Turning the Tide: Chomping at the bit
A couple of thought provoking passages from Turning the Tide: The U.S. and Latin America by Noam Chomsky (1987).
“Assistance should be concentrated on those countries of primary strategic importance to the United States in cases of ideological warfare, excepting in those rare instances which present an opportunity for the United States to gain worldwide approbation by an act strikingly humanitarian.” Quoted from a secret report of the Joint Survey Committee, in 1984, in discussion of the military point of view on foreign assistance.
This one is pure Chomsky, on US intervention: “It is particularly important for people who hope to influence government policy to be clear about these matters. There is no point in wasting time in patiently explaining to our leaders that the policies they pursue are inconsistent with the goals they profess; they know this well enough without our help. Nor is there any reason to suppose that a different group of leaders would react in any essentially different way to the same institutional imperatives. It is not failure to understand a simple point so clear to us that regularly leads the political leadership to commit the same ‘error’ over and over again.”
