ALLIES: THE UNITED STATES, BRITAIN, EUROPE AND THE WAR IN IRAQ
By William Shawcross
Atlantic Books, £14.99; 261pp
ISBN 1 84354 257 9
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Librarians will probably give these two books the same Dewey classification, but is difficult to believe that their authors inhabit the same planet.

William Shawcross’s Allies is expanded and updated from his Harkness Lecture in the spring, a lucid and judicious analysis of the ways in which the challenge posed by Iraq was unlike anything previously faced by the postwar Western consensus. The central thesis of Noam Chomsky’s rambling jeremiad is that the Bush Administration is intent on “full spectrum dominance” and that this imperial grand strategy constitutes “a recipe for an earthly wasteland”.

Not an easy man to pigeonhole, Chomsky. He admires Bertrand Russell. He has variously described himself as an anarchist, a conservative and a Zionist, although this last sits oddly with his view that Israel should be abolished and replaced by a “secular bi-national state” modelled on Lebanon or Yugoslavia. He sees himself as a citizen not of a democracy but of a polyarchy — “a system of elite decision-making and public ratification”. In Chomsky’s book, Wilsonian idealism equates with the Leninist ideal.

His academic background is in linguistics, although he has also written about the cognitive sciences and psychology. He first came to attention in the 1960s when he outlined an approach to language known as transformational generative grammar. His professional work, however, has long been overshadowed by his extramural activities; for most of his adult life he has moonlighted tirelessly as a general-purpose dissident. An inspirational figure to many on the Left, he is naturally somewhat differently regarded in other bands of the political spectrum.

“My idea of the ideal text is still the Talmud,” he told an interviewer. “I love the idea of parallel texts, with long, discursive footnotes and marginal commentary, texts commenting on texts.” That explains much about his own prose style. When a film was made about him in the 1990s, Chomsky did not wish to see it: “I hate watching or hearing myself. I can only think about how I should have said things better.”

His latest book teems with capricious and intemperate ipse dixits. Winston Churchill “was enamoured of the possibilities of using poison gas to subdue ‘recalcitrant Arabs’ ”. In 1948 “the US undertook to subvert Italian democracy by withholding food from starving people”. The Reagan administration “established an Office of Public diplomacy “to manufacture consent for its murderous policies in Central America.”

The text is shot through with conspiracy theory. Chomsky’s heavy reliance on irony and insinuation quickly become tedious. Having assailed the US Administration for its former support of Saddam Hussein, for example, he continues: “Praise and support shifted to denunciation as soon as the monster committed his first authentic crime: disobeying (or perhaps misunderstanding) orders by invading Kuwait.”

There are numerous digressions — at times the narrative resembles a stream-of-consciousness novel. Chomsky interrupts his tendentious account of America’s “terrorist war” against Nicaragua to wag his finger at his fellow-countrymen for their behaviour in Haiti — and at George Washington for an expedition in 1779 against the Iroquois.

He cites the view of the historian Robert Kagan that Europe is consumed with “paranoid, conspiratorial anti-Americanism” that has reached “a fevered intensity”. And that seems a plausible diagnosis of Chomsky’s own condition. His catalogue of US crimes includes terrorism in Cuba and participation in mass slaughter to destroy the only broad-based political parties in South Vietnam and Indonesia. The general impression he creates is that the United States has been run, since the days of the Founding Fathers, by a cadet branch of the Borgias.

One of the more preposterous sections in the book is his account of the collapse of the Camp David (Taba) negotiations of 2000-01, when Yassir Arafat rejected the offer made by the Israeli Prime Minister and backed by President Clinton — a deal that would have provided $30 billion of compensation for refugees and ceded to a Palestinian state some 97 per cent of the occupied territories and much of the Old City of Jerusalem.

“US-Israeli rejectionism runs through the Camp David negotiations,” Chomsky writes, and offers a fatuous description of the proposals as “modelled on South Africa’s Bantustans of 40 years ago.” The chief American negotiator, Dennis Ross, offered a more convincing analysis: Arafat rejected Israel’s offer because “to end the conflict is to end himself”.

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