Glenn Greenwald (Salon, 6/3/10), in a compelling blog post on “Victimhood, Aggression and Tribalism,” quotes Noam Chomsky from Imperial Ambitions:

In one of his many speeches, to U.S. troops in Vietnam, [Lyndon] Johnson said plaintively, “There are three billion people in the world and we have only two hundred million of them. We are outnumbered fifteen to one. If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have. We have what they want.”That is a constant refrain of imperialism. You have your jackboot on someone’s neck and they’re about to destroy you. The same is true with any form of oppression. And it’s psychologically understandable. If you’re crushing and destroying someone, you have to have a reason for it, and it can’t be,”I’m a murderous monster.”It has to be self-defense. “I’m protecting myself against them. Look what they’re doing to me.” Oppression gets psychologically inverted; the oppressor is the victim who is defending himself.

This is, in fact, one of the standard justifications for violence of the strong against the weak–up to and including genocide. (See FAIR Blog, 2/2/09). That’s why when Israeli security forces kill more than 3,000 civilians in Gaza since 2001 and Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza kill 27 Israelis over the same time period, people can argue with a straight face that Israel’s self-defense needs require it to impose a crushing blockade on Gaza that has forced 10 percent of the population into chronic malnutrition.

That the blockade’s actual purpose has little to do with self-defense is illustrated by the wide array of prohibited goods that have nothing to do with security, as Peter Beinart pointed out in the Daily Beast (6/1/10; cited in Yglesias, 6/3/10):