Frontline At 40 | ‘Dominance and its dilemmas’ by Noam Chomsky

American professor and public intellectual Noam Chomsky has written more than 150 books on linguistics, war, and politics. The grand strategy authorises Washington to carry out “preventive war”: Preventive, not pre-emptive. Whatever the justifications for pre-emptive war may sometimes 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. As the U.S. invaded Iraq, Arthur Schlesinger wrote that Bush’s grand strategy is “alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbour, on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.” FDR was right, he added, “but today it is we Americans who live in infamy”. It is no surprise that “the global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism,” and the belief that Bush is “a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein.” For the political leadership, mostly recycled from more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush I administrations, “the global wave of hatred” is not a particular problem.