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 James Woolsey |
POWER POLITICS?
James Woolsey and Noam Chomsky debate how far the U.S. can go in its foreign policy. March 12, 1998 |
 Chomsky |
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Questions asked
in this forum:
Does the U.S. have a moral obligation to intervene in international affairs? Is America's willingness to use force against Iraq just a continuation of previous policies? Do you think the U.S. government, including Congress, is overstepping its limits? Do you believe that the U.S. public has an adequate opportunity to form rational opinions about U.S. policy given the quality of media coverage? What does the recent crisis tell us about the direction U.S. foreign policy is headed in the post-Cold War world? 
Kyle Fisher of Laurel, DE, asks: Could you comment on whether or not you believe the U.S. has a moral obligation, because of its capabilities, to intervene in international affairs?
Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at M.I.T., responds:
We should, I think, bear in mind that moral concepts apply at root to people. States do have legal obligations, but they are not moral agents, though their citizens can influence them to act in morally responsible and legally admissible ways, or can allow them to act quite differently.
Individuals are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of what they do, hence for the course of international affairs to the extent that they can influence events by action, or inaction. We happen to be citizens of by far the most powerful state in the world. Our action/inaction can therefore have unusual influence; and unlike many others, we are privileged to be able to act without undue fear of repression. Accordingly, our moral responsibilities -- sometimes obligations -- reach far beyond those of others, in general.
Just what these responsibilities are, and whether they extend to the very serious matter of intervention, has to be determined case by case. There are no formulas; each case has to be examined on its merits, with careful inquiry into the actual facts (which may not be easy to determine), the options available, the requirements of international law, and the likely consequences of action or inaction.
"First, do no harm."
The simplest cases are those that fall under a traditional medical doctrine: First, do no harm. These include crucial examples of recent and current history. Consider two.
One of the world's worst violators of human rights is Indonesian dictator General Suharto, who came to power with an army-led massacre that the CIA described as "one of the worst mass murders in the twentieth century," ranking it alongside the crimes of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. These crimes were carried out with U.S. support, which has not wavered as Suharto compiled a shocking record of terror against his own population and invaded a small oil-rich country (East Timor), killing some 200,000 people and robbing its resources. The invasion was in direct violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution to withdraw at once. These crimes too have been carried out with the decisive military and diplomatic support of the United States. Accordingly, it was -- and is -- our moral responsibility as citizens to terminate these crimes. That would require no "intervention," only withdrawal of support, a far simpler matter.
During these years, Saddam Hussein has also carried out major crimes. The worst by far were committed in the 1980s, including his gassing of Kurds at Halabja in 1988, chemical warfare against Iran, torture of dissidents, and numerous others. His invasion of Kuwait, though a serious crime, in fact added little to his already horrendous record. Throughout the period of his worst crimes, Saddam remained a favored ally and trading partner of the U.S. and Britain, which furthermore abetted these crimes. The Reagan Administration even sought to prevent congressional reaction to the the gassing of the Kurds, including the (failed) plea of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell that "we cannot be silent to genocide again" as the world was when Hitler exterminated Europe's Jews. So extreme was Reaganite support for their friend that when ABC TV correspondent Charles Glass revealed the site of one of Saddam's biological warfare programs a few months after Halabja, Washington denied the facts, and the story died; the State Department "now issues briefings on the same site," Glass writes (in England).
There were no passionate calls for a military strike against this brutal killer and torturer. Quite the contrary: much of what was known, including U.S. support, was downplayed or not reported.
"In these and many other cases, the criterion that distinguishes friend from enemy is obedience, not crime."
After the Gulf War, the Senate Banking Committee found that the Commerce Department had traced shipment of "biological materials" of a kind later found and destroyed by U.N. inspectors, continuing at least until November 1989. A month later, during his invasion of Panama, Bush authorized new loans for Saddam: to achieve the "goal of increasing U.S. exports and put us in a better position to deal with Iraq regarding its human rights record...," the State Department announced, facing no criticism in the mainstream (in fact, no report). The Bush Administration continued to support the mass murderer up to his invasion of Kuwait, which shifted his status from ally to enemy, much as the Suharto coup and slaughters of 1965 shifted Indonesia from enemy to friend. In these and many other cases, the criterion that distinguishes friend from enemy is obedience, not crime.
Immediately after the Gulf war ended in March 1991, Washington returned to support for Saddam. The State Department formally reiterated its refusal to have any dealings with the Iraqi democratic opposition: "Political meetings with them would not be appropriate for our policy at this time," the Department spokesman declared. "This time" was March 14 1991, while Saddam was decimating the southern opposition under the eyes of U.S. forces, which refused even to grant rebelling Iraqi military officers access to captured Iraqi arms, to defend the population and perhaps overthrow the monster. Had it not been for unexpected public reaction, Washington might not have extended even weak support to rebelling Kurds, subjected to the same treatment shortly after.
The official reason for protecting Saddam was the need to preserve "stability." Administration reasoning was outlined by New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman. While opposing a popular rebellion, he wrote, Washington did hope that a military coup might remove Saddam, "and then Washington would have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein," a return to the days when Saddam's "iron fist...held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia," not to speak of Washington. Iraqi democrats did not regard this as "the best of all worlds." A leading figure of the opposition, Ahmed Chalabi, described the outcome as "the worst of all possible worlds" for the Iraqi people, whose tragedy is "awesome." The U.S., he said, was "waiting for Saddam to butcher the insurgents in the hope that he can be overthrown later by a suitable officer," an attitude rooted in the U.S. policy of "supporting dictatorships to maintain stability."
Washington claims to have supported the democratic opposition in later years. Their own picture is different, however. Just last month, the British press reported Chalabi's observation that "everyone says Saddam is boxed in, but it is the Americans and British who are boxed in by their refusal to support the idea of political change."
"It was our responsibility, indeed obligation, to compel Washington to end its support for Saddam's worst crimes when they occurred, perhaps even to intervene to terminate them had that been necessary. "
It was our responsibility, indeed obligation, to compel Washington to end its support for Saddam's worst crimes when they occurred, perhaps even to intervene to terminate them had that been necessary. Quite possibly, as in the case of Suharto, withdrawal of support would have sufficed. Currently the Iraqi Democratic opposition is advancing concrete proposals for overthrowing Saddam in favor of a popular-based alternative. They are requesting U.S. support but not military intervention, which they have consistently opposed. How realistic these proposals are it is hard to judge, but we have a responsibility, I think, to ensure that they receive serious and honest attention, and to ensure further that Washington abandon the "refusal to support the idea of political change," apparently still in force.
Again, there are no simple general formulas. Slogans are easy, sometimes policy choices too, particularly when we are carrying out or abetting crimes and can desist. But choices are often hard and complex, with unpredictable and possibly extreme consequences. There is no alternative to the careful evaluation of each case, on its merits.
Mr. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, responds:
All countries intervene, in one way or another, in one another's affairs -- the question is, it seems to me, whether there is anything uniqe about the United States, i.e. whether we have any special claim on the right, or the obligation, to conduct ourselves differently than any other country would -- to take action beyond doing such things as, say, fighting if we were directly attacked or using trade leverage to get another country to treat our exports fairly.
"But in some circumstances, I believe we do have an obligation to act, to intervene in international affairs, even if our direct interests are not immediately threatened."
The way I look at it is that we Americans really don't have any special claim as a matter of right -- Americans are not inherently better than anyone else. But in some circumstances, I believe we do have an obligation to act, to intervene in international affairs, even if our direct interests are not immediately threatened. This is hard to argue about -- it's one of those things that either you feel or you don't. But I believe that it should be true for countries, in this regard, just as it should be for individuals -- for those to whom much is given, much should be demanded. In those periods, such as the 1920's and 1930's when we withdrew from the world things didn't subsequently work out very well. In retrospect, for example, if we had led a coalition to stop Hitler as soon as he moved into the Rhineland, most historians agree that he would have been deposed as Chancellor -- we could have saved the world a lot of pain and death by intervening then instead of sitting here as we did, self-satisfied, behind our two oceans, until some six years later we ourselves were attacked more than two years after the beginning of World War II.
"But in great measure because of our interventions in the 20th century, our one-time enemies in the three great wars of the century (two hot, one cold) are on the ash-heap of history: Imperial Germany, the Axis powers, and the Soviet bloc are gone."
Of course we don't always intervene wisely -- we make mistakes, we get full of ourselves and try to do too much, and so on. But in great measure because of our interventions in the 20th century, our one-time enemies in the three great wars of the century (two hot, one cold) are on the ash-heap of history: Imperial Germany, the Axis powers, and the Soviet bloc are gone. Not only are these regimes now largely replaced by democracies, the same is true of most of the autocratic states that were at one time or another allied with us in the cold war and that we pushed to reform their governments -- e.g. almost all of Latin America, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, Portugal, etc.
On the whole, if you look at results, our interventions in this century have left the world a much better place than it would have been if we had behaved during the rest of the century in the non-intervening way we did in the 20's and 30's.
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