Snarksmith writes about the dean of American anti-Americans, Noam Chomsky. 

It’s become obvious that if the term “anti-American” has any legitimate political definition, it is embodied by the style and substance of Chomsky. His latest essay in Monthly Review is a fair example. Using harsh truths about U.S. foreign policy, his conclusion is that every media-anointed rogue state and enemy of not just our own national interests but of human rights, pluralism and transparency are actually the defiant victims of the One True Hegemon. Some paragraphs do more work than the MIT linguist intended, such as this one:

Saddam may have been despised almost everywhere, but it was only in the United States that a majority of the population were terrified of what he might do to them, tomorrow.

I should think that most Iraqis were similarly terrified, if not more so. Though their opinion only counts when it can it be ranged against the avowed policy of the United States:

It is an astonishing fact that the United States and Britain have had more trouble running Iraq than the Nazis had in occupied Europe, or the Russians in their East European satellites, where the countries were run by local civilians and security forces, with the iron fist poised if anything went wrong but usually in the background. In contrast, the United States has been unable to establish an obedient client regime in Iraq, under far easier conditions.

One admires the use of the word “usually,” which would surely come as a surprise to occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto, Estonians in 1940, and then again in 1941, the Polish dissidents who met their end in Katyn Forest in 1940, Berliners in 1945, Hungarians in 1956, Czechs in 1968, etc. But wait — there’s more in the same vein:

The second responsibility [of an invader] is to obey the will of the population. British and U.S. polls provide sufficient evidence about that. The most recent polls find that 87 percent of Iraqis want a “concrete timeline for US withdrawal,” up from 76 percent in 2005.4 If the reports really mean Iraqis, as they say, that would imply that virtually the entire population of Arab Iraq, where the U.S. and British armies are deployed, wants a firm timetable for withdrawal. I doubt that one would have found comparable figures in occupied Europe under the Nazis, or Eastern Europe under Russian rule.

Thus, sufficient evidence is offered about conditions in present-day Iraq but we are left to educated doubts of Chomsky to determine the sentiments of occupied populations toward fascism and Stalinism. Also, those same polls to which Chomsky alludes are characteristically asked in such a way that the crucial question preceding the pull-out one is this: “Do you think withdrawal of U.S. troops would enhance or diminish Iraqi security?,” the implication being that an American footprint in the country greater provokes the true enemies of civil society: namely, Al Qaeda, sectarian death squads, Baathist revanchists, double-dealing police officers, etc. In what congruent way would, say, occupied France have similarly wished for the withdrawal of the S.S. in 1940? Because the Nazis were, despite their best efforts, doing little to hold the democratic structure of France together, or because they were by design doing everything possible to tear it apart?