Chomsky, the hypocrite!

"Which leads to a question: is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from thewindow of your library at MIT?
Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River?
Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing yourdissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it?
The faults of theBush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. Theywill be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world's greatest - ifflawed and selfish - democracy going to the polls."I have borrowed these impassioned lines from the brilliant review of NoamChomsky's new book Failed State: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy(published by Hamish Hamilton) by by Peter Beaumont, Foreign Affairs Editor,Observer newspaper, London.Noam Chomsky is the unabashed flag bearer of anti-United States rehtoric. AnFidel Castro among the intellectuals, if you like it that way.Disgruntled lefties and so called liberals all over the world, and Indianacademia and Left is no exception, have considered Chomsky as the messiahpointing his accusing fingers at the Great Satan.In India, the left and fellow travellers have lapped up his view points, and intheir opinion, Chomsky's arguments are infallible. Chomsky represents the good against the evil of the United States.As it happens, in the liberal Indian media Chomsky has never been approachedwith a critical eye; leave alone interrogated.Now I chanced upon Beaumont brilliant review. Beaumont has displayed the patience and perseverance in ample measure to nailChomsky's noxious lies. Beaumont points out that Chomsky's angst is similar to that of the water thatrails against the cup that holds it.Read the charge against ChomskyI will admit one thing from the start. When I read Noam Chomsky, the voice Ihear is that of Chloe, the terrier-like computer geek in 24. This is not withoutreason. I met Chomsky once at a New Statesman lunch and that nagging, bullying,wheedling voice has stuck with me since. It is a voice that brooks no dissentfrom his dissident view. 'You'll know ... ' was his opening line on beingintroduced to two of us who covered the war in Kosovo, before launching into oneof his favourite rants - that it really wasn't the poor Serbs what done it, butnasty Nato.What is most troubling about all this is that there is much thatChomsky and I should agree on. Like him, I was opposed to what I believed was anillegal war in Iraq. In my travels in that country, I, too, have been troubledby the consequences of occupation. Where I differ from him, however, is that Ireject Chomsky's view that American misdeeds are printed through history likethe lettering in a stick of rock. Instead, the conclusions I have drawn frommore than a decade of reporting wars on the ground is that motivations arecomplex, messy and contradictory, that the best intentions can spawn the worstoutcomes and, occasionally, vice versa.But you've got to admire him for theverbal speed with which he comes out from his corner, if not for his grasp onreality. He hits you with five facts before you have had time to digest thefirst. Chomsky is an intellectual bruiser. Bang, bang, bang, he goes, and allthat is left for slower-witted mortals is to hang on, 'rope-a-dope', likeMuhammad Ali and try to survive until the round is over. Except it doesn't workquite so well in his written prose.Reading Failed States, I had an epiphany:that by applying a Chomskian analysis to his own writing, you discover exactlythe same subtle textual biases, evasions and elisions of meaning as used bythose he calls 'the doctrinal managers' of the 'powerful elites'. The mightyChomsky, the world's greatest public intellectual, is prone to playing fast andloose.It is important to recognise this fact because the Chomskian analysishas become the defining dissident voice of the blogosphere and a certain kind offar-left academia. So a sense of its integrity is crucial. It is obsessivelywell-read, but rather famished in original research, except when it is countinghow often the liberal media say this or that in their search for hidden, andsometimes not-so-hidden, bias. Crucially, it is not interested in debate,because balance is a ruse of the liberal media elites used to con the dumbmasses. Chomsky is essential to save you, dear reader, from the lies we peddle.And, boy, is it a big lie this time. What Chomsky is taking on now is America'sclaim to be the world's greatest democracy. Failed States posits, tendentiously,that the US has become the ultimate 'failed state', a term usually reserved forplaces like Somalia. It is a terrorist state and a rogue state, a country thathas brought us to the brink of annihilating darkness. These big claims arebolstered by his familiar arsenal of exaggeration, sarcasm and allusion.Thisis a shame, because the issues Chomsky addresses in this book are crucial. Thepresent US administration has presided over one of the most venal periods in thecountry's recent history at home and abroad. Through a tricksy application oflaws never intended for those purposes, George W Bush's lawyers have dismantledconstitutional balances between the executive, legislative and judicial branchesof US governance to accumulate the exclusive power to interpret law in thepresidential office, while on the international stage, citing the same necessityof protecting the homeland, American officials have stormed their way around theglobe, kidnapping, torturing and killing.These are all serious matters, butChomsky chooses to deal with America's growing democratic deficit not by puttingit under a microscope, but by reaching for hyperbole. He suggests an America inthe grip of a 'demonic messianism' comparable to that of Hitler's NationalSocialism. Except that it isn't. Conveniently missing from Chomsky's account isthe fact that the failure and overreach of George W Bush's policies, both on thedomestic and the international front, has had serious consequences for his brandof neo-conservatism: disastrously collapsing public-approval ratings.But thenthere is an awful lot conveniently missing from Chomsky's account of the crimesof his own country. In attempting to create a consistent argument for America asmurderous bully, going back to the Seminole Wars, he edits out anything thatcould be put on the other side of the balance sheet. I could find no mention ofthe Marshall Plan, although there is enough about American crimes in Guatemala,to which he returns repeatedly. He can find enough to say about America'smisdemeanours during the Cold War; but nothing about the genuine fear of theSoviet Union, one of the most brutally efficient human-rights-abusing states inhistory.These are small matters in comparison with some of Chomsky's otherrhetorical stunts. There are the long riffs on ideas extracted out of singlesentences from journalistic articles or academic papers, sometimes bynow-discredited figures, employed to explain whole policies and strands ofhistory to his satisfaction. At other times, he elides rumour with quotes takenout of context, for example where he refers to: 'A Jordanian journalist [who]was informed by officials in charge of the Jordanian-Iraqi border after US andUK forces took over that radioactive materials were detected in one of everyeight trucks crossing into Jordan destination unknown. "Stuff happens," inRumsfeld's words.'That's all pretty puzzling - as four pages earlier, Chomskygives the impression that the weapons of mass destruction thing was all adeception. It is not only that his desire to wallop the US at any cost hasallowed inconsistencies to creep in; there is also plain sloppiness. Betweenpages 60 and 62, for instance, he cannot decide whether an alleged bribe paid toUN official is $150,000 or $160,000. Maybe it's a typo. Maybe not.If all thissounds entirely negative, I do concede that there are areas where Chomsky landssome crunching punches. His analysis of US double standards on issues from thepromotion of democracy abroad, to the World Court, Kyoto, US support for Israel,nuclear proliferation and trade is spot-on - but far from novel areas ofconcern, and Chomsky doesn't like to settle on them. In themselves, they are notenough for the professor. The case that he wants to make is that the US isuniquely awful.In setting about this task quite so selectively, he allieshimself with some obnoxious characters. While Chomsky was righteously indignantover suggestions in a recent Guardian interview that he defended Srebrenica, hedoes portray a certain sympathy for Slobodan Milosevic. Kosovo, in his reading,began in 1999 with Nato bombers, not in 1998 with Serbian police actions thatcleared villages, towns and valleys of their populations. (I know this, MrChomsky, because I saw them do it.)But what I find most noxious aboutChomsky's argument is his desire to create a moral - or rather immoral -equivalence between the US and the greatest criminals in history. Thus on page129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy inIraq after the failure to find WMD, Chomsky claims: 'Professions of benignintent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. They are nearuniversal and predictable, and hence carry virtually no information. The worstmonsters - Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and manyothers - have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility ofpurpose.'Which leads to a question: is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky,from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag waftingover the Charles River? Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder forexpressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it?The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such asFailed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in theworld's greatest - if flawed and selfish - democracy going to the polls.