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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NYT' s Roger Cohen Pens Imperialistic Column on Hugo Chávez

With no sense of irony, Roger Cohen pens an op-ed this morning in the New York Times telling President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela to shut up, and halt that economic model to which Cohen objects.

Cohen was quoting the paragon of democracy, King Juan Carlos of Spain, who "got it right when he recently interrupted Chávez’s trademark verbal diarrhea with a brusque: "Why don’t you just shut up?"

To democratic minds, it's monarchs like Carlos who are repulsive and obscene, an assault on the very notion of democracy. [Democracy etiquette tip: When in the presence of monarchs like Juan Carlos, politely interrupt and remind them that they are grotesque anachronisms.]

So it comes as no surprise that Chávez, elected, re-elected, and committed to using the spoils of oil to spread the wealth around to the poor should be such a pain to the monarch Carlos and the imperialist-minded Cohen, who take it as an assumption that they have a right to tell the people of Venezuela and its president how to conduct themselves.

Cohen notes: Venezuelans will vote Sunday in a referendum that would remove all limits on presidential re-election, grant Chávez direct control over foreign currency reserves, allow him to censor the media under a state of emergency declarable at his discretion, expand his powers to expropriate private property, and create the second formally socialist nation in the Americas alongside Fidel’s.

The reality is a bit more complicated. As Mark Weisbrot writes in the New Statesman (via Z): In any case, the voters will decide, with a far stronger opposition media than exists in the United States proselytising against the government. Venezuelans have not lost civil liberties the way people in the U.S. (or even the UK) have in recent years, and ordinary citizens continue to have more say in their government, and share more in its oil wealth, than ever before. It is doubtful that the referendum will reverse these changes, regardless of the outcome.

One fact one ought to emphasize is that the Venezuelans will vote, just like they voted for Chávez. [Cohen does allow that "Certainly, the oil money Chávez has plowed into poor neighborhoods (at the expense of an oil industry suffering chronic underinvestment) has reduced poverty. "]

As for Cohen (and King Juan Carlos - yuck!), if you do not like Chávez, don't vote for him, or for his proposed Constitutional amendments in the next election.

Wait a minute; you're not citizens of Venezuela, are you?
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