Selective memory and a dishonest doctrine
By Noam Chomsky
Dec. 21— All people who have any concern for human rights,
justice, and integrity should be overjoyed by the capture of Saddam
Hussein, and should be awaiting a fair trial for him by an international
tribunal.
An indictment of Saddam’s atrocities would include not only his
slaughter and gassing of Kurds in 1988, but also, rather crucially,
his massacre of the Shiite rebels who might have overthrown him in 1991.
At the time, Washington and its allies held the “strikingly unanimous
view (that) whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West
and the region a better hope for his country’s stability than did
those who have suffered his repression,” reported Alan Cowell in
the New York Times. Last December, Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign
secretary, released a dossier of Saddam’s crimes drawn almost entirely
from the period of firm US-British support of Saddam. With the usual
display of moral integrity, Straw’s report and Washington’s
reaction overlooked that support. Such practices reflect a trap deeply
rooted in the intellectual culture generally — a trap sometimes
called the doctrine of change of course, invoked in the United States
every two or three years. The content of the doctrine is: “Yes,
in the past we did some wrong things because of innocence or inadvertence.
But now that’s all over, so let’s not waste any more time
on this boring, stale stuff.” The doctrine is dishonest and cowardly,
but it does have advantages: It protects us from the danger of understanding
what is happening before our eyes.
For example, the Bush administration’s original reason for going
to war in Iraq was to save the world from a tyrant developing weapons
of mass destruction and cultivating links to terror. Nobody believes
that now, not even Bush’s speech writers.
The new reason is that we invaded Iraq to establish a democracy there
and, in fact, to democratize the whole Middle East.
Sometimes, the repetition of this democracy-building posture reaches
the level of rapturous acclaim.
Last month, for example, David Ignatius, the Washington Post commentator,
described the invasion of Iraq as “the most idealistic war in modern
times” — fought solely to bring democracy to Iraq and the
region.
Ignatius was particularly impressed with Paul Wolfowitz, “the Bush
administration’s idealist in chief,” whom he described as
a genuine intellectual who “bleeds for (the Arab world’s)
oppression and dreams of liberating it.” Maybe that helps explain
Wolfowitz’s career — like his strong support for Suharto in
Indonesia, one of the last century’s worst mass murderers and aggressors,
when Wolfowitz was ambassador to that country under Ronald Reagan. As
the State Department official responsible for Asian affairs under Reagan,
Wolfowitz oversaw support for the murderous dictators Chun of South
Korea and Marcos of the Philippines.
All this is irrelevant because of the convenient doctrine of change
of course.
So, yes, Wolfowitz’s heart bleeds for the victims of oppression
— and if the record shows the opposite, it’s just that boring
old stuff that we want to forget about. One might recall another recent
illustration of Wolfowitz’s love of democracy. The Turkish parliament,
heeding its population’s near-unanimous opposition to war in Iraq,
refused to let US forces deploy fully from Turkey. This caused absolute
fury in Washington.
Wolfowitz denounced the Turkish military for failing to intervene to
overturn the decision. Turkey was listening to its people, not taking
orders from Crawford, Texas, or Washington, DC.
The most recent chapter is Wolfowitz’s “Determination and
Findings” on bidding for lavish reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
Excluded are countries where the government dared to take the same position
as the vast majority of the population. Wolfowitz’s alleged grounds
are “security interests,” which are non-existent, though the
visceral hatred of democracy is hard to miss — along with the fact
that Halliburton and Bechtel corporations will be free to “compete”
with the vibrant democracy of Uzbekistan and the Solomon Islands, but
not with leading industrial societies.
What’s revealing and important to the future is that Washington’s
display of contempt for democracy went side by side with a chorus of
adulation about its yearning for democracy.
To be able to carry that off is an impressive achievement, hard to mimic
even in a totalitarian state. Iraqis have some insight into this process
of conquerors and conquered.
The British created Iraq for their own interests. When they ran that
part of the world, they discussed how to set up what they called Arab
facades — weak, pliable governments, parliamentary if possible,
so long as the British effectively ruled.
Who would expect that the United States would ever permit an independent
Iraqi government to exist? Especially now that Washington has reserved
the right to set up permanent military bases there, in the heart of
the world’s greatest oil-producing region, and has imposed an economic
regime that no sovereign country would accept, putting the country’s
fate in the hands of Western corporations. Throughout history, even
the harshest and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by
professions of noble intent — and rhetoric about bestowing freedom
and independence. An honest look would only generalize Thomas Jefferson’s
observation on the world situation of his day: “We believe no more
in Bonaparte’s fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than
in Great Britain’s fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object
is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources
of other nations.”
Political activist and author Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Source: Toronto Star
