WEDNESDAY, FEB 15, 2012 01:08 AM +0900
The hysterical American decline
As America tries to cling to world dominance, we can learn important lessons from Vietnam and Iraq
NOAM CHOMSKY
TLに流れてきたので読んだら面白かった。でも、２０１２年の記事なんだね。
チョムスキー節といえば、それまでだが、わりに好きなんだよね、チョムスキー節。
国際状況について国益重視の勢力争いのリアリズムと共通する認識を持っているところが面白い。もっとも、それを是としないところが、リアリストとの違いである。
記事は、戦後アメリカの一貫した帝国主義的戦略を俯瞰し、この帝国を維持するには、油などの資源、経済的利益、そして、米軍基地など要所を押さえておく必要があり、また、その近隣諸国についても、地域の”安定”のために、アメリカのいうことをきく指導者なら、独裁者でも支持し、言うことを聞かないなら民主主義でもぶっつぶす歴史を指摘。
アジアの国々が独立して、ドミノ効果でアメリカの覇権を揺るがすのを防ぐために、ベトナムなどに侵攻し、結果として、アジアに多大な被害を与えたのはそう古い話ではない。
戦後７０年談話で、あの鳩派でアメリカの良心のように思われているカーター大統領、から学ぶことはあるか？
ベトナム戦争について
ーーー最低だな。
なんてやったら、すごいことになる。
これはまねてはまずい！
（歴史問題）
ああ、そういえば、記事のなかにでてくる、
クリスチャン・シオニズム
というのは注目しておくべきですね。 イスラエルの地理的重要性、そして、軍事技術的重要性と共に、アメリカがイスラエルを支持する理由の一つなわけですね。
The hysterical American decline
As America tries to cling to world dominance, we can learn important lessons from Vietnam and Iraq
NOAM CHOMSKY
TLに流れてきたので読んだら面白かった。でも、２０１２年の記事なんだね。
チョムスキー節といえば、それまでだが、わりに好きなんだよね、チョムスキー節。
国際状況について国益重視の勢力争いのリアリズムと共通する認識を持っているところが面白い。もっとも、それを是としないところが、リアリストとの違いである。
記事は、戦後アメリカの一貫した帝国主義的戦略を俯瞰し、この帝国を維持するには、油などの資源、経済的利益、そして、米軍基地など要所を押さえておく必要があり、また、その近隣諸国についても、地域の”安定”のために、アメリカのいうことをきく指導者なら、独裁者でも支持し、言うことを聞かないなら民主主義でもぶっつぶす歴史を指摘。
アジアの国々が独立して、ドミノ効果でアメリカの覇権を揺るがすのを防ぐために、ベトナムなどに侵攻し、結果として、アジアに多大な被害を与えたのはそう古い話ではない。
戦後７０年談話で、あの鳩派でアメリカの良心のように思われているカーター大統領、から学ぶことはあるか？
ベトナム戦争について
The destruction was mutual. We went to Vietnam without any desire to capture territory or impose American will on other people. I don't feel that we ought to apologize or castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability.
大量破壊や殺人はお互い様じゃな。
アメリカは領土を奪いにいこうとしたわけでもなく、アメリカの意志を押し付けようとして、ベトナム戦争やったわけでないでのお。
なんで、謝ったり、自分たちを叱責したり、、とがめられなくちゃいけないかのおお。
ーーー最低だな。
We owe China no debt because the destruction was mutual.
なんてやったら、すごいことになる。
これはまねてはまずい！
（歴史問題）
At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.
When the war ended eight horrendous years later, mainstream opinion was divided between those who described the war as a “noble cause” that could have been won with more dedication, and at the opposite extreme, the critics, to whom it was “a mistake” that proved too costly. By 1977, President Carter aroused little notice when he explained that we owe Vietnam “no debt” because “the destruction was mutual.”
There are important lessons in all this for today, even apart from another reminder that only the weak and defeated are called to account for their crimes. One lesson is that to understand what is happening we should attend not only to critical events of the real world, often dismissed from history, but also to what leaders and elite opinion believe, however tinged with fantasy. Another lesson is that alongside the flights of fancy concocted to terrify and mobilize the public (and perhaps believed by some who are trapped in their own rhetoric), there is also geostrategic planning based on principles that are rational and stable over long periods because they are rooted in stable institutions and their concerns.
The Iraq war is an instructive case.
Later, as the scale of the U.S. defeat in Iraq was becoming difficult to suppress, the government quietly conceded what had been clear all along. In 2007-2008, the administration officially announced that a final settlement must grant the U.S. military bases and the right of combat operations, and must privilege U.S. investors in the rich energy system — demands later reluctantly abandoned in the face of Iraqi resistance. And all well kept from the general population.
he plans that Kennan helped formulate and implement took for granted that the U.S. would control the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, the former British empire (including the incomparable energy resources of the Middle East), and as much of Eurasia as possible, crucially its commercial and industrial centers. These were not unrealistic objectives, given the distribution of power. But decline set in at once.
In 1949, China declared independence, an event known in Western discourse as “the loss of China” — in the U.S., with bitter recriminations and conflict over who was responsible for that loss. The terminology is revealing. It is only possible to lose something that one owns. The tacit assumption was that the U.S. owned China, by right, along with most of the rest of the world, much as postwar planners assumed.
The “loss of China” was the first major step in “America’s decline.” It had major policy consequences. One was the immediate decision to support France’s effort to reconquer its former colony of Indochina, so that it, too, would not be “lost.”
Indochina itself was not a major concern, despite claims about its rich resources by President Eisenhower and others. Rather, the concern was the “domino theory,” which is often ridiculed when dominoes don’t fall, but remains a leading principle of policy because it is quite rational. To adopt Henry Kissinger’s version, a region that falls out of control can become a “virus” that will “spread contagion,” inducing others to follow the same path.
In the case of Vietnam, the concern was that the virus of independent development might infect Indonesia, which really does have rich resources. And that might lead Japan — the “superdomino” as it was called by the prominent Asia historian John Dower — to “accommodate” to an independent Asia as its technological and industrial center in a system that would escape the reach of U.S. power. That would mean, in effect, that the U.S. had lost the Pacific phase of World War II, fought to prevent Japan’s attempt to establish such a New Order in Asia.
The way to deal with such a problem is clear: destroy the virus and “inoculate” those who might be infected. In the Vietnam case, the rational choice was to destroy any hope of successful independent development and to impose brutal dictatorships in the surrounding regions. Those tasks were successfully carried out — though history has its own cunning, and something similar to what was feared has since been developing in East Asia, much to Washington’s dismay.
The most important victory of the Indochina wars was in 1965, when a U.S.-backed military coup in Indonesia led by General Suharto carried out massive crimes that were compared by the CIA to those of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. The “staggering mass slaughter,” as the New York Times described it, was reported accurately across the mainstream, and with unrestrained euphoria.
It was “a gleam of light in Asia,” as the noted liberal commentator James Reston wrote in the Times. The coup ended the threat of democracy by demolishing the mass-based political party of the poor, established a dictatorship that went on to compile one of the worst human rights records in the world, and threw the riches of the country open to western investors. Small wonder that, after many other horrors, including the near-genocidal invasion of East Timor, Suharto was welcomed by the Clinton administration in 1995 as “our kind of guy.”
Noam Chomsky: The Decline of American Empire (Part 2)
The principles of imperial domination have undergone little change, but the capacity to implement them has markedly declined.
By Noam Chomsky / TomDispatch.com February 15, 2012
Even more serious would be the loss of the MENA countries -- Middle East/North Africa -- which have been regarded by planners since the 1940s as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Control of MENA energy reserves would yield “substantial control of the world,” in the words of the influential Roosevelt advisor A.A. Berle.
The Arab Spring, another development of historic importance, might portend at least a partial “loss” of MENA. The US and its allies have tried hard to prevent that outcome -- so far, with considerable success. Their policy towards the popular uprisings has kept closely to the standard guidelines: support the forces most amenable to U.S. influence and control.
Favored dictators are supported as long as they can maintain control (as in the major oil states). When that is no longer possible, then discard them and try to restore the old regime as fully as possible (as in Tunisia and Egypt). The general pattern is familiar: Somoza, Marcos, Duvalier, Mobutu, Suharto, and many others. In one case, Libya, the three traditional imperial powers intervened by force to participate in a rebellion to overthrow a mercurial and unreliable dictator, opening the way, it is expected, to more efficient control over Libya’s rich resources (oil primarily, but also water, of particular interest to French corporations), to a possible base for the U.S. Africa Command (so far restricted to Germany), and to the reversal of growing Chinese penetration. As far as policy goes, there have been few surprises.
It is quite in accord with the general and unsurprising principle recognized by mainstream scholarship: the U.S. supports democracy if, and only if, the outcomes accord with its strategic and economic objectives,
It is understandable that Palestinian rights should be marginalized in U.S. policy and discourse. Palestinians have no wealth or power. They offer virtually nothing to U.S. policy concerns; in fact, they have negative value, as a nuisance that stirs up “the Arab street.”
Israel, in contrast, is a valuable ally. It is a rich society with a sophisticated, largely militarized high-tech industry.
Apart from such elementary considerations of great power politics as these, there are cultural factors that should not be ignored. Christian Zionism in Britain and the U.S. long preceded Jewish Zionism, and has been a significant elite phenomenon with clear policy implications (including the Balfour Declaration, which drew from it). When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.
The next step was for the Chosen People to return to the land promised to them by the Lord. Articulating a common elite view, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes described Jewish colonization of Palestine as an achievement “without comparison in the history of the human race.” Such attitudes find their place easily within the Providentialist doctrines that have been a strong element in popular and elite culture since the country’s origins: the belief that God has a plan for the world and the U.S. is carrying it forward under divine guidance, as articulated by a long list of leading figures.
Moreover, evangelical Christianity is a major popular force in the U.S. Further toward the extremes, End Times evangelical Christianity also has enormous popular outreach, invigorated by the establishment of Israel in 1948, revitalized even more by the conquest of the rest of Palestine in 1967 -- all signs that End Times and the Second Coming are approaching.
Why exactly is Iran regarded as such a colossal threat? The question is rarely discussed, but it is not hard to find a serious answer -- though not, as usual, in the fevered pronouncements. The most authoritative answer is provided by the Pentagon and the intelligence services in their regular reports to Congress on global security. They report that Iran does not pose a military threat. Its military spending is very low even by the standards of the region, minuscule of course in comparison with the U.S.
The regime is doubtless a serious threat to much of its own population -- and regrettably, is hardly unique on that score. But the primary threat to the U.S. and Israel is that Iran might deter their free exercise of violence. A further threat is that the Iranians clearly seek to extend their influence to neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and beyond as well. Those “illegitimate” acts are called “destabilizing” (or worse). In contrast, forceful imposition of U.S. influence halfway around the world contributes to “stability” and order, in accord with traditional doctrine about who owns the world.
Revealing how little fundamental assumptions have changed, U.S. strategic analysts describe the result of China’s military programs as a “classic 'security dilemma,' whereby military programs and national strategies deemed defensive by their planners are viewed as threatening by the other side,” writes Paul Godwin of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The security dilemma arises over control of the seas off China’s coasts. The U.S. regards its policies of controlling these waters as “defensive,” while China regards them as threatening; correspondingly, China regards its actions in nearby areas as “defensive” while the U.S. regards them as threatening. No such debate is even imaginable concerning U.S. coastal waters. This “classic security dilemma” makes sense, again, on the assumption that the U.S. has a right to control most of the world, and that U.S. security requires something approaching absolute global control.
ああ、そういえば、記事のなかにでてくる、
クリスチャン・シオニズム
この立場では、イスラエル（パレスチナ）を神がユダヤ人に与えた土地と認める。さらに、イスラエル国家の建設は聖書に預言された「イスラエルの回復」であるとし、ユダヤ人のイスラエルへの帰還を支援する。キリストの再臨と世界の終末が起こる前に、イスラエルの回復がなされている必要があると考え、イスラエルの建国と存続を支持する。
というのは注目しておくべきですね。 イスラエルの地理的重要性、そして、軍事技術的重要性と共に、アメリカがイスラエルを支持する理由の一つなわけですね。
