1. The Alliance of the victorious powers, Russia, Prussia, Austria and Great Britain, following the fall of Napoleon, which proclaimed a “right of intervention” allowing it to suppress popular national aspirations and insurrections in Europe.
2. Serge Halimi provides a good analysis of that evolution in his book, Le grand bond en arrière. Comment l’ordre libéral s’est imposé au monde, Paris, Fayard, 2004.
3. For a criticism of certain forms of relativism, see: Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’Abuse of Science, New York, Picador, 1997; and Régis Debray, Jean Bricmont, À l’ombre des Lumières, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2003.
4. For a good analysis of the neoconservative philosophy, see Shadia B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
5. My text, “Why we still need to be anti-imperialists,” is available in the electronic publication of CEIMSA, La Publication des Actes du Colloque des 11–12 janvier 2002, Chapter 25, to be found under the heading “Colloques” on the site: <http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/>. Also available on: http://www.zmag.org/content/TerrorWar/bricmontimperial.cfm.
1. Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1920). During the First World War, the Entente was made up of England, France, and (until the October Revolution) Russia, opposed to the Central German and Austro-Hungarian empires.
2. I have also taken part in the Brussels Tribunal (http://www.brusselstribunal.org), a section of the World Tribunal on Iraq (http://www.worldtribunal.org), which is set up to judge the crimes committed by the United States and their allies in Iraq.
3. U.S. Department of Defense, National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, March 2005, available on http://www.stormingmedia.us/41/4121/A412134.html, or http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/dod/nds-usa_mar2005.htm.
4. In particular, see “new philosophers” Pascal Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (New York: Macmillan, 1986); and Bernard-Henri Levy, La barbarie a visage humain (Paris: Grasset, 1977). It is worth noting that the second book is not, as is sometimes assumed, a simple critique of Stalinism but rather an all-out attack against the very idea of progress.
5. Russell, Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, 85.
6. John A. Hobson, a reformist British economist, wrote one of the first critical works on imperialism: Imperialism, A Study (New York: James Pott and Co., 1902). This work had a strong influence on Lenin.
7. Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2001. If the Wall Street Journal’s reporters are surprised by the reactions to September 11 in the Arab world, it may well be because they share with Marxists the idea that self-enrichment is the “natural aim of man’s political action.”
1. Bertrand Russell, Freedom and Organization, 1814–1914 (London: Routledge, 2001), 45–473.
2. Arthur Schlessinger, New York Times, February 6,1966.
3. Shannon, New York Times, September 28, 1974, cited by Noam Chomsky in Human Rights and American Foreign Policy (Nottingham, Eng.: Spokesman Books, 1978), 2–3. Available at http://book-case.kroupnov.ru/pages/library/HumanRights/.
4. This letter, justifying the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, was signed by sixty intellectuals, including Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Michael Walzer. So far, the Muslim “brothers and sisters” do not seem to have been impressed by this display of altruism. The full text is available at http://www.americanvalues.org/html/wwff.html.
5. “Secular priesthood” is an expression coined by Isaiah Berlin (“The Bent Twig,” Foreign Affairs, October 1977) who was referring to the Communist intelligentsia in the socialist countries.
1. See http://members.aol.com/Bblum6/American_holocaust.htm.
2. It is true that there are other Third World leaders, less admirable than those mentioned here, who are also opposed by the West, a matter touched upon in point 3 that follows.
3. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon Press, 1989), 214–15.
4. Under-five mortality measures the number of children per thousand who die in their first five years of life. For Cuba and Latin America, the rate is respectively 9 and 34 (Human Development Report 2004, pp. 169 and 171). The number of children who could be saved is calculated on the basis of the difference between the rate of mortality multiplied by the birth rate (22 per thousand) and the number of inhabitants (518.9 million). See also: The state of the world’s children 2007. The Double Dividend of Gender Equality, http://www.unicef.org/sowc07/docs/sowc07.pdf, p. 102 & 105.
5. ILO, The end of child labour: Within reach. Genève 2006, http://www.ilo.org/public/english/standards/relm/ilc/ilc95/pdf/rep-i-b.pdf, p. 8.
6. “UNICEF reports that there are 100 million street children in the world, of which half are found in Latin America,” quoted in: Street Children in Central America: An Overview. Miki Takahashi and Caroline Cederlof, Human Development Department, World bank, http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/external/lac/lac.nsf/0/19e661ab-7bbb25de852568cf006ad8a8?OpenDocument
7. A conference held in Bandung (Indonesia) in 1955 brought together some thirty newly independent Asian and African countries. Among those participating were Nehru for India, Nasser for Egypt, and Zhou Enlai for China. It marked the birth of the Third World as a political entity. It called for decolonization, peaceful cooperation, nonalignment, and respect for national sovereignty.
8. Michael Ignatieff, “The Burden,” The New York Times Magazine, January 5,2003.
9. Noam Chomsky, “Telling the Truth about Imperialism,” International Socialist Review, November-December 2003, available at http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200311-.htm.
10. Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times Magazine, March 28,1999.
11. See Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). Mayer cites the “approximate figures” in Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 53–54: two million dead in the First World War; one million in the first phase of the civil war; two million in the peasant wars; three million dead of disease and five million of famine. Russia was the only principal belligerent to lose more civilians than soldiers in World War I. In World War II, Soviet deaths are estimated at over twenty million.
12. The Versailles Treaty, signed in June 1919, formally ended World War I. It imposed on Germany full responsibility for the war, the loss of territory and colonies, partial demilitarization, and heavy reparations payments. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires were dismantled.
13. Russell, Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, 55.
14. International Herald Tribune, October 29, 1992, cited by William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1995).
15. Facts taken from United Nations Development Program, “Human Development Report” (2005).
16. In 1916, the secret Sykes-Picot Accord between Great Britain and France defined the way those two countries would divide up the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This accord betrayed the promises made to Arab leaders (to get them to fight the Ottoman Turks) and was revealed by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. In 1956, in an attempt to stop Egyptian president Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, France, Britain, and Israel attacked Egypt, but the United States and the Soviet Union forced them to back down.
17. A few examples are the 1871 Paris Commune, which originated as a defensive movement against Prussian occupation; the Chinese Communist Revolution, a defensive movement against Japanese invasion; and the violence of the Khmer Rouge, a reaction to years of U.S. clandestine bombing of the Cambodian countryside.
18. See Blum, Killing Hope, chap. 9, for the overthrow of Mossadegh; and chap. 12 for the failed attempt to overthrow the Syrian regime.
19. Cited by Noam Chomsky, “Human Rights” and American Foreign Policy (Nottingham, Eng.: Spokesman Books, 1978), 18.
20. Kautsky, a theoretician of German social democracy, is best known by the epithet “renegade,” attributed to him by Lenin. But his work Terrorism and Communism (to which Trotsky replied with a work of his own with the same title), although it suffers from the optimistic illusions current in the Second International, nevertheless contains an interesting critique of Bolshevik ideas, in particular dictatorship.
21. The United States considered Cambodia’s popular ruling prince too neutralist in regard to the war in Vietnam. Thus in 1970, Prince Sihanouk was overthrown by General Lon Nol with the support of the United States. Lon Nol’s brutal and unpopular rule contributed to the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975.
22. Diana Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (New York: Monthly Review Press/London: Pluto Press, 2002), 43–44.
23. Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 67.
24. See, for example, Washington Post, March 11, 1999, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com:wpsrv/inatl/daukt/larcg99/ckubtib11.htm.
25. The web site “Economy in Crisis” (http://www.economyincrisis.org/) gives numerous figures illustrating the growing dependence of the United States on Asia (debt, sales of companies, loss of competition, etc.).
26. Thomas L. Friedman, “Fly Me to the Moon,” New York Times, December 5,2004.
27. Jamie Wilson, “U.S. Military Sends Scientists to Film School,” The Guardian, August 5, 2005.
28. It is significant that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, made up of China, Russia, and four former Soviet Republics, in the summer of 2005 called on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal of their troops from Central Asia. See, for example, Siddarth Varadarajan, “China, Russia Get Central Asians to say ‘Yankees Out!’,” The Hindu, July 7,2005.
29. “Missile defense isn’t really meant to protect America. It’s a tool for global dominance.” It is “not about defense. It’s about offense. And that’s exactly why we need it.” It will provide the U.S. with “absolute freedom in using or threatening to use force in international relations.” It will “cement U.S. hegemony and make Americans ‘masters of the world.’” Lawrence F. Kaplan, “Offensive Line,” The New Republic 224 (March 12, 2001), quoted in Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003).
30. See http://www.casi.org.uk/halliday/quotes.html.
31. Report by Marc Bossuyt, “The Adverse Consequences of Economic Sanctions on the Enjoyment of Human Rights,” to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, June 21, 2000. Available at: http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/unreports/bossuyt.htm.
32. John A. Hobson, Imperialism, A Study (New York: James Pott and Co., 1902).
33. This section is based on Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope. The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Edward S. Herman, “From Guatemala to Iraq. How the Pitbull Manages His Poodles,” Z Magazine, January 2003, available at http://zmagsite.zmag.org/jan2003/herman0103.shtm.
1. Thomas Cushman ed., A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Contributors include Tony Blair, Christopher Hitchens, Adam Michnik (who became known as an intellectual supporter of Polish Solidarnosc) and José Ramos Horta, 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner for his commitment to independence for East Timor.
2. The Euston Manifesto, March 29,2006. At http://www.eustonmanifesto.org/.
3. Letter to President Clinton, January 28, 1998, and signed by: Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, William J. Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Robert B. Zoellick, many of whom have at some time held high positions in the Bush administration. Available at http://www.newamericancentury.org.
4. “Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy. And I say this with assurance, because human rights is the soul of our sense of nationhood…. Uniquely, ours is a nation founded on an idea of human rights.” From “The U.S. Commitment: Human Rights and Foreign Policy,” remarks by President Jimmy Carter at a White House meeting for the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 1978; available at http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/hrintro/carter.htm. President of the United States from 1977 to 1980, an apparently sincere Christian with little foreign affairs experience before his election, Carter was certainly one of the most appealing U.S. presidents, especially for what he has done since leaving office. He is also one of the least popular. In France, the media and political class much preferred the supposedly worldly realpolitik of a Kissinger. Regardless of his good intentions, Carter ended up as the “useful idiot” of the Trilateral Commission, David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, helping Vietnam be forgotten thanks to his moralizing, before the return to business as usual under Reagan, president from 1981 to 1988.
5. Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), January 15–21, 1998, 76. (Trans, from the French by author.)
6. Bernard Kouchner, Les Guerriers de la Paix (Paris: Grasset, 2004), 373–74.
7. On the application of the “Salvador option” to Iraq, that is, the utilization of death squads to eliminate the civilian resistance, see Mussab Al-Khairall, “U.N. Raises Alarm on Death Squads and Torture in Iraq,” Reuters, September 8, 2005; for a detailed analysis, see Max Fuller, “For Iraq, ‘The Salvador Option’ Becomes Reality,” available at http:/globalresearch.ca/articles/FUL506A.html.
8. George Will, “A War President’s Job,” The Washington Post, April 7,2004.
9. See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon, 2002), for a detailed analysis of media distortion in a free society.
10. Les Roberts et al., “Mortality Before and After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Cluster Sample Survey,” The Lancet 364 (November 20, 2004). A new study, published when the English translation of this book was done, puts the death toll above 600,000, see http://web.mit.edu/CIS/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf.
11. For media treatment of the study, see Media Lens at http://www.medialens.org/alerts/archive_2005.php.
12. See the site of families who have become active for peace after having lost a member in the war: http://www.gsfp.org/.
13. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090300165.html.
14. Stead, Die Neue Zeit, 1898, 16th year, no. 1, 304, cited by Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
15. Amy Wilentz, The New Republic, March 9, 1992. Also see Noam Chomsky, Rogue States; The Rule of Force in World Affairs (Boston: South End Press, 2000), chap. 10.
16. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4151742.stm.
17. Alan M. Dershowitz, “New Response to Palestinian Terrorism,” Jerusalem Post, March 11,2002.
18. See Richard B. DuBoff, Accumulation and Power: An Economic History of the United States (New York and London: M.E.Sharpe/Armonk, 1989).
19. For an enumeration of U.S. military budget items, see Winslow T. Wheeler, “Just How Big Is the Defense Budget? A Tutorial on How to Find the Real Numbers,” Counterpunch, January 19, 2006: “If you count all these costs, the total is $669.8 billion. This amount easily outdoes the rest of the world. In fact, if you count just the costs of the National Defense budget function, the approximate $538 billion we spend is $29 billion more than the $509 billion the entire rest of the world spends.” Available at http://www.counterpunch.org/wheeler01192006.html.
20. Michael Neumann, “Michael Ignatieff, Apostle of He-manitarianism,” Counterpunch, December 8,2003; available at http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann12082003.html.
21. For the full story of the dismantling of Yugoslavia, see Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (London: Pluto, 2002).
22. For an excellent analysis of the indirect effects of classic nineteenth-century colonialism, far worse than the direct effects, see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino, Famines and the Making of the Third World (London/New York: Verso, 2001).
23. Excerpts from a speech given by former Malaysian prime minister Mohamed Mahathir at the Suhakam Human Rights Conference, September 9,2005. During the speech, Western diplomats walked out. Available at http://informationclearing-house.info/article 10305.htm.
24. For example, Article 22 of the Declaration states: “Everyone, as a member of society, has a right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international cooperation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each state, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.”
25. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “Establishing a Viable Human Rights Policy,” article presented to human rights conference, Kenyon College, April 4,1981. The article is an attack on the “human rights policy” of the Carter administration, from a Reaganite point of view. “Such declarations of human ‘rights’ take on the character of ‘a letter to Santa Claus’—as Orwin and Prangle noted. They can multiply indefinitely because ‘no clear standard informs them, and no great reflection produced them.’ For every goal human beings have worked toward, there is in our time a ‘right.’ Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of ‘entitlements,’ which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors. The fact that such entitlements may be without possibility of realization does not mean they are without consequences.”
26. For details, see William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 2005), 168–78.
27. “Erst kommt das fressen, dann kommt die Moral.” Brecht, Drei Groschen Oper.
28. For example, the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) and the French League of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (LDH) issued a statement stressing that “civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights are indivisible, democracy, development and human rights are interdependent. The experience of the practices ascribed to the Tunisian regime demonstrate how much economic development does not at all lead to improvement with respect to civil and political rights but on the contrary serves as a pretext to legitimatize their violation.” However, in the case of the West, it is indeed “economic development” that preceded “improvement with respect to civil and political rights.”
29. It is said that in his youth Chirac peddled the Communist newspaper L’Humanité on street corners. Perhaps of the two, he has changed the least.
30. Nevertheless, as an example of tit for tat, see the Chinese report of violations of human rights in the United States, as well as in the course of U.S. wars: http://english.people.com.cn/200503/03/eng20050303_175406.html.
1. In September 1938, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain (for Great Britain), and Daladier (for France) signed the Munich Agreement that allowed Germany to annex part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudeten region, populated mainly by Germans who considered themselves persecuted by the Czechs and welcomed the German troops. Weakened by this annexation, Czechoslovakia as a whole was annexed by Germany in March 1939.
2. See Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes against Humanity (London: Pluto Press, 2004) for a detailed argument on that issue.
3. In 1940, the year before Pearl Harbor, U.S. Air Force General Chenneault recommended using flying fortresses “to burn out the industrial heart of the Empire” by dropping incendiary bombs “on the teeming bamboo ant heaps” of Japan, a proposal that “simply delighted” Roosevelt. Saddam Hussein never expressed such warlike intentions against the United States. See Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), chap. 4; and Noam Chomsky, “The Manipulation of Fear,” Tehelka, July 16, 2005, available at http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20050716.htm.
4. See Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), for a warning, written by a former CIA consultant before September 11, about the risks posed to the United States by its empire.
5. Washington Post, September 14, 1969, cited by William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1995).
6. Excerpt from final document of the Thirteenth Conference of Heads of State and of Governments of the Movement of Non-aligned Countries, Kuala Lumpur, February 24–25, 2003, Article 354. Available at http://www.bemama.com/events/newnam2003/indexspeech.shtml?declare.
7. Edward S. Herman, “Michael Ignatieff’s Pseudo-Hegelian Apologetics for Imperialism,” Z Magazine, October 2005. See also William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 2005), for numerous examples; and Stephen Zunes, Tinderbox: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 2002), for an account of how José Bustani, who directed the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, was fired under United States influence the moment he wanted to have both American and Iraqi sites inspected, which might have had the disadvantage of allowing a peaceful resolution of the conflict. See also Richard Du Boff, “Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Biggest Rogue of All?” for a more complete and detailed list of the treaties and accords rejected by the United States. See http://www.zmag.org/content/ForeignPolicy/boffroguebig.cfa
8. Daniel P. Moynihan and S. Weaver, A Dangerous Place (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1979).
9. Available at http://www.americanvalues.org/html/wwff.html. A response, entitled “Letter from American citizens to their friends in Europe,” signed by 140 intellectuals, stressed: “The central fallacy of the pro-war celebrants is the equation between ‘American values’ as understood at home and the exercise of United States economic and especially military power abroad.” This letter was published in a number of European newspapers, including Le Monde, Frankfurter Rundschau, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. It was reproduced in L’Autre Amérique: Les Américains contre l’état de guerre (Paris: Textuel, 2002).
10. See Blum, Rogue State, 185–97, for many similar examples.
11. This is a total fantasy-the Sandinistas never made such a claim.
12. Blum, Rogue State, 47.
13. Alexandre Adler, “Les tentations de Chávez,” Le Figaro (Paris), May 11,2005.
1. See Robert Fisk, “The Wartime Deceptions: Saddam Is Hitler and It’s Not About Oil,” Independent (London), January 27, 2003.
2. Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic, quoted in Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
3. See, for example, Thomas Cushman, ed., A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
4. Full text is available at http://www.mae.es/index2.jsp?URL=Buscar.jsp.
5. From Proceso, journal of the Jesuit University of El Salvador, cited by Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (New York: Vintage, 1992), 354–55.
6. Tony Judt, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” London Review of Books, September 21,2006.
1. Vernon Loeb, “Afghan Combat a Lab for Honing Military Technology,” Washington Post, March 28,2002; available at www.dawn.com/2002/03/28/int14.htm.
2. This and other memos dealing with the same subject and going back to March 2002 (that is, well before all the debates on the need to disarm Iraq) are available at http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/memos.html.
3. Jaurès was assassinated on July 31, 1914, on the eve of the war. Liebknecht and Luxemburg, German social democrats opposed to the war, were murdered in 1919.
When Bertrand Russell sought to convince the United States to help work out a compromise in Europe rather than enter the war, his colleague Alfred North Whitehead, with whom he had written his major work Principia Matematica, sent him reports on victims of German atrocities with the comment that those who wanted America to remain neutral were responsible for their fate, adding, “What are you going to do to help these people?” Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell, the Spirit of Solitude (London: Random House/Vintage, 1997), 487.
Edmund Morel was an Anglo-French journalist and political figure who denounced the exactions of Leopold II in the Belgian Congo and opposed the First World War. He was imprisoned in Britain for having mailed pacifist literature to the novelist Romain Rolland in Switzerland, a neutral country, in violation of certain wartime measures.
Eugene Debs, labor leader and cofounder of the American Socialist Party, was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1918 for antimilitarism.
4. This distinction is deliberately blurred when genuine civil conflict within a country, notably the wars of Yugoslav disintegration, is presented as “outside aggression,” in order to justify real outside intervention. See Diana Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (New York: Monthly Review Press/London: Pluto Press, 2002), 169: “Rapid recognition of Croatia and Slovenia was designed not—as officially claimed by the German government—to prevent military conflict, but to internationalize it, in order to justify outside military intervention, with German participation.” The same device was used when Yugoslavia’s suppression of Albanian secession in Kosovo was presented as a Serbian “invasion” of its own territory.
5. See Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics, ed. C. P. Otero (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1988), 204–8, for a more thorough discussion.
6. More than simply refusing to help “heal the wounds of war” (as the Vietnamese tactfully put it), in 1977 the United States tried to prevent India from sending a hundred buffalo to Vietnam (whose livestock had been decimated by U.S. bombing), and also tried to prohibit American Mennonites from sending pencils to Cambodia and shovels to Laos. See The Chomsky Reader, ed. James Peck (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 326.
7. See Naomi Klein, “Baghdad Year Zero,” Harper’s, September 2004 (available at http://harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html), for a sarcastic description of American companies’ behavior, which ended in a general rout when the Iraqi resistance and the chaos in the country made pillage more difficult.
8. Salman Rushdie, “How to Fight and Lose the Moral High Ground,” Guardian, March 23,2002.
9. In 1935, when the French prime minister Pierre Laval asked Stalin to restore good relations with the Vatican, Stalin is said to have replied: “The Pope, how many divisions?”
10. Thomas L. Friedman, “Bush’s Radically Liberal War in Iraq Is No Vietnam,” New York Times, October 31,2003.
1. These lies were authoritatively exposed by a retired German General who had served with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) during the Yugoslav crisis. Heinz Loquai, Der Kosovo-Konflikt-Wege in einen vermeidbaren Krieg [The Kosovo Conflict: Paths to an Avoidable War] (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 2000). For background of the Kosovo war, see Diana Johnstone, Fool’s Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (London: Pluto, 2002).
2. Peter Beaumont, “PM Admits Graves Claim ‘Untrue’,” Observer, July 18, 2004. Note that they forget to mention the Vietnam War in which deaths were in the millions, not the hundreds of thousands.
3. See http://uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=8626.
4. For example, in mid-September 2005, the Interior Ministry of Italy refused to grant visas to a number of representatives of movements and associations opposed to the Iraqi government and to the occupation who had hoped to come to Italy to attend a conference in support of the Iraqi resistance. II Manifesto, September 14,2005.
5. “The front page story in the New York Times reported “Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs.” An accompanying photograph depicted the scene. That was presented as a meritorious achievement. “The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.” Plainly such a propaganda weapon is a legitimate target, particularly when “inflated civilian casualty figures”—inflated because our leader so declares—were “inflaming opinion throughout the country, driving up the political costs of the conflict.” The word “conflict” is a common euphemism for U.S. aggression, as when we read on the same pages that the U.S. must now rebuild “what the conflict just destroyed”: just “the conflict,” with no agent, like a hurricane.” Noam Chomsky, Failed States. The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 47–48.
6. David Baran, “Iraq: the Fear of Chaos,” Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2003.
7. See http://www.brusselstribunal.org/.
8. John McNaughton, CIA analyst, text from the Pentagon Papers quoted in Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: New Press, 2003), 67.
9. Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes against Humanity (London: Pluto Press, 2004).
10. “Open Letter to Amnesty International on the Iraqi Constitution,” published by the Brussels Tribunal (www.brusselstribunal.org).
11. Noam Chomsky, “On the War in Iraq,” interview with David McNeill, ZNet, January 31,2005.
12. Johann Hari, “After Three Years, After 150,000 Dead, Why I Was Wrong about Iraq: A Melancholic Mea Culpa,” Independent (London), March 18, 2006. On his own web site, Hari writes modestly that “Johann has been attacked in print by the Daily Telegraph, John Pilger, Peter Oborne, Private Eye, the Socialist Worker, Cristina Odone, the Spectator, Andrew Neil, Mark Steyn, the British National Party, Medialens, al Muhajaroun and Richard Littlejohn. ‘Prince’ Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to Britain, has accused Johann of ‘waging a private jihad against the House of Saud.’ (He’s right). Johann has been called ‘a Stalinist’ and ‘beneath contempt’ by Noam Chomsky, ‘Horrible Hari’ by Niall Ferguson, ‘an uppity little queer’ by Bruce Anderson, ‘a drug addict’ by George Galloway, ‘fat’ by the Dalai Lama and ‘a cunt’ by Busted.” Now, he is called deluded, but by himself.
13. Rick Klein, “Democrats Embrace Tough Military Stance,” Boston Globe, August 14, 2005. Available at http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/08/14/democrats_embrace_tough_military_stance/?page=l.
14. Ari Berman, “The Strategic Class,” The Nation, August 29,2005.
15. An example of this attitude is expressed by Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and a former contributing editor for National Review. See http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts-arch.html.
16. Posted by Billmon on http://billmon.org/archives/002767.html.
17. Human Rights Watch press release, New York, December 12,2003. One wonders how Roth knows the intentions of the coalition forces. The same type of problems occurred during the 2006 Lebanon war; see Jonathan Cook, “Human Rights Watch: Still Missing the Point,” available at http://www.counterpunch.org/cook09252006.html.
18. Summary and recommendations of Human Rights Watch, “Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq,” available at http://hrw.org/reports/2003/usa1203/.
19. Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder, 8, quoted in Paul de Rooij, “Amnesty International: A False Beacon?,” Counterpunch, October 13, 2004, http://www.counterpunch.org/rooij10132004.html.
20. See William Preston Jr., Edward S. Herman, Herbert I. Schiller, Hope and Folly: The United States and UNESCO 1945–1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
21. On the nature of international justice and the ideology of intervention that underlies it, see David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention (London: Pluto Press, 2002); Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade; and Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder.
22. Patrick Tyler, New York Times, February 17,2003.
23. See Associated Press, “U.S. Nuke Arms Plan Envisions Pre-Emption,” September 11,2005.
24. For a similar judgment, see Tony Judt, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” London Review of Books, September 21,2006.
25. “[We need] an Arab facade ruled and administered under British guidance and controlled by a native Mohammedan and, as far as possible, by an Arab staff…. There should be no actual incorporation of the conquered territory in the dominions of the conqueror, but the absorption may be veiled by such constitutional fictions as a protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer state and so on.” Memorandum of Lord Curzon, “German and Turkish Territories Captured in the War,” December 12, 1917, CAB 24/4. Cited by William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey, and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982).