Hegemonía Y Sobrevivencia

Hegemony or survival : America's quest for global dominance

Noam Chomsky

Contents
1. Priorities and Prospects 2. Imperial Grand Strategy 3. The New Era of Enlightenment 4. Dangerous Times 5. The Iraq Connection 6. Dilemmas of Dominance 7. Cauldron of Animosities 8. Terrorism and Justice: Some Useful Truisms 9. A Passing Nightmare? Notes Index

All notes in this text refer to originalnotes located here http://www.americanempireproject.com/chomsky/hegemony_notes.htm

Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company, LLC Publishers since 1866 115 West 18th Street New York, New York 10011 Copyright © 2003 by Aviva Chomsky, Diane Chomsky, and Harry Chomsky All rights reserved. Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication dataChomsky, Noam. Hegemony or survival : America's quest for global dominance / Noam Chomsky.—1st ed. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8050-7400-7 1. United States—Foreign relations—2001- 2. United States—Foreign relations—20th century. 3. Imperialism. 4. United States—Military policy. 5. Unilateral acts (International law) 6. Intervention (International law) 7. State-sponsoredterrorism. 8. War on Terrorism, 2001- I. Title. E902.C47 2003 327.73'009'0511—dc22 2003058195

Please see www.hegemonyorsurvival.net or www.americanempireproject.com for expanded endnotes and an e-book with additional background, discussion, and sources.
First Edition 2003 Designed by Paula Russell Szafranski Printed in the United States of America 13579 10 8642

Chapter 1

Priorities andProspects
A few years ago, one of the great figures of contemporary biology, Ernst Mayr, published some reflections on the likelihood of success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.1 He considered the prospects very low. His reasoning had to do with the adaptive value of what we call "higher intelligence," meaning the particular human form of intellectual organization. Mayr estimatedthe number of species since the origin of life at about fifty billion, only one of which "achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization." It did so very recently, perhaps 100,000 years ago. It is generally assumed that only one small breeding group survived, of which we are all descendants. Mayr speculated that the human form of intellectual organization may not be favored byselection. The history of life on Earth, he wrote, refutes the claim that "it is better to be smart than to be stupid," at least judging by biological success: beetles and bacteria, for example, are vastly more successful than humans in terms of survival. He also made the rather somber observation that "the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years." We are entering a period ofhuman history that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid. The most hopeful prospect is that the question will not be answered: if it receives a definite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of "biological error," using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else. The species has surely developedthe capacity to do just that, and a hypothetical extraterrestrial observer might well conclude that humans have demonstrated that capacity throughout their history, dramatically in the past few hundred years, with an assault on the environment that sustains life, on the diversity of more complex organisms, and with cold and calculated savagery, on each other as well. TWO SUPERPOWERS The year 2003opened with many indications that concerns about human survival are all too realistic. To mention just a few examples, in the early fall of 2002 it was learned that a possibly terminal nuclear war was barely avoided forty years earlier. Immediately after this startling discovery, the Bush administration blocked UN efforts to ban the militarization of space, a serious threat to survival. The...