Godfather. In a nutshell, that’s it.</bq> <bq caption="Page 67">After the United States had withdrawn from Vietnam, U.S. president Jimmy Carter was asked in March 1977 if the United States owed anything to the people of Southeast Asia for having destroyed Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, killed millions of people, devasted the region with chemical warfare, and so on. His answer was quite measured. He said, “We owe them no debt. The destruction was mutual.” Okay. That’s the liberal president. Reagan was worse: “It was a noble cause, we were right, so they owe us reparations.” Or George H. W. Bush: “We’re willing to forgive the Vietnamese their crimes against us, because we are a forgiving nation. If they carry out their one responsibility—to find the bones of U.S. pilots who were shot down by the evil North Vietnamese while they were on a mercy mission, flying over North Vietnam in their B-52s to devastate the place, if they do that—and since we are a forgiving country—we will forgive them if they carry out that duty.” That’s George H. W. Bush, the statesman,</bq> <bq caption="Page 70">Imagine if Iran were carrying out an international terrorist campaign to assassinate people who it thought might pose a potential danger to Iran? Every leading figure in the U.S. government and the Israeli government, and anybody else who happened to be standing around, would be treated as collateral damage for this campaign. Suppose that they did that. What would the United States say? First of all, we wouldn’t say anything, because we’d nuke them and wipe them out. But if we were to say anything, we would say, They’re the greatest terrorist threat in the world. How can a country dare to go around assassinating people? Which is what the drone campaign is actually all about. It kills people that the United States believes pose a threat to the United States or to its interests. What it actually means is that a couple of guys in northwestern Pakistan are fixing a tire, and a drone circles around them, decides that they are up to no good, and then blasts them with a hellfire missile.</bq> <bq caption="Page 71">The United States had been dragging its feet on efforts to do something about the impending existential catastrophe of environmental destruction. Trump accelerated the devastation. He said, Who cares? Let’s race to the precipice as fast as possible, maximize the use of fossil fuels, including the most dangerous of them, get rid of all the regulations that somewhat mitigate their effect, let’s destroy everything as quickly as possible for the benefit of my masters, the people in the ExxonMobil corporate headquarters who need to register their profits tomorrow. That’s the precise order of things. Wipe out everything. Can you find an analogous figure in history? The point is that these are outrageous statements, but they happen to be true, and they are true not just in my opinion.</bq> <bq caption="Page 73">Can’t imagine why the remnants of Native Americans might have some negative feelings about the United States, or why, say, Mexicans could look at the town where I live in occupied Mexico and say something was wrong with a war of aggression; we stole half of Mexico from Mexico, now the Southwestern and Western United States. How could they have any negative feelings about that? It’s all for the benefit of civilization.</bq> <bq caption="Page 76">Abdul Haq said so just as the bombs began to fall. The world opposed the invasion of Afghanistan. That is now forgotten. The United States said, We don’t care what you think. We’ve got the power. We control the means of violence. We do what we want. If we’re angry, we will show our muscle and intimidate everyone.</bq> <bq caption="Page 77">Do what you have to do to control the world. The United States is the Godfather, who does not accept successful defiance even from the smallest country. Just like the Godfather: if some small shopkeeper doesn’t pay protection money, the Godfather won’t even notice the money, but he still sends in the goons to smash up the shop.</bq> <bq caption="Page 77">We should recognize that there is no country in the world that has anything like the capacity of the United States to inflict brutal harm and violence everywhere in the world. Nobody else, for instance, can impose sanctions. When the United States imposes sanctions, they are third-party sanctions that everyone has to live up to no matter how much they hate them. Nobody in the world can come anywhere near this kind of power and violence. That’s imperialism.</bq> <bq caption="Page 78">[...] the United States and Israel—say [the Cuban blockade] should continue. The whole world obeys U.S. orders, but not all, actually. China does not. That’s the China threat, really. If you look at it, China does not follow U.S. orders. China refuses to be intimidated. That’s the great China threat. Cuba is the same.</bq> <bq caption="Page 80">The United States cannot tolerate defiance, particularly successful defiance. When Maurice Bishop of the New Jewel Movement took control over Grenada and tried to advance a limited social democratic agenda, the United States saw this as defiance. The Carter administration cut funds, imposed restrictions, set up the basis for the invasion conducted by the Reagan administration where six thousand U.S. Special Forces were presented with eight thousand Medals of Honor for overcoming the resistance of forty Cuban construction workers. An immense triumph.</bq> <bq caption="Page 81">Israel carries out periodic, murderous, destructive attacks with U.S. weapons and U.S. support against the Palestinians, most brutally in Gaza. If they run out of weapons, which happens regularly, the Israelis turn to the United States to replenish them, which the United States can do just by transferring weapons that it stores in Israel. <b>Israel calls these attacks, politely, mowing the lawn.</b></bq> <bq caption="Page 82">The British did the same thing with the destruction and deindustrialization of the richest country in the world, India. It was a massive robbery to enrich Britain. The British ran the world’s greatest narco-trafficking operation to force China, through the opium trade, to submit to British commercial practices and accept British goods that they did not want. When the Chinese said no, then they had to be destroyed with gunboats.</bq> <bq caption="Page 82">The British did the same thing with the destruction and deindustrialization of the richest country in the world, India. It was a massive robbery to enrich Britain. The British ran the world’s greatest narco-trafficking operation to force China, through the opium trade, to submit to British commercial practices and accept British goods that they did not want. When the Chinese said no, then they had to be destroyed with gunboats. The Summer Palace was destroyed and whatever could be stolen was stolen, including Hong Kong.</bq> <bq caption="Page 83">By the late 1940s, it was taken for granted in government-corporate circles that the state would have to intervene massively to maintain the private economy. In 1948, with postwar pent-up consumer demand exhausted and the economy sinking back into recession, Truman's "cold-war spending was regarded by the business press as a "magic formula for almost endless good times" (<i>Steel</i>), a way to "maintain a generally upward tone" (<i>Business Week</i>). The <i>Magazine of Wall Street</i> saw military spending as a way to "inject new strength into the entire economy," and a few years later, found it "obvious that foreign economies as well as our own are now mainly dependent on the scope of continued arms spending in this country,"</bq> <bq caption="Page 85--86">It was therefore necessary, Secretary of State Dean Acheson urged, "to bludgeon the mass mind" of Congress and recalcitrant officials with the communist threat in a manner "clearer than truth," and to "scare the hell out of the American people, " as Senator Arthur Vandenberg interpreted the message. To carry out these tasks has been a prime responsibility of intellectuals throughout these years.</bq> <bq caption="Page 84">Like all advanced societies, the United States has relied on state intervention in the economy from its origins, though for ideological reasons, the fact is commonly denied.</bq> They prefer the myth that they won a fair and balanced game, rather than that they essentially picked themselves as winners because they were privileged to do so---because they set the rules. <bq caption="Page 87">[...] the previous book that you both wrote together, <i>Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda</i> (1973). The history of the previous book, little known these days, is that after it was advertised by Warner Modular Publications, the head of the book division of Warner Publishing tried to suppress it, then simply had the firm destroy all remaining copies of the book, and then put the entire publisher out of business as punishment for trying to distribute it.</bq> <bq caption="Page 88">The actions of the U.S. government, in places such as Vietnam and Thailand, are like those of the mafia, you contend; but what makes it difficult to establish in popular discourse is the screen provided by the mass media, which operates more and more like a Ministry of Propaganda than a normal news operation. Reports of massacres do make it into the media, but routinely these are the massacres done by the enemies of the United States rather than the massacres conducted by United States personnel.</bq> <bq caption="Page 88">The regularly publicized and condemned bloodbaths, whose victims are worthy of serious concern, often turn out, upon close examination, to be fictional in whole or in part. These mythical or semi-mythical bloodbaths have served an extremely important public relations function in mobilizing support for American military intervention in other countries.</bq> <bq caption="Page 89">You can read op-eds in the <i>New York Times</i>. One in August 2021 was by two specialists on Cuba.° They said, essentially, <i>All this talk about a sanctions blockade is nonsense. The United States provides humanitarian aid to Cuba, provides food aid, and so on.</i> They even made the mistake of giving a reference, a hyperlink. Well, I took the trouble of looking up the reference. It was to a U.S. government publication that says the opposite of what they claim. It says, <i>The US does not allow humanitarian aid to Cuba.</i> I had assumed that the <i>New York Times</i> had fact-checked such articles, looked up these sorts of references, noticed that it says the opposite in each case, and so on. Obviously, I'm wrong. They don't. This is pretty normal,</bq> <bq caption="Page 91">At the end of the war on Vietnam, a couple of years afterward, there was a media study group at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst that did a study of attitudes of UMASS students. This is UMASS-Amherst, an advanced college with the best students. One of the questions asked to the students was could you estimate the number of Vietnamese killed in the war. Their mean estimate was 100,000. The official number is 2 million. The actual number is probably 4 million. Their estimate was 100,000. Suppose you took a poll in Germany and young people from the most advanced educational institutions were asked about the death toll in the Holocaust, what would you get? Suppose they said, 200,000. We'd think that there is a problem in Germany. Do we think that there is a problem in the United States? Can't be. The United States does not have problems.</bq> <bq caption="Page 93">The basic idea was that there should be what they called a Grand Area, which would be completely under U.S. control and within which the United States would not tolerate any expression of sovereignty that interfered with U.S. global designs. There would be no competitor permitted, of course, to the United States. And that area was pretty expansive. It included the Western Hemisphere, East Asia, the former British Empire, which the United States would take over--that includes crucially the Middle East energy reserves, which are the main ones in the world.</bq> <bq caption="Page 105">After Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the United States immediately turned to strong support for Iraq. There is a famous photograph of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, making deals to send weapons to try to support Iraq's unprovoked invasion of Iran, which was a brutal, murderous invasion that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of Iranians.</bq> <bq caption="Page 106">[...] the love affair between the United States and Saddam was so extreme that Saddam received a gift that no country other than Israel could receive, which was the allowance to attack a U.S. warship and face no retaliation.</bq> <bq caption="Page 107">[...] the families of the 9/11 victims will receive $3.1 million per person in 2020 dollars from the seized Afghan external reserves./Iraq</bq> <bq caption="Page 107">On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes fired guided missiles at Iran Air Flight 655 from Tehran to Dubai in a clearly identified commercial corridor, killing all 290 civilians on board. The U.S. ship went back to port in Norfolk, Virginia, and was given a rousing welcome. The captain, Will Rogers, was given a medal by George H. W. Bush. It was in this context that Bush said that Americans never apologize for anything that they do. You want to shoot down a commercial airliner, fine. We give you a Medal of Honor.</bq> <bq caption="Page 108">Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming told Saddam that his problem was not with the U.S. government but with the U.S. press. <i>We have this crazy First Amendment business, so the government cannot properly shut down the press, but it is best to ignore it.</i> Dole said that the one commentator at <i>Voice of America</i> who had been critical of Saddam was removed. They told Saddam that they were doing what they could to end this unfair criticism of Bush's friend.</bq> <bq caption="Page 109">One paper did report it, a tabloid in Long Island [...]</bq> The Newsday was not a tabloid. Jimmy Breslin worked there. I was subscribed to that paper for eight years. It was much closer to a people's paper than any other mainstream thing in NYC. Had a helluva crossword, too. I did that thing every morning on the train, on the way to work, usually with Kath. In pen. Usually regretting it. <bq caption="Page 111">[...] the United States wanted the war. The effective surrender of Saddam Hussein was not only barely reported at the time, but it is also now almost universally forgotten. The general narrative is that the United States stood firm against a recalcitrant Saddam Hussein and forced him to leave Kuwait. This allows the United States to claim that the war of 1991 was a heroic war.</bq> <bq caption="Page 112">George H. W. Bush explained what was happening clearly, <i>We've shown that what we say goes. That's it.</i> It is sort of like the war on Afghanistan, the muscle intimidating everyone. We didn't want negotiations, even surrender. We wanted a devastating attack to show the world that what we say goes.</bq> <bq caption="Page 112">Both the main UN diplomats-Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck-resigned in protest, charging that the sanctions regime was genocidal. Von Sponeck wrote an important book--A Different Kind of War: The UN Sanctions Regime in Iraq (2006)-in which he detailed what was going on. Von Sponeck knew more about Iraq at that time than any other Westerner. His staff went about the country collecting information on the severe sadism of the sanctions,</bq> <bq caption="Page 114">Thomas Friedman wrote an article in the <i>New York Times</i> to say that France should be thrown out of the United Nations Security Council; he said it in the way that children speak in kindergartens: if you don't play by our rules, then leave. The U.S. Senate banned <i>french</i> fries in their cafeteria; they renamed them freedom fries. We'll show those French for daring to follow public opinion!</bq> <bq caption="Page 116">I remember the first day of the attack, when the U.S. forces took over the general hospital, which is a major war crime. The soldiers threw patients on the floor, threw doctors on the floor, and tied them up. The press was euphoric; the <i>New York Times</i> had a picture of the general hospital, talking about how wonderful it was and blaming the attack on the "terrorists." The press described how the U.S. Marines found the "packrats" in their "warrens" and killed them. Nobody knows how many people were killed, since we don't count our atrocities. Dangerous weapons were used, including lots of depleted uranium, lots of radioactivity, which increased the rates of cancer.</bq> <bq caption="Page 120">We're supposed to believe that if Iraq were producing asparagus and if the center of oil production were in the South Pacific, then the United States would've invaded Iraq anyway to bring democracy.</bq> <bq caption="Page 120">Iraq is now one of the most bitter, unhappy, tortured countries in the world, and the Shia-Sunni conflict, which was incubated in Iraq, is now general across the Middle East. So, that was a great achievement of the U.S. government. The Iraqi parliament has called on the U.S. forces to leave. But that's like being informed by world opinion. The United States will leave when the United States decides to leave, not when the Iraqi parliament decides. That's how it stands.</bq> <bq caption="Page 121">There was a lot of hue and cry in the Washington think tanks about the "Freedom Agenda" and about "democracy promotion." All of this seemed to run aground for the United States when Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Fatah leadership that they must overthrow the Hamas leadership in Gaza; Rice organized for the United Arab Emirates to do emergency training for Fatah and for Egypt to send arms to the fighters. When Fatah revolted against Hamas in 2007, it was a rebuke to the U.S. "democracy promotion" strategy. Seems "liberty in other lands" was only going to work if the political leadership in other lands was sufficiently pliant to the United States' overall agenda.</bq> <bq caption="Page 125">The invasion was undertaken with the understanding that it was going to escalate atrocities, which did escalate. The increased atrocities were used as a justification for the invasion, just reversing the timing, which is almost uniform as a practice. Even the Goldstone Commission, which investigated the war, inverted the chronology, saying that it was a humanitarian invasion because of the atrocities, which were the anticipated result of the invasion and not its cause</bq> <bq caption="Page 125">By the 1990s, the ideas of just and unjust war and humanitarian intervention became a big deal for reasons that are not surprising. The issue was raised during the invasion of Serbia and Kosovo, when there was going to be this fantastic NATO-led humanitarian intervention that would show how marvelous the Europeans and the United States are. The facts are exactly the reverse of what was portrayed and what continues to be portrayed. In Serbia and Kosovo, there were perfectly good negotiating options. The United States invaded with the complete knowledge that the invasion was going to sharply escalate atrocities.</bq> <bq caption="Page 127">So, R2P means keeping to the UN Charter with one exception, which is that NATO can invade and destroy any country that it wants, as it did in Yugoslavia. NATO, of course, means the United States, with others dragged along without a UN Security Council authorization.</bq> <bq caption="Page 127">We have humanitarian intervention, which means we can attack anyone we want because we say that it is humanitarian, and it is given legitimacy because the UN had an R2P resolution supporting it, except it said you can't do it without a UN Security Council resolution, but that's a minor difficulty.</bq> <bq caption="Page 127">Kofi Annan said that the U.S. war on Iraq was a crime. That's a textbook case of a crime--a war of aggression-for which Nazi war criminals were hanged. There was no credible pretext for the invasion, no UN Security Council authorization, overwhelming opposition of the world's population, no possible redeeming feature. Hitler invaded Poland based on the "wild terror of the Poles," who had to be repressed in the name of peace. When Hitler took the Sudetenland, he said it was to bring peace and security to an area where people were in conflict, and where the Nazis would bring ... the advantages of German civilization. That's about as credible a justification as that given by Washington for its invasion of Iraq. In the entire mainstream commentary on Iraq, you will not find one person saying that the war on Iraq was the same kind of crime as the war of aggression of Germany, which resulted in the Nuremberg trials. What you will find is someone like Obama calling the invasion of Iraq a "strategic blunder," which is what the Nazi generals said after the Battle of Stalingrad.</bq> <bq caption="Page 132">By 1998, when the terror against the Kurds peaked, U.S. aid was at its highest. There was no coverage of any of this, with the <i>New York Times</i> largely silent (this is even though it had a bureau and a very good reporter---Stephen Kinzer---in the country. Kinzer would later write very well about these issues). Basically, what was happening in the southeast of Turkey to the Kurds was suppressed. You can find a few things here and there, but not much.</bq> <bq caption="Page 134">What you want is for people to be frightened, to huddle under the umbrella of power, not to pay attention to what you are doing to them while serving the interests of narrow rich-and-powerful sectors. So, you want to have a military conflict.</bq> <bq caption="Page 134">right now, if the Iraqi oil were to come back into the international system, it would be largely under the control of Russia, France, and others, not U.S. energy companies. And the United States is not going to permit that. So, we can be pretty confident that one way or another the United States is trying to ensure that Iraq will renter the international system under U.S. control.</bq> <bq caption="Page 141">The <i>New York Times</i> came out with its first editorial in which it said, Hey we have this bright idea: <i>why not establish a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East and end the Iranian threat?</i> Then comes the footnote: Israel's nuclear weapons are nonnegotiable. We can have a nuclear weapons free zone, except the one state that has a big arsenal of nuclear weapons will not be in it. The United States does not even formally concede that Israel has nuclear weapons. But at least the Times mentioned it; first time I've seen it mentioned in these kinds of publications. The United States does not concede it due to the implications of U.S. law. If a state develops nuclear weapons outside the framework of international agreements, then there are legal issues -such as the Symington Amendment--that might ban U.S. transfers of a range of economic and military assistance to that state.</bq> <bq caption="Page 144">The 189 member nations of the NPT-including Iran said they would attend. Israel refused. There are three other states, apart from Israel, that are not in the NPT: India, Pakistan, and South Sudan!</bq> <bq caption="Page 145">Israel does not want anything like a nuclear weapons free zone. It does not want a deterrent in West Asia. Israel regularly bombs Syria, it invaded Lebanon numerous times, it continues the occupation of the Palestinians. I've seen the extremely harmful effects of Israeli policy several times. Israel simply does not want a deterrent in the region.</bq> <bq caption="Page 154">Until the collapse of the USSR in 1991, there was at least a moderately plausible rationale for NATO. It claimed to be a defensive alliance, defending Western Europe against what was said to be Soviet aggression. We can discuss how credible that pretext was, but at least it had an element of rationality behind it.</bq> <bq caption="Page 156"><i>If you're dumb enough to accept our word of honor, they implied, that's your problem.</i> The best study of these discussions was published in <i>International Security</i>, authored by Joshua Itzkowitz Shifrinson, who argued that Bush and Baker consciously deceived Gorbachev.</bq> <bq caption="Page 162">Qaddafi agreed to the African Union road map to peace. Zuma, who met with Qaddafi, told the press that Qaddafi would proceed to a cease-fire as soon as the deal had been agreed to in Benghazi by the rebel leadership. However, given the advantage of the NATO air cover, the rebel leadership refused when the African Union delegation came to Benghazi.</bq> <bq caption="Page 166">[...] the Europeans send the refugees either to vicious concentration camps or back to their homelands from which they have fled because they find them unlivable (the result of hundreds of years of mostly European devastation of Africa, which is quite serious). That's Libya today.</bq> <bq caption="Page 168">That's an axiom. NATO means the United States, and the United States cannot commit war crimes by definition. Even in the canons of international law, the United States cannot commit war crimes. When the United States agreed to jurisdiction by the World Court, it inserted a proviso that the United States was not bound by the UN Charter or the Charter of the Organization of American States [OAS].</bq> <bq caption="Page 168">Those are the foundations of modern international law. The United States insisted right away that it was not to be bound by either the UN Charter or the OAS Charter, so therefore it is legally entitled to commit war crimes, even to commit genocide. When the United States signed on to the genocide convention in 1988-after a thirty-seven-year battle in the U.S. Senate-it added a proviso saying that it did not apply to the United States. The tribunal at the International Court of Justice that assessed the Yugoslav charge against NATO in 1999 permitted the United States to separate itself and not be subject to the charge, because the Yugoslav charge included the word <i>genocide</i> and the United States-by law-is entitled to carry out genocide.</bq> <bq caption="Page 170">Their first publication is called <i>The Crisis of Democracy</i> (1975). This is elite liberal opinion that condemned what happened in the 1960s because these new movements brought about a crisis of democracy. These "special interests"-youth, elderly, women, workers, farmers, minorities-who were supposed to be passive and obedient had begun to enter the public arena with their concerns and their demands. The state, they said, cannot deal with these pressures, so these special interests must revert to their obedience and passivity so that we can have a real democracy.</bq> <bq caption="Page 171">The Trilateral Commission was concerned that universities and churches had failed in their responsibility to "indoctrinate the young. " They had failed to indoctrinate the youth into passivity and obedience, and therefore the Trilateral Commission had to change that. In fact, universities changed considerably after that to exercise more effective control and indoctrination, imposing their business models on the curriculum and on faculty members. That's the liberal end of the spectrum, which forms the cultural background to the neoliberal assault that picked up in the decades to come. Got to destroy the reservoirs of popular resistance-unions and political organizations. No interference was permitted in the rights of the very rich and the corporate sector to do what they wanted.</bq> <bq caption="Page 173">In short order, thanks to U.S.-imposed conflicts, Europe lost access to its three sources of energy: Iran, due to the sanctions regime put in place starting from 2006; Libya, due to NATO's war in 2011 that disrupted the entire oil infrastructure and the legal basis for ownership of the oil; and Russia, due to the conflict over Ukraine in 2014. Europe lost access to natural gas and oil. European self-interest seemed to be totally forgotten.</bq> <bq caption="Page 175">The Marshall Plan, set in motion after World War II, was in large part a U.S. program to convert Europe from reliance upon coal to reliance upon oil. Coal was abundant in Europe, which had no oil. If they became oil based, the United States would have "veto power" (George Kennan's phrase, referring specifically to Japan) over Europe because the United States would control their energy supplies. Ten percent of the Marshall Plan money--about $1.2 billion was shifted among U.S. banks as they converted Europe into an oil-based economy. This oil was not going to come from the United States, but from the Middle East; by 1950, 85 percent of Europe's oil needs were supplied from the Middle East, which the United States controlled and profited from. The same process was imposed on Japan.</bq> <bq caption="Page 176">of course, Europe can be on its own, since it has a larger population than the United States, more wealth, and a more highly educated population. If Europe strikes out on its own, it will come as a radical reorientation of the world system.</bq> <bq caption="Page 181">The Chinese have established a thousand vocational schools in Southeast Asia and Africa to train students in the new Chinese technologies. These are efficient technologies that will integrate these countries and their development into the China-based BR system. The Chinese are sharing this technology in very poor parts of the world at prices that are reasonable for those economies. They have developed leading technologies in robotics, green energy, and telecommunications. It's a very personal issue, incidentally. Where I live, which is partly rural, there is very poor internet service. If we were allowed to bring Huawei technology, we'd have 5G internet. We badly need solar panels, and the most technologically advanced and cheapest ones are made in China.</bq> <bq caption="Page 183">If we return to the question of Afghanistan, there are two approaches to deal with the immense crisis there. The U.S. approach is to blockade the country. The other approach, from the SCO, is to try to integrate Afghanistan into the massive Eurasian system. They say, <i>The Taliban is the government. We have to deal with them. We will try to induce them to become more inclusive, maybe to moderate their behavior. Let's hope to shift the economy from producing heroin for the West to mining its rich mineral resources, which we in China will be happy to make use of. We will move in that direction and provide immediate aid to end the humanitarian crisis.</i></bq> <bq caption="Page 185">The "rules-based order" is supported by the United States, which defines the system as, <i>If you follow the United States then you are following the rules.</i> The other system is the UN-based international order, which is grounded in the U Charter and is advocated for and often followed by the Chinese.</bq> <bq caption="Page 186">The east coast of China is ringed with U.S. bases with nuclear armed missiles aimed at China. What about that? Are the Chinese concerned about that? Would we be concerned if China had dozens of bases along the Pacific or Atlantic coasts, with nuclear missiles aimed at the United States? Would that bother us? Well, it wouldn't bother us, because we'd destroy the world to make sure it didn't happen. But this doesn't even get mentioned. All that is mentioned is that they're threatening our means of defense off the coast of China. There will be no letter to the editor about it, because it is taken for granted. We have a right to defend ourselves against China by aiming nuclear missiles at them.</bq> <bq caption="Page 187">Every strategic analyst knows that landbased missiles are more of a threat to the country that has them than to the adversary. The United States has about a thousand land-based missiles. They're all targeted. Any adversary knows exactly where they are down to a couple of kilometers. If a threat develops, the adversary can destroy these missiles. The U.S. command knows this and calls them "use them or lose them" missiles. You either fire them off immediately or you lose them. This means that if there is tension anywhere in the world, you have the necessity to fire them. Using them means that you are destroyed by a retaliatory strike. They are now upgrading the land-based missile system. It would be a great advantage for American security if they were simply destroyed.</bq> <bq caption="Page 188">And you can't touch the military, just like you can't touch the fossil fuel companies or the banks. You know? These are institutional failures, which are extremely deep, and they simply must be overcome quickly, or we're just finished. Can't survive this dysfunctional society. Impossible.</bq> <bq caption="Page 190">it is important to point out that NATO's war on Yugoslavia in 1999 might be the real turning point for Russia with Europe in thrall to the United States as it pursued an unprovoked aggression, an aggression covered up with incredible lying, which persists to the present.</bq> <bq caption="Page 191">Russia will likely drift further into China's orbit, becoming even more of a declining kleptocratic raw materials producer than it is now. China is likely to persist in its programs of incorporating more and more of the world into the development-and-investment system based on the Belt and Road Initiative, the "maritime silk road" that passes through the UAE into the Middle East, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.</bq> <bq caption="Page 192">The most significant effect of this war, barely discussed, is that it sets back--maybe permanently--the meager hopes for escaping the total catastrophe of climate destruction, the end of organized human life (and innumerable other species we are wantonly destroying). During the war, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change released an interim report that showed the governments of the world nowhere near making any commitment to limit climate change to 1.5°C and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The U Secretary-General António Guterres said that this was a "red alert for our planet." No such alarm was on the front pages of the newspapers. The glee in the executive offices of the fossil fuel companies, now free to accelerate total destruction, perhaps even exceeds the glee in the offices of military contractors.</bq> From the afterword, written by Vijay Prashad. <bq caption="Page 197">From his first political book (<i>American Power and the New Mandarins</i>), Noam has understood U.S. power not in the minutiae of its reproduction but through a long-term perspective that seeks to understand its generative grammar, to steal from Noam's linguistics. This habit of contextualization, of setting current events in terms of their historical dynamics and in terms of the sociology of power, is Noam's greatest contribution to our understanding of our times.</bq> <bq caption="Page 201">Noam does not bang his podium or stamp his feet; he remains at the level of facts, facts being the sharpened sword in his intellectual arsenal. But these are not merely facts; they are facts that he has unearthed because he has been taught to read and to look for facts in places that people do not know exist, and because he is able to marshal these facts into a theory of the world that is otherwise little known because of the fog of manufactured consent.</bq> <bq caption="Page 203">Here, you get the sense of humor, the adherence to unpopular facts, and the stance for a moral position against injustice and for equality. That's Noam in a nutshell.</bq> <bq caption="Page 205">[...] to read Noam on U.S. imperialism, to read Noam on the Middle East, to read Noam on Central America, to read Noam on East Timor, to read Noam on Yugoslavia. I learned my geography and ethics from Noam.</bq>