Noam Chomsky on economic collapse

Anti-Democratic Nature of US Capitalism is Being Exposed

Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals - the very people who created the banking crisis writes Noam Chomsky

THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unraveling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.

Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as "a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close", as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years - that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.

These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments "socialise their losses," as in today's taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention "has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries", they conclude.

In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.

The financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient", as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These "externalities" can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.

The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on "to themselves". Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others - the "externalities" of decent survival - if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.

Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a "virtual parliament" of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and "vote" against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.

Investors and lenders can "vote" by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*

The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will - for some measure of democracy.

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.

In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".

In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been "politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties". Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.

But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, "limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures".

The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.

"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business," concluded America's leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda".

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades "real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans".

Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.

Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.

* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.

Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.

The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.

The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the "reserve currency" for the other countries within Bretton Woods.

Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writings on linguistics and politics have just been collected in The Essential Chomsky, edited by Anthony Arnove, from the New Press.

Original article posted here.

weazl believes that he has rendered himself irrelevant by his silly 911 dismissal, but some are still impressed, so weazl includes Chomsky interview

Chomsky Speaks

By WAJAHAT ALI

"I’m absolutely deluged with requests right now, but I really would like to do this interview, I just don’t know when,” replied the 79 year old, prolific author, linguist, scholar and political dissident to the first of my many emails over a six-month correspondence. Noam Chomsky is the most cited, and perhaps most controversial, leading living public intellectual according to the 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll. Although mainstream media refuses him airtime, The New York Times states Chomsky remains one of the most “influential” intellectuals alive, constantly sought by students, Universities, activists, academic symposiums, and even world leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

I first met the infamous and controversial scholar activist in 2002 when I moderated a question and answer session with him at my old alma mater, U.C. California, Berkeley. [The educational and informative event was later transcribed in the book Power and Terror: Post 9-11 Talks and Interviews.] Before the program, we had a nice hour to chat, and I was impressed by his inexhaustible memory, low key demeanor, and razor sharp recollection of facts, names and dates when answering my endless questions. When I asked whether he identified himself more as a scholar or an activist, he said neither exclusively, but mentioned dissent was firmly ingrained in him after he wrote his first article condemning the rise of fascism during the Spanish Civil War. [He was ten when he wrote it.] Although many academics and intellectuals’ arrogance is outmatched only by their insecurity thereby reflecting a cold, selfish elitism, I’ve always found Chomsky to be gracious, accommodating and agreeable with his time and knowledge.

Thus, it was no surprise that after six months of email tag, Professor Chomsky “finally found a little time to respond to the questions.” In this exclusive interview, Chomsky discusses the “threat” of Iran, the parallels and dissimilarities between Vietnam and Iraq, the American media, his critics and detractors, Pakistan, and the Norman Finkelstein tenure debacle.

ALI: In 1969, you published your first major political work, American Power and the New Mandarins, a scathing critique of the United States involvement in Vietnam and South East Asia. As you know, many have drawn parallels between our current War in Iraq with our military actions in Vietnam. (Others, of course, reject this comparison). As one with considerable experience researching both significant moments in history, are these parallels premature and presumptuous? Or, are there significant similarities that can be gleaned from both wars in relation to the United States involvement?

CHOMSKY: The primary similarities have to do with how the wars are viewed in the U.S. (and the West generally). Apart from the margins, opinions range from “hawk” to “dove.” In both cases, the hawks say that with more commitment the U.S. could win. The doves, in both cases, take the stand expressed by Barack Obama about Iraq (a “strategic blunder,” too costly to ourselves), or by the prominent liberal historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger in 1966, when Vietnam was coming to be seen as a venture that is too costly for the US. Schlesinger explained that “we all pray” that the hawks will be right, and that more troops (the “surge” of the day) will bring victory. And if they prove to be right, we may all be praising “the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government” in winning victory while leaving “the tragic country gutted and devastated by bombs, burned by napalm, turned into a wasteland by chemical defoliation, a land of ruin and wreck,” with its “political and institutional fabric” pulverized. But escalation probably will not succeed, he felt, and will prove to be too costly for ourselves, so perhaps strategy should be rethought. The position of the doves on Iraq is rather similar. If, for example, General Petraeus could achieve anything like what Putin has achieved in Chechnya, he would be elevated to the Pantheon, with the applause of liberal doves.

It is next to inconceivable, within the mainstream of Western intellectual culture, that one might give a principled critique of the war – that is, the kind of critique we give reflexively, and properly, when some enemy state commits aggression: for example, when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia, or Afghanistan, or Chechnya. We do not criticize those actions on grounds of cost, error, blunder, quagmire. Rather, we condemn the actions as horrendous war crimes, whether they succeed or not.

The Vietnam and Iraq wars themselves, however, are quite different in motivation and character. Vietnam was of no particular value to the U.S. in itself, even though President Eisenhower tried to arouse some support for his undermining of the Geneva peace agreements by bringing up resources of tin and rubber. If Vietnam had disappeared into the sea, it would have been of little concern to U.S. planners. Iraq is entirely different. It has perhaps the second largest oil reserves in the world, which are, furthermore, very cheap to extract: no permafrost or tar sands. And it is right at the center of the world’s greatest resources of easily exploitable energy.

In the case of Vietnam, the concern was that successful independent development there might be a “virus” that would “spread contagion” to others, to borrow Henry Kissinger’s rhetoric with regard to democratic socialism in Chile. That has been a primary motive for military intervention and subversion throughout the world since World War II – the rational version of the “domino theory.” The “contagion” is that others suffering similar burdens might see successful independent development as a model and might try to pursue the same path, and the system of domination might erode. Even the weakest and tiniest country therefore poses extreme threats to order.

International affairs are much like the Mafia: the Godfather cannot tolerate disobedience even from a small storekeeper who fails to pay protection money, or “the rot might spread and spoil the barrel,” in the terminology of US planners: the rot of successful independent development, out of US control. Vietnam, it was feared, might infect surrounding countries, even Indonesia, with its rich resources. And Japan – what the prominent Asia historian John Dower called “the superdomino” – might “accommodate” to an independent East Asia, becoming its industrial and technological center, effectively recreating the “New Order” that fascist Japan had sought to construct by force during World War II. The U.S. was not prepared to lose the Pacific phase of World War II a few years later.

When there is fear that a virus may spread contagion, the proper steps are to destroy the virus and inoculate those who might be infected. That was done. Vietnam was virtually destroyed (along with Indochina altogether, as the U.S. expanded its war to Laos and Cambodia). By the late 1960s it was clear that it would never be a model for anyone, and would be lucky to survive. And the region was “inoculated” by imposition of murderous tyrants: Suharto in Indonesia, Marcos in the Philippines, and so on. Suharto’s military coup in 1965 was particularly important. It was described fairly accurately. The New York Times described it as a “staggering mass slaughter” – and also as “a gleam of light in Asia” -- as Suharto’s military forces led the massacre of perhaps a million people, mostly landless peasants; destroyed the only mass popular political party in the country, a party of the poor, as it was described by Australian Indonesia specialist Harold Crouch; and opened the rich resources of the country to exploitation by Western corporations. Euphoria was unconstrained. In retrospect, Kennedy-Johnson National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy reflected that the U.S. should have called of the Vietnam war in 1965, after this grand victory for freedom and justice.

The U.S. achieved a significant victory in Indochina, though it did not achieve its most far-reaching objective: installing a client state. For the imperial consciousness, the Vietnam war is therefore a “disaster.”

Iraq, as noted, is entirely different. It is far too valuable to destroy. It is imperative that it remain under U.S. control, if at all possible, with an obedient client state that will also house major U.S. military bases. That these were the primary goals of the invasion was always quite obvious, but there is no longer any need to debate it. These plans were made explicit by the Bush administration in its November 2007 declaration and subsequent pronouncements, along with the rather brazen demand that U.S. corporations must have privileged access to Iraq’s enormous oil reserves.

ALI: It seems the American public has finally discovered the existence of Pakistan after 60 years. How sincere was General Musharraf’s intentions in rebuilding a democracy in Pakistan? Specifically, why does the United States trust Musharraf over potential rivals, such as Bhutto and Zardari’s PPP, Nawaaz Sharif and others, in their “War on terrorism” and “hunt for Bin Laden?”

CHOMSKY: We need not tarry on Musharraf’s sincere intentions to rebuild democracy. The U.S. supported him as long as possible, just as it supported earlier tyrants, like Zia ul-Haq. Choice of allies follows a simple criterion: it depends on who is perceived to be the most loyal client, the one who can most be depended on to follow orders. Despite occasional exceptions, the uniformity is impressive.

ALI: Recently, an U.S. intelligence report concluded that Iran had successfully stopped a nuclear weapons program 4 years ago. Iran maintains it never advanced a program in the first place. Regardless, President Bush, Israel President Olmert and ranking officials in Washington claim Iran remains a “dangerous threat” and is still in pursuit of “nuclear weapons.” How tenable are both parties’ claims (U.S. and Iran)? If it is unsubstantiated, why then the aggressive and confrontational rhetoric against Iran, and how does this benefit U.S foreign policy in the Middle Eastern region?

CHOMSKY: The claims should be evaluated by the International Atomic Energy Agency. I have no special knowledge, of course. It would hardly be surprising if it were discovered that Iran has some kind of nuclear weapons program, perhaps contingency plans. The reasons were explained by one of Israel’s leading military historians, Martin van Creveld. He argued that Iran would be “crazy” if it were not developing a nuclear deterrent in its current predicament: with hostile forces of a violent superpower on two borders and a hostile regional power (Israel) brandishing hundreds of nuclear weapons, both calling loudly for “regime change.” Nevertheless, the available evidence indicates that if Iran had such a program, they stopped pursuing it several years ago.

From the U.S. perspective, Iran committed a grave crime in 1979. As we know, in 1953 the U.S. and UK dismantled Iranian parliamentary democracy and installed a brutal tyrant, the Shah, who remained a pillar of U.S. control over the energy-rich region until 1979, when he was overthrown by a popular uprising. That was rather like Cuba’s overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1959, or other acts of “successful defiance” of Washington’s principle, to borrow the terms used in internal documents. The Godfather cannot tolerate “successful defiance.” It is far too great a threat to what is called “stability” – that is, obedience to the master.

Iranian independence is no slight problem. It threatens U.S. domination of one of the most valuable prizes in the world, Middle East oil. Accordingly, from 1979 the U.S. has been bitterly hostile to Iran. Washington backed Saddam Hussein’s vicious and murderous assault against Iran, and even after the war, continued to provide strong support to its friend Saddam, even inviting Iraqi nuclear engineers for advanced training in nuclear weapons development in 1989. It then turned to severe sanctions against Iran, along with regular threats to attack Iran and overthrow the government.

That continues to the present. As I write (June 15, 2008), Reuters reports that ‘Analysts believe that offering Iran security guarantees, an idea floated by Russia, could help end the deadlock, seeing such guarantees as Iran's fundamental goal given the Bush administration's "regime change" policy toward it. But the United States last month said major powers had no plans to make such security pledges to Tehran.’

In simple words, the US insists on maintaining its stance as an outlaw state, dismissing core principles of international law, including the UN Charter, which outlaws the threat or use of force in international affairs. Bush is joined by both 2008 presidential candidates and by elite opinion in the U.S. and Europe – but not by the American public, which by a large majority favors diplomacy and opposes the threat of force. But public opinion is largely irrelevant to policy formation, not just in this case.

The political class, across the spectrum with rare exceptions, is committed to maintaining U.S. control over the world’s major energy resources, and to punishing “successful defiance.” Therefore, the U.S. has tried very hard to mobilize an anti-Iranian alliance among the Sunni states of the region, though without much success. Bush’s two trips to Saudi Arabia in early 2008 were complete failures in this regard. The Saudi press, normally very polite to important visitors, condemned the policies proposed to them by Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as “not diplomacy in search of peace, but madness in search of war.” The Gulf monarchies are no friends of Iran, but appear to prefer accommodation to confrontation, a bitter blow to U.S. policies. Washington is facing similar problems in Iraq and Lebanon. In the background lies a much broader concern: that the energy producers of the region may turn to the East, perhaps even following Iran to establish links to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes China, Russia, and the Central Asian states, with India, Pakistan, and Iran as observers, a status denied to Washington.

ALI: A significant rise in Sunni-Shia conflict has arisen over the past few years specifically in Iraq due to the rising insurgency and civil war catalyzed by Saddam Hussein’s fall and the resulting power vacuum. How will the “Sunni-Shia” conflict, if at all, reverberate throughout the Middle East, specifically in countries like Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon and in relation to “The War on Terror?” Are we going to see a rise in terrorism, extremism and Anti-Americanism, or will this lead the way for “Divide and conquer” and help American forces and foreign policy “pacify” the region?

CHOMSKY: According to the studies of popular opinion in Iraq by the Pentagon, sectarian conflict in Iraq was not “catalyzed by Saddam Hussein’s fall and the resulting power vacuum,” but by U.S. aggression. To quote the Washington Post summary of the Pentagon findings released in December 2007, “Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of `occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation.” As noted, the U.S. has not had great success in inspiring a regional Sunni-Shia conflict, though the tensions and conflicts are real, and ominous.

The Iraqi invasion has increased terrorism, far more than was anticipated: seven-fold, according to an analysis of quasi-official figures by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank. What happens next depends in no slight measure on what U.S. policies will be, though there are many internal factors in this complex region.

ALI: On September 20, 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez promoted your book, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, during his speech at the U.N. General Assembly praising the book for articulating why the greatest danger to world peace currently is the United States. Consequently, there was a media barrage and blitz. You rejected most of the interviews, because you mentioned the reporters didn’t bother or care to actually read the book and discuss its contents, they were instead chasing sensationalism. Does the U.S. media provide an outlet for informative and educational journalism and accurate information that is not tainted by “sensationalism” and ratings-grabbing rhetoric? Does the advent of the Internet and blogs, YouTube, webzines and the like, counter what you have called the “manufacturing of consent,” whereby powerful entities, such as corporations and the U.S. government, spoon feed the media and public convenient propaganda and half truths?

CHOMSKY If I were restricted to a single newspaper, I would choose the New York Times, even though I have written hundreds of pages documenting in detail its misrepresentations, distortions, and crucial omissions in the service of power – selecting the NYT for close examination specifically because of its importance and unmatched resources. One can learn a great deal by careful and critical reading of the mainstream media, though other sources are very valuable. The internet provides access to an extraordinary range of information, opinion, and interpretation. But as with any source, it is useful to the extent that it is used with discrimination and insight. The best biologists are not the ones who have read the most technical papers in their field, but the ones who have a framework of understanding that enables them to select what is likely to be significant, even in a paper that is otherwise of little value. The same kind of discernment is necessary in the study of human affairs.

ALI: Your critics, and there are many, state your rhetoric and ideologies belie a broken record – an endless litany and screed of repetitive assaults against the U.S., its foreign policy, and its military actions. How do you respond to critics who insist your painting of U.S. foreign policy is both simplistic and cynical? Is the U.S. truly an evil empire? Can we not point to instances where U.S. intervention or aid was truly selfless and altruistic as per the ideals of the Constitution?

CHOMSKY: The kind of criticisms to which you refer are leveled against dissidents in just about every society in history, and are therefore rightly ignored. If critics have arguments and evidence, I am glad to look at them, in this domain or others. When they simply produce tantrums, of the kind to which you refer, we can dismiss the performances as another illustration of what the founder of realist international relations theory, Hans Morgenthau, called “our conformist subservience to those in power,” referring to American (in fact Western) intellectuals, always with a margin of exceptions. I do not respond to the charge that I describe the U.S. as an “evil empire” because the charge is an infantile fabrication by desperate apologists for state power. In fact, I repeatedly stress that the U.S. is very much like other systems of power. True, that stance that is intolerable to nationalists, who insist on U.S. “exceptionalism” – as do the political leadership and the intellectual classes in other powerful states, past and present, quite commonly. As for genuine “selfless and altruistic” intervention, it is very hard to find examples in the historical record, as scholarship has reviewed, though of course virtually every intervention is depicted in such terms by the perpetrators, even the worst monsters. The picture is more ambiguous with regard to aid, but not all that different, when we look closely, again close to a historical universal, as I have discussed.

ALI: What does the Norman Finkelstein tenure debacle at Depaul and his scathing critique and dismantling of Alan Dershowitz’s book, Case for Israel, tell of intellectual honesty and integrity in the United States? Is this a warning for academics and intellectuals who don’t “play by the rules” and openly challenge ideologies espoused by powerful interest groups and lobbies? Or, is this just an isolated incident without profound implications or reflections regarding the intellectual environment of post 9-11?

CHOMSKY: The behavior of the DePaul administration in overturning the faculty recommendation for tenure was of course deplorable, but this case should not be generalized too far. It had special features, notably the role of the desperate and fanatic Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. Finkelstein demonstrated with impeccable scholarship that Dershowitz is a slanderer, a liar, and a vulgar apologist for the crimes of his favored state. Dershowitz turned over heaven and earth to try to prevent the book from being published, and after he failed, launched a hysterical crusade to try to suppress its contents. He is not a fool, and knows that he cannot respond at the level of fact and argument, so turned to what comes naturally to him: a stream of vilification and abuse, and an extraordinary campaign of intimidation, to which the administration finally succumbed, presumably because of concerns that funders would be mobilized. The depraved performance is reviewed with fair accuracy in standard journals, like the Chronicle of Higher Education, and I need not comment further here.

It is true that there are major efforts to prevent honest and independent discussion of Middle East issues, particularly anything relating to Israel. Nonetheless, this is a special case. And it has nothing to do with the post-9/11 environment.

Wajahat Ali is Pakistani Muslim American who is neither a terrorist nor a saint. He is a playwright, essayist, humorist, and Attorney at Law, whose work, “The Domestic Crusaders” is the first major play about Muslim Americans living in a post 9-11 America. His blog is at http://goatmilk.wordpress.com/. He can be reached at wajahatmali@gmail.com

Original article posted here.

Right wing mouthpiece, Bill Buckley, dead. At least he was intelligent and articulate, unlike many of the tadpoles swimming in his wake.

Noam Chomsky on Iran

A Virtual Debate: Noam Chomsky v. Mike Ruppert (aka why you should always remain critical)

Noam on the Grand Chessboard

Noam Chomsky: The US says it is fighting for democracy - but is deaf to the cries of the Iraqis
They are not building a palatial embassy with the intention of going

There was unprecedented élite condemnation of the plans to invade Iraq. Sensible analysts were able to perceive that the enterprise carried significant risks for US interests, however conceived. Phrases thrown in by the official Presidential Directive from the standard boilerplate about freedom that accompany every action, and are close to a historical universal, were dismissed as meaningless by reasonable people. Global opposition was utterly overwhelming, and the likely costs to the US were apparent, though the catastrophe created by the invasion went far beyond anyone's worst expectations. It's amusing to watch the lying as the strongest supporters of the war try to deny what they very clearly said.

On the US motives for staying in Iraq, I can only repeat what I've been saying for years. A sovereign Iraq, partially democratic, could well be a disaster for US planners. With a Shia majority, it is likely to continue improving relations with Iran. There is a Shia population right across the border in Saudi Arabia, bitterly oppressed by the US-backed tyranny. Any step towards sovereignty in Iraq encourages activism there for human rights and a degree of autonomy - and that happens to be where most of Saudi oil is.

Sovereignty in Iraq might well lead to a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world's petroleum resources and independent of the US, undermining a primary goal of US foreign policy since it became the world-dominant power after the Second World War. Worse yet, though the US can intimidate Europe, it cannot intimidate China, which blithely goes its own way, even in Saudi Arabia, the jewel in the crown - the primary reason why China is considered a leading threat. An independent energy bloc in the Gulf area is likely to link up with the China-based Asian Energy Security Grid and Shanghai Cooperation Council, with Russia (which has its own huge resources) as an integral part, and with the Central Asian states (already members), possibly India. Iran is already associated with them, and a Shia-dominated bloc in the Arab states might well go along. All of that would be a nightmare for US planners and their Western allies.

There are, then, very powerful reasons why the US and UK are likely to try in every possible way to maintain effective control over Iraq. The US is not constructing a palatial embassy, by far the largest in the world and virtually a separate city within Baghdad, and pouring money into military bases, with the intention of leaving Iraq to Iraqis. All of this is quite separate from the expectations that matters can be arranged so that US corporations profit from the vast riches of Iraq.

These topics, though high on the agenda of planners, are not within the realm of discussion, as can easily be determined. That is only to be expected. These considerations violate the fundamental doctrine that state power has noble objectives, and while it may make terrible blunders, it can have no crass motives and is not influenced by domestic concentrations of private power. Any questioning of these Higher Truths is either ignored or bitterly denounced, also for good reasons: allowing them to be discussed could undermine power and privilege.

There is another issue: even the most dedicated scholar/advocates of "democracy promotion" recognise that there is a "strong line of continuity" in US efforts to promote democracy going back as far as you like and reaching the present: democracy is supported if and only if it conforms to strategic and economic objectives. For example, supporting the brutal punishment of people who committed the crime of voting "the wrong way" in a free election, as in Palestine right now, with pretexts that would inspire ridicule in a free society. As for democracy in the US, élite opinion has generally considered it a dangerous threat which must be resisted. But some Iraqis agreed with Bush's mission to bring democracy to the world: 1 per cent in a poll in Baghdad just as the noble vision was declared in Washington.

On withdrawal proposals from élite circles, however, I think one should be cautious. Some may be so deeply indoctrinated that they cannot allow themselves to think about the reasons for the invasion or the insistence on maintaining the occupation, in one or another form. Others may have in mind more effective techniques of control by redeploying US military forces in bases in Iraq and in the region, making sure to control logistics and support for client forces in Iraq, air power in the style of the destruction of much of Indochina after the business community turned against the war, and so on.

As to the consequences of a US withdrawal, we are entitled to have our personal judgements, all of them as uninformed and dubious as those of US intelligence. But they do not matter. What matters is what Iraqis think. Or rather, that is what should matter, and we learn a lot about the character and moral level of the reigning intellectual culture from the fact that the question of what the victims want barely even arises.

The Baker-Hamilton report dismisses partition proposals, even the more limited proposals for a high level of independence within a loosely federal structure. Though it's not really our business, or our right to decide, their scepticism is probably warranted. Neighbouring countries would be very hostile to an independent Kurdistan, which is landlocked, and Turkey might even invade, which would also threaten the long-standing and critical US-Turkey-Israel alliance. Kurds strongly favour independence, but appear to regard it as not feasible - for now, at least. The Sunni states might invade to protect the Sunni areas, which lack resources. The Shia region might improve ties with Iran. It could set off a regional war. My own view is that federal arrangements make good sense, not only in Iraq. But these do not seem realistic prospects for the near-term future.

US policy should be that of all aggressors: (1) pay reparations; (2) attend to the will of the victims; (3) hold the guilty parties accountable, in accord with the Nuremberg principles, the UN Charter, and other international instruments. A more practical proposal is to work to change the domestic society and culture substantially enough so that what should be done can at least become a topic for discussion. That is a large task, not only on this issue, though I think élite opposition is far more ferocious than that of the general public.

Original article published here.