Written by the famed polemicist Noam Chomsky, the book excoriates that American image. “It is a lie,” he bluntly says, “and it has always been.” He exposes what he describes as “the rot of the shining city on the hill, from its foundations to its steeples.” In its many interventions, Chomsky notes, Washington has acted to frustrate the will of the people, often by supporting those engaged in the most chilling violence. He cites cases of how it overthrew democratic governments in Iran, Chile, Guatemala and a long list of others, paying lip service to democracy while doing all it could to rig the outcome.  But he explains that there is a “rational consistency” to the inconsistency between words and actions. And he says the record shows that the US does indeed back democracy abroad “if and only if it is consistent with its strategies and economic interests.”

Chomsky asks: “What is a failed state?” And he answers: “It is one that fails to provide security for the population, to guarantee rights at home or abroad or to maintain functioning democratic institutions.” And with this definition he concludes that the US is the “world’s biggest failed state.” He strongly points out Washington’s woeful efforts to protect Americans from terror attacks, in one instance lavishing more resources on the imaginary threat from Fidel Castro’s Cuba than on the all too real menace of Al Qaeda in the Arab world.

He goes on to cite how the US ignored the Geneva Conventions by its treatment of prisoners of war like those in Guantanamo and of Iraqi civilians; flouted the United Nations Charter, which allows the use of force only when the necessity of self-defense is instant and overwhelming, standards hardly met by the 2003 invasion of Iraq; defied the World Court, which in the 1980’s held Washington guilty of unlawful use of force against Nicaragua, a ruling it simply rejected. And he adds acidly that America exempts itself from the rules it demands from everyone else.

The American system, Chomsky writes on, is “rotten,” and he faults US leaders from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Harry S.  Truman to John F. Kennedy for their pursuit of international domination.

Just like any other polemicist, Chomsky is selective in his materials. He argues, for example, that the American  invasion of Iraq has unleashed a wave of terrorism in that country, but he has little interest in the bombers and beheaders there. He dismisses the acts of those who would want American power deployed to thwart genocide in other countries.  Chomsky’s book may sound ludicrously overblown to American officials and readers, but his fierce excoriation may very well serve as a kind of wake-up call to Washington’s officialdom. A reminder that America may indeed be the only great power in the world today, or even, as Bill Clinton once put it, “the world’s indispensable nation,” but absolutely not forever and ever.

Today, under the aegis of George W. Bush, the United States is becoming increasingly unpopular, primarily because of his administration’s Iraq war policy, worldwide.  Interestingly, the recent primary victory of a neophyte in American politics, whose fierce anti-Iraq war stance has made him a political star overnight, presages dire tidings for Bush’s Republicans in the mid-term elections this year and probably in the presidential polls of 2008.  It was a vivid demonstration of how deep is the American people’s hostility toward Bush and his war policies not just among Democrats but other Americans who shudder at the thought of losing more of their sons and daughters in the Middle East conflicts.

The New York Times put it quite succinctly in its editorial that the political rebellion in Connecticut that befell an advocate and supporter of Bush’s war was a rare phenomenon by irate voters who have been unnerved by a war that has “degenerated into a desperate bloody mess that has turned much of the world” against the United States of America.