Ludwig Watzal: The Crimes of Empire
Successive governments of the United States of America like to designate other countries, whose leaders they do not like, “rogue states”. Noam Chomsky showed in “Rogue States” that this designation does not apply to countries such as Iraq but to the United States itself. According to him, the American superpower fulfills all the characteristics of such an entity. The U. S. and its “junior partner”, the United Kingdom, made Iraq a cartoon of an “outlaw nation” that threatens the entire world, and Saddam Hussein the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. If that would have been true, they should have turned to the U.N. Security Council. Instead they started an act of aggression against Iraq, thereby showing contempt for international law and the U.N. Charter, which would have provided a legal base to handle this crisis peacefully. Chomsky mentions that Libya, Cuba, and North Korea were also designated as “rogue states”, and the “boy emperor from Crawford, Texas” named Iran, Iraq and North Korea the “axis of evil”. U. S. President Ronald Reagan had already termed the Soviet Union an “evil empire”. Having red Carl Boggs book, one can doubt whether the right countries were stigmatized “rogue states” because “The Crime of Empire” is the criminal history of U.S. behavior in international relations.
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