America?

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 all costs. 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 security is 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 idea has 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...