The United States is going to continue-path-Monroe Doctrine?

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Michael Shank recently interviewed Noam Chomsky, noted linguist and
foreign policy expert, on the latest developments in U.S. policy toward
Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Venezuela. Along the way, Chomsky also
commented on climate change, the World Social Forum, and why
international relations are run like the mafia.

Michael Shank:
With similar nuclear developments in North Korea and Iran, why has the
United States pursued direct diplomacy with North Korea but refuses to
do so with Iran?

Noam Chomsky: To say that the United
States has pursued diplomacy with North Korea is a little bit
misleading. It did under the Clinton administration, though neither
side completely lived up to their obligations. Clinton didn't do what
was promised, nor did North Korea, but they were making progress. So
when Bush came into the presidency, North Korea had enough uranium or
plutonium for maybe one or two bombs, but then very limited missile
capacity. During the Bush years it's exploded. The reason is, he
immediately canceled the diplomacy and he's pretty much blocked it ever
since.

They made a very substantial agreement in September 2005
in which North Korea agreed to eliminate its enrichment programs and
nuclear development completely. In return the United States agreed to
terminate the threats of attack and to begin moving towards the
planning for the provision of a light water reactor, which had been
promised under the framework agreement. But the Bush administration
instantly undermined it. Right away, they canceled the international
consortium that was planning for the light water reactor, which was a
way of saying we're not going to agree to this agreement. A couple of
days later they started attacking the financial transactions of various
banks. It was timed in such a way to make it clear that the United
States was not going to move towards its commitment to improve
relations. And of course it never withdrew the threats. So that was the
end of the September 2005 agreement.

That one is now coming back,
just in the last few days. The way it's portrayed in the U.S. media is,
as usual with the government's party line, that North Korea is now
perhaps a little more amenable to accept the September 2005 proposal.
So there's some optimism. If you go across the Atlantic, to the Financial Times,
to review the same events they point out that an embattled Bush
administration, it's their phrase, needs some kind of victory, so maybe
it'll be willing to move towards diplomacy. It's a little more accurate
I think if you look at the background.

But there is some minimal
sense of optimism about it. If you look back over the record -- and
North Korea is a horrible place nobody is arguing about that -- on this
issue they've been pretty rational. It's been a kind of tit-for-tat
history. If the United States is accommodating, the North Koreans
become accommodating. If the United States is hostile, they become
hostile. That's reviewed pretty well by Leon Sigal, who's one of the
leading specialists on this, in a recent issue of Current History. But that's been the general picture and we're now at a place where there could be a settlement on North Korea.

That's
much less significant for the United States than Iran. The Iranian
issue I don't think has much to do with nuclear weapons frankly. Nobody
is saying Iran should have nuclear weapons -- nor should anybody else.
But the point in the Middle East, as distinct from North Korea, is that
this is center of the world's energy resources. Originally the British
and secondarily the French had dominated it, but after the Second World
War, it's been a U.S. preserve. That's been an axiom of U.S. foreign
policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources. It is not a
matter of access as people often say. Once the oil is on the seas it
goes anywhere. In fact if the United States used no Middle East oil,
it'd have the same policies. If we went on solar energy tomorrow, it'd
keep the same policies. Just look at the internal record, or the logic
of it, the issue has always been control. Control is the source of
strategic power.

Dick Cheney declared in Kazakhstan or somewhere
that control over pipeline is a "tool of intimidation and blackmail."
When we have control over the pipelines it's a tool of benevolence. If
other countries have control over the sources of energy and the
distribution of energy then it is a tool of intimidation and blackmail
exactly as Cheney said. And that's been understood as far back as
George Kennan and the early post-war days when he pointed out that if
the United States controls Middle East resources it'll have veto power
over its industrial rivals. He was speaking particularly of Japan but
the point generalizes.

So Iran is a different situation. It's part of the major energy system of the world.

Shank:
So when the United States considers a potential invasion you think it's
under the premise of gaining control? That is what the United States
will gain from attacking Iran?

Chomsky: There are several
issues in the case of Iran. One is simply that it is independent and
independence is not tolerated. Sometimes it's called successful
defiance in the internal record. Take Cuba. A very large majority of
the U.S. population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations
with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations. And even
part of the business world is in favor of it too. But the government
won't allow it. It's attributed to the Florida vote but I don't think
that's much of an explanation. I think it has to do with a feature of
world affairs that is insufficiently appreciated. International affairs
is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept
disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn't pay his
protection money. You have to have obedience otherwise the idea can
spread that you don't have to listen to the orders and it can spread to
important places.

If you look back at the record, what was the
main reason for the U.S. attack on Vietnam? Independent development can
be a virus that can infect others. That's the way it's been put,
Kissinger in this case, referring to Allende in Chile. And with Cuba
it's explicit in the internal record. Arthur Schlesinger, presenting
the report of the Latin American Study Group to incoming President
Kennedy, wrote that the danger is the spread of the Castro idea of
taking matters into your own hands, which has a lot of appeal to others
in the same region that suffer from the same problems. Later internal
documents charged Cuba with successful defiance of U.S. policies going
back 150 years -- to the Monroe Doctrine -- and that can't be
tolerated. So there's kind of a state commitment to ensuring obedience.

Going
back to Iran, it's not only that it has substantial resources and that
it's part of the world's major energy system but it also defied the
United States. The United States, as we know, overthrew the
parliamentary government, installed a brutal tyrant, was helping him
develop nuclear power, in fact the very same programs that are now
considered a threat were being sponsored by the U.S. government, by
Cheney, Wolfowitz, Kissinger, and others, in the 1970s, as long as the
Shah was in power. But then the Iranians overthrew him, and they kept
U.S. hostages for several hundred days. And the United States
immediately turned to supporting Saddam Hussein and his war against
Iran as a way of punishing Iran. So that's a separate factor.

And
again, the will of the U.S. population and even US business is
considered mostly irrelevant. Seventy five percent of the population
here favors improving relations with Iran, instead of threats. But this
is disregarded. We don't have polls from the business world, but it's
pretty clear that the energy corporations would be quite happy to be
given authorization to go back into Iran instead of leaving all that to
their rivals. But the state won't allow it. And it is setting up
confrontations right now, very explicitly. Part of the reason is
strategic, geo-political, economic, but part of the reason is the mafia
complex. They have to be punished for disobeying us.

Shank: Venezuela has been successfully defiant with Chavez making a swing towards socialism. Where are they on our list?

Chomsky:
They're very high. The United States sponsored and supported a military
coup to overthrow the government. In fact, that's its last, most recent
effort in what used to be a conventional resort to such measures.

Shank: But why haven't we turned our sights more toward Venezuela?

Chomsky:
Oh they're there. There's a constant stream of abuse and attack by the
government and therefore the media, who are almost reflexively against
Venezuela. For several reasons. Venezuela is independent. It's
diversifying its exports to a limited extent, instead of just being
dependent on exports to the United States. And it's initiating moves
toward Latin American integration and independence. It's what they call
a Bolivarian alternative and the United States doesn't like any of that.

This
again is defiance of U.S. policies going back to the .
There's now a standard interpretation of this trend in Latin America,
another kind of party line. Latin America is all moving to the left,
from Venezuela to Argentina with rare exceptions, but there's a good
left and a bad left. The good left is Garcia and Lula, and then there's
the bad left which is Chavez, Morales, maybe Correa. And that's the
split.

In order to maintain that position, it's necessary to
resort to some fancy footwork. For example, it's necessary not to
report the fact that when Lula was re-elected in October, his foreign
trip and one of his first acts was to visit Caracas to support Chavez
and his electoral campaign and to dedicate a joint Venezuelan-Brazilian
project on the Orinoco River, to talk about new projects and so on.
It's necessary not to report the fact that a couple of weeks later in
Cochabamba, Bolivia, which is the heart of the bad guys, there was a
meeting of all South American leaders. There had been bad blood between
Chavez and Garcia, but it was apparently patched up. They laid plans
for pretty constructive South American integration, but that just
doesn't fit the U.S. agenda. So it wasn't reported.

Shank:
How is the political deadlock in Lebanon impacting the U.S.
government's decision to potentially go to war with Iran? Is there a
relationship at all?

Chomsky: There's a relationship. I
presume part of the reason for the U.S.-Israel invasion of Lebanon in
July -- and it is US-Israeli, the Lebanese are correct in calling it
that -- part of the reason I suppose was that Hezbollah is considered a
deterrent to a potential U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran. It had a
deterrent capacity, i.e. rockets. And the goal I presume was to wipe
out the deterrent so as to free up the United States and Israel for an
eventual attack on Iran. That's at least part of the reason. The
official reason given for the invasion can't be taken seriously for a
moment. That's the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of a
couple others. For decades Israel has been capturing, and kidnapping
Lebanese and Palestinian refugees on the high seas, from Cyprus to
Lebanon, killing them in Lebanon, bringing them to Israel, holding them
as hostages. It's been going on for decades, has anybody called for an
invasion of Israel?

Of course Israel doesn't want any competition
in the region. But there's no principled basis for the massive attack
on Lebanon, which was horrendous. In fact, one of the last acts of the
U.S.-Israeli invasion, right after the ceasefire was announced before
it was implemented, was to saturate much of the south with cluster
bombs. There's no military purpose for that, the war was over, the
ceasefire was coming.

UN de-mining groups that are working there
say that the scale is unprecedented. It's much worse than any other
place they've worked: Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, anywhere. There are
supposed to be about one million bomblets left there. A large
percentage of them don't explode until you pick them up, a child picks
them up, or a farmer hits it with a hoe or something. So what it does
basically is make the south uninhabitable until the mining teams, for
which the United States and Israel don't contribute, clean it up. This
is arable land. It means that farmers can't go back; it means that it
may undermine a potential Hezbollah deterrent. They apparently have
pretty much withdrawn from the south, according to the UN.

You
can't mention Hezbollah in the U.S. media without putting in the
context of "Iranian-supported Hezbollah." That's its name. Its name is
Iranian-supported Hezbollah. It gets Iranian support. But you can
mention Israel without saying US-supported Israel. So this is more
tacit propaganda. The idea that Hezbollah is acting as an agent of Iran
is very dubious. It's not accepted by specialists on Iran or
specialists on Hezbollah. But it's the party line. Or sometimes you can
put in Syria, i.e. "Syrian-supported Hezbollah," but since Syria is of
less interest now you have to emphasize Iranian support.

Shank: How can the U.S. government think an attack on Iran is feasible given troop availability, troop capacity, and public sentiment?

Chomsky:
As far as I'm aware, the military in the United States thinks it's
crazy. And from whatever leaks we have from intelligence, the
intelligence community thinks it's outlandish, but not impossible. If
you look at people who have really been involved in the Pentagon's
strategic planning for years, people like Sam Gardiner, they point out
that there are things that possibly could be done.

I don't think
any of the outside commentators at least as far as I'm aware have taken
very seriously the idea of bombing nuclear facilities. They say if
there will be bombing it'll be carpet bombing. So get the nuclear
facilities but get the rest of the country too, with an exception. By
accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in
Shi'ite-dominated areas. Iran's oil is concentrated right near the
gulf, which happens to be an Arab area, not Persian. Khuzestan is Arab,
has been loyal to Iran, fought with Iran not Iraq during the Iran-Iraq
war. This is a potential source of dissension. I would be amazed if
there isn't an attempt going on to stir up secessionist elements in
Khuzestan. U.S. forces right across the border in Iraq, including the
surge, are available potentially to "defend" an independent Khuzestan
against Iran, which is the way it would be put, if they can carry it
off.

Shank: Do you think that's what the surge was for?

Chomsky:
That's one possibility. There was a release of a Pentagon war-gaming
report, in December 2004, with Gardiner leading it. It was released and
published in the Atlantic Monthly. They couldn't come up with a
proposal that didn't lead to disaster, but one of the things they
considered was maintaining troop presence in Iraq beyond what's to be
used in Iraq for troop replacement and so on, and use them for a
potential land move in Iran -- presumably Khuzestan where the oil is.
If you could carry that off, you could just bomb the rest of the
country to dust.

Again, I would be amazed if there aren't efforts
to sponsor secessionist movements elsewhere, among the Azeri population
for example. It's a very complex ethnic mix in Iran; much of the
population isn't Persian. There are secessionist tendencies anyway and
almost certainly, without knowing any of the facts, the United States
is trying to stir them up, to break the country internally if possible.
The strategy appears to be: try to break the country up internally, try
to impel the leadership to be as harsh and brutal as possible.

That's
the immediate consequence of constant threats. Everyone knows that.
That's one of the reasons the reformists, Shirin Ebadi and Akbar Ganji
and others, are bitterly complaining about the U.S. threats, that it's
undermining their efforts to reform and democratize Iran. But that's
presumably its purpose. Since it's an obvious consequence you have to
assume it's the purpose. Just like in law, anticipated consequences are
taken as the evidence for intention. And here's it so obvious you can't
seriously doubt it.

So it could be that one strain of the policy
is to stir up secessionist movements, particularly in the oil rich
regions, the Arab regions near the Gulf, also the Azeri regions and
others. Second is to try to get the leadership to be as brutal and
harsh and repressive as possible, to stir up internal disorder and
maybe resistance. And a third is to try to pressure other countries,
and Europe is the most amenable, to join efforts to strangle Iran
economically. Europe is kind of dragging its feet but they usually go
along with the United States.

The efforts to intensify the
harshness of the regime show up in many ways. For example, the West
absolutely adores Ahmadinejad. Any wild statement that he comes out
with immediately gets circulated in headlines and mistranslated. They
love him. But anybody who knows anything about Iran, presumably the
editorial offices, knows that he doesn't have anything to do with
foreign policy. Foreign policy is in the hands of his superior, the
Supreme Leader Khamenei. But they don't report his statements,
particularly when his statements are pretty conciliatory. For example,
they love when Ahmadinejad says that Israel shouldn't exist, but they
don't like it when Khamenei right afterwards says that Iran supports
the Arab League position on Israel-Palestine. As far as I'm aware, it
never got reported. Actually you could find Khamenei's more
conciliatory positions in the Financial Times, but not here.
And it's repeated by Iranian diplomats but that's no good. The Arab
League proposal calls for normalization of relations ith Israel if it
accepts the international consensus of the two-state settlement which
has been blocked by the United States and Israel for 30 years. And
that's not a good story, so it's either not mentioned or it's hidden
somewhere.

It's very hard to predict the Bush administration
today because they're deeply irrational. They were irrational to start
with but now they're desperate. They have created an unimaginable
catastrophe in Iraq. This should've been one of the easiest military
occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the
worst military disasters in history. They can't control it and it's
almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can't discuss in
the United States because to discuss the reasons why they can't get out
would be to concede the reasons why they invaded.

We're supposed
to believe that oil had nothing to do with it, that if Iraq were
exporting pickles or jelly and the center of world oil production were
in the South Pacific that the United States would've liberated them
anyway. It has nothing to do with the oil, what a crass idea. Anyone
with their head screwed on knows that that can't be true. Allowing an
independent and sovereign Iraq could be a nightmare for the United
States. It would mean that it would be Shi'ite-dominated, at least if
it's minimally democratic. It would continue to improve relations with
Iran, just what the United States doesn't want to see. And beyond that,
right across the border in Saudi Arabia where most of Saudi oil is,
there happens to be a large Shi'ite population, probably a majority.

Moves
toward sovereignty in Iraq stimulate pressures first for human rights
among the bitterly repressed Shi'ite population but also toward some
degree of autonomy. You can imagine a kind of a loose Shi'ite alliance
in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, controlling most of the world's oil
and independent of the United States. And much worse, although Europe
can be intimidated by the United States, China can't. It's one of the
reasons, the main reasons, why China is considered a threat. We're back
to the Mafia principle.

China has been there for 3,000 years, has
contempt for the barbarians, is overcoming a century of domination, and
simply moves on its own. It does not get intimidated when Uncle Sam
shakes his fist. That's scary. In particular, it's dangerous in the
case of the Middle East. China is the center of the Asian energy
security grid, which includes the Central Asian states and Russia.
India is also hovering around the edge, South Korea is involved, and
Iran is an associate member of some kind. If the Middle East oil
resources around the Gulf, which are the main ones in the world, if
they link up to the Asian grid, the United States is really a
second-rate power. A lot is at stake in not withdrawing from Iraq.

I'm
sure that these issues are discussed in internal planning. It's
inconceivable that they can't think of this. But it's out of public
discussion, it's not in the media, it's not in the journals, it's not
in the Baker-Hamilton report. And I think you can understand the
reason. To bring up these issues would open the question why the United
States and Britain invaded. And that question is taboo.

It's a
principle that anything our leaders do is for noble reasons. It may be
mistaken, it may be ugly, but basically noble. And if you bring in
normal moderate, conservative, strategic, economic objectives you are
threatening that principle. It's remarkable the extent to which it's
held. So the original pretexts for the invasion were weapons of mass
destruction and ties to al-Qaida that nobody but maybe Wolfowitz or
Cheney took seriously. The single question, as they kept reiterating in
the leadership, was: will Saddam give up his programs of weapons of
mass destruction? The single question was answered a couple of months
later, the wrong way. And quickly the party line shifted. In November
2003, Bush announced his freedom agenda: our real goal is to bring
democracy to Iraq, to transform the Middle East. That became the party
line, instantly.

But it's a mistake to pick out individuals
because it's close to universal, even in scholarship. In fact you can
even find scholarly articles that begin by giving the evidence that
it's complete farce but nevertheless accept it. There was a pretty good
study of the freedom agenda in Current History by two scholars
and they give the facts. They point out that the freedom agenda was
announced on November 2003 after the failure to find weapons of mass
destruction, but the freedom agenda is real even if there's no evidence
for it.

In fact, if you look at our policies they're the
opposite. Take Palestine. There was a free election in Palestine, but
it came out the wrong way. So instantly, the United States and Israel
with Europe tagging along, moved to punish the Palestinian people, and
punish them harshly, because they voted the wrong way in a free
election. That's accepted here in the West as perfectly normal. That
illustrates the deep hatred and contempt for democracy among western
elites, so deep-seated they can't even perceive it when it's in front
of their eyes. You punish people severely if they vote the wrong way in
a free election. There's a pretext for that too, repeated every day:
Hamas must agree to first recognize Israel, second to end all violence,
third to accept past agreements. Try to find a mention of the fact that
the United States and Israel reject all three of those. They obviously
don't recognize Palestine, they certainly don't withdraw the use of
violence or the threat of it -- in fact they insist on it -- and tey
don't accept past agreements, including the road map.

I suspect
one of the reasons why Jimmy Carter's book has come under such fierce
attack is because it's the first time, I think, in the mainstream, that
one can find the truth about the road map. I have never seen anything
in the mainstream that discusses the fact that Israel instantly
rejected the road map with U.S. support. They formally accepted it but
added 14 reservations that totally eviscerated it. It was done
instantly. It's public knowledge, I've written about it, talked about
it, so have others, but I've never seen it mentioned in the mainstream
before. And obviously they don't accept the Arab League proposal or any
other serious proposal. In fact they've been blocking the international
consensus on the two-state solution for decades. But Hamas has to
accept them.

It really makes no sense. Hamas is a political party
and political parties don't recognize other countries. And Hamas itself
has made it very clear, they actually carried out a truce for a year
and a half, didn't respond to Israeli attacks, and have called for a
long-term truce, during which it'd be possible to negotiate a
settlement along the lines of the international consensus and the Arab
League proposal.

All of this is obvious, it's right on the
surface, and that's just one example of the deep hatred of democracy on
the part of western elites. It's a striking example but you can add
case after case. Yet, the president announced the freedom agenda and if
the dear leader said something, it's got to be true, kind of North
Korean style. Therefore there's a freedom agenda even if there's a
mountain of evidence against it, the only evidence for it is in words,
even apart from the timing.

Shank: In the 2008
presidential election, how will the candidates approach Iran? Do you
think Iran will be a deciding factor in the elections?

Chomsky:
What they're saying so far is not encouraging. I still think, despite
everything, that the US is very unlikely to attack Iran. It could be a
huge catastrophe; nobody knows what the consequences would be. I
imagine that only an administration that's really desperate would
resort to that. But if the Democratic candidates are on the verge of
winning the election, the administration is going to be desperate. It
still has the problem of Iraq: can't stay in, and can't get out.

Shank: The Senate Democrats can't seem to achieve consensus on this issue.

Chomsky:
I think there's a reason for it. The reason is just thinking through
the consequences of allowing an independent, partially democratic Iraq.
The consequences are nontrivial. We may decide to hide our heads in the
sand and pretend we can't think it through because we cannot allow the
question of why the United States invaded to open, but that's very
self-destructive.

Shank: Is there any connection to this
conversation and why we cannot find the political will and momentum to
enact legislation that would reduce C02 emissions levels, institute a
cap-and-trade system, etc.?

Chomsky: It's perfectly clear
why the United States didn't sign the Kyoto Protocol. Again, there's
overwhelming popular support for signing, in fact it's so strong that a
majority of Bush voters in 2004 thought that he was in favor of the
Kyoto Protocol, it's such an obvious thing to support. Popular support
for alternative energy has been very high for years. But it harms
corporate profits. After all, that's the Administration's constituency.

I
remember talking to, 40 years ago, one of the leading people in the
government who was involved in arms control, pressing for arms control
measures, détente, and so on. He's very high up, and we were talking
about whether arms control could succeed. And only partially as a joke
he said, "Well it might succeed if the high tech industry makes more
profit from arms control than it can make from weapons-related research
and production. If we get to that tipping point maybe arms control will
work." He was partially joking but there's a truth that lies behind it.

Shank: How do we move forward on climate change without beggaring the South?

Chomsky:
Unfortunately, the poor countries, the south, are going to suffer the
worst according to most projections -- and that being so, it undermines
support in the north for doing much. Look at the ozone story. As long
as it was the southern hemisphere that was being threatened, there was
very little talk about it. When it was discovered in the north, very
quickly actions were taken to do something about it. Right now there's
discussion of putting serious effort into developing a malaria vaccine,
because global warming might extend malaria to the rich countries, so
something should be done about it.

Same thing on health
insurance. Here's an issue where, for the general population, it's been
the leading domestic issue, or close to it, for years. And there's a
consensus for a national healthcare system on the model of other
industrial countries, maybe expanding Medicare to everyone or something
like that. Well, that's off the agenda, nobody can talk about that. The
insurance companies don't like it, the financial industry doesn't like
and so on.

Now there's a change taking place. What's happening is
that manufacturing industries are beginning to turn to support for it
because they're being undermined by the hopelessly inefficient U.S.
healthcare system. It's the worst in the industrial world by far, and
they have to pay for it. Since it's employer-compensated, in part,
their production costs are much higher than those competitors who have
a national healthcare system. Take GM. If it produces the same car in
Detroit and in Windsor across the border in Canada, it saves, I forget
the number, I think over $1000 with the Windsor production because
there's a national healthcare system, it's much more efficient, it's
much cheaper, it's much more effective.

So the manufacturing
industry is starting to press for some kind of national healthcare. Now
it's beginning to put it on the agenda. It doesn't matter if the
population wants it. What 90% of the population wants would be kind of
irrelevant. But if part of the concentration of corporate capital that
basically runs the country -- another thing we're not allowed to say
but it's obvious -- if part of that sector becomes in favor then the
issue moves onto the political agenda.

Shank: So how does the south get its voice heard on the international agenda? Is the World Social Forum a place for it?

Chomsky:
The World Social Forum is very important but of course that can't be
covered in the West. In fact, I remember reading an article, I think in
the Financial Times, about the two major forums that were taking place.
One was the World Economic Forum in Davos and a second was a forum in
Herzeliyah in Israel, a right wing forum in Herzeliyah. Those were the
two forums. Of course there was also the World Social Forum in Nairobi
but that's only tens of thousands of people from around the world.

Shank: With the trend towards vilifying the G77 at the UN one wonders where the developing world can effectively voice their concerns.

Chomsky:
The developing world voice can be amplified enormously by support from
the wealthy and the privileged, otherwise it's very likely to be
marginalized, as in every other issue.