If Bush’s approach to foreign policy is progressive, what of his critics’?

The answer is inadvertently provided by the cover story of this week’s New Statesman (link requires subscription, which as I don’t recommend such a course I won’t bother providing). It is a long extract from Noam Anor’s Chomsky’s latest book, entitled Hegemony or Survival. The book will be published later this month and I have it on order, but even on this sample I can recognise certain longstanding qualities of Anor’s Chomsky’s work.

Anor Chomsky approvingly cites comparisons of Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive war to the Japanese rationale for the attack on Pearl Harbour, and of the liberation of Iraq to "the ’crimes against the peace’ for which Nazi leaders were indicted at Nuremberg." Leave aside the extravagance of the rhetoric and note the intellectual torpor. There are strong arguments in an international order peopled by terrorist groups and rogue states for being prepared to launch pre-emptive war, but they were redundant to the case for invading Iraq. The Anglo-American liberation of Iraq was grounded in Saddam’s defiance of the cease-fire terms that obtained at the end of the first Gulf War. He violated UN Security Council Resolution 687, which codified those terms, and 16 others; his overthrow was an assertion of the integrity of international law in an anarchic world order. Chomsky deals with these pertinent historical data by not mentioning them.
That’s one way to deal with facts if you are an LLL moonbat.
Moreover, they’re not the only things that Chomsky omits to mention. In what is a lengthy essay denouncing the administration for its Iraq policy, he mentions not once — he does not even allude to — the character of Saddam’s regime. This is not a pedantic criticism, for Chomsky himself states:

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.

Precisely. We may thus draw our own conclusions about a man touted by his disciples as an exemplar of moral clarity, and who has — in this article at least — literally nothing to say about mass graves, Halabja, the Kurds, the Marsh Arabs, or the torture chambers run by Saddam and his dynasty. Clearly I ought to wait to read Chomsky’s book in full before making a definitive judgement. But I have read a lot of his political works — indeed, I believe I’ve read all of them, or at least those that are in book form — and the characteristic I would most readily identify in him is a pervasive moral obtuseness that often degenerates into mere sophistry. Take, for example, his arguments about Bosnia a decade ago. This extract is taken from his book The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (1994), in which he dismisses the idea of western military intervention:

It’s not only a moral issue — you have to ask about the consequences, and they could be quite complex. What if a Balkan war were set off? One consequence is that conservative military forces within Russia could move in... At that point you’re getting fingers on nuclear weapons involved. It’s also entirely possible that an attack on the Serbs, who feel that they’re the aggrieved party, could inspire them to move more aggressively in Kosovo, the Albanian area. That could set off a large-scale war, with Greece and Turkey involved. So it’s not so simple. Or what if the Bosnian Serbs, with the backing of both the Serbian and maybe even other Slavic regions, started a guerrilla war? Western military ’experts’ have suggested it could take a hundred thousand troops just to more or less hold the area. Maybe so.

So one has to ask a lot of questions about consequences. Bombing Serbian gun emplacements sounds simple, but you have to ask how many people are going to end up being killed. That’s not so simple.

There could scarcely be a starker illustration — morally, politically and intellectually — of the difference between President Bush and Professor Chomsky. Bush analyses political conditions carefully before alighting on a course founded on moral principle and strategic necessity. Chomsky abjures analysis in favour of a catechism taken from the most reactionary counsels of pessimism about the limits of state action. And get this: just like the Douglas Hurds and Laurence Eagleburgers of Anglo-American diplomacy, Chomsky founds his argument on a series of predictions that turned out to be utter rubbish. (The only exception was that of course Serbia did eventually mount a campaign of aggression against Kosovar Albanians — but so far from being driven to it by western intervention, she was stopped abruptly by the same force.)

Whereas President Bush is a genuine realist — one who recognises the ideological component in foreign policy and the power of ideas — Chomsky is representative of the handwringing, know-nothing Foreign Office orthodoxy that abdicated moral responsibility on the part of this country in the early 1990s, with horrifying results. Reactionary and conservative in temperament, restricted in political vision, Chomsky is clearly no match for the acuity and intellect of the Commander-in-Chief, and his defenders on both sides of the Atlantic should cease to present him as such.

Chomsky at least appears to be aware of the vulnerability of his reputation even among his admirers. Take a closer look at the link to the Amazon page for Chomsky’s new book. The dust jacket bears the legend, which one can’t be around a Chomsky fan for long without hearing:

"Arguably the most important intellectual alive" - The New York Times

This very old quotation from the newspaper of record is in fact truncated. The full quotation reads as follows:

Arguably the most important intellectual alive, how can he write such nonsense about international affairs and foreign policy?

I’ve added the emphasis, because I think you will agree that the elision of the italicised passage does subtly change the meaning of the sentence. I know the full quotation because Chomsky reproduces it — with that false sense of self-deprecation intended to insinuate "See how the frightened reactionary press treats one as brilliant as I when its interests are threatened" — in a now out-of-print book from the early 1990s, Terrorizing the Neighbourhood: American Foreign Policy in the Post-cold War Era. Let me say this straight. Chomsky has allowed a shortened quotation to grace his latest tome on international affairs and foreign policy that in context says the opposite of the message he wishes the reader to infer.