Review: "Failed States" by N. Chomsky

My first remark about this book is that Chomsky isn't really making an audit of the American democracy based the usual benchmarks: transparent elections, freedom of speech and assembly, and a vibrant civil society. The title "Failed State" can hardly be applied to the United States in a literal sense, at least not comparatively to other failed states like, say, Haiti, Afghanistan, Palestine, or more recently Iraq. But I gather that this is the whole point that the author is trying to make: these four countries have all one thing in common in that they have all been at some point in their history used and abused by American meddling in their internal affairs. The hypocritical, hegemonic, and routinely brutal nature of American foreign policy is exposed from the early days of the Confederation, to the Cuba crisis, to Bosnia, to the messianic "war on terror" of post-9/11. Unfortunately, if one is to look for an actual assessment of (domestic) democracy, it will not be found until to the last chapter (titled "Democracy Promotion at Home").

Another criticism I have of Chomsky's work in general is that he consistently portrays, admittedly with very solid arguments, that the US government is out there to deceive the people. Sure, one can find a slew of such brazen attempts at deceiving the average citizen, not the least (nor last?) of which is the hyped-up claim that Iraq had an flourishing arsenal of WMDs just waiting to be tapped into by Al Qaeda. (Recall the 2003 parade of "proofs" trotted out by Rice and Powell that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were conspiring an imminent pandemonium of biological and chemical warfare.) But the question Chomsky does not answer is: who got W. Bush to the White House if not the American electorate? No real criticism of the electoral system per se is articulated anywhere in his reasoning. Instead the political elite is denounced as if it were parachuted to positions of power by unknown nebulae of corporate predators with the sole purpose to deceive the nice and gullible American citizen. This does not make sense. Here is an example: the latest movements in favor of "Intelligent Design" (which Chomsky describes as actively instigated in a top-down manner from the evangelist-in-chief, Bush himself) are after all a grassroots movement that is rampant within the largest and most organized chunk of the American electorate: the church-going, god-fearing, gun-clutching middle-class rednecks of degenerated WASP descent. Why can't Chomsky admit that the White House and all it's policies, foreign and domestic, are nothing but the result of the layman's gullible and politically-illiterate vote who hoist these neocon cliques and PR puppets to positions of supreme power? No matter how powerful and insidious the corporate, evangelical, or Zionist lobbies may be, they are not the ones that put G.W. Bush in office (not once mind you, but twice!).

The widespread analysis of the Iraq war within scholarly circles is that it was motivated by a belief among strategic planners that democracy can and should be exported, or otherwise forcibly implanted in potentially "subversive" countries. As Chomsky reminds us, Vietnam, Haiti, and pretty much every Latin American country have been "gratified" by democracy made in the USA via military intervention on their soil. This scholarly thesis, voiced by Chomsky (albeit with a different tone) in his "spreading virus" model is the following: Strategic planners export "democracy" because if any foreign regime were to be left with its own brand of homegrown self-governance, these parochial schools of self-determinacy would spread to neighboring zones and thereby impede the homogeneous and standardized World Order headquartered in Washington.

But then here comes the contradiction. Chomsky goes on to say that if "Iraq were exporting lettuce" instead of oil, the war would never had happened. In bringing oil into the picture, Chomsky has undermined his argument that the invasion was primarily motivated by Democracy^TM _{made in the USA} promotion. This is for me one the main conundrums I am grappling with in understanding American foreign policy: Was the Iraq war (or pretty much any other military intervention of the US for that matter) motivated by economic predation (oil) or by ideological coercion and preventive ideological vaccination (democracy export). The two concepts are mutually exclusive and the answer, if there is any, may very well be a combination of both. Given the thinly veiled interest that the USA has in Iraqi oil fields, the notion of economic predation seems much more viable (indeed, a political motivation would lead us to ask why the US has not invaded other "undemocratic" and "subversive" regimes such as Zimbabwe or Belarus). But then again this "economic predation model" does not explain what lead the US to Vietnam or Haiti (no oil to loot there) and the political explanation becomes the only alternative.

Anyways, this book, like most of Chomsky's writings, uses a proof-by-example type of reasoning and does not deal with the abstractions of political theory. The author has in fact put together and very well researched prosecution case against his own government. He essentially proved through an empirical methodology what Thomas Carothers, head of the Democracy and Law project of the Carnegie Endowment, had succinctly formulated: that the White House supports democracy if and only if it conforms to strategic and economic interests of its corporate patronage. It's an excellent book with an otherwise very misleading title. "Failed Electorate" would much better capture the essence of the problem.