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by Noam Chomsky
9/02
The philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein advised readers to attend to the use of a phrase in order to
determine its meaning. Adopting that suggestion, one regularly discovers
that terms of political discourse are used with a doctrinal meaning that
is crucially different from the literal one. The term “terrorism,” for
example, is not used in accord with the official definition but is
restricted to terrorism (as officially defined) carried out by them
against us and our clients. Similar conventions hold for “war crime,”
“defense,” “peace process,” and other standard terms.
One such term is “the
international community.” The literal sense is reasonably clear; the U.N.
General Assembly, or a substantial majority of it, is a fair first
approximation. But the term is regularly used in a technical sense to
describe the United States joined by some allies and clients. (Henceforth,
I will use the term “Intcom,” in this technical sense.) Accordingly, it is
a logical impossibility for the United States to defy the international
community. These conventions are illustrated well enough by cases of
current concern.
One does not read that for 25
years the United States has barred the efforts of the international
community to achieve a diplomatic settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict along the lines repeated, in essence, in the Saudi proposal
adopted by the Arab League in March 2002. That initiative has been widely
acclaimed as a historic opportunity that can only be realized if Arab
states agree at last to accept the existence of Israel. In fact, Arab
states (along with the Palestine Liberation Organization) have repeatedly
done so since January 1976, when they joined the rest of the world in
backing a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for a political
settlement based on Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories with
“appropriate arrangements ... to guarantee ... the sovereignty,
territorial integrity, and political independence of all states in the
area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized
borders”—in effect, U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 expanded to
include a Palestinian state. The United States vetoed the resolution.
Since then, Washington has regularly blocked similar initiatives. A
majority of Americans support the political settlement reiterated in the
Saudi plan. Yet it does not follow that Washington is defying the
international community or domestic opinion. Under prevailing conventions,
that cannot be since, by definition, the U.S. government cannot defy
Intcom, and as a democratic state, it naturally heeds domestic opinion.
Similarly, one does not read that
the United States defies the international community on terrorism, even
though it voted virtually alone (with Israel; Honduras alone abstaining)
against the major U.N. resolution in December 1987 harshly condemning this
plague of the modern age and calling on all states to eradicate it. The
reasons are instructive and highly relevant today. But all of that has
disappeared from history, as is customary when Intcom opposes the
international community (in the literal sense).
At the time, Washington was
undermining Latin American efforts to bring about a peaceful settlement in
Central America and had been condemned for international terrorism by the
International Court of Justice, which ordered the United States to
terminate such crimes. The U.S. response was escalation. Again, none of
this history nor similar episodes since bear on Intcom’s attitude toward
terrorism.
Occasionally, Intcom’s isolation
is noticed, leading to perplexed inquiries into the psychic maladies of
the world. Richard Bernstein’s January 1984 New York Times Magazine
article “The U.N. versus the U.S.” (not the converse) is an apt example.
Further evidence that the world is out of step is that after the early
years of the United Nations, when Washington’s writ was law, the United
States has been far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions,
with Great Britain second and the Soviet Union (later Russia) a distant
third. The record in the General Assembly is similar—but no conclusions
follow about the international community.
A major contemporary theme is the
normative revolution that Intcom allegedly underwent in the 1990s, at last
accepting its duty of humanitarian intervention to end terrible crimes.
But one never reads that the international community “reject[s] the
so-called ‘right’ of humanitarian intervention” along with other forms of
coercion that it perceives as traditional imperialism in a new guise,
particularly the version of economic integration called globalization in
Western doctrine. Such conclusions were elaborated in the declaration of
the South Summit in April 2000, the first meeting of the heads of state of
the G-77 (the descendant of the former nonaligned countries), which
accounts for nearly 80 percent of the world’s population. The declaration
merited a few disparaging words in elite media.
The 1990s are widely considered
the decade of humanitarian intervention, not the 1970s, even though the
latter decade was bounded by the two most significant cases of
intervention to terminate horrendous crimes: India in East Pakistan and
Vietnam in Cambodia. The reason is clear. Intcom did not carry out these
interventions. In fact, it bitterly opposed them, imposing sanctions and
making threatening gestures toward India and harshly punishing Vietnam for
the crime of terminating Pol Pot’s atrocities as they were peaking. In
contrast, the U.S.-led bombing of Serbia stands as the great moment of the
new international enlightenment—no matter that such action was strongly
opposed by India, China, and much of the rest of the world. Here is not
the place to review the humanitarian intervention undertaken to preserve
Intcom’s “credibility” and, for public relations purposes, to terminate
the crimes that it precipitated. Nor is this the place to examine Intcom’s
refusal to withdraw from its long-standing participation in comparable or
worse crimes and what that implies about Intcom’s operative values.
Such topics do not enter the
extensive literature on the responsibilities of the self-declared
enlightened states. Instead, there is a highly regarded literary genre
inquiring into the cultural defect of Intcom that keeps it from responding
properly to the crimes of others. An interesting question no doubt, though
by any reasonable measure it ranks well below a different one that remains
unasked: Why does Intcom persist in its own substantial crimes, either
directly or through crucial support for murderous clients?
It is all too easy for me to
continue, though it should be recognized that such practices are no
innovation of Intcom. They are close to historical universals, including
analogues that are not pleasant to recall.
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