Noam Chomsky/Gilbert Achcar: Perilous Power

I've bought many of Chomsky's recent books, including Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance and Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, but haven't read them. I greatly respect his command of the relevant history, generally agree with his analysis, and sympathize with his fundamental political precepts, but find his writing painful to read -- not for the substance, which is after all the point, but for his monomaniacally embittered tone. To some degree, it is necessary to have some respect for the architects of American imperialism, if only to keep them from falling into caricature, and away from any comprehension.

Chomsky didn't always have this problem, but it seems to have grown over decades, perhaps a matter of losing patience, or maybe just the result of having been proven so right so often without receiving his due recognition. Not that he remains a voice in the wilderness: since 9/11 his books have been bestsellers, he has become a celebrity speaker, and for many of us who have somehow managed to escape the "manufactured consent" he criticized in an earlier book, he has become something of an oracle.

His interviews tend to avoid the worst traits of his prose, so I figured this set of dialogues with Gilbert Achcar -- a French middle east expert with an explicitly Marxist perspective -- might be a good chance to check up on him. As it turned out, the book wasn't all that satisfactory: a lot of stuff I already knew, too much back-and-forth trying to reconcile positions that mostly turned on different reactions to keywords. So I didn't wind up marking much, but it's the sort of book where any random page is likely to provoke some thought.

Chomsky talks about Israel's decision in 1971 to reject Egypt's peace offer (p. 167):

Israel had a crucial choice at that point. Israeli officials -- as we know from Cabinet records and other internal discussions -- recognized that they were being presented with a peace offer, and they had to decide whether to accept or reject it. They rejected it. They said we will not withdraw to the borders, which, at the time, meant we will not eliminate the northeast Sinai settlements. Incidentally, the next year Jordan came along with a very similar offer, but Israel didn't even respond to that. So there was an opportunity for peace along the lines of Resolution 242, offering nothing for the Palestinians but an international peace among the Arab states and Israel -- and Israel rejected it.

The crucial question, as always, was what the United States would do. We don't have internal U.S. records from that period yet, but it's pretty clear what happened. There apparently was a dispute between the State Department, which wanted to accept it, and Henry Kissinger, who was national security advisor, who wanted to reject it. I suspect his motives were mostly that he was trying to take over the State Department, which he later did, so it was probably bureaucratic maneuvering. But Kissinger's position we know, because he wrote about it in his memoirs; it was what he called "stalemate" -- there was no reason for Washington do do anything since the United States has the military force. It was a view that assumed Arabs didn't know which end of a gun to hold, and so the United States could just do what it wanted by force. Kissinger's position won the internal U.S. policy debate. And this was critical, because Israel at that point made a fateful decision in favor of expansion instead of real security.

Chomsky, on the dismantling of Israeli settlements in Sinai as a result of the Camp David agreements (p. 169):

Israel tried to brush aside these aspects of the accords. It decided to interpret them as meaning it could increase settlements, but not in Egypt, so it pulled out of Yamit.

And it's striking that the way Israel pulled out of Yamit was very much like the Gaza disengagement of September 2005. It was a staged, carefully orchestrated trauma. The general in charge explained that it had all been completely worked out with the settlers, that this would be a dramatic event in which Israeli soldiers with tears coming from their eyes would remove the poor settlers from their homes, and that this should never happen to Jews again, recalling the famous slogan "Never again." Never again would Jews be removed from their homes. There was a lot of ridicule of this staged event in the Hebrew press at the time. In fact, the Ha'aretz headline said, "Operation National Trauma, '82." And the 2005 Gaza disengagement was just a replay -- a very carefully staged national trauma to send the same message: Never again must this happen to Jews, the West Bank is ours; that's the message.

From Gilbert Achcar's epilogue (p. 221):

Now, if U.S. forces in Iraq are to be compared to a firefighting force, the truth of the matter is that they are led by highly dangerous arsonists! Ever since the occupation started, the situation in Iraq has steadily and relentlessly deteriorated: This is the undeniable truth, which only blatant liars like those in Washington can deny, insisting that the situation is improving in the face of glaring evidence to the contrary. Iraq is caught in a vicious circle: The occupation fuels the insurgency, which stirs up the sectarian tension that Washington's proconsul strives to fan by political means, which in turn is used to justify the continuing occupation. The latest major way in which U.S. occupation authorities are throwing oil on the Iraqi fire, according to Shiite sources, is by helping the Islamic Party -- the Iraqi Arab Sunni group closest to Washington and to the Saudis -- build an armed wing that is already taking part in the sectarian feud.

There is no way out of this burning circle but one: Only by announcing immediately the total and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops can a decisive step be taken toward putting out the fire. This would cool down the Sunni insurgency that the Association of Muslim Scholars has repeatedly pledged to call to a halt as soon as a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation troops is announced. It would dampen as well the sectarian tension, as Iraqis will then look squarely at their future and feel compelled to reach a way to coexist peacefully. And if ever they came to the conclusion that they needed a foreign presence for awhile to help them restore order and start real reconstruction, it should definitely not be one composed of troops from countries that harbor hegemonic ambitions over Iraq, but one that is welcomed by all segments of the Iraqi people as friendly and disinterested help.