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374 of 424 people found the following review helpful:
Pointed, Repetitive, Worthy, and Futile, May 2, 2006
Within the 900+ non-fiction books about information, intelligence, emerging threats, and national security that I have reviewed for Amazon, I count many of Noam Chomsky's books. As with others, there is some repetition here, and he could have done a better job of reviewing the function and purpose of the state before labeling the U.S. a failed state. I will say, before my concluding comment, that all of my reading bears out Chomsky's inherent correctness.
Among the points that earned a note on my flyleaf:
* US began with the genocide of the Indians, moved on to slavery, and now condones genocide across Africa and elsewhere.
* Quotes CIA Bin Laden analyst with appreciation in noting that all the US has to do to stop the problems in the Middle East is wean itself from dictators and cheap oil, remove its forces from the Muslim lands, and stop predatory capitalism. Hmmmm. There just might be a moral point in there someplace!
* Chomsky asserts that history documents that preventive wars usually bring about the outcomes they ostensibly seek to stop, and does very very well in detailing how the US invasion allowed hundreds of missile and weapons sites to be looted, moving many of the components of weapons of mass destruction into unfriendly insurgent hands--precisely what we allegedly sought to prevent.
* The author recounts the varied facts that have emerged on how the US specifically sought regime change, the British (at least those with integrity like the Foreign Minister who quit) refused to go along with that, so Blair and Bush together concocted pretexts.
* Chomsky confirms in this book what I have seen myself, which is that the only part of the US Government that is "at war" is the U.S. Army and select portions of the U.S. Air Force. The rest of the government is NOT at war, and simply pursuing business as usual. Our war on terrorism is ineffective in the sense of capturing specific terrorists, and counter-productive in the sense of producing tens of thousands more--as Chomsky recounts in the book citing RAND and other studies, 85% of the "foreign fighters" in Iraq were mobilized and radicalized by the US invasion of Iraq.
* Chomsky is provocatively on target when he anticipates the emergence of a Shiite regional power based on Iran that includes the Shiite controlled regions of Iraq and Saudi Arabia--and in the latter, that happens to include the most productive oil fields--in short, the extremist Republicans' worst nightmare.
* Chomsky harps, no doubt with reason, on the long record that the US has in sponsoring crimes against humanity including regime changes that are against democracy (Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, the list goes on) and in favor of dictators who will protect US private investment as the expense of the public interest in their own countries.
* Chomsky focuses a portion of the book on the crimes by Israel against the Palestinians, although he does not appear to balance this by noting how ill-treated the Palestinians have been by all the Arab nations. He emphatically and deliberately identifies Bush with Hitler in that the two share a strain of "demonic messiaism" and rely on "the big lie" that (if repeated often enough) will fool the people. Goebbels would be proud of his kin in the White House, Karl Rove.
* Chomsky concludes the book by discussing the "democratic deficit" in the USA, and while he is very much on point, he wanders somewhat. For a better appreciation of why we allowed the extreme right to take over and ruin the country, I recommend Jacob Hacker's OFF CENTER: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy as well as other books on my democracy list. As a moderate Republican, I can certify that the Republican party today is run by thieves, lunatics, extremists, and -- in the case of John McCain -- born again Bushophiles.
This book is, like, most of his books, a very long Op-Ed but with good footnotes. We need to move toward more analysis and toward finding solutions. Inspired by Chomsky and others, I am in the process of developing a monograph that takes the top ten threats to global and national security identified by the High-Level threat panel of the United Nations (with LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft as the US representative), and showing that 80% of the information we need to understand and address those threats is open source information (OSIF), not secret information, on which we spend $60 billion a year. At the same time, we are spending $500 billion a year on a heavy-metal military and missile defense, when in fact inter-state conflict is only one of the ten threats, or 10%. We are not, as a nation, trained, equipped, nor organized to do poverty, infectious disease, environmental collapse, civil war, terrorism, or translational crime. America is in effect, two Americas: a nation of sheep living for their next six pack, and a very small exclusive group of perhaps 10,000 really rich people dominating Wall Street, the energy companies, and a handful of other major corporate networks. They are busy looting the Republic on the false assumption that they will be able to retire to gated enclaves. They simply do not understand that within twenty years there will be no place for them or their heirs to hide, and this will all come back to haunt them.
I would also say that I am more optimistic than Chomsky. Collective Intelligence and a Citizens Party (as a second home party, non-rival) are emergent, and technologies are coming out that will help eliminate poverty and infectious disease while stabilizing the environment and population. What we lack right now is moral strategic leadership. It is my hope that Bush-Cheney have radicalized enough of the world so that we might thank them in 2008 for making possible the return of balanced centrist coalition leadership.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
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105 of 157 people found the following review helpful:
Encourages a successful state (of mind), April 25, 2006
The obtaining of information is not a problem at all these days, but being able to interpret this information and judge its reliability can be difficult. This is particularly true for information about governments and their activities. Being intrinsically guarded about their information, governments seek to mask their activities through propaganda and hype, and therefore the imputation of certain intents and goals to the members of these governments frequently occurs. The lack of reliable or accurate information coming from governmental institutions provokes in the extreme case various conspiracy theories or elaborate generalizations. The author of this book does this to a certain degree, but he also offers an alternative viewpoint that at first glance may seem radical or cynical by some. This book, one of many by the author, is valuable because it helps to maintain an extreme skepticism about the activities of governments. Such a degree of skepticism is justified, given the horrendous acts that have been perpetrated by governments throughout the ages. It should be held as an axiom that governments cannot be trusted, that they lie more often than telling the truth, and that their goal is to mislead and manipulate the citizens they govern. To not hold to this extreme skepticism is to be vulnerable to government manipulation and propaganda, and susceptible to its possible tyrannies, to be in a failed state of mind.
The author is the guru of the political left, but since he has a scientific background he has attracted the attention of many readers who view themselves as being in the center of the political spectrum. He therefore has a wide audience, which would be even larger if he would not place so much trust in mainstream newspaper publications. The author incessantly speaks of the press as being the tool of the elite and as being an ally to government propaganda. However he references their articles without restraint, as if they were an authority on the events that they presume to cover. It is quite easy, even fashionable, to sit in an armchair and summarize what has been written in popular newspapers. It is quite another thing to get information from other sources that can act as a balance and countercheck. This is extremely difficult to do, even if you are "on the ground" in the geographical area of interest. In addition, the author should remember that he too is a member of society, and therefore is subject to the same biases and media pressures that everyone else is. He does not have an apodictic certainty about the events and history that he writes about. To refer to the "populace" as being something outside of oneself, and subjected to misleading doctrines beyond their control, is not justified or even fruitful for objective analysis.
The main goal of this book of course is to elaborate on the notion of a failed state, which as the author remarks, is a state that as a first requirement must be a potential threat to the security of the United States. Another requirement is that a failed state have a "deficit in democracy'. Still another is that it views itself as being outside the constraints of international law. And the author claims, perhaps without surprise, that the United States satisfies these requirements. This is a deep irony indeed, if one holds that the majority of Americans do in fact believe that they are "above it all" and are incapable of engaging in self-criticism.
The author asks the reader to look in the mirror and honestly assess whether the United States is approaching the status of a failed state. He offers a lot of evidence supporting this view throughout the book. But he also imputes intentions to government officials that would be difficult to verify. This mistake is a consequence of some of the vague, floating abstractions that sometimes arise in the book. The problem with abstraction and generalization is that it can sometimes lead to conceptual tyranny: it does not allow the classification of events or individuals outside of its borders, or even sometimes insists there are no borders. A good example of this is the author's insistence that moral truth must conform to the `principle of universality'. This he accepts without critical analysis, possibly because the abandoning of it would weaken his case on the inherent hypocrisy of American society. Indeed, abandoning this principle would allow the view of American culture as having some kind of "special status" and would leave open the possibility of its citizens being allowed to do as they please to other peoples of the world.
In general though the book is interesting reading and thought provoking, and encourages the reader to seek out more information on a particular topic. This is particularly true in the author's discussion on Israel, which is a country that is typically viewed by many in the Unites States as being benign or even heroic. The author though presents a view of Israel that is certainly a strong intellectual perturbation to this generally received view. His view of Israel is not a popular one, and if one repeats it in certain circles it will certainly raise an eyebrow, or even instigate retaliation and violence.
American society is deeply introspective but not self-critical. If this book can induce more healthy criticism it has done its job. If it merely preaches to the choir it has failed. It would be wrong to characterize American society as a failed state due to the actions of its government therefore. A good state is one where its citizens concern themselves with what is right and just, and act accordingly. A failed state is one whose citizens are pliant and easily manipulated. American society seems to be struggling with the idea of freedom and democracy, which is a supreme irony considering its history. The pragmatism of its citizens will no doubt win over the immoralities and criminal acts of its government.
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64 of 77 people found the following review helpful:
Pessimist's view, April 8, 2006
Most people who see the danger and evil of the course that the United States has taken under Bush II imagine that it is an anomaly in United States history. With brutal efficiency and undeniable facts and logic, Chomsky's latest book destroys that illusion, and by so doing snuffs out the last faint glimmerings of hope that the trend might be easily reversed. It is concentrated reality in a single dimension. Don't read it if you are unwilling to have your world view changed.
If you are like me you will find Chomsky's message difficult to accept emotionally, but impossible to deny intellectually.
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