Chomsky on Foreign Fighters in Iraq

Noam Chomsky's appearance on C-Span 2 yesterday provides another entertaining and edifying discussion on the arrogance of American foreign policy.

Among the topics is the American political culture's inability to conceive of and describe the powerful "foreign fighters" in Iraq, and the dangers they pose to regional stability.

There are over 150,000 foreign fighters in Iraq; the fighters are American troops.

But the corporate media and the political culture generally is ideologically unable or disinclined to discuss our intervention in Iraq in such terms as "foreign fighters," invaders, aggressors or terror; no matter that America has invaded, aggressed and terrorized a sovereign country.

See Chomsky.info for more information.

On a related note, I would add that the same Neocons who are so hell-bent on war are ideologically opposed to giving the veterans the care and respect that they deserve when the troops rotate home.

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Democracy Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

The National Journal is a political junkie's fix. And the Journal has broken much new ground the last few years in exposing the Bush administration's corruption.

But its cover story this week, State Of Disorder, by James Kitfield, reveals again the imperialistic mindset of the establishment American political culture on foreign policy as it relates to the desired social arrangement citizens of other countries have about their own societies.

Kitfield is imbued with a staggering inability to conceive that democratic results that create administrations in South America dedicated to directing their natural resources to their own people is not our problem. It is not our problem when the Sandinistas did it in Nicaragua in the 1980s; and it not our problem that President Hugo Chavez in now doing it in Venezuela.

But Kitfield frets that "new crises erupt with frightening regularity" around the world, and notes "a wave of leftist populism sweeping Latin America."

To Kitfield, it is axiomatic that this state of affairs, this state of disorder, must be dealt with, though he bemoans the fact that Bush is leaving the problem to the next American president to solve.

"Anti-Americanism everywhere you look," notes Kitfield, equating the mild redistribution of South American wealth to South American human beings with "devastating attacks by Islamic terrorists," "violence and threatened implosion in Pakistan," among other American challenges.

Kitfield (and Bush and Condi Rice) and the American foreign policy establishment apparently do not contemplate that the establishment of social arrangement through democratic processes that increase the material wealth of a given country's citizens is not destabilizing.

This dynamic is the achievement of "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ..."

And that's a good thing.

See also PARAG KHANNA's Waving Goodbye to Hegemony.

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UK Archbishop: U.S. ‘Worst’ Imperialist; Scorns God's-Chosen-Country Notion

Update: It’s the Oil, Stupid

What's obvious in other western countries would bring forth a storm of ridicule were simple truisms repeated by the major American presidential candidates or the major newspapers and television networks.
The obvious example is our illegal and imperialistic enterprise to establish a client oil state in Iraq, under the cover of well-crafted propaganda about democracy and deterring terrorism—aka lies.

In reaction, the Archbishop of Canterbury (England) said in a wide-ranging interview with the London Times published this morning that America is the single worst imperialist power, surpassing even Britain during its imperial apex.

From the (UK) Times online, Abul Taher reports:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has said that the United States wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain during its imperial heyday.

Rowan Williams claimed that America’s attempt to intervene overseas by “clearing the decks” with a “quick burst of violent action” had led to “the worst of all worlds”.

In a wide-ranging interview with a British Muslim magazine, the Anglican leader linked criticism of the United States to one of his most pessimistic declarations about the state of western civilisation.

He said the crisis was caused not just by America’s actions but also by its misguided sense of its own mission. He poured scorn on the “chosen nation myth of America, meaning that what happens in America is very much at the heart of God’s purpose for humanity”. ...


He went on to suggest that the West was fundamentally adrift: “Our modern western definition of humanity is clearly not working very well. There is something about western modernity which really does eat away at the soul.”

Williams suggested American leadership had broken down: “We have only one global hegemonic power. It is not accumulating territory: it is trying to accumulate influence and control. That’s not working.”

Read more at (UK) Times online.

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Open Our Government

Our government wants to know a lot about us, but almost nothing about them. It should be the other way around.

OpenTheGovernment.org concludes:

The current administration has exercised an unprecedented level not only of restriction of access to information about federal government's policies and decisions, but also of suppression of discussion of those policies, their underpinnings, and their implications. It has also increasingly refused to be held accountable to the public through the oversight responsibilities of Congress. These practices inhibit democracy and our representative government; neither the public nor Congress can make informed decisions in these circumstances. Our open society is undermined and made insecure.

And Ruth Rosen reports on The Secret White House. This regime does not see itself as accountable to the public, and deserves to be treated as such. Face it, we live in a society high-jacked by an authoritarian bunch of repulsive renegades, at least if one believes in a Jeffersonian conception of government.
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