What's the "big change in material circumstances" that altered US policy goals in the ME in a generation? The only one I can see is increasing dominance by the US and its client(s). The loss of control of Iran thirty years ago has surely been made up.
Your professed love for Noam is probably tested by the following, from Newsweek [sic] in 2006:
Q: Where do you see Iraq heading right now?
Chomsky: Well, it's extremely difficult to talk about this because of a very rigid doctrine that prevails in the United States and Britain which prevents us from looking at the situation realistically. The doctrine, to oversimplify, is that we have to believe the United States would have so-called liberated Iraq even if its main products were lettuce and pickles and [the] main energy resource of the world were in central Africa. Anyone who doesn't accept that is dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or a lunatic or something. But anyone with a functioning brain knows that that's not true -- as all Iraqis do, for example. The United States invaded Iraq because its major resource is oil. And it gives the United States, to quote [Zbigniew] Brzezinski, "critical leverage" over its competitors, Europe and Japan. That's a policy that goes way back to the second world war. That's the fundamental reason for invading Iraq, not anything else.
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Dec 14, 2009, at 3:50 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> American planners are not idiots. (We went to school with most of
>> them.) They (essentially the same people through the last two
>> administrations, except for a slight neocon detour) would not have
>> poured people and money into their 21st-century Middle East wars out
>> of pique or madness. Their plans were not irrational -- just
>> vicious. Capitalism, imperialism, and geopolitics provide an adequate
>> account. And, as Carrol pointed out, they're winning.
>
> Intellectual ability and being in the grip of delusions aren't mutually
> exclusive.
>
> I just listed a bunch of reasons why the "control of oil" analysis
> doesn't make much sense. Could you refute those instead of invoking the
> high-level generalities of "capitalism, imperialism, and geopolitics"?
>
> There's a longing on the left to believe that our rulers are always
> clear-eyed and rational. Obviously they wouldn't have gotten this far if
> they were loony dopes. But they don't always know what they're doing,
> really.
>
> Doug
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