Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (American Empire Project) (Hardcover)

by Noam Chomsky (Author) "Half a century ago, in July 1955, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein issued an extraordinary appeal to the people of the world, asking them "to..." (more)
Key Phrases: United States, Middle East, West Bank (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Forget Iraq and Sudan--America is the foremost failed state, argues the latest polemic from America's most controversial Left intellectual. Chomsky (Imperial Ambitions) contends the U.S. government wallows in lawless military aggression (the Iraq war is merely the latest example); ignores public opinion on everything from global warming to social spending and foreign policy; and jeopardizes domestic security by under-funding homeland defense in favor of tax cuts for the rich and by provoking hatred and instability abroad that may lead to terrorist blowback or nuclear conflict. Ranging haphazardly from the Seminole War forward, Chomsky's jeremiad views American interventionism as a pageant of imperialist power-plays motivated by crass business interests. Disdaining euphemisms, he denounces American "terror" and "war crimes," castigates the public-bamboozling "government-media propaganda campaign" and floats comparisons to Mongols and Nazis. Chomsky's fans will love it, but even mainstream critics are catching up to the substance of his take on Bush Administration policies; meanwhile his uncompromising moral sensibility, icy logic and withering sarcasm remain in a class by themselves. Required reading for every thoughtful citizen.
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Review

“Chomsky is a global phenomenon . . . perhaps the most widely read voice on
foreign policy on the planet.”—The New York Times Book Review

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 314 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1st edition (April 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805079122
• ISBN-13: 978-0805079128
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (98 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #227,603 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

374 of 428 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Preventive Wars Don't Work; Democracy Deficit in USA, May 2, 2006

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

Within the 900+ non-fiction books about information, intelligence, emerging threats, and national security that I have reviewed for Amazon, I count many of Noam Chomsky's books. As with others, there is some repetition here, and he could have done a better job of reviewing the function and purpose of the state before labeling the U.S. a failed state. I will say, before my concluding comment, that all of my reading bears out Chomsky's inherent correctness.

Among the points that earned a note on my flyleaf:

* US began with the genocide of the Indians, moved on to slavery, and now condones genocide across Africa and elsewhere.

* Quotes CIA Bin Laden analyst with appreciation in noting that all the US has to do to stop the problems in the Middle East is wean itself from dictators and cheap oil, remove its forces from the Muslim lands, and stop predatory capitalism. Hmmmm. There just might be a moral point in there someplace!

* Chomsky asserts that history documents that preventive wars usually bring about the outcomes they ostensibly seek to stop, and does very very well in detailing how the US invasion allowed hundreds of missile and weapons sites to be looted, moving many of the components of weapons of mass destruction into unfriendly insurgent hands--precisely what we allegedly sought to prevent.

* The author recounts the varied facts that have emerged on how the US specifically sought regime change, the British (at least those with integrity like the Foreign Minister who quit) refused to go along with that, so Blair and Bush together concocted pretexts.

* Chomsky confirms in this book what I have seen myself, which is that the only part of the US Government that is "at war" is the U.S. Army and select portions of the U.S. Air Force. The rest of the government is NOT at war, and simply pursuing business as usual. Our war on terrorism is ineffective in the sense of capturing specific terrorists, and counter-productive in the sense of producing tens of thousands more--as Chomsky recounts in the book citing RAND and other studies, 85% of the "foreign fighters" in Iraq were mobilized and radicalized by the US invasion of Iraq.

* Chomsky is provocatively on target when he anticipates the emergence of a Shiite regional power based on Iran that includes the Shiite controlled regions of Iraq and Saudi Arabia--and in the latter, that happens to include the most productive oil fields--in short, the extremist Republicans' worst nightmare.

* Chomsky harps, no doubt with reason, on the long record that the US has in sponsoring crimes against humanity including regime changes that are against democracy (Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, the list goes on) and in favor of dictators who will protect US private investment as the expense of the public interest in their own countries.

* Chomsky focuses a portion of the book on the crimes by Israel against the Palestinians, although he does not appear to balance this by noting how ill-treated the Palestinians have been by all the Arab nations. He emphatically and deliberately identifies Bush with Hitler in that the two share a strain of "demonic messiaism" and rely on "the big lie" that (if repeated often enough) will fool the people. Goebbels would be proud of his kin in the White House, Karl Rove.

* Chomsky concludes the book by discussing the "democratic deficit" in the USA, and while he is very much on point, he wanders somewhat. For a better appreciation of why we allowed the extreme right to take over and ruin the country, I recommend Jacob Hacker's OFF CENTER: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy as well as other books on my democracy list. As a moderate Republican, I can certify that the Republican party today is run by thieves, lunatics, extremists, and -- in the case of John McCain -- born again Bushophiles.

This book is, like, most of his books, a very long Op-Ed but with good footnotes. We need to move toward more analysis and toward finding solutions. Inspired by Chomsky and others, I am in the process of developing a monograph that takes the top ten threats to global and national security identified by the High-Level threat panel of the United Nations (with LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft as the US representative), and showing that 80% of the information we need to understand and address those threats is open source information (OSIF), not secret information, on which we spend $60 billion a year. At the same time, we are spending $500 billion a year on a heavy-metal military and missile defense, when in fact inter-state conflict is only one of the ten threats, or 10%. We are not, as a nation, trained, equipped, nor organized to do poverty, infectious disease, environmental collapse, civil war, terrorism, or translational crime. America is in effect, two Americas: a nation of sheep living for their next six pack, and a very small exclusive group of perhaps 10,000 really rich people dominating Wall Street, the energy companies, and a handful of other major corporate networks. They are busy looting the Republic on the false assumption that they will be able to retire to gated enclaves. They simply do not understand that within twenty years there will be no place for them or their heirs to hide, and this will all come back to haunt them.

I would also say that I am more optimistic than Chomsky. Collective Intelligence and a Citizens Party (as a second home party, non-rival) are emergent, and technologies are coming out that will help eliminate poverty and infectious disease while stabilizing the environment and population. What we lack right now is moral strategic leadership. It is my hope that Bush-Cheney have radicalized enough of the world so that we might thank them in 2008 for making possible the return of balanced centrist coalition leadership.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It

76 of 90 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pessimist's view, April 8, 2006

By	Irene Adler "The Woman" (San Diego, California) - See all my reviews

Most people who see the danger and evil of the course that the United States has taken under Bush II imagine that it is an anomaly in United States history. With brutal efficiency and undeniable facts and logic, Chomsky's latest book destroys that illusion, and by so doing snuffs out the last faint glimmerings of hope that the trend might be easily reversed. It is concentrated reality in a single dimension. Don't read it if you are unwilling to have your world view changed.

If you are like me you will find Chomsky's message difficult to accept emotionally, but impossible to deny intellectually.

34 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gnosis, Diagnosis; solutions, revolutions; this is a work of far-reaching importance and mind-numbing brilliance, May 11, 2006

By	The Awakening (New York) - See all my reviews

"One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: "They present solutions, but I don't like them." In addition to the proposals that should be familiar about dealing with the crises that reach to the level of survival, a few simple suggestions for the United States have already been mentioned:

1) accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the World Court

2) sign and carry forward the Kyoto protocols

3) let the UN take the lead in international crises

4) rely on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror

5) keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter

6) give up the Security Council veto and have "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind," as the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centers disagree

7) cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending.

For people who believe in democracy, these are very conservative suggestions: they appear to be the opinions of the majority of the US population, in most cases the overwhelming majority. They are in radical opposition to public policy. To be sure, we cannot be very confident about the state of public opinion on such matters because of another feature of the democratic deficit: the topics scarcely enter into public discussion and the basic facts are little known...

Though it is natural for doctrinal systems to seek to induce pessimism, hopelessness and despair, reality is different...Opportunities [to promote democracy at home] are ample, and failure to grasp them is likely to have ominous repercussions: for the country, for the world, and for future generations."

Noam Chomsky
FAILED STATES
From the Afterword

You may never find a book that starts off as deeply angering, becomes by the middle as powerfully saddening, and by the end as incredibly inspiring as this one. In using the political adjective "failed states"--coined by the Republican administration for countries with plunderable resources or strategically shatterable alliances with fragile or non-existent democratic institutions--to define OUR OWN ountry, Noam Chomsky analyses the "deficit of democracy" that currently exists in the United States of America, as we hit high speed in a moral and democratic decline surpassing the lows of the Reagan administration. His analysis of the linguistics of fear, hypocrisy and deceit, co-opted from the Public Relations and advertising industries and made a part of the political and cultural lexicon, will ultimately change your entire way of looking at our country and its (actual) leaders--and its direction, regardless of your previous political views; left, right or center. Business Week once said about Noam Chomsky, "Agree with him or not, we lose out by not listening." This is the understatement of the 21st century--a century that may no longer belong to America, as we follow the footsteps of Imperial Rome, but still tear open a painful path to our own redemption.

Read this; read this now.