Imminent Crises

This article is a transcription of a talk Chomsky gave to the students attending Z Media Institute in 2005. The three crises reviewed here are particularly relevant today, post-election, as neither of the three were addressed by the candidates (although they involve survival of the species) and there are no known plans to do something about them.

CHOMSKY: I’ve been asked to speak on imminent crises and earlier I asked for suggestions. I only got one: “Rapture.” So I’ll keep to that. It’s a good one, although I won’t talk about it in those terms.

There are actually three crises that I think are worth telling about, at very high priority. One is the Rapture, if you like. It has to do with the threat of nuclear war, which is very high—unimaginably high—certainly unacceptably so. And that assumption is very widely accepted among strategic analysts and others. In the U.S. strategic community, the official strategic analysts in the government regard the prospect of a dirty bomb as completely inevitable in the U.S. and the possibility of a real nuclear weapon as very high, which would mean apocalypse.

There was an article a couple of months ago by Robert McNamara called “Apocalypse Soon” in which he joined the general consensus among analysts that on the current course of policy—mostly U.S. policy which is driving it—a nuclear war is inevitable. McNamara and the former defense secretary William Perry, Graham Allison, an American political scientist and professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and many others give a subjective estimate that the probability of a nuclear terror attack within the next decade is 50 percent or higher. Subjective estimates don’t mean much, but it shows you what people are thinking—even in mainstream journals like the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is not given to hyperbole. Two leading strategic analysts a couple of months ago argued in some detail that the current policies of the Bush administration carry what they call “an appreciable risk of ultimate doom.”

So that’s one major crisis and how imminent it is anyone knows. It could be tomorrow. Everything’s in place for it. The second one is familiar and I won’t say that much about it—that’s the threat of environmental catastrophe, which is not imminent in the sense that it’s going to happen soon, but the decision as to whether to ensure that it does happen is soon. In fact, it might be right now.

So, for example, a couple of days ago a group of leading scientists from the National Academies of a number of counties and the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S., addressed a petition to the leaders of G8—the 8 industrial countries who were meeting in Scotland in a few months—urging them to take immediate steps to avert a threat, the details of which are unknown, but it could be catastrophic and it could be unavoidable if it’s allowed to drag on too long. Again, the U.S. is alone in refusing to take any steps. That’s the second imminent crisis.

The third one that I have in mind is actually connected with those two. When I say the U.S. is refusing to take any steps, that’s only true if you assume that the U.S. is not a functioning democracy. When you read a report in the press, saying the U.S. refused almost alone to sign the Kyoto Protocol, that’s only if you exclude the population of the U.S. because an overwhelming majority of the U.S. population is in favor of signing the Protocol and, in fact, are so strongly in favor that a majority of Bush voters assumed that he was in favor, too, because it’s such an obvious thing to do.

So U.S. policies are carrying an appreciable risk of ultimate doom and will continue to do so if the U.S. doesn’t function as a working democracy, which is the third crisis—namely, democracy deficit—which means a country that has formal democratic institutions, but they don’t function. It’s extreme in the U.S. and when there’s a democracy deficit in the most powerful nation in the world, and that nation has the capacity to pursue—and is pursuing—policies which carry an appreciable risk of ultimate doom and maybe apocalypse soon, and maybe irreversible environmental catastrophe, then the democracy deficit is a very serious problem and, therefore, the third imminent crisis.

Apocalypse Soon, Ultimate Doom

The first crisis, and surely the most serious, really is imminent and once it happens the result is total nuclear war. Actually, we’ve come extremely close in the past. You may remember that we are coming up to the 50th anniversary of what should be a famous manifesto by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein—July 1955—in which they pleaded with the people of the world to put aside other concerns, to think of themselves as members of the human species, and ask themselves whether they want the species to survive. They point out, sensibly, that we have a stark, dreadful, drastic choice: either doom the species to extinction or end war.

That was the choice in 1955 and it’s an even more urgent choice today. Of course, the choice to end war hasn’t happened. And it’s something of a miracle that “ultimate doom” hasn’t happened already. It certainly has come very close. By all common agreement, the closest it came was in 1962 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis when we were within a hair of terminal nuclear war.

It was known already by the participants in the crisis on all sides that the threat of nuclear war was very serious, but how serious it was finally became clear in October 2002 at the 40th anniversary retrospective meeting in Havana of American, Russian, and Cuban participants in the crisis, which Arthur Schlesinger, President Kennedy’s advisor, described as the most dangerous moment in history. But they learned it was much worse than they thought. At the most dangerous moment in the crisis, Kennedy put a quarantine around Cuba. Russian ships were approaching the quarantine zone and there were submarines with them. What was unknown at the time was that those submarines had torpedoes with nuclear warheads. When they came under attack by American destroyers, the Russian submarine commanders thought there was a nuclear war going on and ordered the torpedoes fired.

Russian command orders are that three commanders have to authorize firing of the weapons. Two agreed, a third refused to agree and countermanded the order, and that’s why we’re still here. One word stopped the firing of the first nuclear weapons since Nagasaki, with almost unimaginable consequences. .

That information was exposed in 2002 and it was quite intriguing to see the reaction. You have to have had a microscope to see it because there was barely any coverage in the press, either here or in England. I didn’t check other countries, but it was probably less. That was particularly striking because that moment—October 2002—was being described by very serious analysts—the head of the Stimson Center, for example—as the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The missile crisis was itself, in part, a reaction to a major international terrorist campaign that President Kennedy had organized. His brother, Robert, was the head of it and his highest priority was to bring the “terrors of the earth” to Cuba—a phrase from Schlesinger who, in his biography of Robert Kennedy, describes the latter’s near fanaticism in pursuing this terror campaign. That was certainly part of the background to the crisis, which came within a word of nuclear war and, subsequently, the threat of international terrorism in October 2002. Clearly, the Russell/Einstein warning was more stark and dreadful than what they indicated in 1955.

There have been many other times in the past 50 years when survival hung by a thread, when nuclear missiles came very close to being fired. The NATO policy—meaning U.S. policy—is for missiles with nuclear warheads to be on automated response, a hair trigger alert. That means if the computer systems determine there is an attack on the U.S. or any NATO country, they have to provide the computer analysis of whether it’s happening. If there is a warning—and there have been many warnings—human analysis has 3 minutes to determine whether it’s real and then it gives the president 30 seconds to make a decision, so it’s been reported.

In 1986, Gorbachev had called for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. That ran into an impasse because of Reagan’s space militarization program—what’s called Star Wars. By 1994, the Russians reversed their no first strike policy and reverted to the NATO program of first strike/automated response and so on.

The reason for that is not too well known, but it should be. It had to do with the negotiations at the end of the Cold War. The U.S. wanted a unified Germany to be incorporated within NATO, which was a serious danger to the Soviet Union—now Russia. Nonetheless, Gorbachev agreed to that on the condition—which was given by George Bush I—that NATO would not expand eastward. Clinton reversed that guarantee and NATO expanded eastward, a terrible danger to the Soviet Union. In response, the Russians dropped their call for a ban on nuclear weapons and reverted to the NATO doctrine of first strike and their missiles remain on hair trigger alert. The Russian systems are nowhere near as good as the American ones and, since the 1990s when the Russian economy totally collapsed and probably lost about 50 percent of its capacity, there was a huge demographic disaster. Millions of people died. Their computer systems are undoubtedly far more deteriorated, which means the threat of accidental war again rises.

Increasing the Danger

Further, U.S. policies are increasing the danger, very consciously. By now the U.S. spends approximately as much on the military as the rest of the world—estimated at 47 percent of total world spending (Swedish Research Institute estimate). It was understood that what’s called “the transformation of the military” was going to lead almost inevitably to a response by potential adversaries and it did. The Russians sharply increased military spending after the Bush administration came in and in response to the U.S. tripling of its military spending, the Russians held their first war games in decades at which they displayed new, more sophisticated offensive missiles aimed at the U.S., all on alert, making the thread on which survival hangs even thinner. These are some of the reasons for the concerns of mainstream strategic analysts about ultimate doom and the possibility being increased. The U.S. is so far ahead of them in weaponry that the Russians are compelled to shift missiles constantly across their huge territory to counter U.S. threats.

That adds to another risk, namely the risk that they’ll be stolen. The U.S. is well aware that Chechen rebels have been casing Russian railroad stations, certainly with the intention of stealing missiles. If one missile is stolen with some launch device, that means the end of some American city. If several are stolen, it could mean whole nations are destroyed. There’s nothing secret about this—you can read it not only in the technical literature, but in the Washington Post, places like that. It’s understood that the increase in military spending is having precisely this result. But it’s just not a significant problem. It’s not that the Administration wants ultimate doom, it’s just that it’s not a high priority. There are much higher priorities than whether the species survives.

One much higher priority is to stuff more money into the pockets of their rich friends and dominate the world in the short term. The thinking is standard and it drives policy ,and it will continue to, as long as the democratic deficit reigns and as long as policy is out of control of public opinion. The same is true of a potential environmental catastrophe.

There have been attempts over the last 50 years to strengthen the thin thread on which our survival rests. The most important was the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, which went into effect in 1970. This May [2005] was the regular five-year review of the NPT by participating states, which was almost everyone. It met in New York and ended up a total fiasco. Nothing happened. It had been predicted by high level analysts that if this review failed, it might be the end of the treaty.

There was barely any reporting of it. And the reporting I saw kept to the U.S. agenda, which was to focus on one part of the treaty. There are two crucial articles in the treaty. One is article six, which obligates the nuclear states to take good faith measures to eliminate nuclear weapons. It’s a core part of the treaty. Of course, the U.S. refuses to allow this to be discussed, but the Bush administration was the first to have formally stated that it no longer accepts Article Six and that maintaining nuclear weapons is part of the U.S. arsenal. So the U.S. has officially said—no Article Six.

Furthermore, the U.S. is proceeding to violate it by planning to develop new nuclear weapons. Okay, that’s one issue that was crucially part of the NPT review. You’ll have to search pretty hard to find that one. There’s also a unanimous World Court decision which obligates the nuclear powers to pursue this commitment under Article Six, which is connected to a series of other commitments. One is that the nuclear states sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In 1999, the Republican Congress blocked it and the Bush administration took it off the agenda. So that’s gone. Another condition was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which the Bush administration rescinded.

There were a couple of others, but the most important one of all is FMCT or Fis-Ban—the treaty banning production of fissile materials—nuclear grade materials, such as highly enriched uranium. So the FMCT is absolutely crucial because it’s well understood that if fissile materials continue to be produced, then a nuclear war is inevitable.

The Fissile Treaty had been under review for a long time. In November, it came up for a vote at the UN and the vote was 147-1 with 2 abstentions. One abstention was Israel—reflexive because of its ties to the U.S.—so that vote is insignificant. The second one is more interesting. It was Britain. In the latest issue of Britain’s Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Britain is described as the spear-carrier for Pax Americana—and not with great pride. So the spear-carrier abstained and the British Ambassador explained why at the UN meetings. He said that the British government supported the fissile materials ban, but it couldn’t accept this version of it because this version was too divisive, namely 147-1. That tells you something about the ranking of human survival among the priorities of the leadership of the world’s most powerful state and its spear-carrier.

Let me turn to Article 4, which has to do with non-nuclear states. Article Six has to do with nuclear states. Article 4 grants the non-nuclear states the right to develop peaceful uses of nuclear energy. That’s the one the U.S. wanted to focus on. That’s why the NPT broke down because the U.S. insisted on focusing on Article 4, not on the total package. What does this have to do with? Well, it has to do with whether Iran should be permitted to pursue its legal right, under the treaty, to develop nuclear energy. The U.S. position is that Iran can only be doing this if they want nuclear weapons because there’s no reason for an oil rich state like Iran to develop nuclear energy unless they’re planning to develop nuclear weapons.

It’s a little difficult for the U.S. to take that position, but, thanks to the loyalty of the media, they didn’t have much trouble with it. One of the problems is that when Iran was being ruled by a U.S. client, namely the Shah, who was put in power by the U.S. and its spear-carrier back in 1953—overthrowing parliamentary democracy—the U.S. was in favor of Iran’s developing nuclear energy on the grounds that they needed it because their oil was going to run out. U.S. universities—my own for example—were involved with deals with the Shah to train nuclear engineers, surely with the approval of the U.S. government. In fact, Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, specifically asserted that Iran—then an ally—must proceed to develop nuclear energy.

However, there was a point to that. The fact of the matter is that, if you develop the capacity to enrich uranium for peaceful uses, it’s not a long step to go on from there to nuclear weapons. So Article 4 is a real gap in the NPT. Something should be done to close that gap. That much is correct.

There are proposals for how to do that. The most important one—and the only one that makes any sense—is from the head of the International Atomic Energy Commission, Mohamed El Baradei, who proposed in an article in the Economist, and elsewhere, that production of fissile materials be under international control. That proposal is known and it’s described in the strategic analysis literature as not pragmatic. That’s a polite way of saying: the U.S. won’t accept any international control of the production of fissile materials. And, since the U.S. will not accept international controls of any kind or international law or international obligations and treaties, this method of controlling the production of fissile materials—the sensible way of overcoming the gap in Article 4—that’s ruled out because it’s not “pragmatic.” Again, that’s as long as the democratic deficit persists.

I’m pretty sure if it came up in a poll and people were asked: should we accept international guarantees and controls, I’m willing to bet, people would say yes, judging by other similar results. But it doesn’t come up. These issues, of course, never come up because it’s not for the general public to decide. But there’s nothing very profound about it: if fissile materials are produced and there’s no controls, they’ll sooner or later turn into bombs, which means apocalypse soon, ultimate doom, either by failure of computer systems or by stealing missiles with nuclear warheads, or just making bombs.

Well, U.S analysts have proposed alternatives, which they say are more “pragmatic” than this one; that is, the nuclear powers, which means the U.S., provide a guarantee to every country that the U.S. will produce fissile materials and a guarantee that it will provide them for peaceful uses. So other countries should have trust in the U.S.—this is their pragmatic alternative. It’s inconceivable that any country is going to trust the U.S., given its record.

And so the threat hangs very thin. The NPT broke down and nobody has any hope for the next one, which means that the critical issues that determine survival of the species—what Russell and Einstein were talking about—those issues for the moment are moot. There’s no cut off treaty because it was blocked by that “divisive” 147-1 vote and the whole package of treaties that are part of the compact for the nuclear states are gone because they’ve all been rescinded and the Bush administration has already said it doesn’t accept Article 6 and is going ahead to develop new nuclear weapons. That’s where that one stands.

Again, this is a question on which the public ought to have a voice, but can’t unless the issue is at least made public—which it isn’t.

Is Iran actually developing nuclear weapons? I don’t know, but my guess, for what it’s worth, is that, for once, U.S. claims are correct. In fact, I think that’s widely accepted. One of Israel’s leading military historians wrote an article concluding that, while he couldn’t be certain that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, if they weren’t, they were crazy because, of course, they ought to be developing  nuclear weapons. They’re completely surrounded by nuclear armed states. They’re under serious threat by the world’s superpower. The U.S. has just taught a lesson to every country in the world. That if you want to protect yourself from invasion by the U.S., you’d better have a deterrent otherwise the U.S. will invade you. That’s what the Iraq war was about. Iraq could be attacked because it was known to be defenseless. It was understood that Iraq was hanging together with scotch tape—there’s no military, it’s the weakest state in the region—so it’s safe to attack it.

That’s just telling the world that if you don’t want to be invaded, then have a deterrent. There’s only two deterrents around. Nobody can spend 47 percent of world military expenditures to match the U.S., so the only deterrents around are either nuclear weapons or terrorism.

Creating A Terrorist Haven

In advance of the Iraq war, it was pointed out very widely in the international affairs literature—and even by intelligence agencies, including U.S. intelligence agencies, that the invasion of Iraq was likely to increase nuclear proliferation and increase the threat of terror. The Bush administration certainly was aware of that. Their own national intelligence estimate said that right before the war. But they went ahead and their predictions were verified, not surprisingly.

The very likely (we don’t know) Iranian moves to develop at least the potential for nuclear weapons, meaning getting close enough so they can have a deterrent if they need it, is one example—same with North Korea, same with others. And the increase in terror is already verified. In fact, , it was observed by intelligence agencies and independent analysts even during the war and by the end, it was completely verified that, yes, it increased the threat of terror exactly as expected. The highest national intelligence estimate, in December 2004, concluded that the effect of the war, as anticipated, was to increase the threat of terror.

Remember that Iraq, whatever you think about it, was not involved in terror before the war nor did it had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). But after the war, it became what’s called a terrorist haven by intelligence analysts. In the words of the intelligence estimates, the Iraq war created a new category of professional terrorists—armed and trained. They’ll be spreading around the world to carry out terrorist attacks and, obviously, increasing the threat of terror. Actually, it goes well beyond that.

Remember when the invasion took place, Bush, Blair, Powell, Rice, and the rest of them kept insisting that there was what they all called a single question: Will Iraq stop its production of WMDs? That was the single question on which the U.S. Congress agreed to authorize force and on which the war was allegedly started.

That single question was soon answered. And something interesting happened right afterwards. The answer to that single question that’s usually given is not quite accurate. The answer is, usually, that they didn’t have any WMDs and probably hadn’t any for ten years or more. But they did have WMDs at some point—namely the ones provided to them by the U.S., Britain, and others during the 1980s, for their friend Saddam Hussein. The Reagan and Thatcher administrations provided their friend Saddam with substantial aid, including dual-use technology, which could be used to produce WMDs. This continued to the day of the invasion of Kuwait.

At that time, some of these weapons were still there. They had been under UN control after 1991 and UN inspectors were dismantling them, but there were still some there. What happened to them? Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz forgot to tell their troops that they should guard the sites. The only sites that were still being guarded were the oil ministry and the security ministry. That’s why some of the most important treasures of civilization were looted and destroyed—the worst destruction since the Mongol invasion. The sites where the WMDs were kept were also massively looted, according to UN satellite inspections. They found 109 sites that were completely looted, including high precision equipment which could be used to develop nuclear weapons, missiles, bio-toxins, and so on. Where they’ve gone, nobody has a clue—presumably in the hands of terrorists.

If there was anything remotely like a free press in the U.S. or England or France or Germany or anywhere, the headlines would be reading that, “The U.S. and Britain invaded to destroy WMDs that weren’t there and the effect of their invasion was to provide WMDs—that they had given Saddam Hussein—to terrorists who they had organized and trained in Afghanistan as part of state policy.”

That’s the headline. That’s exactly what happened. This is all quite apart from what happened to Iraq—like an estimated 100,000 civilians dead by 2004, virtual doubling of malnutrition among young children, now down to the level of Burundi, below Uganda and Haiti, meaning permanent brain damage, hundreds of thousands of wasted children, This is in a country that had already been devastated by U.S./British sanctions, which killed nobody knows how many hundreds of thousands of people and probably kept Saddam in power.

Why was it worthwhile? There’s what’s called a conspiracy theory, which is usually used to mean an obvious truth that no one’s allowed to talk about. The conspiracy theory here is that the fact the U.S and Britain invaded Iraq had something to do with its having oil there. In fact, it has everything to do with it. Iraq is estimated to have the second largest oil reserves in the world. The oil is unusually rich because it’s largely untapped and it’s extremely cheap because it’s near the surface, which means huge profits for any corporations that get the rights to drill there, which will be the U.S. and Britain, it is hoped, thanks to the invasion.

Critical Leverage

But much more important than that is strategic power. Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the more astute of the planning community, pointed out in a recent article, quite accurately, that one positive effect of the invasion of Iraq (he was not in favor of it), other than control of Mideast oil—is that it gives the United States what he called “critical leverage” over its rivals—namely European and Asian economies. That is what most of the conflicts in the Middle East have been about for 50 years—and no doubt critical leverage was crucial. That Europe and Japan might pursue an independent course has been a core concern of U.S. policy planning since the Second World War.

In the last 30 years or so, the world economy has become what’s called tripolar—3 roughly comparable economic centers: North America, run by the U.S., Europe, and a northeast Asian complex (loosely linked to India) including: Japan, South Korea, China, and the SE Asian complex, which is now the most dynamic economy in the world, controlling maybe half of the world’s foreign exchange. It’s willingness to buy U.S. Treasury Bonds is keeping the U.S. afloat. So the world is tripolar, except the U.S. dominates as a military force. In every other dimension, it’s just one of three and not necessarily the strongest.

If the U.S. can hold on to and maintain control of Iraq, that will be crucial. In fact, it’s astonishing that it’s had so much trouble. I assumed, along with many others, that this would be the easiest military occupation in history. The country was barely surviving—no military, no resistance, no outside support for resistance—and the invaders were able to put to an end two brutal regimes—Saddam’s and the sanctions regime. Actually, if they had put an end to the sanctions regime, the Iraqi people would have probably put an end to Saddam’s regime. One of the major effects of the sanctions was to devastate civilian society, strengthen the dictator, and force people to rely on him for survival. If that hadn’t been the case, there’s a strong likelihood that Saddam would have been sent the same way as a whole string of other monsters the U.S. and Britain supported right to the end—Ceausescu in Romania, Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Duvalier in Haiti. The fact of the matter is that the U.S. and Britain supported them right to the end when they were ultimately overthrown from within.

Anyway, it’s happened, there’s an utter catastrophe. It’s not very clear what they can do about it. Even worse, from the U.S. point of view, the U.S. was compelled to accept elections in Iraq, so the new party line became that the U.S. wanted elections and is promoting democracy. You can take a look at the mainstream press. It was reporting quite openly that the U.S. was trying in every possible way to block elections. These were elections, by the way, forced by massive non-violent resistance, which the U.S. tried to take credit for, while attempting to subvert the outcome.

Brazen Liars

With all the fancy talk about democracy promotion, can the U.S. permit a sovereign, more or less democratic Iraq? Can it? The foreign minister of Iran recently said that Iran is strongly in favor of sovereignty in Iraq. Did anybody take him seriously? No, because you never take statements by political leaders seriously. There’s a simple reason: they’re totally predictable, therefore, they carry no information whatsoever so you disregard them. They’re predictable because everyone’s always following noble objectives. Try to find an exception—Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, the Japanese fascists—they’re just overflowing with love for everyone. See if you can find any case when they weren’t supporting freedom, justice, every wonderful thing you can think of.

For that reason, nobody pays much attention to the pronouncement of leaders. The only place where they do is maybe North Korea where, if the dear leader says something, I suppose the people believe it. The other example is the U.S. and the West. Western intellectuals have to believe it when the dear leader says something. Remember the single question about the invasion of Iraq: Is Saddam going to stop producing WMDs? When that frittered out a few months later, the party line changed to what the liberal press called Bush’s messianic vision to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq, the middle east, and the universe.

I actually did a study of this and I couldn’t find any deviation. This was instantly accepted by everyone. Yes, it was the messianic vision. In fact, there is one particle of evidence for it: the dear leader said so. Try to find some other evidence for it. Actually, there’s massive evidence against it. Take a look at the timing. When did this become the messianic vision? A soon as the single question was answered. So Bush, Blair, and the rest are saying, we are among the most brazen liars in history. We drove you to war because we claimed we wanted the answer to the single question, but we weren’t telling you that our real reason was the messianic vision. In other words, we are brazen liars, but you’ve got to believe us now. And everyone believes it. It becomes what the Washington Post calls maybe the most noble war in history run by idealist-in-chief Paul Wolfowitz, who’s got a passion for democracy—and on and on.

So, can the U.S. accept the sovereignty of Iraq? Well, what would the policies be of a sovereign, democratic Iraq? It’s not hard to imagine. It would have a Shiite majority. One of its first policies would be to improve relations with Shiite Iran. They don’t particularly love Iran, but they’d rather have a friendly neighbor than a hostile one. They’d probably try to continue the process of integrating Iraq into the general Muslim region.

There’s another problem lurking in the background. Saudi Arabia next door happens to have a Shiite population right on the border. Furthermore, that Shiite population happens to be sitting on most of the oil. They’d been oppressed for years and the turmoil of the war had already led to pressures for a degree of autonomy. A sovereign independent Iraq would only increase that. So here you have the specter of a Shiite alliance, independent of the U.S., controlling most of the world’s oil. The U.S. is going to accept that?

Furthermore, Iraq is likely to move to regain its natural position in the Arab World as a leading state, if not the leading state—highly educated population, huge resources, etc. That’s a position that goes back to biblical times, under various names, which means they’ll re-arm and they’ll have to confront the regional enemy, Israel, which means they’ll probably have to develop WMDs, if only for deterrence. So here’s what we’re looking at: a Shiite alliance controlling most of the world’s oil, re-arming, maybe developing WMDs, independent of the U.S. Is it imaginable that the U.S. is going to accept this?

And there’s more. In fact, the best witnesses for the defense of the messianic vision should be advocates for democracy promotion. The leading one by far is Thomas Carothers, the head of the Carnegie Endowment Program on law and democracy, who published a book in which he reviews democracy promotion after the Cold War. He’s a strong advocate of democracy promotion. He calls himself a neo-Reaganite. He was in the state department under Reagan as part of the democracy promotion project. What he concludes in his very book—which is really quite scholarly—is that there’s a strong line of continuity in the U.S. with regard to democracy promotion. He says every Administration is schizophrenic. Why? They promote democracy only in cases that support U.S. strategies and economic objectives. If they don’t support U.S. objectives, the U.S. doesn’t support democracy. In fact, it often overthrows it.

Democracy Deficit

To finish the story, Carothers also happened to write a book about democracy promotion in the 1980s. Again, he’s writing partly from an insider’s perspective. He thinks the Reagan programs are very sincere. He greatly admires them, participated in them, but he says they were a failure—as he points out, a systematic failure. In the regions where the U.S. had limited power, mainly the Southern Cone of the Western Hemisphere, there was real progress toward democracy which the U.S. tried to block. In the regions where U.S. power was greatest, there was no progress toward democracy—a kind of accidental correlation. Carothers says the reason is that the U.S. would permit only top down forms of democracy with traditional elites in power, elites that have been allied with the U.S. in very undemocratic societies. So there was no progress.

So what we have, on the one hand, is a mountain of reasons for not taking the rhetoric about Bush’s messianic vision seriously, and only one reason for taking it seriously, namely, it was declared by the dear leader after the single question got the wrong answer.

One final word about the third problem, which is, in a way, the core of the democracy deficit. There is a huge gap between public opinion and public policy. Right before the November elections, there were major studies of public opinion carried out by some of the most prestigious institutions that monitor it. The studies received virtually no reporting—two or three newspapers. What they found was that on foreign and domestic policy, the bi-partisan media consensus is way to the right of the general population on issue after issue. It’s one of the reasons why the elections had to carefully avoid issues and keep to imagery to delude the public. And it continues. When the Federal Budget came out, again major studies of public opinion on what the budget ought to be were almost exactly the opposite of what the budget was.

The studies show that the public is overwhelmingly in favor of cutting the military spending, of increasing social spending—health, education—more funding for renewable energy, more funding for the UN, which the public, unlike the political parties, very strongly supports—so strongly that a majority of the public, amazingly, even thinks the U.S. should give up the veto and follow majority opinion at the UN.

In general, there’s just an enormous gulf between opinion and public policy which is in many ways a very optimistic conclusion—very optimistic. What it means is there are tremendous opportunities for educating people enough so they understand their own opinions are not idiosyncratic—that they are public opinion—and on to organizing and activism. We’ve got every imaginable opportunity to do something to put an end quickly to crises which really are extremely severe and, in some cases, imminent.  

Z

Noam Chomsky is a linguist, philosopher, political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT where he has worked for over 50 years. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books.