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Summary and Conclusions How Chomsky Has Been Right It should be clear by now that I believe Noam Chomsky has been right about a great many important issues during the course of his long career as a public intellectual. He was right to condemn America’s war in Vietnam not merely as a disastrous mistake but as a moral catastrophe: it was a war that inflicted massive violence on a noncombatant population the United States claimed to be protecting in order to maintain a Vietnamese government that served US foreign policy objectives.1 He was right, too, to point to America’s alliance with repressive regimes throughout the Third World, some of them owing their very existence to US sponsorship. Widespread and sometimes staggering human rights abuses in what Chomsky called the American empire were often abetted—sometimes actively and directly, more often indirectly—by American power. Chomsky has been a persistent and productive muckraker of American foreign policy for nearly half a century. Chomsky’s critique of the limitations of American democracy—of the concentration of political power in the holders of corporate wealth, and the relative powerlessness and alienation of much of the citizenry—is more relevant than ever in an era of widening economic and political inequality. Whatever the limitations of his analysis, he deserves credit for his relatively early identification of problems that eluded recognition by mainstream pundits and academics alike. Chomsky has also been mostly on target in his criticisms of the US mass media for their servitude to the prevailing orthodoxies of American foreign policy. From his early writings on Vietnam through his discussions of post–Cold War foreign policy, Chomsky has been adept at exposing journalists’ implicit and largely unconscious adoption of Washington-centered values and assumptions. The main findings of Chomsky’s most important work of media analysis, Manufacturing Consent, have been largely confirmed by subsequent academic scholarship, even though some of the academics resist acknowledging the kinship between their work and Chomsky’s. Chomsky has also been correct that America’s leaders have continued to pursue global hegemony since the end of Cold War. He was on solid ground in analyzing the 2003 US invasion of Iraq in the context of the Bush-Cheney administration ’s world hegemonic ambitions, and his arguments against that misadventure were incisive. More broadly, Chomsky makes a strong case that America’s 207 striving for world hegemony has undermined international law and infringed on the sovereignty of poor countries seeking independent paths to development. Chomsky has repeatedly taken up themes that were mostly neglected in the American public arena; for example, the consistently benign attitude taken by US policymakers toward the Suharto regime in Indonesia, especially during the massive bloodletting of the initial Suharto coup period and during its brutal suppression of the East Timorese struggle for independence. Similarly, few Americans were aware that during the 1990s the United States’ Turkish ally was engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign that displaced millions of people, or that Americanimposed sanctions were causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. At other times, Chomsky has spoken out on controversies that were very much in the public arena, but his critiques usefully challenged the boundaries of existing debate. Congressional Democrats generally opposed the Reagan administration on Central America because they did not want to risk embroilment in open-ended wars, but few Democrats were willing to call our Guatemalan and Salvadoran clients “terror states” as Chomsky quite reasonably did; few were willing to stress that the contra army sponsored by the United States in Nicaragua engaged in terrorism, or to acknowledge the very real achievements of the Sandinista regime in addressing the needs of the poor. “Responsible” critics of American policy were generally loath to argue, as Chomsky plausibly argued, that Sandinista Nicaragua was more nearly a democracy than were the United States’ Central America’s client states—those proclaimed repeatedly as “fledgling democracies .” And, on Iraq, while others criticized the second Bush administration for naive expectations of promoting democracy in the Middle East, Chomsky cast more than reasonable doubt on whether the administration was genuine in its proclamations of democratic intent. Chomsky is a prodigious researcher, drawing on an incredibly wide range of both primary and secondary sources, both in the United States and abroad. Often, he brings to a larger audience the work of human rights and other nongovernmental organizations, as well as the writings of radical scholars and journalists and sundry other muckrakers, that otherwise tend...

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