Awesome Noam Chomsky article, page 1

www.informationclearinghouse.info...

Preventive War 'The Supreme Crime'
Iraq: invasion that will live in infamy

by NOAM CHOMSKY (08/11/03)

The article's long but very good, and a little unsettling.

"SEPTEMBER 2002 was marked by three events of considerable importance, closely related. The United States , the most powerful state in history, announced a new national security strategy asserting that it will maintain global hegemony permanently. Any challenge will be blocked by force, the dimension in which the US reigns supreme. At the same time, the war drums began to beat to mobilise the population for an invasion of Iraq . And the campaign opened for the mid-term congressional elections, which would determine whether the administration would be able to carry forward its radical international and domestic agenda. "

..."President Bush declared that the US "has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security", threatened by Iraq with or without Saddam, according to the Bush doctrine. The US will be happy to establish an Arab facade, to borrow the term of the British during their days in the sun, while US power is firmly implanted at the heart of the world's major energy-producing region. Formal democracy will be fine, but only if it is of a submissive kind accepted in the US 's backyard, at least if history and current practice are any guide.

The grand strategy authorises the US to carry out preventive war: preventive, not pre-emptive. Whatever the justifications for pre-emptive war might be, they do not hold for preventive war, particularly as that concept is interpreted by its current enthusiasts: the use of military force to eliminate an invented or imagined threat, so that even the term "preventive" is too charitable. Preventive war is, very simply, the supreme crime that was condemned at Nuremberg ."

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[Edited on 17-8-2003 by Jakomo]

[Edited on 17-8-2003 by Jakomo]