Failed States, Rogue States and America

Democracy Now!. Posted April 3, 2006.

[Editor's Note: This is an edited transcript of an interview from the radio program Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. The interview originally aired on March 31, 2006, and the full transcipt and podcast are available for download from Democracy Now!.]

AMY GOODMAN: The New York Times calls him "arguably the most important intellectual alive." The Boston Globe calls him "America's most useful citizen." He was recently voted the world's No. 1 intellectual in a poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines.

We're talking about Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the foremost critics of U.S. foreign policy. Professor Chomsky has just released a new book titled "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy."

It examines how the United States is beginning to resemble a failed state that cannot protect its citizens from violence and has a government that regards itself as beyond the reach of domestic or international law. In the book, professor Noam Chomsky presents a series of solutions to help rescue the nation from turning into a failed state.

They include: Accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court, sign the Kyoto protocols on global warming, let the United Nations take the lead in international crises, rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror, and sharply reduce military spending and sharply increase social spending.

AG: In this first broadcast interview upon publication of his book, professor Noam Chomsky joins us today from Boston for the hour. We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Noam.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Glad to be with you again.

AG: It's good to have you with us. Failed states -- what do you mean?

NC: Well, over the years there have been a series of concepts developed to justify the use of force in international affairs for a long period. It was possible to justify it on the pretext, which usually turned out to have very little substance, that the U.S. was defending itself against the communist menace. By the 1980s, that was wearing pretty thin. The Reagan administration concocted a new category: terrorist states. They declared a war on terror as soon as they entered office in the early 1980s, 1981. 'We have to defend ourselves from the plague of the modern age, return to barbarism, the evil scourge of terrorism,' and so on, and particularly state-directed international terrorism.

A few years later, Clinton devised the concept of rogue states. "It's 1994, we have to defend ourselves from rogue states." Then, later on came the failed states, which either threaten our security, like Iraq, or require our intervention in order to save them, like Haiti, often devastating them in the process. In each case, the terms have been pretty hard to sustain, because it's been difficult to overlook the fact that under any, even the most conservative characterization of these notions -- let's say U.S. law -- the United States fits fairly well into the category, as has often been recognized. By now, for example, the category -- even in the Clinton years, leading scholars, Samuel Huntington and others, observed that -- in the major journals, Foreign Affairs -- that in most of the world, much of the world, the United States is regarded as the leading rogue state and the greatest threat to their existence.

By now, a couple of years later, Bush years, same journals' leading specialists don't even report international opinion. They just describe it as a fact that the United States has become a leading rogue state. Surely, it's a terrorist state under its own definition of international terrorism, not only carrying out violent terrorist acts and supporting them, but even radically violating the so-called "Bush Doctrine," that a state that harbors terrorists is a terrorist state. Undoubtedly, the U.S. harbors leading international terrorists, people described by the FBI and the Justice Department as leading terrorists, like Orlando Bosch, now Posada Carriles, not to speak of those who actually implement state terrorism.

And I think the same is true of the category "failed states." The U.S. increasingly has taken on the characteristics of what we describe as failed states. In the respects that one mentioned, and also, another critical respect, namely the -- what is sometimes called a democratic deficit, that is, a substantial gap between public policy and public opinion. So those suggestions that you just read off, Amy, those are actually not mine. Those are pretty conservative suggestions. They are the opinion of the majority of the American population, in fact, an overwhelming majority. And to propose those suggestions is to simply take democracy seriously. It's interesting that on these examples that you've read and many others, there is an enormous gap between public policy and public opinion. The proposals, the general attitudes of the public, which are pretty well studied, are -- both political parties are, on most of these issues, well to the right of the population.

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