I suppose I should confess that, while I admire Noam Chomsky's devotion to honesty and truth, his commitment to justice and passion for those whose voices are far too often stilled in our high-minded debates over how America conducts its relations with other states, I have come to several realizations about him and his enormous, and important, body of work.
First and foremost, his developing voice of one put upon, ignored, even silenced through a conspiracy of those who hold the reins of power would be more creditable if not for the consistency of his output (if the powerful were trying to silence him, they might be more successful). Furthermore, while it is true he is, for the most part, sidelined in elite debates on foreign policy, I believe it has less to do with any bold truth-telling on his part; rather, I believe that most folks in the foreign service, and political scientists who study foreign relations and diplomatic history, find much of the framework of his criticisms of American foreign policy not only banal, but beside the point.
A good summary of Chomsky would be, "America professes to act in the world according to the principles of international law and toward the end of advancing the political, social, and economic welfare of all nation-states; in fact, the United States acts as an imperial power, with the greatest military machine in world history, grinding the aspirations and dreams of foreign peoples under the heels of its 'national interest'."
To which I can only ask, "Has there ever been an imperial power that didn't act this way?"
Much of the chiding Chomsky does, for all it sets an understanding of various foreign policy problems on a far more realistic understanding of the issues involved (case in point - the Israeli/Palestinian issue, as it developed through the 1970's and 1980's, had little to do with security, and almost nothing to do with ethnicity or religion, but was about access to resources, specifically water and arable land in the West Bank Territories), ends up sounding like whining, particularly as he complains, again and again, that his critique is unheard, his voice silenced, his point-of-view mocked. While he has served an important, even prophetic role in calling to account both the intellectual and policy elite for their many and varied crimes, both of omission and commission, the pose of the put-upon victim wearies even the most dedicated reader.
Finally, in a not-unimportant point, he has yet, to my knowledge, apologized for the historically ridiculous last chapter of his two-volume The Washington Connection in which, by refusing to give any benefit of the doubt not only to American, but the few foreign sources then available, he called the accusations against the, then, newly successful Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, in essence, lies. While it is possible to understand a certain hesitance in passing an final judgment, at the time, given that the Khmer Rouge denied any access to foreigners during the period immediately following the revolution, even then, as the cities were cleared, the roads to the jungle strewn with the bodies of those whose lives were deemed expendable, a certain credence, at the very least, to the possibility that something dreadful was happening could at least be considered.
Yet, three decades later, with the millions of bodies a mute testimony to the horrors human beings can inflict in the name of the pursuit of an ideal, Chomsky has yet to publish anything that might even come close to saying, "I was wrong about Cambodia." This is even more troubling because it certainly gives a certain amount of ammunition to critics who insist he is far more quick to place blame on the United States for its role in various local horrors than to contemplate that other nations have people equally ready and able to commit mass murder.
Chomsky has done more than any other commentator to point out not only the distance between our rhetoric and our actions, but to point in the direction for the sources of our actions. For that he is to be thanked. His myopia, however, placing all blame and responsibility for the tragedies of the past half-century at the feet of the United States is not only wrong, being quick to judge ourselves too harshly has led, in his case, to a blindness to one of the greatest crimes against humanity.
