[P2P-F] Fwd: Noam Chomsky: Masters of Mankind (from his new book::Who Rules the World--2016)

Wed May 11 00:09:58 CEST 2016

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From: Tikkun & The (interfaith & secular-humanist-and-atheist welcoming)
Network of Spiritual Progressives <magazine at tikkun.org>
Date: Tue, May 10, 2016 at 10:02 PM
Subject: Noam Chomsky: Masters of Mankind (from his new book::Who Rules the
World--2016)
To: Michelsub2004 at gmail.com

<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=yyk6BK9jLcsWmUcfTuHqSDm2UvLy1SiI>

You can read this online at: http://
www.tikkun.org/nextgen/noam-chomsky-who-rules-the-world
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=Huglb7rnD%2B0kdQQbnmSs0jm2UvLy1SiI>

Editor’s Note:  Noam Chomsky is one of the great contemporary analysts of
the global impact of American power. I first met Chomsky when we both were
involved in challenging America’s disastrous war in Vietnam–never yet
adequately mourned by the U.S. government and its architects like Henry
Kissinger never punished for the war crimes for which we were responsible.
Chomsky has been a voice of sanity and a scholar whose broad vision of the
role of America in the world puts to shame the shallow interpretations of
American politics that still mesmerize the media and mislead the American
people. Instead, the media and much of academia dismisses Chomsky as a
leftist extremist rather than addressing the reasoned and documented
analyses he has developed in his many books. Please read this article and
his new book *Who Rules the World*

–Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun magazine www.tikkun.org
RabbiLerner.Tikkun at gmail.com

*American Power Under Challenge*

*Masters of Mankind (Part 1)*

By *Noam Chomsky *
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=taNMhbXKMm1%2F2t3Y%2BaJSqJJKPU8SNa%2Fl>

[*This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted **from Noam Chomsky’s
new book, *Who Rules the World?
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=qwbet94Fa8xhctnXH1cgqDm2UvLy1SiI>
 *(Metro**politan Books). It is reprinted by Tikkun with permission from
our ally TomDispatch.com.*

When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard
convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great
powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That
is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of
abstraction can also be highly misleading.

States of course have complex internal structures, and the choices and
decisions of the political leadership are heavily influenced by internal
concentrations of power, while the general population is often
marginalized. That is true even for the more democratic societies, and
obviously for others. We cannot gain a realistic understanding of who rules
the world while ignoring the “masters of mankind,” as Adam Smith called
them: in his day, the merchants and manufacturers of England; in ours,
multinational conglomerates, huge financial institutions, retail empires,
and the like. Still following Smith, it is also wise to attend to the “vile
maxim” to which the “masters of mankind” are dedicated: “All for ourselves
and nothing for other people” -- a doctrine known otherwise as bitter and
incessant class war, often one-sided, much to the detriment of the people
of the home country and the world.

In the contemporary global order, the institutions of the masters hold
enormous power, not only in the international arena but also within their
home states, on which they rely to protect their power and to provide
economic support by a wide variety of means. When we consider the role of
the masters of mankind, we turn to such state policy priorities of the
moment as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the investor-rights
agreements mislabeled “free-trade agreements” in propaganda and commentary.
They are negotiated in secret, apart from the hundreds of corporate lawyers
and lobbyists writing the crucial details. The intention is to have them
adopted in good Stalinist style with “fast track” procedures designed to
block discussion and allow only the choice of yes or no (hence yes). The
designers regularly do quite well, not surprisingly. People are incidental,
with the consequences one might anticipate.

*The Second Superpower*

The neoliberal programs of the past generation have concentrated wealth and
power in far fewer hands while undermining functioning democracy, but they
have aroused opposition as well, most prominently in Latin America but also
in the centers of global power. The European Union (EU), one of the more
promising developments of the post-World War II period, has been tottering
because of the harsh effect of the policies of austerity during recession,
condemned even by the economists of the International Monetary Fund (if not
the IMF’s political actors). Democracy has been undermined as decision
making shifted to the Brussels bureaucracy, with the northern banks casting
their shadow over their proceedings.

Mainstream parties have been rapidly losing members to left and to right.
The executive director of the Paris-based research group EuropaNova
attributes the general disenchantment to “a mood of angry impotence as the
real power to shape events largely shifted from national political leaders
[who, in principle at least, are subject to democratic politics] to the
market, the institutions of the European Union and corporations,” quite in
accord with neoliberal doctrine. Very similar processes are under way in
the United States, for somewhat similar reasons, a matter of significance
and concern not just for the country but, because of U.S. power, for the
world.

The rising opposition to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial
aspect of the standard convention: it sets aside the public, which often
fails to accept the approved role of “spectators” (rather than
“participants”) assigned to it in liberal democratic theory. Such
disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant classes. Just
keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people
who formed the militias that he was to command as “an exceedingly dirty and
nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower
class of these people.”

In *Violent Politics*, his masterful review of insurgencies from “the
American insurgency” to contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, William Polk
concludes that General Washington “was so anxious to sideline [the fighters
he despised] that he came close to losing the Revolution.” Indeed, he
“might have actually done so” had France not massively intervened and
“saved the Revolution,” which until then had been won by guerrillas -- whom
we would now call “terrorists” -- while Washington’s British-style army
“was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”

A common feature of successful insurgencies, Polk records, is that once
popular support dissolves after victory, the leadership suppresses the
“dirty and nasty people” who actually won the war with guerrilla tactics
and terror, for fear that they might challenge class privilege. The elites’
contempt for “the lower class of these people” has taken various forms
throughout the years. In recent times one expression of this contempt is
the call for passivity and obedience (“moderation in democracy”) by liberal
internationalists reacting to the dangerous democratizing effects of the
popular movements of the 1960s.

Sometimes states do choose to follow public opinion, eliciting much fury in
centers of power. One dramatic case was in 2003, when the Bush
administration called on Turkey to join its invasion of Iraq. Ninety-five
percent of Turks opposed that course of action and, to the amazement and
horror of Washington, the Turkish government adhered to their views. Turkey
was bitterly condemned for this departure from responsible behavior. Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, designated by the press as the
“idealist-in-chief” of the administration, berated the Turkish military for
permitting the malfeasance of the government and demanded an apology.
Unperturbed by these and innumerable other illustrations of our fabled
“yearning for democracy,” respectable commentary continued to laud
President George W. Bush for his dedication to “democracy promotion,” or
sometimes criticized him for his naïveté in thinking that an outside power
could impose its democratic yearnings on others.

The Turkish public was not alone. Global opposition to U.S.-UK aggression
was overwhelming. Support for Washington’s war plans scarcely reached 10%
almost anywhere, according to international polls. Opposition sparked huge
worldwide protests, in the United States as well, probably the first time
in history that imperial aggression was strongly protested even before it
was officially launched. On the front page of the *New York Times*,
journalist Patrick Tyler reported that “there may still be two superpowers
on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”

Unprecedented protest in the United States was a manifestation of the
opposition to aggression that began decades earlier in the condemnation of
the U.S. wars in Indochina, reaching a scale that was substantial and
influential, even if far too late. By 1967, when the antiwar movement was
becoming a significant force, military historian and Vietnam specialist
Bernard Fall warned that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity... is
threatened with extinction... [as] the countryside literally dies under the
blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this
size.”

But the antiwar movement did become a force that could not be ignored. Nor
could it be ignored when Ronald Reagan came into office determined to
launch an assault on Central America. His administration mimicked closely
the steps John F. Kennedy had taken 20 years earlier in launching the war
against South Vietnam, but had to back off because of the kind of vigorous
public protest that had been lacking in the early 1960s. The assault was
awful enough. The victims have yet to recover. But what happened to South
Vietnam and later all of Indochina, where “the second superpower” imposed
its impediments only much later in the conflict, was incomparably worse.

It is often argued that the enormous public opposition to the invasion of
Iraq had no effect. That seems incorrect to me. Again, the invasion was
horrifying enough, and its aftermath is utterly grotesque. Nevertheless, it
could have been far worse. Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of Bush’s top officials could never even
contemplate the sort of measures that President Kennedy and President
Lyndon Johnson adopted 40 years earlier largely without protest.

*Western Power Under Pressure*

There is far more to say, of course, about the factors in determining state
policy that are put to the side when we adopt the standard convention that
states are the actors in international affairs. But with such nontrivial
caveats as these, let us nevertheless adopt the convention, at least as a
first approximation to reality. Then the question of who rules the world
leads at once to such concerns as China’s rise to power and its challenge
to the United States and “world order,” the new cold war simmering in
eastern Europe, the Global War on Terror, American hegemony and American
decline, and a range of similar considerations.

The challenges faced by Western power at the outset of 2016 are usefully
summarized within the conventional framework by Gideon Rachman, chief
foreign-affairs columnist for the London *Financial Times*. He begins by
reviewing the Western picture of world order: “Ever since the end of the
Cold War, the overwhelming power of the U.S. military has been the central
fact of international politics.” This is particularly crucial in three
regions: East Asia, where “the U.S. Navy has become used to treating the
Pacific as an ‘American lake’”; Europe, where NATO -- meaning the United
States, which “accounts for a staggering three-quarters of NATO’s military
spending” -- “guarantees the territorial integrity of its member states”;
and the Middle East, where giant U.S. naval and air bases “exist to
reassure friends and to intimidate rivals.”

The problem of world order today, Rachman continues, is that “these
security orders are now under challenge in all three regions” because of
Russian intervention in Ukraine and Syria, and because of China turning its
nearby seas from an American lake to “clearly contested water.” The
fundamental question of international relations, then, is whether the
United States should “accept that other major powers should have some kind
of zone of influence in their neighborhoods.” Rachman thinks it should, for
reasons of “diffusion of economic power around the world -- combined with
simple common sense.”

There are, to be sure, ways of looking at the world from different
standpoints. But let us keep to these three regions, surely critically
important ones.

*The Challenges Today: East Asia*

Beginning with the “American lake,” some eyebrows might be raised over the
report in mid-December 2015 that “an American B-52 bomber on a routine
mission over the South China Sea unintentionally flew within two nautical
miles of an artificial island built by China, senior defense officials
said, exacerbating a hotly divisive issue for Washington and Beijing.”
Those familiar with the grim record of the 70 years of the nuclear weapons
era will be all too aware that this is the kind of incident that has often
come perilously close to igniting terminal nuclear war. One need not be a
supporter of China’s provocative and aggressive actions in the South China
Sea to notice that the incident did not involve a Chinese nuclear-capable
bomber in the Caribbean, or off the coast of California, where China has no
pretensions of establishing a “Chinese lake.” Luckily for the world.

<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=FJUQ4%2F6O%2Fqm3e%2BGADDLKEzm2UvLy1SiI>Chinese
leaders understand very well that their country’s maritime trade routes are
ringed with hostile powers from Japan through the Malacca Straits and
beyond, backed by overwhelming U.S. military force. Accordingly, China is
proceeding to expand westward with extensive investments and careful moves
toward integration. In part, these developments are within the framework of
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes the Central
Asian states and Russia, and soon India and Pakistan with Iran as one of
the observers -- a status that was denied to the United States, which was
also called on to close all military bases in the region*.* China is
constructing a modernized version of the old silk roads, with the intent
not only of integrating the region under Chinese influence, but also of
reaching Europe and the Middle Eastern oil-producing regions. It is pouring
huge sums into creating an integrated Asian energy and commercial system,
with extensive high-speed rail lines and pipelines.

One element of the program is a highway through some of the world’s tallest
mountains to the new Chinese-developed port of Gwadar in Pakistan, which
will protect oil shipments from potential U.S. interference. The program
may also, China and Pakistan hope, spur industrial development in Pakistan,
which the United States has not undertaken despite massive military aid,
and might also provide an incentive for Pakistan to clamp down on domestic
terrorism, a serious issue for China in western Xinjiang Province. Gwadar
will be part of China’s “string of pearls,” bases being constructed in the
Indian Ocean for commercial purposes but potentially also for military use,
with the expectation that China might someday be able to project power as
far as the Persian Gulf for the first time in the modern era.

All of these moves remain immune to Washington’s overwhelming military
power, short of annihilation by nuclear war, which would destroy the United
States as well.

In 2015, China also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank
(AIIB), with itself as the main shareholder. Fifty-six nations participated
in the opening in Beijing in June, including U.S. allies Australia,
Britain, and others which joined in defiance of Washington’s wishes. The
United States and Japan were absent. Some analysts believe that the new
bank might turn out to be a competitor to the Bretton Woods institutions
(the IMF and the World Bank), in which the United States holds veto power.
There are also some expectations that the SCO might eventually become a
counterpart to NATO.

*The Challenges Today: Eastern Europe*

Turning to the second region, Eastern Europe, there is a crisis brewing at
the NATO-Russian border. It is no small matter. In his illuminating and
judicious scholarly study of the region, *Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the
Borderlands*, Richard Sakwa writes -- all too plausibly -- that the
“Russo-Georgian war of August 2008 was in effect the first of the ‘wars to
stop NATO enlargement’; the Ukraine crisis of 2014 is the second. It is not
clear whether humanity would survive a third.”

The West sees NATO enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along
with much of the Global South, has a different opinion, as do some
prominent Western voices. George Kennan warned early on that NATO
enlargement is a “tragic mistake,” and he was joined by senior American
statesmen in an open letter to the White House describing it as a “policy
error of historic proportions.”

The present crisis has its origins in 1991, with the end of the Cold War
and the collapse of the Soviet Union. There were then two contrasting
visions of a new security system and political economy in Eurasia. In
Sakwa’s words, one vision was of a “‘Wider Europe,’ with the EU at its
heart but increasingly coterminous with the Euro-Atlantic security and
political community; and on the other side there [was] the idea of ‘Greater
Europe,’ a vision of a continental Europe, stretching from Lisbon to
Vladivostok, that has multiple centers, including Brussels, Moscow and
Ankara, but with a common purpose in overcoming the divisions that have
traditionally plagued the continent.”

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was the major proponent of Greater Europe,
a concept that also had European roots in Gaullism and other initiatives.
However, as Russia collapsed under the devastating market reforms of the
1990s, the vision faded, only to be renewed as Russia began to recover and
seek a place on the world stage under Vladimir Putin who, along with his
associate Dmitry Medvedev, has repeatedly “called for the geopolitical
unification of all of ‘Greater Europe’ from Lisbon to Vladivostok, to
create a genuine ‘strategic partnership.’”

These initiatives were “greeted with polite contempt,” Sakwa writes,
regarded as “little more than a cover for the establishment of a ‘Greater
Russia’ by stealth” and an effort to “drive a wedge” between North America
and Western Europe. Such concerns trace back to earlier Cold War fears that
Europe might become a “third force” independent of both the great and minor
superpowers and moving toward closer links to the latter (as can be seen in
Willy Brandt’s *Ostpolitik* and other initiatives).

The Western response to Russia’s collapse was triumphalist. It was hailed
as signaling “the end of history,” the final victory of Western capitalist
democracy, almost as if Russia were being instructed to revert to its
pre-World War I status as a virtual economic colony of the West. NATO
enlargement began at once, in violation of verbal assurances to Gorbachev
that NATO forces would not move “one inch to the east” after he agreed that
a unified Germany could become a NATO member -- a remarkable concession, in
the light of history. That discussion kept to East Germany. The possibility
that NATO might expand *beyond *Germany was not discussed with Gorbachev,
even if privately considered.

Soon, NATO did begin to move beyond, right to the borders of Russia. The
general mission of NATO was officially changed to a mandate to protect
“crucial infrastructure” of the global energy system, sea lanes and
pipelines, giving it a global area of operations. Furthermore, under a
crucial Western revision of the now widely heralded doctrine of
“responsibility to protect,” sharply different from the official U.N.
version, NATO may now also serve as an intervention force under U.S.
command.

Of particular concern to Russia are plans to expand NATO to Ukraine. These
plans were articulated explicitly at the Bucharest NATO summit of April
2008, when Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual membership in NATO.
The wording was unambiguous: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s
Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that
these countries will become members of NATO.” With the “Orange Revolution”
victory of pro-Western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department
representative Daniel Fried rushed there and “emphasized U.S. support for
Ukraine’s NATO and Euro-Atlantic aspirations,” as a WikiLeaks report
revealed.

Russia’s concerns are easily understandable. They are outlined by
international relations scholar John Mearsheimer in the leading U.S.
establishment journal, *Foreign Affairs.* He writes that “the taproot of
the current crisis [over Ukraine] is NATO expansion and Washington’s
commitment to move Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit and integrate it into the
West,” which Putin viewed as “a direct threat to Russia’s core interests.”

“Who can blame him?” Mearsheimer asks, pointing out that “Washington may
not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it.”
That should not be too difficult. After all, as everyone knows, “The United
States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces
anywhere in the Western hemisphere, much less on its borders.”

In fact, the U.S. stand is far stronger. It does not tolerate what is
officially called “successful defiance” of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823,
which declared (but could not yet implement) U.S. control of the
hemisphere. And a small country that carries out such successful defiance
may be subjected to “the terrors of the earth” and a crushing embargo -- as
happened to Cuba. We need not ask how the United States would have reacted
had the countries of Latin America joined the Warsaw Pact, with plans for
Mexico and Canada to join as well. The merest hint of the first tentative
steps in that direction would have been “terminated with extreme
prejudice,” to adopt CIA lingo.

As in the case of China, one does not have to regard Putin’s moves and
motives favorably to understand the logic behind them, nor to grasp the
importance of understanding that logic instead of issuing imprecations
against it. As in the case of China, a great deal is at stake, reaching as
far -- literally -- as questions of survival.

*The Challenges Today: The Islamic World*

Let us turn to the third region of major concern, the (largely) Islamic
world, also the scene of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) that George W.
Bush declared in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attack. To be more accurate,
*re-*declared. The GWOT was declared by the Reagan administration when it
took office, with fevered rhetoric about a “plague spread by depraved
opponents of civilization itself” (as Reagan put it) and a “return to
barbarism in the modern age” (the words of George Shultz, his secretary of
state). The original GWOT has been quietly removed from history. It very
quickly turned into a murderous and destructive terrorist war afflicting
Central America, southern Africa, and the Middle East, with grim
repercussions to the present, even leading to condemnation of the United
States by the World Court (which Washington dismissed). In any event, it is
not the right story for history, so it is gone.

The success of the Bush-Obama version of GWOT can readily be evaluated on
direct inspection. When the war was declared, the terrorist targets were
confined to a small corner of tribal Afghanistan. They were protected by
Afghans, who mostly disliked or despised them, under the tribal code of
hospitality -- which baffled Americans when poor peasants refused “to turn
over Osama bin Laden for the, to them, astronomical sum of $25 million.”

There are good reasons to believe that a well-constructed police action, or
even serious diplomatic negotiations with the Taliban, might have placed
those suspected of the 9/11 crimes in American hands for trial and
sentencing. But such options were off the table. Instead, the reflexive
choice was large-scale violence -- not with the goal of overthrowing the
Taliban (that came later) but to make clear U.S. contempt for tentative
Taliban offers of the possible extradition of bin Laden. How serious these
offers were we do not know, since the possibility of exploring them was
never entertained. Or perhaps the United States was just intent on “trying
to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They
don’t care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will
lose.”

That was the judgment of the highly respected anti-Taliban leader Abdul
Haq, one of the many oppositionists who condemned the American bombing
campaign launched in October 2001 as "a big setback" for their efforts to
overthrow the Taliban from within, a goal they considered within their
reach. His judgment is confirmed by Richard A. Clarke, who was chairman of
the Counterterrorism Security Group at the White House under President
George W. Bush when the plans to attack Afghanistan were made. As Clarke
describes the meeting, when informed that the attack would violate
international law, "the President yelled in the narrow conference room, ‘I
don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some
ass.'" The attack was also bitterly opposed by the major aid organizations
working in Afghanistan, who warned that millions were on the verge of
starvation and that the consequences might be horrendous.

The consequences for poor Afghanistan years later need hardly be reviewed.

The next target of the sledgehammer was Iraq. The U.S.-UK invasion, utterly
without credible pretext, is the major crime of the twenty-first century.
The invasion led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people in a
country where the civilian society had already been devastated by American
and British sanctions that were regarded as “genocidal” by the two
distinguished international diplomats who administered them, and resigned
in protest for this reason. The invasion also generated millions of
refugees, largely destroyed the country, and instigated a sectarian
conflict that is now tearing apart Iraq and the entire region. It is an
astonishing fact about our intellectual and moral culture that in informed
and enlightened circles it can be called, blandly, “the liberation of Iraq.”

Pentagon and British Ministry of Defense polls found that only 3% of Iraqis
regarded the U.S. security role in their neighborhood as legitimate, less
than 1% believed that “coalition” (U.S.-UK) forces were good for their
security, 80% opposed the presence of coalition forces in the country, and
a majority supported attacks on coalition troops. Afghanistan has been
destroyed beyond the possibility of reliable polling, but there are
indications that something similar may be true there as well. Particularly
in Iraq the United States suffered a severe defeat, abandoning its official
war aims, and leaving the country under the influence of the sole victor,
Iran.

The sledgehammer was also wielded elsewhere, notably in Libya, where the
three traditional imperial powers (Britain, France, and the United States)
procured Security Council resolution 1973 and instantly violated it,
becoming the air force of the rebels. The effect was to undercut the
possibility of a peaceful, negotiated settlement; sharply increase
casualties (by at least a factor of 10, according to political scientist
Alan Kuperman); leave Libya in ruins, in the hands of warring militias;
and, more recently, to provide the Islamic State with a base that it can
use to spread terror beyond. Quite sensible diplomatic proposals by the
African Union, accepted in principle by Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, were
ignored by the imperial triumvirate, as Africa specialist Alex de Waal
reviews. A huge flow of weapons and jihadis has spread terror and violence
from West Africa (now the champion for terrorist murders) to the Levant,
while the NATO attack also sent a flood of refugees from Africa to Europe.

Yet another triumph of “humanitarian intervention,” and, as the long and
often ghastly record reveals, not an unusual one, going back to its modern
origins four centuries ago.

*The Costs of Violence*
*Masters of Mankind (Part 2)*
By Noam Chomsky
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=pIBvw6FdqePe7e0A7A1Kwjm2UvLy1SiI>

In brief, the Global War on Terror sledgehammer strategy has spread jihadi
terror from a tiny corner of Afghanistan to much of the world, from Africa
through the Levant and South Asia to Southeast Asia. It has also incited
attacks in Europe and the United States. The invasion of Iraq made a
substantial contribution to this process, much as intelligence agencies had
predicted. Terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank estimate
that the Iraq War “generated a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly
rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of
additional terrorist attacks and thousands of civilian lives lost; even
when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the
rest of the world have increased by more than one-third.” Other exercises
have been similarly productive.

A group of major human rights organizations -- Physicians for Social
Responsibility (U.S.), Physicians for Global Survival (Canada), and
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (Germany) --
conducted a study that sought "to provide as realistic an estimate as
possible of the total body count in the three main war zones [Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan] during 12 years of ‘war on terrorism,'"
including an extensive review “of the major studies and data published on
the numbers of victims in these countries,” along with additional
information on military actions. Their "conservative estimate" is that
these wars killed about 1.3 million people, a toll that "could also be in
excess of 2 million." A database search by independent researcher David
Peterson in the days following the publication of the report found
virtually no mention of it. Who cares?

More generally, studies carried out by the Oslo Peace Research Institute
show that two-thirds of the region’s conflict fatalities were produced in
originally internal disputes where outsiders imposed their solutions. In
such conflicts, 98% of fatalities were produced only after outsiders had
entered the domestic dispute with their military might. In Syria, the
number of direct conflict fatalities more than tripled after the West
initiated air strikes against the self-declared Islamic State and the CIA
started its indirect military interference in the war -- interference which
appears to have drawn the Russians in as advanced US antitank missiles were
decimating the forces of their ally Bashar al-Assad. Early indications are
that Russian bombing is having the usual consequences.

The evidence reviewed by political scientist Timo Kivimäki indicates that
the “protection wars [fought by ‘coalitions of the willing’] have become
the main source of violence in the world, occasionally contributing over
50% of total conflict fatalities.” Furthermore, in many of these cases,
including Syria, as he reviews, there were opportunities for diplomatic
settlement that were ignored. That has also been true in other horrific
situations, including the Balkans in the early 1990s, the first Gulf War,
and of course the Indochina wars, the worst crime since World War II. In
the case of Iraq the question does not even arise. There surely are some
lessons here.

The general consequences of resorting to the sledgehammer against
vulnerable societies comes as little surprise. William Polk’s careful study
of insurgencies, *Violent Politics*, should be essential reading for those
who want to understand today’s conflicts, and surely for planners, assuming
that they care about human consequences and not merely power and
domination. Polk reveals a pattern that has been replicated over and over.
The invaders -- perhaps professing the most benign motives -- are naturally
disliked by the population, who disobey them, at first in small ways,
eliciting a forceful response, which increases opposition and support for
resistance. The cycle of violence escalates until the invaders withdraw --
or gain their ends by something that may approach genocide.

*Playing by the Al-Qaeda Game Plan*

Obama’s global drone assassination campaign, a remarkable innovation in
global terrorism, exhibits the same patterns. By most accounts, it is
generating terrorists more rapidly than it is murdering those suspected of
someday intending to harm us -- an impressive contribution by a
constitutional lawyer on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, which
established the basis for the principle of presumption of innocence that is
the foundation of civilized law.

Another characteristic feature of such interventions is the belief that the
insurgency will be overcome by eliminating its leaders. But when such an
effort succeeds, the reviled leader is regularly replaced by someone
younger, more determined, more brutal, and more effective. Polk gives many
examples. Military historian Andrew Cockburn has reviewed American
campaigns to kill drug and then terror “kingpins” over a long period in his
important study *Kill Chain* and found the same results. And one can expect
with fair confidence that the pattern will continue.

No doubt right now U.S. strategists are seeking ways to murder the “Caliph
of the Islamic State” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who is a bitter rival of
al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. The likely result of this achievement is
forecast by the prominent terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow at
the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. He predicts that
“al-Baghdadi’s death would likely pave the way for a rapprochement [with
al-Qaeda] producing a combined terrorist force unprecedented in scope,
size, ambition and resources.”

<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=0PawbxXWRH7vc2lqcCclNjm2UvLy1SiI>Polk
cites a treatise on warfare by Henry Jomini, influenced by Napoleon’s
defeat at the hands of Spanish guerrillas, that became a textbook for
generations of cadets at the West Point military academy. Jomini observed
that such interventions by major powers typically result in “wars of
opinion,” and nearly always “national wars,” if not at first then becoming
so in the course of the struggle, by the dynamics that Polk describes.
Jomini concludes that “commanders of regular armies are ill-advised to
engage in such wars because they will lose them,” and even apparent
successes will prove short-lived.

Careful studies of al-Qaeda and ISIS have shown that the United States and
its allies are following their game plan with some precision. Their goal is
to “draw the West as deeply and actively as possible into the quagmire” and
“to perpetually engage and enervate the United States and the West in a
series of prolonged overseas ventures” in which they will undermine their
own societies, expend their resources, and increase the level of violence,
setting off the dynamic that Polk reviews.

Scott Atran, one of the most insightful researchers on jihadi movements,
calculates that “the 9/11 attacks cost between $400,000 and $500,000 to
execute, whereas the military and security response by the U.S. and its
allies is in the order of 10 million times that figure. On a strictly
cost-benefit basis, this violent movement has been wildly successful,
beyond even Bin Laden’s original imagination, and is increasingly so.
Herein lies the full measure of jujitsu-style asymmetric warfare. After
all, who could claim that we are better off than before, or that the
overall danger is declining?”

And if we continue to wield the sledgehammer, tacitly following the jihadi
script, the likely effect is even more violent jihadism with broader
appeal. The record, Atran advises, “should inspire a radical change in our
counter-strategies.”

Al-Qaeda/ISIS are assisted by Americans who follow their directives: for
example, Ted “carpet-bomb ’em” Cruz, a top Republican presidential
candidate. Or, at the other end of the mainstream spectrum, the leading
Middle East and international affairs columnist of the *New York* *Times*,
Thomas Friedman, who in 2003 offered Washington advice on how to fight in
Iraq on the *Charlie Rose* show: “There was what I would call the terrorism
bubble... And what we needed to do was to go over to that part of the world
and burst that bubble. We needed to go over there basically, and, uh, take
out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that
bubble. And there was only one way to do it... What they needed to see was
American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad, and
basically saying, which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You
don’t think we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy
we’re going to just let it go? Well, suck on this. Ok. That, Charlie, was
what this war was about.”

That’ll show the ragheads.

*Looking Forward*

Atran and other close observers generally agree on the prescriptions. We
should begin by recognizing what careful research has convincingly shown:
those drawn to jihad “are longing for something in their history, in their
traditions, with their heroes and their morals; and the Islamic State,
however brutal and repugnant to us and even to most in the Arab-Muslim
world, is speaking directly to that... What inspires the most lethal
assailants today is not so much the Quran but a thrilling cause and a call
to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends.” In fact,
few of the jihadis have much of a background in Islamic texts or theology,
if any.

The best strategy, Polk advises, would be “a multinational,
welfare-oriented and psychologically satisfying program... that would make
the hatred ISIS relies upon less virulent. The elements have been
identified for us: communal needs, compensation for previous
transgressions, and calls for a new beginning.” He adds, “A carefully
phrased apology for past transgressions would cost little and do much.”
Such a project could be carried out in refugee camps or in the “hovels and
grim housing projects of the Paris *banlieues*,” where, Atran writes, his
research team “found fairly wide tolerance or support for ISIS’s values.”
And even more could be done by true dedication to diplomacy and
negotiations instead of reflexive resort to violence.

Not least in significance would be an honorable response to the “refugee
crisis” that was a long time in coming but surged to prominence in Europe
in 2015. That would mean, at the very least, sharply increasing
humanitarian relief to the camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey where
miserable refugees from Syria barely survive. But the issues go well
beyond, and provide a picture of the self-described “enlightened states”
that is far from attractive and should be an incentive to action.

There are countries that generate refugees through massive violence, like
the United States, secondarily Britain and France. Then there are countries
that admit huge numbers of refugees, including those fleeing from Western
violence, like Lebanon (easily the champion, per capita), Jordan, and Syria
before it imploded, among others in the region. And partially overlapping,
there are countries that both generate refugees and refuse to take them in,
not only from the Middle East but also from the U.S. “backyard” south of
the border. A strange picture, painful to contemplate.

An honest picture would trace the generation of refugees much further back
into history. Veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk reports that
one of the first videos produced by ISIS “showed a bulldozer pushing down a
rampart of sand that had marked the border between Iraq and Syria. As the
machine destroyed the dirt revetment, the camera panned down to a
handwritten poster lying in the sand. ‘End of Sykes-Picot,’ it said.”

For the people of the region, the Sykes-Picot agreement is the very symbol
of the cynicism and brutality of Western imperialism. Conspiring in secret
during World War I, Britain’s Mark Sykes and France’s François
Georges-Picot carved up the region into artificial states to satisfy their
own imperial goals, with utter disdain for the interests of the people
living there and in violation of the wartime promises issued to induce
Arabs to join the Allied war effort. The agreement mirrored the practices
of the European states that devastated Africa in a similar manner. It
“transformed what had been relatively quiet provinces of the Ottoman Empire
into some of the least stable and most internationally explosive states in
the world.”

Repeated Western interventions since then in the Middle East and Africa
have exacerbated the tensions, conflicts, and disruptions that have
shattered the societies. The end result is a “refugee crisis” that the
innocent West can scarcely endure. Germany has emerged as the conscience of
Europe, at first (but no longer) admitting almost one million refugees --
in one of the richest countries in the world with a population of 80
million. In contrast, the poor country of Lebanon has absorbed an estimated
1.5 million Syrian refugees, now a quarter of its population, on top of
half a million Palestinian refugees registered with the U.N. refugee agency
UNRWA, mostly victims of Israeli policies.

Europe is also groaning under the burden of refugees from the countries it
has devastated in Africa -- not without U.S. aid, as Congolese and
Angolans, among others, can testify. Europe is now seeking to bribe Turkey
(with over two million Syrian refugees) to distance those fleeing the
horrors of Syria from Europe’s borders, just as Obama is pressuring Mexico
to keep U.S. borders free from miserable people seeking to escape the
aftermath of Reagan’s GWOT along with those seeking to escape more recent
disasters, including a military coup in Honduras that Obama almost alone
legitimized, which created one of the worst horror chambers in the region.

Words can hardly capture the U.S. response to the Syrian refugee crisis, at
least any words I can think of.

Returning to the opening question “Who rules the world?” we might also want
to pose another question: “What principles and values rule the world?” That
question should be foremost in the minds of the citizens of the rich and
powerful states, who enjoy an unusual legacy of freedom, privilege, and
opportunity thanks to the struggles of those who came before them, and who
now face fateful choices as to how to respond to challenges of great human
import.

*Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus in the Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A*
TomDispatch* regular*
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=xO5Uq%2FA6FfQcZEc2kWLDnDm2UvLy1SiI>*,
among his recent books are *Hegemony or Survival*and *Failed States*. This
essay, the second of two parts, is excerpted from his new book, *Who Rules
the World?
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=u%2BtvWA%2Fz1%2FbbPPrCgly%2Bwjm2UvLy1SiI>*
(Metropolitan
Books, the American Empire Project
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=WbIvp9vkHXntcVn%2BeNsCGzm2UvLy1SiI>,
2016). To read part 1, click here
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=KTkdi6vHEANoLI10TrGcTjm2UvLy1SiI>.
His website is **www.chomsky.info
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=JWUFhGAnW35KYeEqBU4JkTm2UvLy1SiI>*
*.*

*We gratefully acknowledge our ally *TomDispatch.com which published this
piece from Noam Chomsky.*Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s *Next
Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=MLbndlnAzIi7BByPDq6iejm2UvLy1SiI>*,
and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, *Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret
Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=gY4DI%2BeNIVxO6lJSTE%2B5Djm2UvLy1SiI>
*.*

Copyright 2016 Valeria Galvao Wasserman-Chomsky

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