The New World Order: The Middle East and Central America Lecture
 
By:
Noam Chomsky
Date:
11/23/1991


The New World Order
    November 23, 1991

    Latin America and the Middle East
    George Bush proclaimed the emergence of a "New World Order" with the defeat of communism and the advent of globalization. What kind of order is it and who does it benefit? MIT professor and dissident Noam Chomsky explains it all.

WATCH IT HERE: [G2 Player] or [RealPlayer] Produced by Jewish Comittee on the Middle East from a lecture given at George Washington Universtiy in 1991.

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Part 1, NOAM CHOMSKY: The New World Order (Transcript)

THE NEW WORLD ORDER: The Middle East and Central America Lecture by Professor Noam Chomsky Given at George Washington University - November 23, 1991

NOAM CHOMSKY:
..... against the heat of those television lights. In fact, I'll start believing in the miracles of Japanese technology when they figure out a way to televise without roasting the person who's standing up in front.

The announced topic was "The New World Order: Central America and the Middle East" which touches quite a few bases. And a title like that leaves essentially two options. One option is to speak in general terms about "the new world order" which, as far as I'm aware, is the old world order adapted to changing contingencies, as happens all the time -- the most important of these changing contingencies having been about twenty years ago when the post-war national economic system was essentially torn apart and has been reconstructed.

A second option would be to pick some crucial issues -- some particular topics -- and to use them to illustrate the way the general contours of the "new world order" (and that means the old world order) [operates]. And in thinking about it, it seemed to me that the second tack might be more informative. In fact, almost any current issue could be used because they all illustrate the same essential features of policy. And, given U.S. power, U.S. policy has an overriding and often determinative influence. Furthermore, they all illustrate the same aspects of the ideological cover within which policy is presented to us, some examples of which you just heard from our illustrious leader.

The two examples that are listed in the announcement, Central America and the Middle East, are perfectly natural ones. Both regions -- Latin America and the Middle East -- are covered by what has been the long-standing central doctrine of U.S. policy, the Monroe Doctrine, which says, in effect, that certain regions of the world are U.S. turf. No one else raises their head. No foreign entry, certainly, but crucially, no indigenous groups. If they do, their heads are cut off "if they get out of control," as the doves like to put it. The Monroe Doctrine was, of course, devised for the Western Hemisphere in less ambitious days.

It's meaning for the Western Hemisphere was recently clarified in the Gates hearings. Maybe the only interesting thing that happened in the Gates hearings, as far as I noticed, was a memorandum that was released from December, 1984 (it was addressed from Gates to William Casey, the head of the CIA) on U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. And it opened by saying that we have to start talking tough about Nicaragua. Let's stop the pretenses about preventing arms [shipments] to El Salvador and all of this other nonsense which is so easily exposed (although, I should say that the media continued to trot it out when it was useful), and let's start talking tough. And then he said: We have to rid the hemisphere of this regime by any means necessary -- any means that we could use, up to bombing. And he pointed out correctly that if we don't accept this commitment to rid the hemisphere of anybody we don't like, we will have abandoned the Monroe Doctrine which confers upon us that right.

Well, it was interesting. Actually, the day that appeared I happened to be talking to someone in Detroit, and I suggested to the audience that they keep their eyes open to see what the reaction will be to this memorandum, predicting that there would be a null reaction. And, in fact, that's true. It never came up in Congress. The media didn't mention it. It wasn't considered one of the big issues. And that's exactly correct because essentially, everyone agrees. Across the spectrum, it's agreed that we have the right to rid the hemisphere -- or, for that matter, the world -- of anybody we don't like, by any means that we find feasible and possible. And he is quite right in saying that is the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine.

In this particular sense (meaning, we have the right to rid any area of anyone we don't like) the Monroe Doctrine was extended to large parts of the world after the Second World War. That's just a reflection of the extraordinary power of the U.S., at the time. In particular, it was extended to the Middle East which was described by the State Department, right after the Second World War, as the most important area in the world in the field of foreign investment. As General Eisenhower described it: "the stategically most important area in the world because of its enormous energy reserves," which have two crucial features. First of all, whoever has influence and control over them has a considerable amount of leverage in world affairs. And secondly, there's a huge flow of capital that comes from the profits of oil production in the cheapest and most abundant areas. And that has to flow back to prop up both the corporations and the general economy of the United States and the country that in internal discussion is
called "our lieutenant"; namely, Britain. The fashionable word is "partner", as Mike Mansfield put it in the Kennedy years. So we have to prop up the economy of "our lieutenant" and, of course, ourselves, more crucially.

Control of the energy resources and the profits that flow from them is a major factor. In fact, that's discussed in internal, declassified top secret planning documents. But it's also very evident in policy. And we saw examples of that a few months ago. So, in other words, Latin America and the Middle East are the obvious areas to discuss if you want to consider the core of U.S. foreign policy interests. Both areas reveal to us quite a lot about ourselves. The reason is because of our overwhelming influence in Latin America for over a century, and in the Middle East for over a century. And what we find there can tell us a good deal about who we are -- a topic which should be of interest to any honest person.

Well, discussion of Latin America could open, for example, with a Latin American strategy development workshop. In Washington -- the Pentagon -- just a year ago, which involved noted academic specialists and others ... they concluded (mostly quotes) that current relations with Mexico (the Mexican dictatorship; that means it's a rather brutal dictatorship with a democratic cover) ... current relations with the Mexican dictatorship they said are extraordinarily positive. That means that they are untroubled by such trivialities as stolen elections, death squads, endemic torture, scandalous treatment of workers and peasants, ecological destruction in the interests of private power, and so on. But, they said that everything is not rosy. There are some problems on the horizon. And the only problem they note is (I'll quote): "a democracy opening up in Mexico could test the special relationship by bringing into office a government more interested in challenging the United States on economic and nationalist grounds."

But right now, everything is fine because it's just a brutal and murderous dictatorship. But if there's a democracy opening, we may have some problems, because a democracy opening might mean that various popular interests might be reflected, and that would be harmful to the U.S. concern, which is, of course, investment opportunities and the local wealthy classes, and so on.

NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, that hits the nail on the head. The primary concern of the United States in the Third World has, in fact, always been the problem of meaningful democracy which is, in fact, a threat to power and privilege. And that has to be crushed. It has to be crushed abroad, and it has to be crushed at home. And without understanding that, you understand very little about domestic or foreign affairs, or about American society and culture.

Now, of course, the methods for crushing democratic forces at home and abroad are different. Abroad, you can do it pretty much in the way that it's done by totalitarian states. They use violence. In fact, unrestricted violence. At home, over centuries of popular struggle, the capacity of the state to coerce and control has been limited, so a whole variety of other devices have been needed. But it's been well understood -- and it's a major theme of intellectual discourse, if you like, for centuries -- that methods have to be found to control and divert what they call "the rascal multitude" and to keep them from interfering in what is none of their business; namely, the management of public affairs. As Walter Lippmann put it: "The elements that rule have to be protected from meddling and ignorant outsiders." That is, the mass of the population. And if you can't do it by force, you do it by other means.

Well, a few weeks after this report on the extraordinarily positive relations with the Mexican tyranny, a leading journal in Mexico published an article reporting on a conference in Mexico -- a conference on international trafficking of children, minors -- the report quotes a leading researcher at the National University, the autonomous university in Mexico, from the Institute for Law Research, who writes:

"Every year, twenty thousand Mexican children are sent, illegally, to the United States for organ transplants or for sexual exploitation, or for various experimental tests."

The conference report also quotes a report of the United Nations saying that over a million children a year suffer from slavery, forced participation in criminal acts, prostitution, and organ transplant sales to rich countries. Well, is any of this true? The answer to that is: Nobody really knows, and more importantly, nobody cares -- at least nobody important cares. It's not the kind of thing we discuss around here. But whether it's true or not (it may be; it may not be) an interesting fact about our domains is that this is very widely believed. There are lots and lots of reports like this one from all through Latin America and other parts of the Third World -- domains, largely, of the United States, that report such things. You can get similar reports from the London Anti-Slavery Society and others. And whether they're true or not, the fact that they're widely believed, alone, is a reflection of the reality of life in the areas where our influence has been overwhelming.

This became much worse during the Reagan-Bush years which was a period of an enormous catastrophe of capitalism throughout the entire World, aside from the state-capitalist industrial countries themselves which, in various ways, were able to protect themselves from it.

Latin America is a striking example. We might proceed with Latin America by quoting .... I'll just pick something that happened to arrive in the mail yesterday, a Latin American church journal which has an article from Uruguay, by a Uruguayan journalist, called: "The War Waged on Latin American Street Kids" (that's the English translation of it). And he describes (I'll give some quotes) the war being waged against millions of abandonded children throughout Latin America where death squads, run by the police and financed by the business sector, target and exterminate street kids who are trying to survive as beggars, thieves, prostitutes, drug runners or cheap factory workers. Some of the victims are gunned down while they are sleeping beneath bridges, on vacant lots or on doorways. Others are kidnapped, tortured or killed in remote areas.

In Brazil, where U.S. influence has been decisive .... the overthrow of Brazilian democracy was described as the greatest victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century by the [Reagan] Administration, when it took place with no little U.S. support .... In Brazil, the bodies of young death squad victims are found in zones outside the metropolitan areas with their hands tied, showing signs of torture, and riddled with bullet holes. Street girls are frequently forced to work as prostitutes. In one town, in the first six months of 1991, a thousand so-called "disposable children" were assassinated. In Guatemala City -- another place where we have succeeded in imposing the kind of values we like -- the majority of the five thousand street kids work as prostitutes. They are found with their ears cut off and their eyes gouged out, and so on. In Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, reports indicate that an average of three children under the age of eighteen are killed daily by these death squads financed by the business community. Almost all murders have been attributed to those death squads.

Going on, the journalist points out that this is a region where a hundred and eighty-three million people live in abject poverty, so that death by violence is only one of the threats for street children. Regional statistics show that every minute, twenty-eight children die from hunger. According to UNICEF, sixty-nine million children survive by doing menial labor, robbing, running drugs, and prostitution.

In Ecuador, about a hundred thousand children from age four up work ten- to twelve-hour shifts, in one region, in Western-run, mostly U.S.-run corporations. Panama had a system of protection for minors, but the minors' protective tribunal buildings were bombed during the 1989 U.S. invasion, rendering work there nearly impossible. Following the invasion, the number of criminal gangs robbing stores in search of food increased. In Peru, fifty thousand of the six hundred thousand children born this year will not survive their first year. In one Brazilian state on the Bolivian border, appoximately a thousand children work as slaves, extracting tin. Another two thousand adolescents work as prostitutes. According to union sources, children work eighteen hours a day in water, up to their knees, and are paid a daily ration of bananas and boiled yucca, according to the labor union reports. Going on (I won't go on reading it), the journalist ends up saying:

"Until recently, the image of the abandoned Latin American child was of a ragged child sleeping in a doorway. Today, the image is of a body lacerated and dumped in a city slum."

Well, we may feel proud of our contributions to this picture of capitalist democracy, triumphant in the "New World Order". And that's what the "New World Order" is all about: an intensification of the horrors of the old world order.

NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, instead of continuing through the Latin American horror chamber, which is what it is, I'll turn to the second area, the Middle East. There's a lot to talk about there. We could talk about a lot of our exploits in the Gulf, for example. But instead, let me talk about the topic that's on the front pages right now, and has been for the last several weeks: what's called "the Middle East peace process", in particular, the conference in Madrid. I'm not going to be continuing with Latin American atrocity stories, but talking about diplomacy -- nice clean topics that won't be so bloody. But let's have a look and see what we can learn about ourselves from that.

Well, I'm sure you all read the newspapers, and you've noticed that there is universal acclaim for the diplomatic triumph of George Bush and James Baker in Madrid. So let me just remind you of some of the boilerplate. Our heroes "exploited the historic window of opportunity opened by their victory in the Gulf to breathe life into the stalled Middle East peace process, showing remarkable courage and vision." That happens to come from Anthony Lewis who is one of the most critical commentators on U.S. Government policies anywhere in the mainstream, and it sort of goes from there over to the real accolades. The United States can, at last, try to bring about its traditional goals of "land for peace", and territorial compromise and autonomy for the Palestinians in the context of a general peace, now that the rejectionists are in disarray and the Russians are no longer causing mischief, and the bad guys everywhere know that "what we say goes", as the President put it last February. That's also true in Latin America where "what we say goes" has been true for a long time, with consequences of the kind that I've already indicated. The news columns report, with considerable awe, that "the President is dreaming great dreams of peace and justice, and of course, marching forth to implement them." That's diplomatic correspondent R.W. Appel in the New York Times. James Baker is praised for his diplomatic skills and his tenacity in putting together what the Times calls "the remarkable tableau in Madrid".

I should point out, to be accurate, that not everyone agrees that the U.S. has really shown itself to be an honest broker. There are people who claim that Bush and Baker have gone too far in allowing their pro-Arab sympathies to influence what they do. But it's agreed that they're both well on their way to a well deserved Nobel Peace Prize.

Well, that's sort of standard, but more interesting than this kind of rather standard sort of Stalinist style rhetoric .... it's very reminiscent of the days of the genius Stalin, for those of you who remember that kind of stuff. That's kind of standard, but more interesting than that is the fact that similar perceptions, though without the Stalinoid rhetoric, are pretty widespread in substantial parts of Europe. And that's more interesting. In fact, Europe has, to a large extent, come to accept the extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the Middle East -- which is new -- and has also come to accept, to a certain extent, the framework of U.S. propaganda. That's also an interesting and a noticeable shift. I think it's one worth study in itself. I think it has to do with the end of the Cold War. Maybe I can comment on that later.

But even more interesting than that is that the euphoria is reaching much further, even to towns and villages in the West Bank and Gaza where expectations are apparently running quite high. The lead article of the current issue of the Journal of Palestine studies is by an advisor to the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation in Madrid, Walid Khalidi, who lauds "the personal commitment of the President of the United States," (I'm quoting) "in front of Congress and the whole world, to a just and comprehensive settlement". And he's also much impressed by "the invigoration of international institutions, and the new recognition that we can't go too far with double standards." So that's a pretty broad spectrum.

In my view, this is all total illusion. I'd like to give some indication of why. Let's just start with a brief comment on the matter of our abandonment of double standards. By chance, that issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies happened to arrive at my home on the same day that the lead front-page story in the newspapers read: "U.S. ACCUSES LIBYA IN PAN AM BOMBING". That's two hundred and seventy people killed. And the sub-heading read: "RETALIATION WEIGHED, SAYS WHITE HOUSE." And the editorials issued stern calls for just punishment, overflowing with self-righteousness.

The news reports told us that: "this fiendish act of wickedness had become the horrific symbol of terrorism" -- quoting the New York Times. Again, it was not entirely uniform, so the New York Times ran an op-ed pointing out that the evidence about Libya was pretty thin, and suggested some Government duplicity in identifying Libya. The authors accused the Government of letting the Palestinians off the hook at a sensitive moment in the peace conference. And also, they charged that Syria and Iran had been let off the hook for similar reasons. The authors of this article, representing the dissidents, are Robert and Tamara Kupperman. Robert Kupperman is a leading proponent of what is called "low-intensity conflict", the author of manuals on how to implement it officially -- manuals in which he defines low-intensity conflict. Here's the definition; it is: "the threat or use of force to achieve political objectives without the full-scale commitment of resources." That's to be distinguished from international terrorism which is defined in U.S. Army manuals as "the threat or use of force to attain goals that are political, or religious, or ideological in nature." In short, low-intensity conflict IS international terrorism, as the advocates and practitioners of it are kind enough to inform us, not only in their definition, but also in the practice.

So we have a spectrum, then, ranging from those who assume that the Government's case against Libya is proven on the obvious grounds that it had been proclaimed. And then on the other extreme, we have skeptics who are leading proponents of international terrorism, and who think that the case hasn't quite yet been proven, and that we should go after other favored enemies, like the Palestinians. So the issue is: Should we mete out stern justice to Libya alone, and also to other official enemies -- and should we use bombing or maybe some other technique.

Well, that's what's known as an independent Press in a free society.

NOAM CHOMSKY:
Now, there were some things that were not discussed. At least I didn't see them discussed. For example, one thing NOT discussed was the worst air tragedy of the decade. That was the bombing of an Air India plane in 1985 which killed three hundred and twenty-nine people. There's a book by Leslie and Andrew Cockburn called, "OUT OF CONTROL" which discusses some of the background for this. Apparently, the two people who bombed it were trained in a paramilitary training camp in Alabama. This was supposedly a sting operation that went out of control. The fact that the U.S. had been involved in training the people who bombed it was acknowledged a couple of months later by the Attorney-General, Edwin Meese, in India, who sort of promised the Indians that we would be careful to see that that doesn't happen again. But that was not a "horrific symbol of international terrorism" in that you don't have huge squads of thousands of people scouring the region to see what sensors you can discover, and so on and so forth. That one I didn't see mentioned, though it's the worse air tragedy of the decade.

There was some mention of another air tragedy -- the downing of an Iranian commercial jet with two hundred and ninety people killed. That's also more than "the most horrific symbol of terrorism of the decade." That was described, for example, by the Middle East correspondent of the Boston Globe, Mary Curdias[sp], as she put it, "the accidental downing of the Iranian passenger plane by the U.S.S. Vincennes" which was part of a naval armada that had been sent by George Bush to help out his pal, Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War. And, in fact, the shooting down of this plane was a rather decisive event in ending the war on Iraqi (meaning U.S.) terms.

A question one might ask is: How can the news columns (these are news columns, remember) be so sure that it was an accidental downing? Well, of course, there's an easy answer to that. The U.S. did it, and therefore, it follows that it was an accidental downing, just as U.S. international terrorism is laudable. It's low-intensity conflict; a good thing. It's not terrorism. However, not everyone agrees. Again, there's a spectrum of opinion. In this case, for example, one of the people who does NOT agree is U.S. Navy Commander David Carlson -- who was the commander of the vessel right nearby the Vincennes -- who wrote an article in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings in which he describes (I'm quoting it now) how he "wondered aloud in disbelief as they watched the Vincennes shoot down what was perfectly obviously a commercial airliner, a passenger jet, taking off at a commercial corridor."

And his assumption is that this is out of a need to prove the viability of its high-tech missile system.

Well, the commander of the Vincennes didn't go completely unpunished. The President reacted. He granted him the Legion of Merit Award, along with the officer-in-charge of shooting down the commercial airliner (I'm quoting from the citation), "for exceptionally meritorious conduct and outstanding service, and for the calm and professional atmosphere under his command in the Gulf."

The shooting down of the airliner was not mentioned in the citation, although that's the only known action of the Vincennes.

The media kept a dutiful silence about this, at least at home. In more civilized parts of the World like, for example, Malaysia, Third World journals were quite open about reporting the facts, including the Legion of Merit award, in reviews of U.S. international terrorism which, they don't understand, is only low-intensity conflict, and accidental.

Libya's response to these charges was a call for a hearing by the World Court or some other international inquiry, a call that was regarded as reasonable by the Arab League. But it was, of course, dismissed here, without any discussion, as utter nonsense. That's what's known as "invigoration of international institutions," just as what I just described is what's known as "the abandonment of the double standard."

For those who are willing to consider fact, what I've just mentioned is like a crumb from a mountain of evidence that illustrates what a Salvadoran Jesuit journal recently described as "the ominous halo of hypocrisy covering U.S. statements and actions" -- an "ominous halo of hypocrisy" that sickens and disgusts any honest person who suffers through the daily output of the commissar culture. That's a major element of the "New World Order", just as it was an element of the old world order.

Well, let's put that aside and turn to the third feature which that lead article in the Journal of Palestine Studies finds so encouraging, along with most other opinion: "the personal commitment of the President to a just and comprehensive settlement." Let me now review at least what I think is happening.

It seems to me that three major questions arise about what's going on right now. One is: Why is it happening now? Why this big diplomatic flurry right now? Two: Is there a break with traditional American policy? And three: What about the apparent conflict between the United States and Israel?

Let's start with the first: Why right now? And in fact, we might turn back to page one of the Boston Globe which has that lead story about the U.S. charges against Libya. That's the lead story, and, by accident or because they've got a subversive in the editorial board or something, there's an adjacent story next to it which discusses White House concern over polls that show that George Bush is falling rapidly because of the problems with the domestic economy. Well, could there be a correlation between those facts? Actually, there could be! The story of the past ten years --the major story of the last ten years is the huge assault against the general public, which you're familiar with -- the huge transfer of resources from a large majority of the public, in fact, to wealthy, priveleged sectors -- investors, and so on.

Now when a state is involved in policies of that kind, it's necessary to divert the public -- the ignorant and meddling outsiders -- somehow, so that they won't pay attention to what's going on around them. And that's true whether it's a totalitarian state or a democratic state. And there aren't a lot of ways to do this. Two of the ways are to inspire fear of terrible enemies who are about to destroy us. And that's got to be accompanied by awe for our amazing leaders who rise just in time, and save us from destruction so that we can, once again, be standing tall, as Ronald Reagan put it when he succeeded in overcoming the threat to our existence from Grenada, if you can remember that far back.

In fact, this is pretty much the story of the last ten years. About every year or two, there's some fantastic threat to our existence. But then, with incredible heroism, our leader somehow beats it down. And that's a natural concomitant of the social policies that are being carried out domestically. You'd find that in any state. Just as another natural concomitant is various devices to set sectors of the targeted populations -- most of the population .... set them against each other so that they hate each other, and so on, instead of having them paying attention to what's going on. This is all pretty standard.


NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, it's all particularly important right now for several reasons. For one thing, the social and economic catastrophe that resulted from the Reagan-Bush programs is getting harder and harder to put to the side. More and more people see it. And that means that efforts at diversion are needed -- and rapid and increasing ones. Secondly, it's also necessary to divert attention away from these foreign policy triumphs that have supposedly shown what great people we are, and have led to the Bush rhetoric. In fact, every one of them has been a complete catastrophe from the point of view of any human value, at least. That's true of Grenada, and Panama, and most strikingly, recently, the Gulf.

It's not too pretty to look at the Gulf after our great triumph there, and notice a couple hundred thousand corpses, an ecological disaster, Saddam Hussein firmly in power, thanks to the support given to him by George Bush and Norman Schwarzkopf who backed his crushing of the popular rebellions -- the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions. In fact, for once I should say -- I've got to give the press credit -- the chief diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times (that's a technical term meaning "State Department spokesman in the New York Times") Thomas Friedman, had an accurate description of what happened. He said that right after the .... You know, George Bush was out fishing, and Norman Schwarzkopf was patting himself on the back .... at the time when Saddam Hussein was authorized to take care of the rascal multitude, the explanation that was given by Friedman expressing the State Department's position was that the United States was seeking to restore what he called "the best of all worlds." The best of all wor
lds would be a takeover by some Iraqi generals who would wield the iron fist, much as Saddam Hussein did in the period up until his one mistake in life; namely, when he stepped on U.S. toes on August 2nd, 1990 .... wield the iron fist, as Saddam Hussein had done, much to the satisfaction of the U.S. allies, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and, of course, the boss in Washington. Well, that's essentially correct.

It would be a little embarrassing to just restore Saddam Hussein after the fuss. But we need a clone. We've got to find somebody exactly like him. And surely, we don't want to allow anything as dangerous as a democracy opening in the Middle East any more than we want a democracy opening in Latin America -- or, for that matter, in the United States. And if the way to block it is by supporting Saddam Hussein's iron fist, well you know, in the interests of what's called pragmatism, that's what we have to do. Pragmatism is a nice technical term that means doing anything you feel like doing for your own interests. And, therefore, we pursue pragmatism. And that even overcomes our high moral commitments to human rights, and so on and so forth.

So there is a need to divert attention. But still, it leaves kind of a bad taste. I mean, maybe the smart guys understand that this is the right thing to do. But the population, having been aroused to considerable hysteria over the need to destroy the Beast of Baghdad, has kind of a tough time figuring out these subtle points about why we're supporting him while he's massacring everybody in sight. So you've got to overcome that somehow.

There also are regional problems. The Arab tyrannies that lined up in the Gulf crusade -- these are what the British imperialists, in their day, called "the Arab facade" that manages the local oil system in the interests of the imperial powers. The British view was that we should veil absorption of the colonies behind constitutional fictions such as "buffer state" or "sphere of influence", and so on. But, of course, as Lord Lloyd George put it, in complimenting the British on blocking an international disarmament agreement, he said: "We have to reserve the right to bomb the niggers." That's sort of the bottom line. So you "reserve the right to bomb the niggers", but you've got to have this "Arab facade" out there, that you can sort of pretend they're countries, but they're actually managing the local wealth for you. And those guys have a problem too. Any tyranny too has to preserve a certain degree of credibility with their population. And if they are exposed as agents of the United States in restoring the tr
aditional Anglo-American condominium over the wealth that lies under the ground in the Arab world, that won't be so good for them. So they need something.

Thirdly, continuing with the urgency of the peace process, so-called, there is, in fact, a window of opportunity. That's not a joke. It is, in fact, correct. Bush is largely correct in saying that "what we say goes." And, in fact, that means that what you see in the Gulf is what we say because that's what we want. We hold all the cards. And now that "what we say goes," we can ram through traditional U.S. policy -- which takes us to the second point.

What are traditional U.S. policies? And: Is there a break with them? Of course, the way in which we're going to get credit for this, and the "Arab facade" is going to get some credibility is by dealing with the festering Palestinian problem. The simple answer to what U.S. traditional policy is is very straightforward. It has been the adamant and inflexible opposition to the peace process.

Now, before I continue, I have to make a side comment on political discourse. Every political discourse has two meanings. It has a dictionary-meaning. And it has what we might call the PC-meaning --the "politically correct" meaning. That is, the meaning that's used to advance power ends. They're always different. So, for example, "terrorism" in the dictionary-meaning is what the Army manual says: "the use or threat of force to advance political ends." But in the PC-meaning of the word, "international terrorism" is: "the threat or use of force to implement political ends," when it's carried out by others -- not when it's carried out by the United States or [its] client states. Then, it has another name. It's called "retaliation" or "defense of freedom" or something like that. The same is true of the term, "democracy". There's a dictionary-meaning in which a state is democratic to the extent that the population has some meaningful way of participating in managing their own affairs. But then there's the PC-mea
ning, in which "democracy" means "the rule by elements who appreciate the transcendent need of those who own American society and who, therefore, must govern it." I borrow one of the favorite maxims of the founding fathers. That's the principle on which the country was founded. And only those who understand that are capable of participating in "democracy" in the PC-sense.

Well, the same is true with the term "peace process." There's the dictionary-meaning in which the "peace process" means something like "efforts to advance peace." And then there's the PC-meaning in which the "peace process" refers to whatever the U.S. happens to be doing at the moment. If what the U.S. happens to be doing at the moment is undermining the peace process and barring the peace process at every turn -- that's the "peace process."

Actually, it's all quite simple once you understand the rules. The reason for institutions like universities is to teach you the rules. So don't forget to do your homework. But once you figure all this stuff out, you can play the game rather well.



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