Hegemony or Survival

Some excerpts from HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL          

These are some excerpts from the book that I found particularly worthwhile.

This is a book written by Noam Chomsky in 2003.

As the invasion of Iraq began, the prominent historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger wrote that:

“The president has adopted a policy of “anticipatory self-defense” that is alarmingly similar in policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.  Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we American who live in infamy.”

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Here is what Chomsky wrote about Iraq under Saddam’s regime:

Horrifying and brutal as Saddam Hussein’s regime was, he nevertheless did direct oil profits to internal development.  “A tyrant, at the head of a regime that has turned violence into an instrument of state,” with a “hideous human rights record,” he nevertheless “had hoisted half the country’s population into the middle class, and Arabs the world over...came to study at Iraqi universities.”  The 1991 war, involving the purposeful destruction of water, power, and sewage systems, took a terrible toll, and the sanctions regime imposed by the US and UK drove the country to the level of bare survival.  As one illustration, UNICEF’s 2003 Report on the State of the Worlds Children states that “Iraqs regression over the past decade is by far the most severe of the 193 countries surveyed,” with the child death rate, “the best single indicator of child welfare,” increasing from 50 to 133 per 1,000 live births, placing Iraq below every country outside Africa apart from Cambodia and Afghanistan.   Two hawkish military analysts observe that “economic sanction may well have been a necessary [sic] cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history,” in the hundreds of thousands according to conservative estimates. 

Just totally disgusting…. completely disgusting.

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Again, Chomsky talking about the Iraq war:

In the end, the Turks proceeded to teach a lesson in democracy to the West.  Parliament finally refused to allow US troops to be deployed fully in Turkey.  To formulate the outcome within the conventional framework:

The ground war has been hampered because Turkey did not accept its role as host of the northern front forces, again for political reasons.  Its government was too weak in the face of antiwar feeling.

The presuppositions are clear.  Strong governments disregard their populations and “accept the role” assigned to them by the global ruler; weak governments succumb to the will of 95 percent of their population.

And to hell with democracy!

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Chomsky again on Iraq, this time on the war in 1991 against Iraq:

US forces in the Gulf War in 1991 enjoyed such overwhelming military superiority that troops could enter Iraq behind plows mounted on tanks and earthmovers, which bulldozed live Iraqi soldiers into trenches in the desert, an “unprecedented tactic,” Patrick Sloyan reported.  “Not a single American was killed during the attack that made an Iraqi body count impossible.”  The victims were mostly Shi’ite and Kurdish peasant conscripts, it appears, hapless victims of Saddam Hussein hiding in hold in the sand or fleeing for their lives.  The report elicited little interest or comment.

I have heard verbal reports of these horrific war crimes, but no national media attention to these incidents.