Quotes from Hegemony or Survival, by Noam Chomsky

- ‘In one country, Nicaragua , Washington had lost control of the armed forces that had traditionally subdued the region’s population, one of the bitter legacies of Wilsonian idealism. The US-backed Somoza dictatorship was overthrown by the Sandinista rebels, and the murderous National Guard was dismantled. Therefore Nicaragua had to be subjected to a campaign of international terrorism that left the country in ruins.’ (9)

- ‘These are all matters that the second superpower, world public opinion, should make every effort to understand if it hopes to escape the containment to which it is subjected and to take seriously the ideals of justice and freedom that comes easily to the lips but are harder to defend and advance.’ (10)

- ‘The imperial grand strategy asserts the right of the United States to undertake ‘preventive war’ at will: Preventive, not preemptive.’ (12)

- ‘The president has adopted a policy of ‘anticipatory self-defense’ that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy.’ Arthur Schlesinger (12)

- ‘Washington ‘made it clear that it intends to do all it can to maintain its preeminence,’ then ‘announced that it would ignore’ the UN Security Council over Iraq and declared more broadly that ‘it would no longer be bound by the [UN] Charter’s rules governing the use of force.’ ’ Michael Glennon Foreign Affairs (13)

- ‘The target of preventive war must have several characteristics:

1. It must be virtually defenseless.

2. It must be important enough to be worth the trouble.

3. There must be a way to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.’ (17)

- ‘As the time approached to demonstrate the new norm of preventive war in September 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice warned that the next evidence of Saddam Hussein’s intentions might be a mushroom cloud – presumably in New York; Hussein’s neighbors, including Israeli intelligence, dismissed the allegations, which were later undermined by the UN inspectors, though Washington continued to claim otherwise. From the first moments of the propaganda offensive, it was apparent that the pronouncements lacked credibility.’ (18)

- ‘The disparity of force was so phenomenal that overwhelming victory was assured, and any humanitarian consequences could be blamed on Saddam Hussein.’ (20)

- ‘The operational definition of crimes of war and crimes against humanity was straightforward: crimes qualified as crimes if they were carried out by the enemy, not by the allies.’ (20-21)

- ‘Shortly after the 1981 [Israeli] bombing [of Iraq ], the Osirak site was inspected by a prominent nuclear physicist, Richard Wilson, then chair of the physics department at Harvard University . He concluded that the installation bombed was not suited for plutonium production, as Israel had charged, unlike Israel ’s own Dimona reactor, which had reportedly produced several hundred nuclear weapons.’ (25)

- ‘When the UN fails to serve as ‘an instrument of American unilateralism’ on issues of elite concern, it is dismissed. One of many illustrations is the record of vetoes. Since the 1960s the US has been far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions on a wide range of issues, even those calling on states to observe international law.’ (29-30)

- ‘Unexplained is why the threat of WMD became so severe after September 2002, while before National Security Adviser Rice had accepted the consensus that ‘if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration.’ Foreign Affairs January-February 2000 (34)

- ‘During the Clinton years, the prominent political analyst Samuel Huntington observed that for much of the world the US is ‘becoming the rogue superpower, [considered] the single greatest external threat to their societies.’ Robert Jervis, then president of the American Political Science Association, warned that ‘in the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States .’ ’ (37)

- ‘Several leading figures of the foreign policy elite have pointed out that the potential targets of America’s imperial ambition are not likely simply to await destruction. They ‘know that theUnited States can be held at bay only be deterrence,’ Kenneth Waltz has written, and that ‘weapons of mass destruction are the only means to deter the United States .’ Washington ’s policies are therefore leading to proliferation of WMD, Waltz concludes.’ (37)

- ‘But to reassure ourselves that the powerful are motivated by ‘elevated ideals’ and ‘altruism’ in the quest of ‘stability and righteousness,’ we have to adopt the stance called ‘intentional ignorance’ by a critic of the terrible atrocities in Central America in the 1980s backed by the political leadership that is again at the helm in Washington.’ (43)

- The term anti-American and its variants (‘hating America,’ and the like) are regularly employed to defame its critics of state policy who may admire and respect the country, its culture, and its achievements, indeed think it is the greatest place on earth. Nevertheless, they ‘hate America ’ and are ‘anti-American’ on the tacit assumption that the society and its people are to be identified with state power. This usage is drawn directly from the lexicon of totalitarianism.’ (45)

- ‘Those who are seriously interested in understanding the world will adopt the same standards whether they are evaluating their own political and intellectual elites or those of official enemies.’ (49)

- ‘1997 was of some significance for the human rights movement. In that single year the flow of US arms to Turkey exceeded the combined total of US military aid to Turkey for the entire Cold War period prior to the onset of its counterinsurgency campaign against its miserably repressed Kurdish population. By 1997 the campaign had driven millions of people from the devastated countryside, with tens of thousands killed and every imaginable form of barbaric torture, ranking high among the crimes of the grisly 1990s. As atrocities escalated, Turkey became the leading recipient of US arms worldwide, Israel and Egypt aside, with 80 percent of its supply coming from Washington.’ (52)

- ‘In 1999, Indonesia escalated the atrocities in the territory they had invaded in 1975, killing perhaps 200,000 people with the military and diplomatic support of the US and Britain , assisted by ‘international ignorance.’ In the early months of 1999, Indonesian forces and their paramilitary associates added several thousands more to the death toll, while the ruling generals announced that worse would come if the population voted the wrong way in an August 30 referendum on independence – as they did, with amazing courage. The Indonesian military made good on its promise, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes and destroying most of the country. For the first time, the atrocities were well publicized in the United States . On September 8, the Clintonadministration reacted by reiterating its position that East Timor is ‘the responsibility of the Government of Indonesia, and we don’t want to take that responsibility away from them.’ A few days later, under strong international and domestic pressure, Clinton reversed the 25-year policy of support for Indonesia ’s crimes in East Timor, and informed the Indonesian military thatWashington would no longer directly support their crimes. They immediately withdrew from the territory, allowing an Australian-led UN peacekeeping force to enter unopposed.’ (53-54)

- ‘The standard picture reverses the order of events [in Kosovo]. Uncontroversially, the bombing preceded the ethnic cleansing and atrocities, which were, in fact, its anticipated consequences.’ (55)

- ‘In the case of Turkey, ‘conscience-shocking situations’ went virtually unheeded in the United States until the moment in early 2003 when the Turkish government defied Washington’s demands and followed the wishes of 95 percent of its population by refusing to allow an attack on Iraq from its borders. At that point, one began to read about ‘Turkey’s ghastly record of torturing, killing, and ‘disappearing’ Turkish Kurds and destroying more than 3,000 of their villages,’ with citations from human rights organizations reiterating what they had reported in far more detail years before while the crimes were in progress, thanks to US aid, and could easily have been stopped.’ (61)

- ‘Attack is therefore defense, another ‘logical illogicality’ that becomes coherent once the critical doctrinal apparatus is properly understood.’ (71)

- ‘The subordination of the ideological system to power ensures that virtually any action – international terrorism (as in Cuba), over aggression (as in South Vietnam at the same time), participation in mass slaughter to destroy the only mass-based political party (as in South Vietnam and Indonesia), and many others – will either by dispatched to oblivion or reshaped into an act of legitimate self-defense or an act of benevolence that perhaps went astray.’ (76)

- ‘Kennedy’s ExComm ‘summarily dismissed any idea of sharing with the allies decisions that could have led to the nuclear destruction of Western Europe as well as North America,’ Frank Costigliola writes in a rare study of the topic. Kennedy told his secretary of state privately that allies ‘must come along or stay behind…. We cannot accept a veto from any other power,’ words heard again forty years later from Bush and Powell. The US commander of NATO put its air forces on alert without consultation with Europe.’ (79)

- ‘Washington’s successful demolition of Guatemala’s first democratic experiment, a ten-year interlude of hope and progress, greatly feared in Washington because of the enormous popular support reported by US intelligence and the ‘demonstration effect’ of social and economic measures to benefit the large majority. The Soviet threat was routinely invoked, abetted by Guatemala’s appeal to the Soviet bloc for arms after the US had threatened to attack and cut off sources of supply. The result was a half-century of horror, even worse than the US-backed tyranny that came before.’ (81)

- ‘The embargo came under considerable domestic criticism as well, on the grounds tat it harms US exporters and investors – the embargo’s only victim, according to the standard picture in the US; Cubans are unaffected. Investigations by US specialists tell a different story. Thus, a detailed study by the American Association for World Health concluded that the embargo had severe health effects, and only Cuba’s remarkable health care system had prevented a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’; this has received virtually no mention in the US.’ (88)

- ‘A National Intelligence Estimate in September 1965 warned that if the efforts of the mass-based PKI ‘to energize and unite the Indonesian nation…succeeded, Indonesia would provide a powerful example for the underdeveloped world and hence a credit to communism and a setback for Western prestige.’ That threat was overcome a few weeks later by a mass slaughter inIndonesia and then the installation of the Suharto dictatorship. From the 1950s, fear of independence and excessive democracy – permitting a popular party of the poor to participate in the electoral arena – had been driving factors in Washington’s exercises of subversion and violence, much as in Latin America.’ (93)

- ‘Regan State Department official and historian Thomas Carothers observes that for Nicaragua, the toll ‘in per capita terms was significantly higher than the number of U.S. persons killed in the U.S. Civil War and all the wars of the twentieth century combined.’ (98)

- ‘[The research journal of Jesuit University] also estimated that ‘Nicaragua’s gross domestic product would have to grow 5 percent annually for the next fifty years to reattain the productive levels of 1978, before our historic underdevelopment was intensified to the extreme by the US-financed war to destroy the revolution,’ by the wreckage left by subsequent ‘globalization,’ and by the ‘massive corruption’ of the post-1990 US-backed governments.’ (104)

- ‘A convenient definition was adopted: terrorism is what our leaders declare it to be. Period. The practice continues as the war is redeclared. In the 1980s the two main foci of the ‘war on terror’ were Central America and the Mideast/Mediterranean region. In Central America, as discussed, the war on terror instantly became a barbaric terrorist war, hailed as a grand success and discarded from history. In the Middle East, as we shall see, the commanders in Washington and their local associates were again responsible for crimes far exceeding anything charged to their official enemies.’ (110)

- ‘The warmth of the relations was indicated when a delegation of senators, led by Majority Leader and future Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole, visited Saddam in April 1990. They conveyed President Bush’s greetings and assured Saddam that his problems did not lie with the US government but with ‘the haughty and pampered press.’ Senator Alan Simpson advised Saddam to ‘invite them to come here and see for themselves’ to overcome their misconceptions. Dole assured Saddam that a commentator on Voice of America who had been critical of him had been removed.’ (112)

- ‘We confront ‘evil’s face’ by lending it a willing hand, at least if there is something to gain.’ (113)

- ‘Just as the early Libyan threats subsided, another even more dangerous one appeared: an air base in Grenada that the Russians could use to bomb us. Fortunately, our leader came to the rescue in the nick of time. After turning down offers for peaceful settlement on US terms, Washington landed 6,000 elite forces, who were able to overcome the resistance of a few dozen lightly armed, middle-aged Cuban construction workers, and we at last ‘standing tall,’ the gallant cowboy in the White House proclaimed.’ (116)

- ‘Crime in the US is not very different from other industrial countries. Fear of crime, however, is much higher. The same is true of drugs: a problem in other societies, an imminent danger to our very existence in the US . It is easy for political leaders to use the media to whip up fear of these and other menaces. Campaigns are mounted periodically, when required by domestic political needs.’ (117)

- ‘ ‘It’s a lead-pipe cinch, [Hodding Carter] wrote, that ‘the mass media in America have an overwhelming tendency to jump up and down and bark in concert whenever the White House – any White House – snaps its fingers.’ (117)

- ‘The campaign was a grand success – apart from affecting drug use.’ (118)

- ‘Privatization has other benefits. If working people depend on the stock market for their pensions, health care, and other means of survival, they have a stake in undermining their own interests: opposing wage increases, health and safety regulations, and other measures that might cut into profits that flow to the benefactors on whom they must rely, in a manner reminiscent of feudalism.’ (120)

- ‘…the letter sent by CIA director George Tenet to the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Senator Bob Graham, reporting that although there was little likelihood that Saddam would initiate a terrorist operation with conventional weapons or any chemical or biological weapons he might have the probability would rise to ‘pretty high’ in the event of US attack. The FBI also reported concerns ‘that a war with Iraq could trigger new domestic terrorism risks,’ as did the head of Homeland Security.’ (122)

- ‘UNICEF’s 2003 Report on the State of the World’s Children states that ‘Iraq’s regression over the past decade is by far the most severe of the 193 countries surveyed.’ ’ (126)

- ‘Defenders of the sanctions regime argued that the appalling situation was Saddam’s fault, because of his refusal to comply fully with UN resolutions and his construction of palaces and monuments to himself, and so on (funded by money diverted from smuggling and other illegal operations, according to the testimony of UN humanitarian coordinators and the World Food Program). The argument, then, was that we had to punish Saddam for his crimes by crushing his victims and strengthening their torturer.’ (128)

- ‘In December 2002, Jack Straw, then [British] finance minister, released a dossier of Saddam’s crimes. It was drawn almost entirely from the period of firm US-UK support, a fact overlooked with the usual display of moral integrity.’ (130)

- ‘Dislike of democracy is nothing new. For obvious reasons, it is a traditional stance of those who have a share in power and privilege.’ (136)

- ‘In the case of Iraq, there was always good reason to take seriously the conclusions of the most knowledgeable observers that ‘a constructive solution’ to regime change in Iraq ‘would be to lift the economic sanctions that have impoverished society, decimated the Iraqi middle class and eliminated any possibility of the emergence of alternative leadership,’ while ‘twelve years of sanctions have only strengthened the current regime’ (Hans von Sponeck). Furthermore, the sanctions compelled the population to depend for survival on the reigning tyranny, reducing even more the likelihood of a constructive solution. ‘We have sustained [the regime and] denied the opportunities for change,’ Denis Haliday added: ‘I believe if the Iraqis had their economy, had their lives back, and had their way of life restored, they would take care of the form of governance that they want, that they believe is suitable to their country.’ (140)

- ‘At the Azores summit in March 2003, Bush reiterated that stand, declaring that the US would invade even if Saddam and his cohorts were to leave the country.’ (141)

- ‘The basic lines of US thinking were illustrated in the organization chart of the ‘Civil Administration of Postwar Iraq.’ There are sixteen boxes, each containing a name in boldface and a designation of the person’s responsibility, from presidential envoy Paul Bremer at the top (answering to the Pentagon), down through the chart. Seven are generals, most of the rest government officials, none Iraqis. At the very bottom, there is a seventeenth box, about one third the size of the others, with no names, no boldface, and no functions: it reads “Iraqi ministry advisers.’ ’ (142)

- ‘The European welfare state systems could have a dangerous impact on American public opinion, as revealed by the continued popularity in the US of a universal tax-based health care system, despite constant denigration in the media and the exclusion of the option from the electoral agenda on grounds that it is ‘politically impossible’ no matter what the public may think about it.’ (147)

- ‘…the US insistence on retaining Okinawa as a military base, as it still does, over strong protests from Okinawans, whose voices barely register in the US.’ (153)

- ‘Since the Carter years, the major US intervention forces have been aimed at the Gulf. Until recently, the only fully reliable military base nearby was the British-held island of Diego Garcia , from which the inhabitants were expelled. The US still refuses them the right of return overruling decisions of the British courts.’ (162)

- ‘In 1979 the shah fell and the Israel-Turkey alliance became even more important as a regional base. The alliance welcomed a new member, replacing the shah: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq , which the Reagan administration removed from the official list of terrorist states in 1982 so that the US could freely provide the tyrant with aid.’ (165)

- ‘On the diplomatic front, by the mid-1970s US-Israeli isolation increased as the Palestinian issue entered the international agenda. In 1976 the US vetoed a resolution calling for a Palestinian state alongside Israel , incorporating the basic wording of UN Resolution 242 from 1967. From then to the present the US has blocked the possibility of a diplomatic settlement in the terms accepted by virtually the entire world: a two-state settlement on the international border, with ‘minor and mutual adjustments’; that was the principle of official, though not actual, US policy until the Clinton administration formally abandoned the framework of international diplomacy, declaring UN resolutions ‘obsolete and anachronistic.’ It is noteworthy that the US stand is also opposed by most of the US population: a large majority support the ‘Saudi Plan,’ proposed in early 2002 and accepted by the Arab League, which offered full recognition and integration of Israel into the region in exchange for withdrawal to the 1967 borders, yet another version of the long-standing international consensus that the US has blocked. Large majorities also believe that the US should equalize aid to Israel and the Palestinians under a negotiated settlement, and should cut aid to either party that refuses to negotiate: meaning, at the time of the poll, that it should cut aid to Israel . But few understand what any of this implies, and almost nothing is reported about it.’ (168-169)

- ‘As for the ‘settlement freeze,’ when Sharon persuaded his extremist cabinet to accept the road map he explained that ‘there is no restriction here, and you can build for your children and grandchildren and I hope for your great-grandchildren as well.’ ’ (176)

- ‘The Bush administration also continued to sustain violence by voting against a resolution calling for intenratioal efforts ‘to halt the deteriorating situation between Israel and the Palestinians, reverse all measures taken on the ground since the latest violence began in September 2000, and push for a peace agreement’ (passed 160-4, the US joined by Israel, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands). Following the conventional pattern, none of this seems to have been reported in the US . Bush also declared the archterrorist Sharon a ‘man of peace’ and demanded that Arafat be replaced by a prime minister who will meet US-Israeli demands, though ‘unlike Mr. Arafat [he] does not have a popular following.’ All of this provides further illustration of the president’s ‘vision of democracy.’ ’ (179)

- ‘The steps that undermine the prospects for a peaceful diplomatic settlement are continually justified as a response to Palestinian terror, which did indeed escalate, including terrible crimes against Israeli civilians during the al-Aqsa Intifada that broke out at the end of September 2000.’ (180)

- ‘Military sources confirmed a report that in one incident, a single shot, fired in the air to illustrate the reality to a European observer, evoked two solid hours of intense fire from Israeli troops and tanks. According to IDF accounting, the ration of Palestinian to Israeli dead was almost twenty to one in the first month of the Intifada (seventy-five Paelestinians, four Israelis), in areas under military occupation, with resistance scarcely going beyond stone throwing. The army’s force of huge, US-provided bulldozers was also called into action to destroy dwellings, fields, olive groves, and forests with utter abandon, following policies that have made Israel ‘synonymous with bulldozers,’ one correspondent wrote with dismay, reversing founding ideals about ‘making the desert bloom.’ ’ (181)

- ‘To illustrate the impact of the sobering lessons of World War II, in Kenya in the 1950s some 150,000 people died in the course of Britain’s repression of a colonial revolt, a campaign conducted with hideous terror and atrocities but, as always, guided by the highest ideals. The British governor had explained to the people of Kenya in 1946 that Britain controls their land and resources ‘as of right, the product of historical events which reflect the greatest glory of our fathers and grandfathers.’ If ‘the greater part of the wealth of the country is at present in our hands,’ that is because ‘this land we have made is our land by right – by right of achievement,’ and Africans will simply have to learn to live in ‘a world which we have made, under the humanitarian impulses of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. History is replete with precedents for what we see before our eyes, day after day, though the stakes grow more awesome along with the means of destruction available.’ (183)

- ‘As the official ration of Palestinians to Israelis killed moved from twenty-to-one to close to three-to-one, attitudes in the US changed from inattention to atrocities or support for them to extreme outrage: at the atrocities directed at innocent US clients. These were indeed outrageous. The selective vision, however, speaks for itself, not least because of its deep roots in the culture and history of conquerors.’ (185)

- ‘On a highly controversial topic like the one we turn to now, perhaps it is a good idea to begin with a few simple truths. The first is that actions are evaluated in terms of the range of likely consequences. A second is the principle of universality; we apply to ourselves the same standards we apply to others, if not more stringent ones. Apart from being the merest truisms, these principles are also the foundation of just war theory, at least any version of it that deserves to be taken seriously. The truisms raise an empirical question: Are they accepted? Investigation will reveal, I believe, that they are rejected almost without exception.’ (187)

- ‘Another problem with the official definitions of terror is that it follows from them that the US is a leading terrorist state.’ (189)

- ‘Let us turn to the belief that 9-11 signaled a sharp change in the course of history. That seems questionable. Nonetheless, something dramatically new and different did happen on that terrible day. The target was not Cuba , or Nicaragua , or Lebanon , or Chechnya , or one of the other traditional victims of international terrorism, but a state with enormous power to shape the future. For the first time, an attack on the rich and powerful countries succeeded on a scale that is, regrettably, not unfamiliar in their traditional domains.’ (191)

- ‘The highly respected president of the Columbian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, writes that the Kennedy administration ‘took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads,’ ushering in ‘what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine…not defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game [with] the right to combat the internal enemy…: it is the right to fight and to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists. And this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.’ ’ (192)

- ‘If not everyone in the world shares that perception of history, then they too are ‘anti-American’ and can be safely dismissed.’ (194)

- ‘When the ‘wrong agents’ are implicated in state-supported international terrorism, we sometimes discover that terrorist atrocities are not fully effaced, but rather praised. An instructive case is the country that replaced El Salvador as the leading recipient of US military aid and training: Turkey , where ‘state terror’ was practiced on a massive scale through the Clinton years, relying on US support.’ (197-198)

- ‘The considerations just reviewed, a small sample, suggest one simple way to reduce the threat of terror: stop participating in it. That would be a significant contribution to a general ‘war on terror.’ ’ (198)

- ‘Were there opponents of the [ Afghanistan ] bombing who were not either absolute pacifists? It turns out that there were, and the opponents formed an interesting collection. To begin with, they apparently included the great majority of the population of the world when the bombing was announced. So we discover from an international Gallup poll in late September 2001. The lead question was this: ‘Once the identity of the terrorists is known, should the American government launch a military attack on the country or countries where the terrorists are based or should the American government seek to extradite the terrorists to stand trial?’ Whether such diplomatic means would have succeeded is known only to ideological extremists on both sides; tentative explorations of extradition by the Taliban were instantly rebuffed by Washington , which also refused to provide evidence of its accusations. World opinion strongly favored diplomatic-judicial measures over military action. In Europe, support for military action ranged from 8 percent in Greece to 29 percent in France . Support was least in Latin America, the region that has the most experience with US intervention: it ranged from 2 percent in Mexico to 11 percent in Columbia and Venezuela . The sole exception was Panama , where only 80 percent preferred peaceful means, 16 percent military attack.’ (199-200)

- ‘I am unable to appreciate any moral, political, or legal difference between this jihad by the United States against those it deems to be its enemies and the jihad by Islamic groups against those they deem to be their enemies.’ Former director of Human Rights Watch Africa

- ‘Among other opponents of the bombing were the major aid and relief agencies, deeply concerned over the likely effect on the population, agreeing with academic specialists that the bombing posed a ‘grave risk’ of starvation for millions of people. In short, the lunatic fringe was not insubstantial.’ (202)

- ‘If these questions are not answered, just war pronouncements cannot be taken seriously. I have yet to discover a single case where the questions are even raised.’ (202)

- ‘At the time when the Taliban reluctance to comply was the lead story of the day, arousing much fury, Haiti renewed its request for extradition of Emmanuel Constant, leader of the paramilitary forces that had primary responsibility for the brutal murder of thousands of Haitians during the early 1990s, when the military junta was supported, not so tacitly, by the first Bush and Clinton administrations. The request apparently did not even merit a response, or more than the barest report.’ (204)

- ‘Why is the question not even raised in this case, or in that of other murderous state terrorists who enjoy safe haven in the US ? And if the question is considered too absurd to consider (as it is, by elementary moral standards), where does that leave the consensus on the resort to violence by one’s own leaders?’ (204)

- ‘The conclusions with regard to the principle of universality extend far beyond these cases, including even such minor escapades (by US-UK standards) as Clinton’s missile attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998, which led to ‘several tens of thousands’ of deaths, according to the only reputable estimates we have, estimates consistent with the immediate assessment of Human Rights Watch and later reports of knowledgeable observers. A crime of even a fraction of the scale would elicit fury if the target were the US, Israel, or some other worthy victim, and retaliation of a kind that one hesitates to imagine, which would furthermore be acclaimed as a paradigm example of just war.’ (206)

- ‘Many point out that the resulting deaths were unintended, so that the perpetrators, and those who disregard the consequences of the attack, are not culpable… The claim that the actions were not criminal can be sustained only on the assumption that the fate of the victims was of no concern to the perpetrators.’ (206-207)

- ‘There are broad tendencies in global affairs that are expected to enhance the threat of this category of terror. Some are discussed by the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) in its projections for the coming years. The NIC expects the official version of globalization to continue on course: ‘Its evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide.’ Financial volatility very likely means slower growth, extending the pattern of neoliberal globalization (for those who follow the rules) and harming mostly the poor. The NIC goes on to predict that as this form of globalization proceeds, ‘deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation [will] foster ethnic, ideological and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it,’ much of it directed against the United States. ‘Unsurprisingly,’ Kenneth Waltz observes, the weak and disaffected ‘lash out at the United Statesas the agent or symbol of their suffering.’ The same assumptions were made by military planners, a matter to which we will return. Those concerned to reduce the threat or terror will attend carefully to such factors as these, and also to specific actions and long-term policies that exacerbate them.’ (209)

- ‘It was widely predicted by intelligence services and analysts in the mainstream tat the invasion of Iraq would be likely to inspire terrorism. It is therefore ‘not unexpected [that] since the United States invaded Iraq in March, [ US ] officials said, the [Al-Qaeda] network has experienced a spike in recruitment,’ and ‘there is an increase in radical fundamentalism all over the world.’ ’ (211)

- ‘The war has, in fact, created a new ‘terrorist haven’: Iraq itself.’ (211)

- ‘Israeli gunships are US gunships with Israeli pilots.’ (212)

- ‘They do not hate us, but rather the policies of our government, something quite different. If the question is properly formulated, answers to it are not hard to find. In the critical year 1958, President Eisenhower and his staff discussed what he called the ‘campaign of hatred against us’ in the Arab world, ‘not by the governments but by the people.’ The basic reason, the National Security Council advised, was the perception that the US supports corrupt and brutal governments and is ‘opposing political or economic progress’ in order ‘to protect its interest in Near East oil.’ ’ (214)

- ‘May commentators prefer more comforting answers: anger in the Muslim world is rooted in resentment of our freedom and democracy; in their own cultural failings tracing back many centuries; in their alleged inability to take part in the form of ‘globalization’ in which they, in fact, happily participate; and other such deficiencies.’ (214)

- ‘What has been reviewed here is the barest sample of what we readily discover if we pay some attention to elementary fact and agree to apply ourselves to the standards we impose on others.’ (216)

- ‘They declare that is unpatriotic and disruptive to question the workings of authority – but patriotic to institute harsh and regressive policies that benefit the wealthy, undermine social programs that serve the needs of the great majority, and subordinate a frightened population to increased state control.’ (217)

- ‘The US is unusual, perhaps, in the access it allows to high-level planning documents, an important achievement of American democracy.’ (219)

- ‘One of the first acts of the Bush administration was to cut back a small program to assist Russia in safeguarding and dismantling these weapons and providing alternative employment for nuclear scientists, a decision that increase the risks of accidental launch, and also leakage of ‘loose nukes,’ perhaps followed by nuclear scientists with no other way to employ their skills.’ (219)

- ‘These and other analyses conclude further that Russia ’s ‘only rational response to the [National Missile Defense] system would be to maintain, and strengthen, the existing Russian nuclear force.’ ’ (219)

- ‘Nunn, too, dismisses the Bush-Putin treaty of 2002 as meaningless. Like the US, Russia responded to the treaty by rapidly increasing the scale and sophistication of its nuclear and other military systems, motivated in part by concerns about US plans.’ (221)

- ‘Bush further proceeded ‘to lower the nuclear threshold and break down the firewall separating nuclear weapons from everything else’ as the US prepared for the invasion of Iraq, making the world ‘infinitely more dangerous than it was two years ago, when George W. Bush took the presidential oath of office,’ military analyst William Arkin wrote.’ (222)

- ‘Missile defense alone received more funding than the entire State Department, and four times as much as ‘programs to safeguard dangerous weapons and materials in the former Soviet Union.’ ’ (222)

- ‘Extension of the arms race to space has been a core program for some years; race is a misleading term, because the US is competing alone, for the moment.’ (223)

- ‘Kenneth Waltz observes that the US ‘in the early 1960s undertook the largest strategic and conventional peace-time military buildup the world has yet seen…even as Khrushchev was trying at once to carry through a major reduction in conventional forces and to follow a strategy of minimum deterrence, and we did so even though the balance of strategic weapons greatly favored the United States,’ predictably eliciting a Soviet reaction.’ (225)

- ‘To comprehend the underlying logic, it is well to recall a doctrinal truism: it is conventional for controversial initiatives, particularly when hazardous, to be called ‘defense.’ Current programs are no exception.’ (225)

- ‘Military programs were sharply increased across the board, with little if any relation to terror.’ (226)

- ‘The basic principle is that hegemony is more important than survival. Hardly novel, the principle has been amply illustrated in the past half-century.’ (231)

- ‘The Bush administration decided to withdraw from negotiations to institute verification measures for the 1972 Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention, effectively terminating them.’ (233)

- ‘The Bush administration moved to undermine continuing efforts to add enforcement mechanisms to the Biological Weapons Convention against germ warfare, preventing any further discussions for four years, and shortly after effectively barred reaffirmation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of poisonous gases and bacteriological methods of warfare.’ (234)

- ‘It would be a great error to conclude that the prospects are uniformly bleak. Far from it. One very promising development is the slow evolution of a human rights culture among the general population.’ (235)