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The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power
Two of our most celebrated intellectuals grapple with the uncertain aftermath of the American collapse in Afghanistan “Through the structure of a deeply engaging conversation between two of our most important contemporary public intellectuals, we are urged to defy the inattention of the media to the disastrous damage inflicted in Afghanistan on life, land, and resources in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal and the connections to the equally avoidable and unnecessary wars on Iraq and Libya.” —from the foreword by Angela Y. Davis Not since the last American troops left Vietnam have we faced such a sudden vacuum in our foreign policy—not only of authority, but also of explanations of what happened, and what the future holds. Few analysts are better poised to address this moment than Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, intellectuals and critics whose work spans generations and continents. Called “the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet” by the New York Times Book Review , Noam Chomsky is the guiding light of dissidents around the world. In The Withdrawal , Chomsky joins with noted scholar Vijay Prashad—who “helps to uncover the shining worlds hidden under official history and dominant media” (Eduardo Galeano)—to get at the roots of this unprecedented time of peril and change. Chomsky and Prashad interrogate key inflection points in America’s downward from the disastrous Iraq War to the failed Libyan intervention to the descent into chaos in Afghanistan. As the final moments of American power in Afghanistan fade from view, this crucial book argues that we must not take our eyes off the wreckage—and that we need, above all, an unsentimental view of the new world we must build together.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published August 30, 2022
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About the author
Noam Chomsky
994 books17.4k followersAvram Noam Chomsky is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media.
Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants (his father was William Chomsky) in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B.F. Skinner.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard M. Nixon's list of political opponents. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Chomsky's commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. An anti-Zionist, Chomsky considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid, and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.
Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Since 2017, he has been Agnese Helms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.
Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants (his father was William Chomsky) in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B.F. Skinner.
An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard M. Nixon's list of political opponents. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Chomsky's commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. An anti-Zionist, Chomsky considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid, and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.
Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Since 2017, he has been Agnese Helms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 166 reviews
June 21, 2022
Transparency Note: I received an advance copy of this book free of charge courtesy of the publisher.
The Withdrawal, despite its title, does not spend much time at all discussing the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. It does discuss Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the fragility of US power though, so I'll give it that.
Discuss is the keyword here—the origin of this book is a conversation between Vijay Prashad and Noam Chomsky. To be quite honest it feels a bit lazy; it reads a bit like a tightly-edited podcast transcript—you even get little "Vijay:" and "Noam:" indicators so you can keep track of each speaker. The conversation throughout the book follows a frustrating pattern of:
1. Prashad introducing a subject
2. Prashad presenting an excerpt from something Chomsky wrote 30 years ago
3. Chomsky more or less says "yes I did indeed say that" and then adds a bit more to it
The excerpts from old Chomsky works are frustrating, as they too are prefaced with "Noam:." This makes following the conversation very confusing at times—it's like Noam Chomsky is unstuck in time and having a conversation with himself.
I'm also not really sure who the target audience is for The Withdrawal. If you're into Chomsky, then you already know how he feels about all of these things—and considering the abundance of excerpts, you've probably read half of this book already! If you're hoping to read about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, then this book is going to disappoint you: it is about American imperialism and illegal warfare in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and so on.
Also, it's not exactly an entry-level discussion of American foreign policy, but at the same time, I was bored for the first 3 chapters because the conversation contains little depth beyond what someone interested in this subject already knows! The Withdrawal, then, functions poorly both as an introduction to the subject and as a deep dive into it.
The two chapters do touch on some of the depth I was hoping for out of the whole book, which was simultaneously relieving and frustrating—the prior chapters should have and could have been like this!
Overall, this book just feels a bit low-effort. Its structure lends itself to less depth, which harms its educational value. At the end of the day, though, I'm probably just being harsh because I wanted more out of it—it's better than most of the books you'll find about America's military affairs. It's a pretty good read if you need an external source to reassure you that America is in-fact the most evil country in the world.
The Withdrawal, despite its title, does not spend much time at all discussing the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. It does discuss Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the fragility of US power though, so I'll give it that.
Discuss is the keyword here—the origin of this book is a conversation between Vijay Prashad and Noam Chomsky. To be quite honest it feels a bit lazy; it reads a bit like a tightly-edited podcast transcript—you even get little "Vijay:" and "Noam:" indicators so you can keep track of each speaker. The conversation throughout the book follows a frustrating pattern of:
1. Prashad introducing a subject
2. Prashad presenting an excerpt from something Chomsky wrote 30 years ago
3. Chomsky more or less says "yes I did indeed say that" and then adds a bit more to it
The excerpts from old Chomsky works are frustrating, as they too are prefaced with "Noam:." This makes following the conversation very confusing at times—it's like Noam Chomsky is unstuck in time and having a conversation with himself.
I'm also not really sure who the target audience is for The Withdrawal. If you're into Chomsky, then you already know how he feels about all of these things—and considering the abundance of excerpts, you've probably read half of this book already! If you're hoping to read about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, then this book is going to disappoint you: it is about American imperialism and illegal warfare in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and so on.
Also, it's not exactly an entry-level discussion of American foreign policy, but at the same time, I was bored for the first 3 chapters because the conversation contains little depth beyond what someone interested in this subject already knows! The Withdrawal, then, functions poorly both as an introduction to the subject and as a deep dive into it.
The two chapters do touch on some of the depth I was hoping for out of the whole book, which was simultaneously relieving and frustrating—the prior chapters should have and could have been like this!
Overall, this book just feels a bit low-effort. Its structure lends itself to less depth, which harms its educational value. At the end of the day, though, I'm probably just being harsh because I wanted more out of it—it's better than most of the books you'll find about America's military affairs. It's a pretty good read if you need an external source to reassure you that America is in-fact the most evil country in the world.
October 5, 2022
This is a solid overview of U.S. hegemony over the past 60 years, from Vietnam to Eastern Europe. I can't say I learned a ton from this, as most of it is basically recycled essays from Noam Chomsky over the years, but it is still a crucial intervention in the dominant imperial mode of thinking in today's society. I would highly recommend this to people who aren't as familiar with U.S. destruction in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, as this provides a really important foundation for understanding the motives and the consequences of these wars of aggression. Finally, it touches on the important geopolitical formations that led to the current Russia-Ukraine war, providing more important historical context that's sorely lacking in discussions today.
I would have liked a little more exposition and a little less interviewing from Vijay, because I've found his writing really important, but in this book he's really just asking questions to Noam. Listen to Millennials are Killing Capitalism's and RevLeft Radio's interviews of Vijay and Noam as well!
I would have liked a little more exposition and a little less interviewing from Vijay, because I've found his writing really important, but in this book he's really just asking questions to Noam. Listen to Millennials are Killing Capitalism's and RevLeft Radio's interviews of Vijay and Noam as well!
February 4, 2025
The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power, Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, 2022, 209 pages, Dewey 327.73058, ISBN 9781620977606
RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALS
Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. p. 24. --Noam Chomsky, 1966, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."
WAR NEEDS CENSORSHIP AND PROPAGANDA
It is impossible to conduct a brutal war of aggression in the name of an enlightened and informed citizenry; either the war must be terminated, or democratic rights, including the right to information and free discussion, must be restricted. This is true not only of the war in Vietnam, but also of the use of American force to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries. p. 28. --Noam Chomsky, 1968, "Reflections on a Political Trial."
VIETNAM AND LAOS
The joint chiefs on March 25, 1968, said, if you send more troops, we're going to need them for civil disorder control in the United States. Women, young people: they're going to be revolting all over the place. That's the last couple of pages of the Pentagon Papers. They called off the trials of the resistance. So I was never tried. pp. 32-34.
The U.S. dropped three times as many bombs by weight on Vietnam as were dropped in all of WWII. p. 34. It was a moonscape. Everything destroyed. p. 36. The U.S. conducted 580,000 bombing missions against Laos, dropping a full payload of bombs every eight minutes around the clock for nine years. Laos is the most bombed country on the planet. p. 36.
9/11 AND AFGHANISTAN
The Soviets protected women. The U.S. collected the most violent, crazed Islamists, sent, armed, and directed them. These murderous gangsters threw acid in women's faces. pp. 48, 59. The U.S. press never reported it. It was the wrong story. p. 59. Things were better under the Soviets. p. 60. The 2001-to-2021 U.S. war against Afghanistan had no geostrategic purpose. p. 97.
MEDIA COMPLICITY
Warner Publishing destroyed all remaining copies of Chomsky's book /Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda/, 1973--and put Warner Modular Communications out of business for trying to distribute it. p. 88. Only 22 worldcat libraries in the world have a copy of it. amazon.com has none.
RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALS
Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. p. 24. --Noam Chomsky, 1966, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."
WAR NEEDS CENSORSHIP AND PROPAGANDA
It is impossible to conduct a brutal war of aggression in the name of an enlightened and informed citizenry; either the war must be terminated, or democratic rights, including the right to information and free discussion, must be restricted. This is true not only of the war in Vietnam, but also of the use of American force to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries. p. 28. --Noam Chomsky, 1968, "Reflections on a Political Trial."
VIETNAM AND LAOS
The joint chiefs on March 25, 1968, said, if you send more troops, we're going to need them for civil disorder control in the United States. Women, young people: they're going to be revolting all over the place. That's the last couple of pages of the Pentagon Papers. They called off the trials of the resistance. So I was never tried. pp. 32-34.
The U.S. dropped three times as many bombs by weight on Vietnam as were dropped in all of WWII. p. 34. It was a moonscape. Everything destroyed. p. 36. The U.S. conducted 580,000 bombing missions against Laos, dropping a full payload of bombs every eight minutes around the clock for nine years. Laos is the most bombed country on the planet. p. 36.
9/11 AND AFGHANISTAN
The Soviets protected women. The U.S. collected the most violent, crazed Islamists, sent, armed, and directed them. These murderous gangsters threw acid in women's faces. pp. 48, 59. The U.S. press never reported it. It was the wrong story. p. 59. Things were better under the Soviets. p. 60. The 2001-to-2021 U.S. war against Afghanistan had no geostrategic purpose. p. 97.
MEDIA COMPLICITY
Warner Publishing destroyed all remaining copies of Chomsky's book /Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda/, 1973--and put Warner Modular Communications out of business for trying to distribute it. p. 88. Only 22 worldcat libraries in the world have a copy of it. amazon.com has none.
September 26, 2022
In 1820, the Chinese economy was six times the size of Great Britain. China isn’t today ‘emerging’ as a world power, its merely getting back to where it was 200 years ago. British military aggression destroyed Chinese economic strength and led to a ‘century of humiliation’. In 1949, Mao said, “the Chinese people have now stood up.” “The most dangerous situation is the pressure campaign the United States is leading against China and Russia.” What is the China’s threat? It’s simply China’s existence. And the fact that you can’t have it developing like it clearly is. China is the threat of successful defiance, like Russia, going it alone w/o kowtowing to the US. Poorer countries prefer now to borrow from China. If you hold up the US to international law it routinely falls short. 193 countries signed on to the UN Charter and it’s a binding treaty. Translation for mainstream media’s term ‘Rules Based Order’: “If you follow (shamelessly suck up to) the United States, you are following the rules.”
For Vijay, Noam is the conscience of our country. For Angela Davis, the prison-industrial complex is “a discernable product of the post-slavery history of the US.” And now some patriotic news from Afghanistan: “A United Nations study found that at least 40 percent of civilians killed by US air strikes were children. The Afghan Ministry of Public Heath estimates that two-thirds of Afghans suffer from war-induced mental health issues. Half of the population lives below the poverty line, and about 60 percent of the population remains illiterate.” Hey, why just cut and run in Afghanistan, when as in Libya, instead you can leave it in ruins and run? The last drone strike in Afghanistan killed seven children and Zemari Ahmadi of the California based Nutrition and Education International. Hey - we gotta go but let’s leave you with even more illiteracy and hunger. And thanks for choosing a certified rogue state as your invader. No one was punished for the last Afghan kid slaughter. Surprised?
Homework: Did any of the wars in Afghanistan Iraq or Libya create a pro-US government? Popularize the context: If the US was a major recording artist, or sports celebrity, why would any management risk financing them at great cost after seeing continual documentation of their own inability to reach ANY basic objectives? Or: “What is the point of bombing a country if that violence attains no political ends?” Or: Aside from US weapons manufacturers, and many private contractors, what benefit did anyone get from the $2 trillion spent on Afghanistan? No relief or infrastructure for Afghans. Where is Lee Greenwood when you really need him? Singing his new Stars & Stripes hits, “Ya’ll Get Nothing and Like It” and “Flags Make Me Less Balding”. In 2019, it came out that US taxpayers were paying for 42,000 Afghan soldiers that didn’t exist. Real US foreign policy is a remake of the Keystone Cops for the Netflix generation.
Kuwait invasion as pretext for Iraq war: US refuses to negotiate with former ally Saddam post-Kuwait invasion preferring to bomb its autocratic old friend instead of waiting for his immediate planned pullout to save his face. Noam says, Saddam effectively surrendered then but good luck finding corporate media ever letting you know that. “We didn’t want negotiations, even surrender. We wanted a devasting attack to show the world that what we say goes.”
Gaddafi also was all for a peace deal, but negotiating there again wasn’t allowed by the US, and NATO bombed Libya anyway. If the US wants war it gets war, screw basic diplomacy. William Henry Harrison gets to be President basically because as Indiana governor he chased Tecumseh (rather than negotiate with him) to Canada and seized his land. We took one third of Mexico and French and Russian territories in California without negotiation. Then started seizing islands Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, Philippines, and don’t forget the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. “The landscape had to be pacified or else destroyed.”
WWII left the US alone with a financial surplus which made the dollar almighty. Noam wasn’t badly repressed in the 50’s and 60’s because he was in linguistics which gave Noam a “perch” to see what repression was happening in academia. In 1968, Noam wrote “It is impossible to conduct a brutal war of aggression in the name of enlightened and informed citizenry; either the war must be terminated or democratic rights, including the right to information and free discussion must be restricted.” If you want to see courage, look at peasants on the front lines. Noam doesn’t care if the intellectual community stands against him as long as Noam thinks he is right.
The Tet offensive was “the most amazing uprising in human history. Every village was penetrated with informants. No one had a clue this was going to take place all across the country.” This was a game changer, it was over for Johnson and for the war. The end of the Pentagon Papers book has officials saying “If you send more troops, we are going to need them for civil disorder control in the United States. Women, young people, they’re going to be revolting all over the place. We can’t send more troops abroad.” Tet happened in 36 of the 44 provincial capitals. Senior US State Department official George Ball said, “as long as we continue to bomb, we alienate ourselves from the civilized world.”
In Laos alone the US “conducted 580,000 bombing missions, dropping a full payload of bombs every eight minutes around the clock for nine years. The country is considered the most bombed on the planet.” Imagine mainstream media telling anyone the real Laos story. All those unexploded mines taking off children’s limbs even today, the gift from the US that keeps on giving. President Carter said we didn’t owe reparations for our Southeast Asia violence and chemical warfare because the “destruction was mutual.” That’s not Nixon saying that, but Carter. Not to be outdone in the human sleaze department, President GHW Bush said, “We are willing to forgive the Vietnamese their crimes against us (defending themselves against our war crime invasion of their nation) because we are a forgiving nation.”
Eqbal Ahmad was a lonely voice saying how the US was “creating a terrorist monster, reviving concepts of ‘jihad’ as ‘holy war’ that had been dormant for centuries in the Islamic world.”
The US turned down the Taliban’s offer to surrender of al-Qaeda and Bin Laden saying, “we don’t negotiate surrenders.” $9.5 billion of the Afghan government’s money is frozen in US banks because although Afghans had nothing to do with 9/11 the US has decided that half of all that Afghan money must be paid out to completely unrelated 9/11 families. WTF? Starving Afghans paying reparations for a crime they didn’t commit would make a great reality TV show to show the true magnificence of US foreign aid. When Aristide in Haiti asked France for $22 billion in reparations, he was replaced by a military junta which renounced the request for reparations. Between 2010 and 2020, the US killed from 283 to 454 children by drone. I know what you’re thinking; those children probably deserved it. That said, I wouldn’t want to be merely fixing my tire outside in northwest Pakistan while a drone circles me.
Noam on Trump: “Can you think of any other figure in world history who is as dedicated to destroying the prospects of human life on earth? Not Hitler, not Genghis Khan, nobody except Trump.” Noam on the US: “The Gallup organization once made a mistake. This was in 2013, the Obama years, when it asked, ‘Which country is the greatest threat to world peace?’ There was no competitor to the United States. That poll did not get published in the United States.” Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman said some nasty stuff: while the US was stealing one third of Mexico, they asked what a bunch of ignorant Mexicans have to do with the future of the human race? In 1999, Samuel Huntington wrote in Foreign Affairs, “While the US regularly denounces various countries as ‘rogue states’, in the eyes of many countries it is becoming the rogue superpower.” “Preventive war is, very simply, the ‘supreme crime’ condemned at Nuremberg.” Hitler tried to invade the Caucasus to gain control of its oil; don’t be morally surprised that the US wants the same.
“The United States is the Godfather, who does not accept successful defiance from even the smallest country. Just like the Godfather: if some small shopkeeper doesn’t pay protection money, the Godfather won’t even notice the money, but he still sends in goons to smash up the shop. You don’t want people to get the wrong idea.” This is what the US did to Haiti and Cuba, even Grenada (Where Reagan comically gave 8,000 medals to only 6,000 soldiers for “overcoming the resistance of forty Cuban construction workers” no doubt armed with hammers, nails, and bag lunches – if that doesn’t make your salute the US flag, nothing will).
According to this Godfather Theory, why does the US call China a threat? Because like Iran, Cuba, and Russia it not only doesn’t obey US orders, it doesn’t act intimidated. As Ricky Gervais has shown, there is huge power in no longer caring about what the powerful want to hear. President Clinton saw that 184 countries in UN had voted to end the Cuba blockade and then intentionally outflanked Republicans from the right intensifying the blockade of Cuba, or put in condensed Charlie Brown form: the Blockhead and the Blockade. This all started with the launching of the US ballsy Monroe Doctrine game, where the US toddler (after demanding all pre-existing Native American playing pieces were his, and having had no nap) threw his arms around all the Latin American game pieces and to his fellow stunned playmates shouted, “Mine!” John Quincy Adams stated the concept in his eloquent sociopathic fashion, “British power will decline. Our power will increase. Especially after we exterminate the native population and take over what is called the national territory.”
Under the Monroe Doctrine, the US forces Cuba “to become pretty much a US colony until 1959.” You’d also have to be blind not to see the real Mafia behind the Batista days in Cuba (first as a base for rum running, then with the Batista-Lansky Alliance). The US only supports countries with “compliant elites” willing to take their cuts (wealth and power) through screwing their fellow countrymen. “You can’t allow a country you’re trying to destroy have a deterrent capacity.” North Korea, anyone? That is why Iran must not develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent; if Iran did, the US would have to rely on -yuck- civility, diplomacy and negotiation with Iran like a fellow mere mortal, instead of threatening like an unhinged common bully.
The well-financed fear of Socialism in the US by propagandized liberals and conservatives “led to the salvage funds of Keynesianism going toward the military rather than the social sector.” The US now operates under military Keynesianism, because otherwise that money might be going to… help all taxpayers. You can’t stop killing people who look different around the globe in endlessly failing misadventures just to finally listen to taxpayers. Keynesianism could of course just as easily be increasing democracy, funding for light rail, high speed trains, hospitals, roads and livable neighborhoods but good luck with corporate media telling us that. And so, after WWII military Keynesianism won – with its catchy slogan “If You Never Think About Our Endless War’s Victims, There’s No Moral Injury.”
In National Security Council Policy Paper 68, the Secretary of State urges that to sell both the upcoming and unnecessary Cold War and military Keynesianism to the masses you will have to “bludgeon the mass mind” and be “clearer than the truth”. This Senator Arthur Vandenberg translated as “scare the hell out of the American People.” Fearmongering wrote many a paycheck for “esteemed” intellectuals through the following decades. Zen Koan: “The United States can destroy any country in the world. And yet, it seems to consistently be defeated by the world’s peasant armies (Vietnam, Afghanistan).”
On 9/11, the Pentagon was struck at 9:37am, by 2:40pm that day, Donald Rumsfeld said we should attack Saddam Hussein. Hey, who needs facts when you have the PNAC? Note: Israel attacked the USS Liberty in 1967 killing 34 sailors and wounding 171 and faced zero retaliation and Saddam attacked the USS Stark warship in 1987, killed 37 US sailors and faced zero retaliation (something no other countries could have done) US 9/11 compensation was $3.1 million per person, Israel here paid only $1.4 million per fatality. - Hey, we don’t pay retail, only wholesale - When the US shot down a commercial plane over Iran from an Aegis class cruiser killing 290 civilians, Bush I jumped into action – and gives the returning captain both a welcome and a medal. “Normally, I’m not big on medals but you just roasted 66 innocent children with a single SM-2 missile, so, come here you bad boy.”
“Before the US invasion (of Iraq), the Shia and Sunni communities lived together, treating each other like two Protestant sects in the US. They intermarried, they lived in the same neighborhood, and they often did not know who was whom.” Imagine US media telling you any of this. Reading Bush II’s 2007 SOFA agreement, you learn that US corporations were granted post-invasion the right to exploit Iraqi resources and the US to have permanent military bases in Iraq. Mission Accomplished! We came, we saw, we took.
The skinny on R2P (Right to Protect Doctrine)” It appears in the 1990’s and eagle eyes see that the exception to R2P is NATO which “can invade any country that it wants, as it did in Yugoslavia”. Through NATO, R2P leads to ‘humanitarian’ intervention that’s not so humanitarian. The unwarranted Iraq invasion was a crime of aggression just like those of Nazis that led to Nuremberg Trials after WWII. Hitler invades the Sudetenland saying he’s just there to bring peace and security; sure sounds like the justification for every illegal US war. Under the US Constitution, the US is bound to follow Nuremberg Principles, which it signed on at Nuremberg, and yet as a rogue state, the US happily drinks from the Nuremburg poisoned chalice of war crimes knowing now international law means everyone but the US and Israel.
Game Time: try to find a single news reference to the Iraq invasion as a crime (not just a mistake). Now do it again for our invasions of Vietnam and Afghanistan. Note: The Gareth Evans version of R2P said that NATO was authorized “to intervene without a UN Security Resolution”. Since the US controls NATO, under the Evans version, the US has one more layer hiding its actions from the moral qualms of US voters. No US liberal will ever point fingers at interventions in Yugoslavia (1999) Afghanistan (2001) or Libya (2011) and say, “You know, these really weren’t NATO interventions, they really were US interventions”. Only a progressive would entertain that thought by being morally driven to put the pieces together even though their own cherished corporate military Keynesian Democratic party initiated it. My identification guide to liberals vs progressives: Liberals ONLY point fingers at Trump or Republicans. Progressives point fingers at WHATEVER is worthy of moral finger pointing. As Noam said in other books to liberals, for a refreshing change, instead of focusing only on Trump/Republicans, focus on what your OWN party is doing to collude with the worst policies of these same Trump/Republicans. Only progressives will reflexively ALSO look critically at their own military Keynesian corporate Big Pharma party.
Newsflash: Did you know that “When the United States agreed to jurisdiction by the World Court, it inserted a proviso that the US was not bound by the UN Charter or the Charter of the Organization of American States [OAS]”. To lay people this means that the US is “legally entitled to commit war crimes, even to commit genocide [page 169].” We reserve the right to get even Hitlerian and still remain above the law. The US could thus murder every American with freckles and still escape international law. This is because, when the US late signed the Genocide Convention in 1988, “it added the proviso that it did not apply to the United States.” If we got genocidal on all remaining Native Americans, we can’t be prosecuted for it. Extra credit question: What kind of US citizen would celebrate the crafting of that proviso?
You can’t have nuclear free zones because the US enjoys hiding nuclear weapons wherever it wants on the planet without oversight, and if Israel ever was forced to admit its nuclear arsenal, there would legally go US aid to Israel through the Symington Amendment. Israel’s illegal nukes are the original “Don’t Ask, Don’t tell”. As Kissinger once explained to Nixon, “Our main object is to keep secret Israeli nuclear weapons.” Norway provided Israel with heavy water in 1959.
Trump authorizes Morocco’s illegal takeover of Western Sahara. Why? “Because Morocco (with of its recent occupation of Western Sahara now) has a virtual monopoly on phosphates, an irreplaceable mineral that is vital for agriculture.” Half of Qatar’s drinking water comes from desalination. “One US nuclear submarine with Trident missiles can destroy almost 200 cities anywhere in the world.” This excellent book ends with this reminder: “Every US administration increases military spending. None reduce it.” That tells you all you need to know about the deep moral caliber of every approved Presidential candidate. Yet another terrific Noam book; if only US liberals instead of just progressives dared read him.
For Vijay, Noam is the conscience of our country. For Angela Davis, the prison-industrial complex is “a discernable product of the post-slavery history of the US.” And now some patriotic news from Afghanistan: “A United Nations study found that at least 40 percent of civilians killed by US air strikes were children. The Afghan Ministry of Public Heath estimates that two-thirds of Afghans suffer from war-induced mental health issues. Half of the population lives below the poverty line, and about 60 percent of the population remains illiterate.” Hey, why just cut and run in Afghanistan, when as in Libya, instead you can leave it in ruins and run? The last drone strike in Afghanistan killed seven children and Zemari Ahmadi of the California based Nutrition and Education International. Hey - we gotta go but let’s leave you with even more illiteracy and hunger. And thanks for choosing a certified rogue state as your invader. No one was punished for the last Afghan kid slaughter. Surprised?
Homework: Did any of the wars in Afghanistan Iraq or Libya create a pro-US government? Popularize the context: If the US was a major recording artist, or sports celebrity, why would any management risk financing them at great cost after seeing continual documentation of their own inability to reach ANY basic objectives? Or: “What is the point of bombing a country if that violence attains no political ends?” Or: Aside from US weapons manufacturers, and many private contractors, what benefit did anyone get from the $2 trillion spent on Afghanistan? No relief or infrastructure for Afghans. Where is Lee Greenwood when you really need him? Singing his new Stars & Stripes hits, “Ya’ll Get Nothing and Like It” and “Flags Make Me Less Balding”. In 2019, it came out that US taxpayers were paying for 42,000 Afghan soldiers that didn’t exist. Real US foreign policy is a remake of the Keystone Cops for the Netflix generation.
Kuwait invasion as pretext for Iraq war: US refuses to negotiate with former ally Saddam post-Kuwait invasion preferring to bomb its autocratic old friend instead of waiting for his immediate planned pullout to save his face. Noam says, Saddam effectively surrendered then but good luck finding corporate media ever letting you know that. “We didn’t want negotiations, even surrender. We wanted a devasting attack to show the world that what we say goes.”
Gaddafi also was all for a peace deal, but negotiating there again wasn’t allowed by the US, and NATO bombed Libya anyway. If the US wants war it gets war, screw basic diplomacy. William Henry Harrison gets to be President basically because as Indiana governor he chased Tecumseh (rather than negotiate with him) to Canada and seized his land. We took one third of Mexico and French and Russian territories in California without negotiation. Then started seizing islands Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, Philippines, and don’t forget the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. “The landscape had to be pacified or else destroyed.”
WWII left the US alone with a financial surplus which made the dollar almighty. Noam wasn’t badly repressed in the 50’s and 60’s because he was in linguistics which gave Noam a “perch” to see what repression was happening in academia. In 1968, Noam wrote “It is impossible to conduct a brutal war of aggression in the name of enlightened and informed citizenry; either the war must be terminated or democratic rights, including the right to information and free discussion must be restricted.” If you want to see courage, look at peasants on the front lines. Noam doesn’t care if the intellectual community stands against him as long as Noam thinks he is right.
The Tet offensive was “the most amazing uprising in human history. Every village was penetrated with informants. No one had a clue this was going to take place all across the country.” This was a game changer, it was over for Johnson and for the war. The end of the Pentagon Papers book has officials saying “If you send more troops, we are going to need them for civil disorder control in the United States. Women, young people, they’re going to be revolting all over the place. We can’t send more troops abroad.” Tet happened in 36 of the 44 provincial capitals. Senior US State Department official George Ball said, “as long as we continue to bomb, we alienate ourselves from the civilized world.”
In Laos alone the US “conducted 580,000 bombing missions, dropping a full payload of bombs every eight minutes around the clock for nine years. The country is considered the most bombed on the planet.” Imagine mainstream media telling anyone the real Laos story. All those unexploded mines taking off children’s limbs even today, the gift from the US that keeps on giving. President Carter said we didn’t owe reparations for our Southeast Asia violence and chemical warfare because the “destruction was mutual.” That’s not Nixon saying that, but Carter. Not to be outdone in the human sleaze department, President GHW Bush said, “We are willing to forgive the Vietnamese their crimes against us (defending themselves against our war crime invasion of their nation) because we are a forgiving nation.”
Eqbal Ahmad was a lonely voice saying how the US was “creating a terrorist monster, reviving concepts of ‘jihad’ as ‘holy war’ that had been dormant for centuries in the Islamic world.”
The US turned down the Taliban’s offer to surrender of al-Qaeda and Bin Laden saying, “we don’t negotiate surrenders.” $9.5 billion of the Afghan government’s money is frozen in US banks because although Afghans had nothing to do with 9/11 the US has decided that half of all that Afghan money must be paid out to completely unrelated 9/11 families. WTF? Starving Afghans paying reparations for a crime they didn’t commit would make a great reality TV show to show the true magnificence of US foreign aid. When Aristide in Haiti asked France for $22 billion in reparations, he was replaced by a military junta which renounced the request for reparations. Between 2010 and 2020, the US killed from 283 to 454 children by drone. I know what you’re thinking; those children probably deserved it. That said, I wouldn’t want to be merely fixing my tire outside in northwest Pakistan while a drone circles me.
Noam on Trump: “Can you think of any other figure in world history who is as dedicated to destroying the prospects of human life on earth? Not Hitler, not Genghis Khan, nobody except Trump.” Noam on the US: “The Gallup organization once made a mistake. This was in 2013, the Obama years, when it asked, ‘Which country is the greatest threat to world peace?’ There was no competitor to the United States. That poll did not get published in the United States.” Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman said some nasty stuff: while the US was stealing one third of Mexico, they asked what a bunch of ignorant Mexicans have to do with the future of the human race? In 1999, Samuel Huntington wrote in Foreign Affairs, “While the US regularly denounces various countries as ‘rogue states’, in the eyes of many countries it is becoming the rogue superpower.” “Preventive war is, very simply, the ‘supreme crime’ condemned at Nuremberg.” Hitler tried to invade the Caucasus to gain control of its oil; don’t be morally surprised that the US wants the same.
“The United States is the Godfather, who does not accept successful defiance from even the smallest country. Just like the Godfather: if some small shopkeeper doesn’t pay protection money, the Godfather won’t even notice the money, but he still sends in goons to smash up the shop. You don’t want people to get the wrong idea.” This is what the US did to Haiti and Cuba, even Grenada (Where Reagan comically gave 8,000 medals to only 6,000 soldiers for “overcoming the resistance of forty Cuban construction workers” no doubt armed with hammers, nails, and bag lunches – if that doesn’t make your salute the US flag, nothing will).
According to this Godfather Theory, why does the US call China a threat? Because like Iran, Cuba, and Russia it not only doesn’t obey US orders, it doesn’t act intimidated. As Ricky Gervais has shown, there is huge power in no longer caring about what the powerful want to hear. President Clinton saw that 184 countries in UN had voted to end the Cuba blockade and then intentionally outflanked Republicans from the right intensifying the blockade of Cuba, or put in condensed Charlie Brown form: the Blockhead and the Blockade. This all started with the launching of the US ballsy Monroe Doctrine game, where the US toddler (after demanding all pre-existing Native American playing pieces were his, and having had no nap) threw his arms around all the Latin American game pieces and to his fellow stunned playmates shouted, “Mine!” John Quincy Adams stated the concept in his eloquent sociopathic fashion, “British power will decline. Our power will increase. Especially after we exterminate the native population and take over what is called the national territory.”
Under the Monroe Doctrine, the US forces Cuba “to become pretty much a US colony until 1959.” You’d also have to be blind not to see the real Mafia behind the Batista days in Cuba (first as a base for rum running, then with the Batista-Lansky Alliance). The US only supports countries with “compliant elites” willing to take their cuts (wealth and power) through screwing their fellow countrymen. “You can’t allow a country you’re trying to destroy have a deterrent capacity.” North Korea, anyone? That is why Iran must not develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent; if Iran did, the US would have to rely on -yuck- civility, diplomacy and negotiation with Iran like a fellow mere mortal, instead of threatening like an unhinged common bully.
The well-financed fear of Socialism in the US by propagandized liberals and conservatives “led to the salvage funds of Keynesianism going toward the military rather than the social sector.” The US now operates under military Keynesianism, because otherwise that money might be going to… help all taxpayers. You can’t stop killing people who look different around the globe in endlessly failing misadventures just to finally listen to taxpayers. Keynesianism could of course just as easily be increasing democracy, funding for light rail, high speed trains, hospitals, roads and livable neighborhoods but good luck with corporate media telling us that. And so, after WWII military Keynesianism won – with its catchy slogan “If You Never Think About Our Endless War’s Victims, There’s No Moral Injury.”
In National Security Council Policy Paper 68, the Secretary of State urges that to sell both the upcoming and unnecessary Cold War and military Keynesianism to the masses you will have to “bludgeon the mass mind” and be “clearer than the truth”. This Senator Arthur Vandenberg translated as “scare the hell out of the American People.” Fearmongering wrote many a paycheck for “esteemed” intellectuals through the following decades. Zen Koan: “The United States can destroy any country in the world. And yet, it seems to consistently be defeated by the world’s peasant armies (Vietnam, Afghanistan).”
On 9/11, the Pentagon was struck at 9:37am, by 2:40pm that day, Donald Rumsfeld said we should attack Saddam Hussein. Hey, who needs facts when you have the PNAC? Note: Israel attacked the USS Liberty in 1967 killing 34 sailors and wounding 171 and faced zero retaliation and Saddam attacked the USS Stark warship in 1987, killed 37 US sailors and faced zero retaliation (something no other countries could have done) US 9/11 compensation was $3.1 million per person, Israel here paid only $1.4 million per fatality. - Hey, we don’t pay retail, only wholesale - When the US shot down a commercial plane over Iran from an Aegis class cruiser killing 290 civilians, Bush I jumped into action – and gives the returning captain both a welcome and a medal. “Normally, I’m not big on medals but you just roasted 66 innocent children with a single SM-2 missile, so, come here you bad boy.”
“Before the US invasion (of Iraq), the Shia and Sunni communities lived together, treating each other like two Protestant sects in the US. They intermarried, they lived in the same neighborhood, and they often did not know who was whom.” Imagine US media telling you any of this. Reading Bush II’s 2007 SOFA agreement, you learn that US corporations were granted post-invasion the right to exploit Iraqi resources and the US to have permanent military bases in Iraq. Mission Accomplished! We came, we saw, we took.
The skinny on R2P (Right to Protect Doctrine)” It appears in the 1990’s and eagle eyes see that the exception to R2P is NATO which “can invade any country that it wants, as it did in Yugoslavia”. Through NATO, R2P leads to ‘humanitarian’ intervention that’s not so humanitarian. The unwarranted Iraq invasion was a crime of aggression just like those of Nazis that led to Nuremberg Trials after WWII. Hitler invades the Sudetenland saying he’s just there to bring peace and security; sure sounds like the justification for every illegal US war. Under the US Constitution, the US is bound to follow Nuremberg Principles, which it signed on at Nuremberg, and yet as a rogue state, the US happily drinks from the Nuremburg poisoned chalice of war crimes knowing now international law means everyone but the US and Israel.
Game Time: try to find a single news reference to the Iraq invasion as a crime (not just a mistake). Now do it again for our invasions of Vietnam and Afghanistan. Note: The Gareth Evans version of R2P said that NATO was authorized “to intervene without a UN Security Resolution”. Since the US controls NATO, under the Evans version, the US has one more layer hiding its actions from the moral qualms of US voters. No US liberal will ever point fingers at interventions in Yugoslavia (1999) Afghanistan (2001) or Libya (2011) and say, “You know, these really weren’t NATO interventions, they really were US interventions”. Only a progressive would entertain that thought by being morally driven to put the pieces together even though their own cherished corporate military Keynesian Democratic party initiated it. My identification guide to liberals vs progressives: Liberals ONLY point fingers at Trump or Republicans. Progressives point fingers at WHATEVER is worthy of moral finger pointing. As Noam said in other books to liberals, for a refreshing change, instead of focusing only on Trump/Republicans, focus on what your OWN party is doing to collude with the worst policies of these same Trump/Republicans. Only progressives will reflexively ALSO look critically at their own military Keynesian corporate Big Pharma party.
Newsflash: Did you know that “When the United States agreed to jurisdiction by the World Court, it inserted a proviso that the US was not bound by the UN Charter or the Charter of the Organization of American States [OAS]”. To lay people this means that the US is “legally entitled to commit war crimes, even to commit genocide [page 169].” We reserve the right to get even Hitlerian and still remain above the law. The US could thus murder every American with freckles and still escape international law. This is because, when the US late signed the Genocide Convention in 1988, “it added the proviso that it did not apply to the United States.” If we got genocidal on all remaining Native Americans, we can’t be prosecuted for it. Extra credit question: What kind of US citizen would celebrate the crafting of that proviso?
You can’t have nuclear free zones because the US enjoys hiding nuclear weapons wherever it wants on the planet without oversight, and if Israel ever was forced to admit its nuclear arsenal, there would legally go US aid to Israel through the Symington Amendment. Israel’s illegal nukes are the original “Don’t Ask, Don’t tell”. As Kissinger once explained to Nixon, “Our main object is to keep secret Israeli nuclear weapons.” Norway provided Israel with heavy water in 1959.
Trump authorizes Morocco’s illegal takeover of Western Sahara. Why? “Because Morocco (with of its recent occupation of Western Sahara now) has a virtual monopoly on phosphates, an irreplaceable mineral that is vital for agriculture.” Half of Qatar’s drinking water comes from desalination. “One US nuclear submarine with Trident missiles can destroy almost 200 cities anywhere in the world.” This excellent book ends with this reminder: “Every US administration increases military spending. None reduce it.” That tells you all you need to know about the deep moral caliber of every approved Presidential candidate. Yet another terrific Noam book; if only US liberals instead of just progressives dared read him.
December 17, 2023
This book has some useful info and tidbits in it, but overall it’s very unfocused and spends a solid 20% of it just pure Noam hagiography writing about how amazing Chomsky is and shit; he's no Lenin folks he rubbed shoulders with Epstein for fuck sake.
About 40% of those killed in the American bombings of Afghanistan were children; around 66% of the population now has war-induced PTSD; half of Afghanistan’s population is impoverished and even more are illiterate. What did the American invasion accomplish? Nothing. 20 years of pain and misery only for the Taliban (whose leaders today were in the organization when America invaded) to effortlessly reclaim control of Afghanistan without any pushback from the pro-U.S. government American taxpayers poured trillions into. After spending $2 trillion on occupation the money was almost completely funneled into the pockets of the rich.
America’s strategy in Afghanistan in the 1980s to ‘draw the USSR into its own Vietnam’ was, in fact, a replay of America’s Vietnam strategy, which had been taken from the French strategy of “yellowing" (shockingly the strategies of racist empires are given racist codenames). This strategy entailed using proxies/underlings who were native to whatever country America (or in the French’s case IndoChina) as canon fodder rather than risk their own troops. In the 80s in Afghanistan this was done by recruiting the most reactionary Islamist forces with the help of Saudi Arabia and their massive bank reserves of petrodollars. The CIA then equipped and trained these reactionaries, while the Pakistani intelligence agency (ISI, a child of MI6 and godson of the CIA) provided the intelligence to these reactionaries. This is pretty much the same strategy America used in South America (just with different key actors) when we funded death squads in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. In Afghanistan, these reactionary proxies eventually toppled the left-leaning, Soviet-backed Afghanistan government. In a historical irony, during the post-9/11 American invasion of Afghanistan, American imperialists would use liberal justifications, such as fighting for women’s rights, as part of the argument as to why they were fighting. The irony here is the fact that the reactionaries they put into power are the ones who stripped Afghans of many of these “human rights” (such as any sort of equality for women) in the first place.
The 9/11 attacks were a result of the arming of Islamic reactionaries in the 1980s, albeit an unintended one. The American ruling class and foreign policy warhawks used this unintended blowback to their advantage to flex America’s muscles toward the rest of the world. The Afghanistan war had absolutely no justification. America assumed that Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were responsible for the attacks. This assumption had not been proven true by the time the US invaded. In fact, 8 months after the Afghanistan invasion, the FBI had only just finished up an extensive investigation and (run by Robert Mueller, the same guy liberals praise for being mean to Trump) which concluded that the US had not been able to definitively prove any types of meaningful links between 9/11 and Al-Qaeda or Afghanistan and the 911 attacks (duh). Even assuming that America was certain that Al-Qaeda did do 9/11 from a stronghold in Afghanistan, this still does not lead to the conclusion that America had to invade the country. The vast majority of peoples in Afghanistan certainly were not responsible for these attacks; moreover, a small, almost police-like operation could have easily been carried out to apprehend Osama bin Laden and various leaders of Al-Qaeda. The truth was that the Taliban were more than willing to get rid of Osama by deporting/moving him to another country where America could have easily detained him. The Taliban even attempted to negotiate a total surrender with the United States, which would’ve put Osama and his compatriots right in our hands, yet the state department responded by saying: “we don’t negotiate surrender. Our aims are bigger than that”. America was unwilling to negotiate at all with the Taliban; the empire simply wanted war to justify its military budget and enact various neoconservative agendas. Overall, this book believes the invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent forever war were consequences of an American post-911 foreign policy designed to intimidate the rest of the world while also expanding American military operations throughout the Middle East.
Tucking tail out of Afghanistan didn’t really hurt America domestically. Noam says losing the Vietnam war “bruised” America at home, but Afghanistan hasn't even done that because there was no draft here. Americans reacted to the pull out by merely “shrugging shoulders”, and policy makers simply redeployed troops elsewhere. Strategically the withdrawal has 3 disadvantages to U.S. geopolitical strategy:
1. It stopped U.S from directly colonizing a country with around $1-3 trillion worth of mineral resources. Direct colonization isn’t necessary for the United States to take advantage of this wealth, but it does take that method of exploitation off the table.
2. America cannot use Afghanistan as a stop gap in China’s belt and road initiative and its aims to build up infrastructure across Asia. Hillary Clinton had talked about using Afghanistan as part of a 'New Silk Road' from India to Central Asia to undermine other Chinese and Russian access to central Asian states; this is now not possible.
3. The U.S. now cannot use Afghanistan to house military bases from which it could launch covert operations into China’s Xinjiang region (with its Uyghur majority) or Iran
Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and various other neocons had a plan to expand American power in the Middle East under the aegis of the “Project for a New American Century”, which 9/11 provided the perfect opportunity to enact. Unfortunately for them they actually helped strengthen their biggest enemy in the region, Iran, by overthrowing 2 of Iran’s biggest rivals: the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The United States began support Iraq in the wake of the Iranian revolution, which overthrew the U.S. puppet-dictator the Shah. After failing to topple the Ayatollah and his regime internally, the U.S. turned to Iraq and began heavily backing them after their 1980 invasion of Iran. Rumsfeld soon began meeting with Saddam and organizing weapons shipments to his government, even as they were butchering hundreds of thousands of Iranians through means as criminal as using chemical weapons (supplied by the United States no less). Under the Bush Sr. regime, Iraqi nuclear scientists were invited to America in order to boost the development of Iraq’s own nuclear weapons program, an act which almost certainly played a central role in Iran’s desire to develop of their own nuclear weapons program. However, by the time of the U.S. invasion there was still no evidence whatsoever that Saddam or Iraq had WMDs or nuclear weapons.
America’s love affair with Saddam ended when he invaded Kuwait after he incorrectly interpreted various vague statements by U.S. state department officials as a green light to do so. After realizing he fucked up, he consistently offered to withdraw his forces all the way up until the U.S. invasion; the Americans refused this offer, manufactured consent through fabrications such as the murder of incubator babies, and began their first attack on Iraq. Much like the subsequent war in Afghanistan, the American empire didn’t want surrender or negotiations. It wanted to flex its muscles for the whole world to see, like a mafia don who burns down a shop when it fails to pay protection money in order to send a warning to every other shop under his domain.
After bombing Iraq back to the stone age, the U.S. pushed forth sanctions through the UN that were, in the words 2 major UN diplomats who resigned in protest, "genocidal". At best they blackmailed Iraq into exporting oil at favorable prices/quantities in exchange for food to feed its starving people. In 2003, thanks to the bloodlust fostered by the War on Terror, the United States invaded Iraq with ground forces; in keeping with American tradition, these ground troops committed countless atrocities along the way. In 2007 the United States explicitly laid out their overall aims of the war when they tried to force the new Iraq government to accept the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). The 2 main goals were: 1) give U.S. energy corporations unimpeded access to Iraqi oil, and 2) to force Iraq to allow the U.S. to set up permanent military bases/outposts throughout the country. The Iraqi parliament attempted to reject the 2007 seven offer they wanted the United States to have to behave under Iraq laws not be able to bilaterally right their own code of conduct in a foreign nation. This began a long, drawn out process of withdrawal in Iraq. Another withdrawal milestone occurred a few weeks after the United States tucked tail from Afghanistan, when the empire agreed to begin focusing combat operations in Iraq towards purely training Iraqi forces, much as it tried to do with Afghanistan forces.
About 40% of those killed in the American bombings of Afghanistan were children; around 66% of the population now has war-induced PTSD; half of Afghanistan’s population is impoverished and even more are illiterate. What did the American invasion accomplish? Nothing. 20 years of pain and misery only for the Taliban (whose leaders today were in the organization when America invaded) to effortlessly reclaim control of Afghanistan without any pushback from the pro-U.S. government American taxpayers poured trillions into. After spending $2 trillion on occupation the money was almost completely funneled into the pockets of the rich.
America’s strategy in Afghanistan in the 1980s to ‘draw the USSR into its own Vietnam’ was, in fact, a replay of America’s Vietnam strategy, which had been taken from the French strategy of “yellowing" (shockingly the strategies of racist empires are given racist codenames). This strategy entailed using proxies/underlings who were native to whatever country America (or in the French’s case IndoChina) as canon fodder rather than risk their own troops. In the 80s in Afghanistan this was done by recruiting the most reactionary Islamist forces with the help of Saudi Arabia and their massive bank reserves of petrodollars. The CIA then equipped and trained these reactionaries, while the Pakistani intelligence agency (ISI, a child of MI6 and godson of the CIA) provided the intelligence to these reactionaries. This is pretty much the same strategy America used in South America (just with different key actors) when we funded death squads in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. In Afghanistan, these reactionary proxies eventually toppled the left-leaning, Soviet-backed Afghanistan government. In a historical irony, during the post-9/11 American invasion of Afghanistan, American imperialists would use liberal justifications, such as fighting for women’s rights, as part of the argument as to why they were fighting. The irony here is the fact that the reactionaries they put into power are the ones who stripped Afghans of many of these “human rights” (such as any sort of equality for women) in the first place.
The 9/11 attacks were a result of the arming of Islamic reactionaries in the 1980s, albeit an unintended one. The American ruling class and foreign policy warhawks used this unintended blowback to their advantage to flex America’s muscles toward the rest of the world. The Afghanistan war had absolutely no justification. America assumed that Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were responsible for the attacks. This assumption had not been proven true by the time the US invaded. In fact, 8 months after the Afghanistan invasion, the FBI had only just finished up an extensive investigation and (run by Robert Mueller, the same guy liberals praise for being mean to Trump) which concluded that the US had not been able to definitively prove any types of meaningful links between 9/11 and Al-Qaeda or Afghanistan and the 911 attacks (duh). Even assuming that America was certain that Al-Qaeda did do 9/11 from a stronghold in Afghanistan, this still does not lead to the conclusion that America had to invade the country. The vast majority of peoples in Afghanistan certainly were not responsible for these attacks; moreover, a small, almost police-like operation could have easily been carried out to apprehend Osama bin Laden and various leaders of Al-Qaeda. The truth was that the Taliban were more than willing to get rid of Osama by deporting/moving him to another country where America could have easily detained him. The Taliban even attempted to negotiate a total surrender with the United States, which would’ve put Osama and his compatriots right in our hands, yet the state department responded by saying: “we don’t negotiate surrender. Our aims are bigger than that”. America was unwilling to negotiate at all with the Taliban; the empire simply wanted war to justify its military budget and enact various neoconservative agendas. Overall, this book believes the invasion of Afghanistan and subsequent forever war were consequences of an American post-911 foreign policy designed to intimidate the rest of the world while also expanding American military operations throughout the Middle East.
Tucking tail out of Afghanistan didn’t really hurt America domestically. Noam says losing the Vietnam war “bruised” America at home, but Afghanistan hasn't even done that because there was no draft here. Americans reacted to the pull out by merely “shrugging shoulders”, and policy makers simply redeployed troops elsewhere. Strategically the withdrawal has 3 disadvantages to U.S. geopolitical strategy:
1. It stopped U.S from directly colonizing a country with around $1-3 trillion worth of mineral resources. Direct colonization isn’t necessary for the United States to take advantage of this wealth, but it does take that method of exploitation off the table.
2. America cannot use Afghanistan as a stop gap in China’s belt and road initiative and its aims to build up infrastructure across Asia. Hillary Clinton had talked about using Afghanistan as part of a 'New Silk Road' from India to Central Asia to undermine other Chinese and Russian access to central Asian states; this is now not possible.
3. The U.S. now cannot use Afghanistan to house military bases from which it could launch covert operations into China’s Xinjiang region (with its Uyghur majority) or Iran
Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and various other neocons had a plan to expand American power in the Middle East under the aegis of the “Project for a New American Century”, which 9/11 provided the perfect opportunity to enact. Unfortunately for them they actually helped strengthen their biggest enemy in the region, Iran, by overthrowing 2 of Iran’s biggest rivals: the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The United States began support Iraq in the wake of the Iranian revolution, which overthrew the U.S. puppet-dictator the Shah. After failing to topple the Ayatollah and his regime internally, the U.S. turned to Iraq and began heavily backing them after their 1980 invasion of Iran. Rumsfeld soon began meeting with Saddam and organizing weapons shipments to his government, even as they were butchering hundreds of thousands of Iranians through means as criminal as using chemical weapons (supplied by the United States no less). Under the Bush Sr. regime, Iraqi nuclear scientists were invited to America in order to boost the development of Iraq’s own nuclear weapons program, an act which almost certainly played a central role in Iran’s desire to develop of their own nuclear weapons program. However, by the time of the U.S. invasion there was still no evidence whatsoever that Saddam or Iraq had WMDs or nuclear weapons.
America’s love affair with Saddam ended when he invaded Kuwait after he incorrectly interpreted various vague statements by U.S. state department officials as a green light to do so. After realizing he fucked up, he consistently offered to withdraw his forces all the way up until the U.S. invasion; the Americans refused this offer, manufactured consent through fabrications such as the murder of incubator babies, and began their first attack on Iraq. Much like the subsequent war in Afghanistan, the American empire didn’t want surrender or negotiations. It wanted to flex its muscles for the whole world to see, like a mafia don who burns down a shop when it fails to pay protection money in order to send a warning to every other shop under his domain.
After bombing Iraq back to the stone age, the U.S. pushed forth sanctions through the UN that were, in the words 2 major UN diplomats who resigned in protest, "genocidal". At best they blackmailed Iraq into exporting oil at favorable prices/quantities in exchange for food to feed its starving people. In 2003, thanks to the bloodlust fostered by the War on Terror, the United States invaded Iraq with ground forces; in keeping with American tradition, these ground troops committed countless atrocities along the way. In 2007 the United States explicitly laid out their overall aims of the war when they tried to force the new Iraq government to accept the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). The 2 main goals were: 1) give U.S. energy corporations unimpeded access to Iraqi oil, and 2) to force Iraq to allow the U.S. to set up permanent military bases/outposts throughout the country. The Iraqi parliament attempted to reject the 2007 seven offer they wanted the United States to have to behave under Iraq laws not be able to bilaterally right their own code of conduct in a foreign nation. This began a long, drawn out process of withdrawal in Iraq. Another withdrawal milestone occurred a few weeks after the United States tucked tail from Afghanistan, when the empire agreed to begin focusing combat operations in Iraq towards purely training Iraqi forces, much as it tried to do with Afghanistan forces.
September 13, 2022
When I pick up any works by Noam Chomsky I know I'm in for a treat and I can wholeheartedly say that this was just as brilliant as I expected. Easy to read, well informed, captivated and essential. I could not recommend this book more highly and I think everyone on earth should read it.
August 15, 2022
I received an eARC of "The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power" by Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad from the publisher The New Press via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
The book is expected to be published on the 30th of August, 2022.
For my reading tastes in this genre, I didn’t mind the podcast-trascript-like style, but I am not a fan.
This book feels like a reiteration of Noam’s forever take on the U.S.’s power and a commentary-like additions—which adds context, refines, and polishes—from Prashad, an intellectual who is “highly-influenced” by Chomsky.
Moreover, I would have liked more stories, more in-depth plunges into the muds and murk of these geographical theatres. Just more details in general would have sated my appetite, especially regarding the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan.
There have also been some facts which are outdated today; they mentioned that “Iraq has the second largest reserves of oil in the world…”—It is now considered to have the fifth largest oil reserves.
All in all, it is a very good book. I recommend it to anyone interested in world politics, and the U.S.’s imperialistic foreign policies over the last few decades.
A full 6-minute read review can be found at:
mustafaabbass.com
The book is expected to be published on the 30th of August, 2022.
For my reading tastes in this genre, I didn’t mind the podcast-trascript-like style, but I am not a fan.
This book feels like a reiteration of Noam’s forever take on the U.S.’s power and a commentary-like additions—which adds context, refines, and polishes—from Prashad, an intellectual who is “highly-influenced” by Chomsky.
Moreover, I would have liked more stories, more in-depth plunges into the muds and murk of these geographical theatres. Just more details in general would have sated my appetite, especially regarding the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan.
There have also been some facts which are outdated today; they mentioned that “Iraq has the second largest reserves of oil in the world…”—It is now considered to have the fifth largest oil reserves.
All in all, it is a very good book. I recommend it to anyone interested in world politics, and the U.S.’s imperialistic foreign policies over the last few decades.
A full 6-minute read review can be found at:
mustafaabbass.com
February 23, 2025
We’re surrounded by headlines about the rise in anti-intellectualism and echo chambers. It can paint a pretty bleak picture. But, then you hear about West Point having to open a lecture, intended for a single philosophy class, to the entire student body due to popular demand. Who is this rockstar speaker? A 95-year-old man who speaks in slow motion. Despite this, Chomsky finds an interested and engaged audience who approach him afterwards wanting his genuine opinions on whether they are doing the right thing by enlisting or asking him to sign their book. That sounds like hope to me.
This book covers all the usual Chomsky critiques of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and Afghanistan. There are discussions about how wars are justified to the U.S. public and NATO’s role in shaping that perception. The format includes conversations between the authors, which bugged some people, but to me, it just felt like cozy podcast vibes.
The book finishes with the potential path to the end of U.S. global dominance. In a nutshell, China working to broaden their sphere of influence (The Belt and Road Initiative, Shanghai Corporation Organization, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, etc.) while the U.S. alienates allies and struggles with its sales pitch for “just wars” abroad.
U.S. power has been predicated on Americans’ viewing themselves as the good guys despite their aggressive foreign policy. Pre-1991, the Soviet Union was the go-to excuse for encroaching on another country’s sovereignty. The sequel is the U.S. proclaiming itself as the leader of the free world, bringing justice and democracy wherever they go.
Today, the U.S. public is fed up with footing the bill for foreign wars and foreign aid. But if the U.S. can’t get the public to buy in—how will it prop up the economy with predatory IMF lending policies, bribed public officials under the guise of aid, appropriated foreign natural resources, and massive defence contracts? Trump's approach is to say the quiet part out loud.
Does Ukraine want our continued support? We want their rare earth minerals. Forget the 1994 Trilateral Statement, when the U.S. coerced Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons (the 3rd largest arsenal in the world at the time) in return for U.S. security assurances. Message loud and clear. Trust the U.S. at your own peril.
While not one of Chomsky's longer works, I still enjoyed hearing his perspective on recent developments in world affairs.
This book covers all the usual Chomsky critiques of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and Afghanistan. There are discussions about how wars are justified to the U.S. public and NATO’s role in shaping that perception. The format includes conversations between the authors, which bugged some people, but to me, it just felt like cozy podcast vibes.
The book finishes with the potential path to the end of U.S. global dominance. In a nutshell, China working to broaden their sphere of influence (The Belt and Road Initiative, Shanghai Corporation Organization, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, etc.) while the U.S. alienates allies and struggles with its sales pitch for “just wars” abroad.
U.S. power has been predicated on Americans’ viewing themselves as the good guys despite their aggressive foreign policy. Pre-1991, the Soviet Union was the go-to excuse for encroaching on another country’s sovereignty. The sequel is the U.S. proclaiming itself as the leader of the free world, bringing justice and democracy wherever they go.
Today, the U.S. public is fed up with footing the bill for foreign wars and foreign aid. But if the U.S. can’t get the public to buy in—how will it prop up the economy with predatory IMF lending policies, bribed public officials under the guise of aid, appropriated foreign natural resources, and massive defence contracts? Trump's approach is to say the quiet part out loud.
Does Ukraine want our continued support? We want their rare earth minerals. Forget the 1994 Trilateral Statement, when the U.S. coerced Ukraine to give up their nuclear weapons (the 3rd largest arsenal in the world at the time) in return for U.S. security assurances. Message loud and clear. Trust the U.S. at your own peril.
While not one of Chomsky's longer works, I still enjoyed hearing his perspective on recent developments in world affairs.
July 26, 2025
The book is based on conversation between Noam and Vijay and is written as a conversation as well. The beginning to me almost felt like an ego show "look at how much I know about this". However it turned into a really interesting history lesson about the "interventions" from the US in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lybia.
Woe, it's wild how much harm and violence has been done under the banner of "peace". Instead of solving problems, the US only creates more harm and instability for the country.
If you're interested in understanding the impact of U.S. foreign policy on Europe and the Middle East, this book offers insights that are both sobering and important.
The conversation/interview style really worked for me because the language is written like spoken language. This way it felt more accessible and helped me understand these big political and historical topics without feeling overwhelmed.
It not openend my eyes, but also makes me want to talk about this book and the USA whenever I can squeeze it in a conversation
Woe, it's wild how much harm and violence has been done under the banner of "peace". Instead of solving problems, the US only creates more harm and instability for the country.
If you're interested in understanding the impact of U.S. foreign policy on Europe and the Middle East, this book offers insights that are both sobering and important.
The conversation/interview style really worked for me because the language is written like spoken language. This way it felt more accessible and helped me understand these big political and historical topics without feeling overwhelmed.
It not openend my eyes, but also makes me want to talk about this book and the USA whenever I can squeeze it in a conversation
October 19, 2022
The Foreword (Angela Y. Davis): An opportunity squandered, to say anything worthwhile about the book or the theme of the book. She only talks about her meeting with Chomsky (and Prashad).
The chapters: Discussion of US invasions and it's sluggish withdrawals from those countries. They also discuss the current "China threat" which is being felt by US.
The content is superficial, serving delectation for those who don't care much for in-detail understanding but would like to know about certain events bullet-point style.
The format, which has irked others and me, somewhat, is probably the major impediment for any serious or in-depth commentary from either of the two authors.
Afterword (Vijay Prashad): He talks about his dialogue with Chomsky over the years and the effect of it on him. Now, I don't want to say this but, I can't help but feel this was some sort of a eulogy, reflecting on Chomsky's age.
All in all, the authors could have either refrained from creating this or should have expounded upon the current events arising by US actions, direct or indirect.
The chapters: Discussion of US invasions and it's sluggish withdrawals from those countries. They also discuss the current "China threat" which is being felt by US.
The content is superficial, serving delectation for those who don't care much for in-detail understanding but would like to know about certain events bullet-point style.
The format, which has irked others and me, somewhat, is probably the major impediment for any serious or in-depth commentary from either of the two authors.
Afterword (Vijay Prashad): He talks about his dialogue with Chomsky over the years and the effect of it on him. Now, I don't want to say this but, I can't help but feel this was some sort of a eulogy, reflecting on Chomsky's age.
All in all, the authors could have either refrained from creating this or should have expounded upon the current events arising by US actions, direct or indirect.
January 17, 2025
LORD does this man like to express his grievances. First, this was supposed to be about the US withdrawal of Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan and what I assume his analysis of what the repercussions of these decisions were.
I felt like the author wanted to take the opportunity in catching audiences with the title in order to launch into a history of American imperialism. He provided very few sources to support broad claims about conflicts, pointing the finger at the US as the one to blame, and completely neglected the numerous factors that have led to conflict over the last century.
Does American exceptionalism exist? Absolutely. But there’s no reason to use this as the sole excuse for international conflict. This dismissal to properly address Turkey’s actions in the Middle East - a NATO ally by the way - and simplify what you could characterize as China’s own form of economic imperialism across Africa and South America as just “wanting to make things better for everyone” is leaving readers deeply misinformed.
I felt like the author wanted to take the opportunity in catching audiences with the title in order to launch into a history of American imperialism. He provided very few sources to support broad claims about conflicts, pointing the finger at the US as the one to blame, and completely neglected the numerous factors that have led to conflict over the last century.
Does American exceptionalism exist? Absolutely. But there’s no reason to use this as the sole excuse for international conflict. This dismissal to properly address Turkey’s actions in the Middle East - a NATO ally by the way - and simplify what you could characterize as China’s own form of economic imperialism across Africa and South America as just “wanting to make things better for everyone” is leaving readers deeply misinformed.
November 5, 2025
This book makes one important perspective crystal-clear:
The U.S. is the world’s villain.
The U.S. is the world’s villain.
Say it louder for those who still believe that the U.S. only “became bad” when Trump was elected: THE U.S. IS, AND ALWAYS WAS, THE WORLD’S VILLAIN.
If that statement causes an adverse reaction in you, pause and think: When we are sick, should we just treat the symptoms, or should we try to find the cause of the sickness and take care of it? If we don’t acknowledge the violent harm that was/is caused by U.S. militaristic imperialism, the same genocidal patterns will simply occur, over and over again.
THE WITHDRAWAL is structured as a conversation in which Vijay interviews Noam. Chomsky is an eloquent thinker, writer, and speaker who is extremely knowledgeable about a great many historical events and how they are all connected. Here are some of the things I learned from him:
1. The U.S. is a “rogue terrorist superpower.” What they want is a world order that abides by their rules, not a truly global one that encompasses the voices of all nations. For instance, in the wake of WWII, the U.S. wrote international laws that exempted themselves from having to follow them. Thus, it is illegally to commit war crimes (which includes genocide), but the same document states that the U.S. is exempt, and thus “legally entitled to commit war crimes”—and even genocide.
2. The U.S. always has an “America first” reason for its military maneuvers overseas, even though they may claim that they are invading or attacking to “help bring freedom and democracy to the locals.” In response to 9/11, despite no evidence that al-Qaeda had committed the terrorist attack (a fact that was communicated repeatedly by high-ranking government officials after the invasion), the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was, like Iraq in the 1990s, not because of their public claims of caring for the Afghani people, or in retaliation against Al-Qaeda. Rather, the U.S. invaded just because they could—the “shock and awe” tactic to remind the world who is in charge.
3. The U.S.’ imperialist military actions abroad often directly create the conditions for fomenting repressive foreign regimes. For example, after invading Afghanistan, the U.S. didn’t want to go about the actual difficult business of nation-building. Instead, they found locals who could do it for them—and these were usually very cunning warlords who knew village politics and knew their way around how to control society. These local warlords often governed through violence, especially violence against women (thus contradicting the U.S.’ white savior explanation of “saving” Afghani women as justification for their invasion and meddling). These warlords often use their influence with the U.S. military to take out their competitors, moderates, or anyone with a conscience who was speaking out: if they didn’t like someone, they’d report said person to the U.S. military as “harboring the Taliban,” and the U.S. military would finish them off. Therefore, all who remain are just violent people on different sides of the U.S. imperial coin.
4. The U.S. believes itself to be a force of savioristic good and often operates with an attitude of “Why does everyone hate us?” even when studies (requested by them!) come back with the conclusion of “It’s because of what you do.”
5. “The China threat” is simply that China is the one country that refuses to accept or play by the U.S.’ violent intimidation tactics, and have built the means to create an alternative to U.S. global rule. And, of course, the U.S. can’t have anyone threatening its status as the global superpower. So a sustained media campaign is kept up to paint China and the Chinese as foreign, unassimilable threats to “American-ness”; to promulgate a McCarthyesque misunderstanding and fear of communism; and to justify having a military budget that is larger than the military budget of every other country in the world combined.
-
So when people say that the U.S. is the biggest threat to world peace, we mean it. Democratic and Republican leadership alike have created the conditions that lead to fascists both abroad and on home turf. What violence was perpetuated against Black and Indigenous peoples domestically was exported overseas to terrorize non-Americans and then imported back into the tactics of the police and ICE nowadays.
So when we say that the U.S. IMPERIAL SYSTEM NEEDS TO BE DISMANTLED if we want to have any hope of world peace, we mean it. If Americans desire to go back to their comfortable lives while ignoring bipartisan war crimes committed overseas to maintain American supremacy, fascists and fascism will rise again, and again, and again, until there is no one and nothing left to destroy.
The U.S. is the world’s villain.
The U.S. is the world’s villain.
Say it louder for those who still believe that the U.S. only “became bad” when Trump was elected: THE U.S. IS, AND ALWAYS WAS, THE WORLD’S VILLAIN.
If that statement causes an adverse reaction in you, pause and think: When we are sick, should we just treat the symptoms, or should we try to find the cause of the sickness and take care of it? If we don’t acknowledge the violent harm that was/is caused by U.S. militaristic imperialism, the same genocidal patterns will simply occur, over and over again.
THE WITHDRAWAL is structured as a conversation in which Vijay interviews Noam. Chomsky is an eloquent thinker, writer, and speaker who is extremely knowledgeable about a great many historical events and how they are all connected. Here are some of the things I learned from him:
1. The U.S. is a “rogue terrorist superpower.” What they want is a world order that abides by their rules, not a truly global one that encompasses the voices of all nations. For instance, in the wake of WWII, the U.S. wrote international laws that exempted themselves from having to follow them. Thus, it is illegally to commit war crimes (which includes genocide), but the same document states that the U.S. is exempt, and thus “legally entitled to commit war crimes”—and even genocide.
2. The U.S. always has an “America first” reason for its military maneuvers overseas, even though they may claim that they are invading or attacking to “help bring freedom and democracy to the locals.” In response to 9/11, despite no evidence that al-Qaeda had committed the terrorist attack (a fact that was communicated repeatedly by high-ranking government officials after the invasion), the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was, like Iraq in the 1990s, not because of their public claims of caring for the Afghani people, or in retaliation against Al-Qaeda. Rather, the U.S. invaded just because they could—the “shock and awe” tactic to remind the world who is in charge.
3. The U.S.’ imperialist military actions abroad often directly create the conditions for fomenting repressive foreign regimes. For example, after invading Afghanistan, the U.S. didn’t want to go about the actual difficult business of nation-building. Instead, they found locals who could do it for them—and these were usually very cunning warlords who knew village politics and knew their way around how to control society. These local warlords often governed through violence, especially violence against women (thus contradicting the U.S.’ white savior explanation of “saving” Afghani women as justification for their invasion and meddling). These warlords often use their influence with the U.S. military to take out their competitors, moderates, or anyone with a conscience who was speaking out: if they didn’t like someone, they’d report said person to the U.S. military as “harboring the Taliban,” and the U.S. military would finish them off. Therefore, all who remain are just violent people on different sides of the U.S. imperial coin.
4. The U.S. believes itself to be a force of savioristic good and often operates with an attitude of “Why does everyone hate us?” even when studies (requested by them!) come back with the conclusion of “It’s because of what you do.”
5. “The China threat” is simply that China is the one country that refuses to accept or play by the U.S.’ violent intimidation tactics, and have built the means to create an alternative to U.S. global rule. And, of course, the U.S. can’t have anyone threatening its status as the global superpower. So a sustained media campaign is kept up to paint China and the Chinese as foreign, unassimilable threats to “American-ness”; to promulgate a McCarthyesque misunderstanding and fear of communism; and to justify having a military budget that is larger than the military budget of every other country in the world combined.
-
So when people say that the U.S. is the biggest threat to world peace, we mean it. Democratic and Republican leadership alike have created the conditions that lead to fascists both abroad and on home turf. What violence was perpetuated against Black and Indigenous peoples domestically was exported overseas to terrorize non-Americans and then imported back into the tactics of the police and ICE nowadays.
So when we say that the U.S. IMPERIAL SYSTEM NEEDS TO BE DISMANTLED if we want to have any hope of world peace, we mean it. If Americans desire to go back to their comfortable lives while ignoring bipartisan war crimes committed overseas to maintain American supremacy, fascists and fascism will rise again, and again, and again, until there is no one and nothing left to destroy.
March 3, 2026
i really wish this wasn’t relevant right now!
anyways. this is a brief overview of american hegemony, american interventionism and the consequent withdrawal from such, argued by chomsky as being a product of a mentality of settler colonialism. and yes, i would argue, it is very very relevant to Current Events.
anyways. this is a brief overview of american hegemony, american interventionism and the consequent withdrawal from such, argued by chomsky as being a product of a mentality of settler colonialism. and yes, i would argue, it is very very relevant to Current Events.
January 10, 2026
so refreshing to hear the quiet part said out loud about american foreign policy. learned a lot of depressing snd important stuff. kicking myself for not having read chomsky sooner
October 13, 2023
The Withdrawal has two major problems. First is an objective problem which is the fact that the book is not about the withdrawal at all, there is barely anything said about it. It is about US involvement in the wars of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
The second problem is subjective and that is typical of Chomsky where any state that opposes the US is presented in a positive light, whether it is the USSR, Yugoslavia or China. The US has done quite a lot of bad things in the world and they should be criticised for it. But that doesn't make dictatorial or genocidal regimes any better.
For example, China is presented as a benevolent country that is only trying to develop itself and its neighbours through the belt and road initiative. Chomsky ignores the fact that a country like Vietnam that fought a war against the US is now actually very close to the US and is receiving visits from US fleets in order to stave off Chinese influence. Chomsky has no problems with Serbians massacring Albanian or Bosnian civilians but he draws the line at US bombing.
The most interesting parts of the book are the discussion about the US invasion of Iraq and Saddam's ill fated attempts at negotiating and stopping the attack. Also, the parts about the bombing of Libya and are quite good too.
I've read many books by Chomsky and by this point they are all starting to get a bit too repetitive. But he's still worth reading as a dissenting voice.
The second problem is subjective and that is typical of Chomsky where any state that opposes the US is presented in a positive light, whether it is the USSR, Yugoslavia or China. The US has done quite a lot of bad things in the world and they should be criticised for it. But that doesn't make dictatorial or genocidal regimes any better.
For example, China is presented as a benevolent country that is only trying to develop itself and its neighbours through the belt and road initiative. Chomsky ignores the fact that a country like Vietnam that fought a war against the US is now actually very close to the US and is receiving visits from US fleets in order to stave off Chinese influence. Chomsky has no problems with Serbians massacring Albanian or Bosnian civilians but he draws the line at US bombing.
The most interesting parts of the book are the discussion about the US invasion of Iraq and Saddam's ill fated attempts at negotiating and stopping the attack. Also, the parts about the bombing of Libya and are quite good too.
I've read many books by Chomsky and by this point they are all starting to get a bit too repetitive. But he's still worth reading as a dissenting voice.
December 4, 2023
Setting aside the latest (and valid) criticisms of Chomsky. This was another solid look into American imperialism and how it generally speaking and in my opinion negatively effects the world. I listened to this as an audio book but I think I may have to acquire it as an ebook or physical to read a few chapters a little closer. Particularly chapters 2 or 3 but there is noteworthy arguments and points in all chapters worth discussing and analyzing.
A notable takeaway from this is something I already believed but had reinforced with this book. That the only real reason "China bad" is because China doesn't play by the rulebook of the US and has the power to defy them (unlike Cuba who has the will to defy but lacks the total power)
A notable takeaway from this is something I already believed but had reinforced with this book. That the only real reason "China bad" is because China doesn't play by the rulebook of the US and has the power to defy them (unlike Cuba who has the will to defy but lacks the total power)
September 1, 2025
A really good breakdown of American/ European Imperialism. I have a much better understanding of why the US actually attacked Afganistan, Libya and Iraq. I also really enjoyed the conversational format of this book!
9/11/ 2001 was my first memory in life, so my understanding of these wars was inevitably skewed by mainstream media portrayal and the fear from 9/11 as a child living in NY. I learned and unlearned a lot, but left feeling heartbroken for the generations that will be forever impacted by US intervention worldwide.
9/11/ 2001 was my first memory in life, so my understanding of these wars was inevitably skewed by mainstream media portrayal and the fear from 9/11 as a child living in NY. I learned and unlearned a lot, but left feeling heartbroken for the generations that will be forever impacted by US intervention worldwide.
April 1, 2025
A typical Noam Chomsky book. Great tidbits not covered by media outlets or our education system followed by unabashed bias toward one point of view. Worth the read to understand the perspective of an influencer in modern political theory.
There are a couple of limitations:
1) The book doesn’t spend nearly enough time exploring the actual withdrawal. I understand the need to explain the history of involvement in other countries but this book read like it is missing a chapter specifically for the withdrawal
2) At times the book felt like a legacy award to Noam. The interview style and praise didn’t really help the reading experience.
There are a couple of limitations:
1) The book doesn’t spend nearly enough time exploring the actual withdrawal. I understand the need to explain the history of involvement in other countries but this book read like it is missing a chapter specifically for the withdrawal
2) At times the book felt like a legacy award to Noam. The interview style and praise didn’t really help the reading experience.
January 11, 2023
God, I have so much respect for both vijay prashad and noam chomsky. the concept of the godfather attitude, the so called “china threat”, sanctions (specifically the illegal embargos on cuba), and U.S. rejection of all things that hint at an idea of international powers.
September 14, 2022
*** Possible Spoilers ***
If your politics are to the left of center, you may enjoy this book. At the very least, you won't dislike it although much of its contents have been presented before. I don't think more than about 5% is new.
If your politics are to the right of center, you won't like this book although it may still be worth reading. Certainly, if you happen to be an author who writes satire, there's all sorts of material you can use. There's also a bit of nostalgia between the covers. I haven't heard slogans like 'military industrial complex', and 'imperialistic etc.' since the late 60s when groups of arts students were protesting, demonstrating, and in general, roaming about campus attempting to convince anyone who would listen that the sky was falling. They didn't have much effect at The University of Waterloo because it was predominantly Math, Science and Engineering, but they did their best to liven up York and a few other universities. I expect many of them, if not retired, are somewhere in the financial sector and likely vote Conservative.
For those who would like to see Critical Theory in action, The Withdrawl is a textbook example. It consists basically of a Marxist manifesto in which the west, primarily the USA but likely including Canada, is evil and the cause of all problems in the world. Facts are presented to support this premise but anything which might contradict it is ignored. For example, Hugo Chavez is lauded for standing up to the United States. The fact he and his successor largely destroyed the Venezuelan economy and caused great privation among the people while he, his friends and the military did very well is ignored. Likewise he lauds China while disregarding the emerging ultra-wealthy Chinese who are busily burying as much money as possible in western real-estate. He also fails to mention the Social Credit system by which the state tyrannizes its citizens. Nor does he mention the massive amount of censorship in the country or how any criticism of the government warrants a prison sentence.
He is not totally against the United States. What he dislikes are older, white, CIS, heterosexual, hardworking males, who, over the years, have managed to build a reasonable lifestyle and are not dependent on government handouts for their survival. Interestingly enough, he is an older, white male who was a professor at MIT and collected a considerable stipend for attacking the society which paid for his lattes. For some reason, he doesn't rail against hypocrisy.
Once more, if you are left of center you might like the book. If you are on the right I think you'd be better off reading something else.
If your politics are to the left of center, you may enjoy this book. At the very least, you won't dislike it although much of its contents have been presented before. I don't think more than about 5% is new.
If your politics are to the right of center, you won't like this book although it may still be worth reading. Certainly, if you happen to be an author who writes satire, there's all sorts of material you can use. There's also a bit of nostalgia between the covers. I haven't heard slogans like 'military industrial complex', and 'imperialistic etc.' since the late 60s when groups of arts students were protesting, demonstrating, and in general, roaming about campus attempting to convince anyone who would listen that the sky was falling. They didn't have much effect at The University of Waterloo because it was predominantly Math, Science and Engineering, but they did their best to liven up York and a few other universities. I expect many of them, if not retired, are somewhere in the financial sector and likely vote Conservative.
For those who would like to see Critical Theory in action, The Withdrawl is a textbook example. It consists basically of a Marxist manifesto in which the west, primarily the USA but likely including Canada, is evil and the cause of all problems in the world. Facts are presented to support this premise but anything which might contradict it is ignored. For example, Hugo Chavez is lauded for standing up to the United States. The fact he and his successor largely destroyed the Venezuelan economy and caused great privation among the people while he, his friends and the military did very well is ignored. Likewise he lauds China while disregarding the emerging ultra-wealthy Chinese who are busily burying as much money as possible in western real-estate. He also fails to mention the Social Credit system by which the state tyrannizes its citizens. Nor does he mention the massive amount of censorship in the country or how any criticism of the government warrants a prison sentence.
He is not totally against the United States. What he dislikes are older, white, CIS, heterosexual, hardworking males, who, over the years, have managed to build a reasonable lifestyle and are not dependent on government handouts for their survival. Interestingly enough, he is an older, white male who was a professor at MIT and collected a considerable stipend for attacking the society which paid for his lattes. For some reason, he doesn't rail against hypocrisy.
Once more, if you are left of center you might like the book. If you are on the right I think you'd be better off reading something else.
September 20, 2022
A post-mortem by Noam Chomsky on the recent wars in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. The US seeks to attain power in these regions but ultimately it leads to the destabilization of both the target region and the US itself.
A great read.
A great read.
July 1, 2022
Disclamer: I was provided a copy by Netgalley
What a depressing but insightful read. I was too young, not born or unaware of a lot of the events described in the book. Though I vividly remember my parents not being happy about the U.S. wars when I was a child. There was a new years eve where I asked my parents why we were not lighting any fireworks, as a lot of other people do here in Germany, and they told me "there is nothing to celebrate with all that misery and war in the world".
I feel like The Withdrawal has explained well how the West, the U.S., the NATO and even we, Europe, are entangled in this and maybe also why this misery seems to not end.
What I have to say about the writing:
The book is mostly is a recall of events and the whys and evidence behind it. At times they didn't explain enough of what had happened and I'm not sure I fully understand because of that. But I assume that some of the things left out would be the things someone a bit more into the topic might know. Then again they went into depth on some other topics. So for a reader like me who has not done a deep dive on some of the topics it was enough to keep up but maybe not enough to fully understand.
The book is written as a conversation between Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad. This is interesting as we get explanations and insights from two sides. Allthough they mostly seem to agree and just complement eachother.
I would though have appreciated another view of the topic that is as funded as their view. Also some kind of outlook on how these dilemmas could be solved, maybe by example, would also have been nice. I refuse to believe that the world is black and white and the outlook is as bleak as this book makes it look!
All in all I'd say this is an eye-opening read I would recommend to anyone interested in world-politics and -dynamics. It is definitely hard to swallow and I would not recommend reading this on the beach to relax. But I feel like it is a worthwhile read, especially in a world where conspiracy theories are threatening to take over and misinformation is more available than ever.
What a depressing but insightful read. I was too young, not born or unaware of a lot of the events described in the book. Though I vividly remember my parents not being happy about the U.S. wars when I was a child. There was a new years eve where I asked my parents why we were not lighting any fireworks, as a lot of other people do here in Germany, and they told me "there is nothing to celebrate with all that misery and war in the world".
I feel like The Withdrawal has explained well how the West, the U.S., the NATO and even we, Europe, are entangled in this and maybe also why this misery seems to not end.
What I have to say about the writing:
The book is mostly is a recall of events and the whys and evidence behind it. At times they didn't explain enough of what had happened and I'm not sure I fully understand because of that. But I assume that some of the things left out would be the things someone a bit more into the topic might know. Then again they went into depth on some other topics. So for a reader like me who has not done a deep dive on some of the topics it was enough to keep up but maybe not enough to fully understand.
The book is written as a conversation between Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad. This is interesting as we get explanations and insights from two sides. Allthough they mostly seem to agree and just complement eachother.
I would though have appreciated another view of the topic that is as funded as their view. Also some kind of outlook on how these dilemmas could be solved, maybe by example, would also have been nice. I refuse to believe that the world is black and white and the outlook is as bleak as this book makes it look!
All in all I'd say this is an eye-opening read I would recommend to anyone interested in world-politics and -dynamics. It is definitely hard to swallow and I would not recommend reading this on the beach to relax. But I feel like it is a worthwhile read, especially in a world where conspiracy theories are threatening to take over and misinformation is more available than ever.
August 13, 2023
I’m somewhat torn on this. On one hand it was interesting and provided information that was new to me. On the other hand, it wasn’t what it was advertised to be. It is not apparent from the back cover description, for example, that this work is a transcription of conversations between an interviewer and Noam Chomsky rather than a researched book written by either of them.
The title is also misleading. The final stages and withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan are discussed a little bit, but far more time is given to the early stages of those conflicts and US foreign policy in general going back to the Cold War and Vietnam War era. Again, very interesting and good information to have; useful for context to really examine the withdrawal, but it felt like all that groundwork and context didn’t provide any payoff. I was disappointed there wasn’t more focus on the actual withdrawals of the three most recent U.S. military adventures—which is really what I was looking for based on the title.
TL;DR
Not bad; just not what it seemed to be advertising itself to be.
The title is also misleading. The final stages and withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan are discussed a little bit, but far more time is given to the early stages of those conflicts and US foreign policy in general going back to the Cold War and Vietnam War era. Again, very interesting and good information to have; useful for context to really examine the withdrawal, but it felt like all that groundwork and context didn’t provide any payoff. I was disappointed there wasn’t more focus on the actual withdrawals of the three most recent U.S. military adventures—which is really what I was looking for based on the title.
TL;DR
Not bad; just not what it seemed to be advertising itself to be.
December 18, 2023
Continuing with my exploration of Chomsky, I am now also grateful having now been introduced to Vijay Prashad. The Withdrawal is a long form interview of Chomsky by Prashad discussing his works, thoughts and observations in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Chomsky reminds (or simply informs depending on your familiarity) readers of the hypocrisy of US foreign relations and the criminality of all of the US’s recent incursions in the Middle East, as well as the fact the major barrier to peace is often the US and Western imperialism. Well worth the read. Very eye opening as it forces Western and American readers to see the US through the rest of the world’s eyes.
January 2, 2023
"I know that the statement about the United States being a terrorist country is considered an outrageous statement. I make outrageous statements purposely if they are true, I don't care if they are outrageous."
"The whole world obeys US orders. But not all actually, China does not. That's the China threat, really. If you look at it, China does not follow US orders. China refuses to be intimidated. That's the great China threat. Cuba is the same."
Noam Chomsky, Vijay Prashad
"The whole world obeys US orders. But not all actually, China does not. That's the China threat, really. If you look at it, China does not follow US orders. China refuses to be intimidated. That's the great China threat. Cuba is the same."
Noam Chomsky, Vijay Prashad
October 27, 2022
Ok, I admittedly expected a bit more - it's Noam Chomsky after all.
It's written in an interview style that I didn't mind but also didn't particularly like as it felt more like reading a transcript than a book.
It's typical Chomsky in that it's critical of the U.S. politics in the Middle East (and let's be honest, much of what he's saying most would agree with. Did the staggering $88B in the last 20 years leave Afghanistan and its people in better or worse condition? Maybe it wasn't on the agenda to "better" the area but the fact that the Taliban is back in power and a large percentage of the population doesn't speak well of the time and money the U.S. invested).
I'm not familiar with Vijay Prashad, the counterpart and interviewer/ee in the discussions.
I think more could have been discussed about the actual withdrawal from Afghanistan given the title of the book, but they touch on Iraq and Libya as well making it more of a discussion around more general US imperialism and foreign policy.
A quick intellectual read for those interested in U.S. foreign policies and middle eastern politics.
It's written in an interview style that I didn't mind but also didn't particularly like as it felt more like reading a transcript than a book.
It's typical Chomsky in that it's critical of the U.S. politics in the Middle East (and let's be honest, much of what he's saying most would agree with. Did the staggering $88B in the last 20 years leave Afghanistan and its people in better or worse condition? Maybe it wasn't on the agenda to "better" the area but the fact that the Taliban is back in power and a large percentage of the population doesn't speak well of the time and money the U.S. invested).
I'm not familiar with Vijay Prashad, the counterpart and interviewer/ee in the discussions.
I think more could have been discussed about the actual withdrawal from Afghanistan given the title of the book, but they touch on Iraq and Libya as well making it more of a discussion around more general US imperialism and foreign policy.
A quick intellectual read for those interested in U.S. foreign policies and middle eastern politics.
October 31, 2024
Me lo he tenido que leer para un ensayo de la uni pero sinceramente me ha acabado enganchando. Como conclusión puedo decir q fuck Estados Unidos, fuck Israel y fuck el capitalismo, son literalmente el origen de todos nuestros males.
November 17, 2024
An interesting conversation between two major thinker's on the political left. As the US hegemony begins to crack this conversation and others like it are important to understand the emerging multipolar world and how multipolarity will manifest economically and socially.
September 8, 2022
3.25 stars
This book suffers from format and bias. I picked this up wanting to learn more about the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan and not how evil the US is. Clearly atrocities were committed, but in the context of the subject matter and thesis of the book, there are definitely one too many diatribes.
This is a transcript style book that reads like a podcast. I agree with other reviews that the formatting feels lazy and sometimes it's hard to keep track of who's talking. This has the same tone as the Norman Mailer episode in Gilmore Girls.
This book suffers from format and bias. I picked this up wanting to learn more about the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan and not how evil the US is. Clearly atrocities were committed, but in the context of the subject matter and thesis of the book, there are definitely one too many diatribes.
This is a transcript style book that reads like a podcast. I agree with other reviews that the formatting feels lazy and sometimes it's hard to keep track of who's talking. This has the same tone as the Norman Mailer episode in Gilmore Girls.
September 28, 2022
The money lenders, seven sisters, Anthony Sampson.
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