Direito

Is America a Rogue State?
The US has rogue leaders, but that does not make it a rogue state; America has plenty to answer for, but the country itself set the standards by which we habitually judge it. By Jennifer Rankin In a little-noticed announcement in September, President Bush's government named Syria and Libya as 'rogue states' whose weapons of mass destruction must be controlled at allcosts. Although Republicans quickly dubbed them 'the axis of evil plus', these additions to America's list of rogues did not hit the headlines. For as the US singles out North Korea, Syria and Libya, the international community is increasingly looking the other way, back towards the country pointing the finger. People all over the world have come to believe that the biggest threat to world securityis wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. At first glance the US displays all the hallmarks of the classic rogue state. Its foreign policy is aggressive; it ignores international law; it is relentless in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Factor in that the president came to power on a minority of votes and it seems an open-and-shut case. Indeed, for many critics of US foreign policy, this ideahas attained the status of a selfevident truth. Noam Chomsky has led the way in exposing the immoral underside of America's (so-called) benign hegemony. Writing from the heart of the American academic establishment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky has identified the US as the worst rogue in a global rogues' gallery. Gore Vidal has said that the Bush regime is just one of'many bad regimes on earth'. Even conservative commentators are conscious of world opinion. Samuel Huntington, better known for his controversial thesis on 'the clash of civilisations' between the west and Islam, noted in 1999 that 'while the US regularly denounces various countries as 'rogue states', in the eyes of many countries, it is becoming the rogue superpower'. In Europe, an array of criticsfrom politicians to street protesters uses the label. In 2001, Harold Pinter denounced the US as the 'most dangerous power the world has ever known - the authentic rogue state, but a rogue state of colossal military and economic might'. The evidence is not hard to find. In order to 'save the world' from 'the communist conspiracy', US agencies such as the CIA quashed democratically electedgovernments and courted murderers, including General Pinochet in Chile, General Suharto in Indonesia and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. William Blum, a former State Department official and the author of Rogue State: a guide to the world's only superpower, estimates that the US has tried to overthrow at least 40 foreign governments since 1945. The US also leads the way in that other aspect of roguestate behaviour, weapons of mass destruction. With 30,000 tonnes of chemical weapons,

the world's largest stores of smallpox and anthrax, and the biggest nuclear arsenal on the planet, the US military establishment must be the envy of all dictators. Finally, the US has made itself literally an outlaw state by acting above and beyond global conventions - the Kyoto treaty, the InternationalCriminal Court and the anti-ballistic missiles treaty, to mention just three. This makes it meet the definition of the classic rogue state, in that it exhibits 'a chronic inability to engage constructively with the outside world'. That phrase was the work of Anthony Lake, a national security adviser to Bill Clinton, who coined it in 1994 as part of the Clinton administration's definition of 'backlashstates'. In fact, the whole concept of the rogue state was invented in the United States. Designed to isolate and demonise countries that would not go the American way, this name-calling approach emerged to fill the foreign-policy gap that appeared after the demise of the 'evil empire'. And like those other catchy slogans 'war on terror' and 'axis of evil', it proved too simplistic to be useful....