If there is a central principle animating Noam Chomsky’s commentaries on US foreign policy, it is his affinity for Realpolitik analysis. As Chomsky argues in a recent interview, “Our leaders have rational imperial interests. We have to assume that they’re good-hearted and bumbling. But they’re not. They’re perfectly sensible.” This methodological axiom presents some serious challenges for those trying to understand the US war in Iraq. With so much evidence of bumbling within the Bush White House, it is tempting to join the chorus of critics, led by the Democrats, who say that incompetence is the defining feature of US foreign policy. Is it possible to tell the story of the US invasion of Iraq as “perfectly sensible”?

 

Chomsky is adamant and he is right to warn against the idea that foreign policy elites are more fool than knave. “Consider the actual situation, not some dream situation… If we can enter the real world we can begin to talk about it… We have to talk about it in the real world and know what the White House is thinking. They’re not willing to live in a dream world.”

 

What, then, is the “actual situation” that led the Bush administration to make the “perfectly sensible” — if entirely imperialist — decision to invade Iraq and topple the regime of Saddam Hussein? Here, according to Chomsky, is the real world:

 

“If [Iraq is] more or less democratic, it’ll have a Shiite majority. They will naturally want to improve their linkages with Iran, Shiite Iran. Most of the clerics come from Iran… So you get an Iraqi/Iran loose alliance. Furthermore, right across the border in Saudi Arabia, there’s a Shiite population which has been bitterly oppressed by the U.S.-backed fundamentalist tyranny. And any moves toward independence in Iraq are surely going to stimulate them, it’s already happening. That happens to be where most of Saudi Arabian oil is. Okay, so you can just imagine the ultimate nightmare in Washington…”

 

Chomsky isn’t making this stuff up. One can get quick confirmation of Chomsky’s characterization of this “ultimate nightmare” scenario from the key “realists” of Republican foreign policy establishment — folks like Bush Sr., former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Secretary of State James Baker, and Colin Powell. When presented with a Shiite uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991, the “realists” opted to leave Saddam in power, rather than let the nightmare become reality. In a co-authored 1998 memoir, A World Transformed, Bush Sr. and Scowcroft insist that they acted to preserve “the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf” (p.489). In his 1995 memoir The Politics of Diplomacy, James Baker recalls that he didn’t want to “play into the hands of the mullahs in Iran, who could export their brand of Islamic fundamentalism with the help of Iraq’s Shiites and quickly transform themselves into the dominant regional power” (p.437). Colin Powell, in his 1995 memoir My American Journey, is equally blunt. “Why didn’t we finish him off?… In March, the Iraqi Shiites in the south rose up in arms… But our practical intention was to leave Baghdad enough power to survive as a threat to an Iran that remained bitterly hostile toward the United States” (pp.512, 516).

 

The problem is that fear of this “ultimate nightmare” provided the rationale in 1991 for not invading Iraq, or more precisely, not promoting the political ascendance of the Iraqi Shiite majority. Chomksy argues that fear of the nightmare scenario will deter realists from supporting US withdrawal from Iraq. But did the “realists” get us into Iraq? “Realists” may keep us in Iraq, but did the “realists” unleash Iraqi Shiite power by terminating Sunni Baathist political and military rule? “Realists” may, in fact, be sensible — at least in a self-serving way — but Scowcroft, Baker, and Bush Sr. all publicly warned George W. Bush about the

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