The other week in a North American shopping mall, an anti-war protester was arrested and handcuffed for sporting a tee shirt which bore the slogan “Give Peace a Chance.” The mall intended to prosecute him for trespass; in the end, the charge was dropped, but in future the young man in question may be less inclined to parade his pacifist opinions.
Harassment of those who oppose the war to topple Saddam Hussein is becoming increasingly common in George Bush’s America. Indeed, the war’s critics are being more or less blatantly intimidated into practicing self-censorship. Not perhaps since the anti-Communist hysteria of the early 1950s has American society been gripped by such rabid intolerance, such a paranoid fear of “enemies within.” It is an atmosphere in which the fanatically anti-Communist senator of those days, Joseph McCarthy, would surely be much at home — albeit that the new McCarthyism is inspired not by communism but terrorism, with Muslims taking the place once occupied by the Russians in American demonology.
Not that dissent is being systematically suppressed in the United States — as it was in the old Soviet Union. Go into any American bookstore and you can buy the works of uncompromising critics of US imperialism like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky (whose polemic 9/11 was a best-seller). From time to time, you might even hear these professional “contrarians” voicing their views on American television or radio. All the same, there is no denying that in the public culture of the United States political dissidents have long since been reduced to marginal status.
The paradox, in Chomsky’s case, is that even as he has become increasingly isolated from the American mainstream, his following both in and outside the US has swelled to vast proportions. However muzzled by the American media, Chomsky commands attention all over the world as a champion of human rights and excoriator of US foreign policy. Last December, the 75-year-old philosopher and political activist was in London to give a talk organized by the British left-wing magazine Red Pepper, and as usual people turned out to hear him in large numbers.
Not without irony, Chomsky told his audience at London’s Logan Hall that, when all due allowances are made, America is in fact a remarkably open society. Admittedly, there is much to do with the state that the American media kindly declines to report, but those who wish to acquaint themselves with the current and future objectives of US strategists are free to do so. The relevant information is generally found to be on the public record; it is simply a question of tracking it down. Chomsky never fails to track it down.
Chomsky focused on a report called Global Trends, 2015, published three years ago by he US National Intelligence Council. The work of academic “experts” and others, this collection of geopolitical predictions anticipated that over the coming decade or so globalization is going to bring with it not growing human solidarity but “chronic financial volatility” and a “widening economic divide.” Expect, warned the report, increasing ethnic, ideological and religious extremism. Expect, too, a huge surge in violence — much of it directed against the United States.
It is this forecast, Chomsky pointed out, which explains the vast expansion of US military power (by now reputed to equal the military power of the whole of rest of the world put together). From the point of view of exponents of American realpolitik, such an expansion represents an entirely rational attempt to “protect US national interests against the victims of the predicted deepening economic divide.”
Chomsky drew particular attention to the thinking of Washington’s “policy wonks” regarding the Middle East. Global Trends, 2015, revealed that they are reckoning on a rising demand for energy that will undermine the Kyoto Protocol whether anyone signs it or not. And because the Gulf is expected to increase in significance to the world energy market, it follows that the US must dominate the whole region. Maintaining that what is at issue here is not “access” but “control,” Chomsky reminded his audience that there is nothing new about American hegemonic designs on the Middle East. Ever since the end of World War II, the notion that the Gulf is the most strategically vital area in the world has been a fundamental axiom of US foreign policy.
Gore Vidal is likewise convinced of the historic centrality of oil to US global strategy; indeed, as tireless scourges of American imperialism, he and Noam Chomsky are in many ways kindred spirits. Bristling with contempt for the “oil-and-gas junta” that has taken charge of America’s destiny, Vidal’s latest book, Dreaming War, brings together his latest mordant reflections on the “military-industrial-complex,” and raises important questions about Sept. 11 — questions which have almost certainly received more consideration outside than inside the United States.
Vidal has long been convinced that during World War II Franklin D. Roosevelt deliberately provoked Japan into declaring war on the United States in order to whip up war fever among the previously isolationist American public. Beguiled by the parallels between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, he cannot rid himself of the feeling that for the warmongers of the Bush administration those attacks were strangely happy accidents.
In Dreaming War, Vidal makes much of the Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 remarks on the value to Washington’s empire-builders of a “truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat;” the hawkish Brzezinski’s point was that in an increasingly multiracial America some such a threat was needed to unite American public opinion behind US foreign policy objectives. Vidal makes much, too, of the barely credible “failure” of the US intelligence services to act on advance warnings of a major terrorist attack, and of George Bush’s own puzzling conduct on the fateful day when the twin towers crashed to the ground. Gore Vidal’s dismay about his country’s cynicism and rapacity knows no bounds — but he suspects that the American empire is already imploding, bankrupted by the madly grandiose ambitions of its proponents. Noam Chomsky, too, is optimistic that the overweening US may be facing its nemesis and takes heart from the unprecedented scale of opposition to its swaggering posture on the world stage.
At a time of pan-global anti-Americanism, it is easy to forget that some of America’s severest critics are Americans themselves.
Arab News Opinion 31 March 2003
