NOAM CHOMSKY ON AN UNJUST WAR _Frontline_, March 2-15, 1991, pp. 86-95. Transcribed by Vicki A. Hendricks ====================================================================== The interview that follows was conducted in Prof. Chomsky's office in Building 20 of the MIT. V.K. Ramachandran's was the first appointment in office of another very busy day; minutes after the interview was over, he was deep in discussion on linguistic theory with two graduate students. ====================================================================== FRONTLINE: Professor Chomsky, the United States administration has said that it had no alternative to waging war against Iraq--that it had gone more than the extra mile for peace. Would you comment on this position? NOAM CHOMSKY: Everyone expects governments to lie--that is their business--but this goes beyond reasonable limits. The fact is that the U.S. position on diplomacy has been clear, explicit and unwavering >from the first minute, and it has been, as George Bush has repeatedly said, that there will be no negotiations. That's been the U.S. position from the start, that's been the U.S. position at the end. That was the U.S. position at the United Nations when it once again blocked a Third World effort: it refused even to allow the Security Council to hear a discussion about a ceasefire. The U.S. position all along has been: _there can be no diplomacy_, period. The U.S. position from August has been that we must narrow the options, from capitulation to the threat or use of force. How can the U.S. administration take this position and still claim that it is going the last mile for peace? Well, it relies on the deeply totalitarian character of Western culture. It assumes that in the U.S. and Britain and other subservient states, when the President says, "There will be no negotiations, we've gone the last mile for peace," every journalist and every intellectual will parrot --will goose-step on command--and say: "They've gone the last mile for peace," even though they have just said that there will be no negotiations. In fact there has been a series of negotiations options from August. All of this talk about whether the sanctions will work is highly misleading because there is very strong evidence that sanctions already had worked, probably by August and almost certainly by January. We know that from a series of proposals, including from Iraq, which have been released by high U.S. officials, so there is no reason to doubt their authenticity. I will not run through the whole record, but shall just take the most recent (at least that is public knowledge). In late December, Iraq made a peace proposal that was released by high U.S. officials on January 2. According to that proposal, they would withdraw totally from Kuwait--totally, no border issues--in return for Security Council arrangements on two outstanding issues: one, the Israel-Palestine issue, and the other, the issue of weapons of mass destruction in the region. A clarification the following day, which was actually published in the _New York Times_ after an interview with Yasser Arafat, who had just returned from a discussion with Saddam Hussein, indicated that a mere _indication_ by the Security Council of a willingness to deal with these two outstanding issues might suffice for a total Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. State Department officials described this as what they call a "serious pre-negotiating position." Earlier offers had also been described as serious and negotiable: they were particularly interested in them because there was no mention of any of the outstanding border questions, the Rumillah oilfields and the islands in the Gulf. The U.S. did have a response to that. The response to that was George Bush's letter to Saddam Hussein, which said: "Principles cannot be compromised. Aggression cannot be rewarded. There will be no negotiations." That principles cannot be compromised is quite true--you can't--if you compromise, it is not a principle. But one thing that is obvious beyond discussion: the U.S. does _not_ uphold the principle that aggressors cannot be rewarded. That's not even a joke. The U.S. constantly rewards aggressors; it is often an aggressor itself. George Bush is the one world leader who stands condemned before the World Court for the unlawful use of force, meaning aggression. Just last year he himself conducted the first post-Cold War act of aggression, the murderous invasion of Panama. And the U.S. has supported aggression throughout the world--I mean, it's ridiculous. So it is true that principles cannot be compromised; but the principle that aggressors cannot be rewarded is not a U.S. principle. Its principle is the third sentence: "There will be no negotiations." In other words, we will not agree to a peaceful political settlement of this issue in return for a potential discussion of the Israel- Palestine question and the question of weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. rejection of diplomacy on those issues has perfectly _nothing_ to do with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and we know that for certain because the U.S. was rejecting a diplomatic approach to those two issues before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Last April, when Saddam Hussein was still George Bush's great friend and favourite trading partner, he offered the U.S. that he would destroy all of his non-conventional weapons, that is, all of his biological and chemical weapons (there are no nuclear weapons). That offer came to the White House, and since Iraq was still a friend at that time, there was an excellent official response. The official response was: we welcome Saddam Hussein's offer to destroy all of his arsenals--that's fine--but we do not want this linked to other issues or weapons systems. Now that is an oblique way of saying "we want Israel to keep its nuclear weapons." In other words, there cannot be a _regional_ disarmament proposal, because the U.S. wants Israel to maintain its several hundred nuclear weapons with which it can intimidate the region. And because of that the U.S. refuses a diplomatic approach to this issue. Notice that they do not _mention_ Israeli nuclear weapons. No U.S. official can mention Israeli nuclear weapons, for a very simple reason. If they _concede_ what everyone _knows_--that Israel has nuclear weapons--then all U.S. aid to Israel becomes illegal (as it has been illegal under U.S. law since 1977, when laws were passed barring any aid to countries developing nuclear weapons). So that is the first issue--the U.S. does not want a diplomatic settlement of the problem of weapons of mass destruction, because it wants Israel to maintain an overwhelmingly intimidating posture with nuclear weapons. On the second issue, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, for 20 years the U.S. has been opposing a diplomatic settlement of that. It has _nothing_ to do with Iraq and Kuwait. The last vote in the United Nations on this was in December 1989, well before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. You cannot have a vote at the Security Council, because the U.S. just vetoes it. But at the General Assembly, where you cannot veto, there was a vote. And the vote called for an international conference on the Israel-Palestinian problem and a settlement of that problem in terms--and here they quoted--of U.S. Resolution 242 on territorial guarantees and security. They opposed the acquisition of territory by force and they added that the solution must take into account the legitimate rights of the Palestinians. It did not mention the Palestinian state, but that is more or less implied. The vote on that was 151 to three. The three were the United States, Israel and Dominica (which was probably sleeping that day). The 151 included all the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies and all the Arab states--in fact it included everyone who did not happen to have a flu on that day. That is the way that it has been for 20 years--the U.S. and Israel are totally isolated on this. Naturally, the U.S. opposes an international conference: it knows that if you pick anyone for the international conference outside of the U.S. and Israel, they will press for a diplomatic settlement, which the U.S. does not want. This has _nothing_ to do with linkage. It has _nothing_ to do with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. It has to do with the U.S. opposition to diplomatic settlement. There are three issues here, and the U.S. is opposed to a diplomatic settlement of each one of them, and therefore it is opposed to linkage. It does not want a diplomatic settlement of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait (which could have been attained, it appears). It does _not_ want a diplomatic settlement of the problem of weapons of mass destruction. It does not want a diplomatic settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Accordingly, it is opposed to linkage, that is, to diplomacy that brings these issues together. It's as simple as that. The extremism of the U.S.-British view on this--Britain tails along like a loyal puppy dog on this topic--was reviewed quite dramatically on January 14. It is worth looking closely at what happened there, it is very enlightening. On the evening of January 14, which was right before the deadline, France introduced a proposal at the U.S. Security Council calling for a total and immediate Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait--_total_, no conditions--in return for which the Security Council would say that at some appropriate moment in the future--which was unspecified--it _might_ be useful to have an international conference on regional issues. There's an almost totally meaningless gesture--it said _nothing_. The U.S. and England at once announced that they would veto any such statement. That takes radical extremism to _unimaginable_ limits. They wanted to go to war in preference to having a complete settlement with the condition that _maybe_ later they would talk about regional issues. Now whether that would have worked or not nobody knows, because the U.S. at once vetoed it. In my view France proposed it only because they knew it was going to be vetoed. I think it was a totally cynical thing--everyone knew that the U.S. would never permit it. If you look more closely, it is even more revealing. The wording of the French proposal--that the members of the Security Council believe that at an appropriate moment an international conference might be useful--was actually drawn from a Security Council statement of December 20. Q: Of 1990? A: Yes. 1990, just a few weeks earlier. On December 20 the U.S. Security Council passed Resolution 681 (I think it was) which had nothing to do with Iraq at all. It had to do with Israeli human rights abuses, deportations and so on, and it called upon Israel to observe the Geneva Conventions. The Security Council tried to introduce into that resolution the wording that I just quoted, that at some appropriate moment in the future an international conference might be useful. The U.S. said that it would veto the resolution if that wording was included in it, and the wording was added as a codicil to the resolution. So it's not _technically_ in the resolution, but after the resolution is a statement that members of the Security Council believe that at an appropriate moment an international conference might be helpful in bringing peace to the region. That had nothing to do with linkage. Iraq was never mentioned in that resolution. It is just the passionate U.S. refusal to accept the possibility--even hint at the possibility--of a diplomatic settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And when France, introducing the wording of the codicil into the resolution, tried to put forward the proposal of January 14, the U.S. and Britain instantly announced that they would veto it. That reveals an opposition to diplomacy that is really passionate, and it will surprise no one whose eyes are open. For the past 20 or 25 years the U.S. and Britain have been in a virtual war against international law at the United Nations. If you take a look at the record of the United Nations, that is very clear. In the Security Council since 1970, fully 80 per cent of the vetoes are by the U.S. and Britain, with the U.S. in the lead. In third place is France, and in fourth place, far behind, is the Soviet Union. It has fewer than one-third as many vetoes as England and about one-seventh as many vetoes as the U.S. That is not too surprising. After all, these are the two imperial states, and they are therefore naturally opposed to international law. International law is a very weak barrier against the depredations of the powerful, and naturally the powerful are against it. You have to be willfully blind not to see these things. I should say that there is a good deal of lying about it in the press. For example, there are just hundreds of articles in the press that talk about the wondrous change at the United Nations, that finally it is acting in its peacekeeping function and that it is no longer blocked by Russian obstructionism and Third World hysterics. The fact is that the United Nations has been blocked overwhelmingly by British-American obstructionism, not by the Russians. Back in the early days, when the United Nations was an instrument of U.S. policy, the Russians were vetoing everything. That stopped in the 1960s. Since the U.N. fell out of control of the United States, the U.S. has been trying to destroy it. The worst deceit in this comes from the academic profession-- people like Professor Adam Roberts at Oxford who is the great British expert on the United Nations. Read his articles in _The Independent_ (of London) on this. He is the main British specialist on this topic, so when he does it, it is not just ignorance, it is conscious deceit. In his very scholarly article in _The Independent_ on this topic he gives the cumulative record of all vetoes since 1946. If you give that cumulative record, it looks like the Russians are vetoing everything, because they did in the early years. Giving that cumulative record and not breaking it down, he then concludes that the Cold War is over and that now the United Nations can function. He knows perfectly well that those Russian vetoes are in the 1940s and 1950s and that the vetoes in the last 20 years are by the U.S. and Britain. But as a loyal commissar he doesn't say that, and he makes it appear as if somehow the Russians have been blocking everything. This combination of deceit and ignorance has allowed the U.S. to get away with claiming that it is pursuing diplomacy while it is clearly--and quite passionately--blocking diplomacy, as it has been doing for a long time. Q: Do you think that sanctions were beginning to take effect, that they were an effective method? A: It was quite obvious in August that sanctions would be unusually effective in this case. There are two very clear reasons for that. For one thing, the sanctions were of absolutely unprecedented severity. There has _never_ been a case in the past when sanctions were imposed on food, even in much worse cases of aggression and atrocities than this one, and there are many worse cases. Secondly, the sanctions this time were going to hold. Remember: sanctions usually do not work because they are violated, and they are usually violated by the U.S., England and France and their allies. Sanctions against the racist states of southern Africa were very porous because imperial countries like the U.S., England and France violated constantly. Hence they were very weak. In this case, however, the usual violators of sanction supported them and therefore they were going to hold. The discussion about whether sanctions _would_ work is more or less irrelevant, because there is very strong evidence that they already _had_ worked. At least, I find no other plausible explanation for the series of Iraqi peace proposals that were released by U.S. officials from late August right through early January. The U.S. and Britain, remember, moved as quickly as they could to _undercut_ sanctions--they did not want sanctions to work. Very quickly, within a few days, they announced that they were going to send an expeditionary force to the desert. Now a _deterrent_ force could be kept in place while sanctions took effect. An _expeditionary_ force--a big expeditionary force, hundreds of thousands of troops--cannot be kept there for more than a few weeks, or maybe a few months at the most. It is just too expensive and it is generally impossible. They were telling the world: "We're going to undercut sanctions, we don't want sanctions to work." That was combined with the explicit statement that there would be no negotiations. Remember, sanctions mean sanctions and negotiations. The peaceful means prescribed by international law are sanctions along with diplomacy to arrange for withdrawal under the pressure of sanctions, and that is what the two warrior-states did not want. ################################################################## Date: Mon, 24 Feb 92 00:45:10 EST From: Vicki A. Hendricks Subject: Chomsky article (second) To: Harel Barzilai X-Acknowledge-To: [Part 2:] In other cases, the question whether sanctions would have worked in five months is ridiculous. Let us take the case of Namibia. The U.N. declared the South African occupation of Namibia illegal back in the 1960s. The World Court declared it illegal in, I think, 1970 or 1971. Sanctions were imposed, but they were very weak, and they were constantly broken by the U.S., Britain and France primarily, but by others as well. Meanwhile, 20 years went on, 20 years of what was called "quiet diplomacy" and "constructive engagement." Nobody proposed bombing Cape Town. Nobody proposed putting a huge expeditionary force to invade South Africa. And it is not that what was happening in Namibia was very pretty. They were robbing the place, they were looting it, they were terrorising it, they were using it as a base for attack against other countries. _The toll was awesome._ According to the U.N. Economic Commission on Africa, in the last ten years alone the cost to the _neighbors_--forget Namibia and South Africa--was over $60 billions and over a million lives were lost. You know that nobody's heart was broken about the suffering of the poor Africans. No one proposed stopping food. In fact, very few people even proposed living up to the very weak sanctions that were imposed. Nobody proposed bombing Cape Town. Nobody asked: "How long can we wait while the sanctions work?" I mean, this is pure hypocrisy--pure and total hypocrisy. Serious people shouldn't even talk about it. Q: The report of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War said medical sanctions had in fact begun to take effect, and disastrously so, even in December. A: Of course, there is just no doubt. These sanctions are so severe that, to their credit, the National Council of Churches immediately condemned them as unconscionable. I think they are right, it is just unheard of. Quite apart from that, it is crucial to recognise that these sanctions were _observed_. The countries that usually violate sanctions, the countries that despise international law--like the U.S., England and France--were observing them this time. Apparently they had worked. Why else would Iraq have come across with these proposals? Q: In the light of U.S. policy in West Asia, of what does Bush's New World Order consist? What message is he sending the world regarding its content? A: He is sending the world a very clear message. The message is: the world is to be ruled by force. Not diplomacy, not economic power, but force. There is an obvious reason why he wants that. You simply take a look at the structure of the New World Order, which has been coming into existence for the last 20 years and has several dramatic features. By the 1950s, England, which used to be the imperial power, was a power very much in decline. It had a very troubled economy: about all that it had left was a big military force and a martial tradition, and that remains the case. The U.S. is pretty much in the same position, although on a much grander scale. By the 1970s the U.S. was losing its economic dominance over the world. It was still the world's biggest economy; in fact, as of today it is still the world's biggest economy. But it is visibly declining in the past 20 years as compared with its major rivals, namely Germany-led Europe and Japan. Economically, you have what is nowadays called the tripolar world. The Reagan-Bush administrations have administered a very severe blow to the American economy. The costs have yet to be paid, but they are real. There is huge debt, the financial institutions are tottering, the infrastructure is collapsing, and the U.S. economy is in severe trouble. It is a rich country, with enormous resources, but the Reagan and Bush administrations basically threw a party for the rich, at the cost of future generations and the poor. The State of the Union message, you will notice, said virtually nothing about the U.S. economy, because they have no way of resurrecting the U.S. economy. that is one feature of the New World Order. A second feature of this New World Order was also visible by the 1970s, and it was that the Soviet Union was in bad trouble. The Soviet Union's military expenses began to level off in the 1970s-- quite the opposite of what we were being told, but those were lies for other reasons--and it was clear that there was stagnation and serious internal problems. By the early 1980s, the Soviet Union was essentially collapsing and by now it has more or less withdrawn from the world. It is doubtful whether it will even hang together as an organised entity. So the disappearance of the Soviet Union from the world scene is the second feature of the New World Order, and that has consequences. One consequence is that western Europe and the U.S. have now achieved a long-term objective, that they have been fighting for since 1917, and that is to return eastern Europe to its traditional status as Third World. Before 1917, eastern Europe was, for the most part, a quasi-colonial dependency of the West, with usual Third World functions--cheap labour, resources, and investment opportunities. The Soviet Union cut that region off from Western exploitation, which is one of the fundamental reasons for the Cold War and for the hostility towards the Soviet Union. Now that is over, and the West can expect to return this region to the status of Mexico and Brazil and others, which is what they have long wanted to do. Of course Germany is well in the lead on this one and Japan will get in the act when they decide that it is worthwhile. The U.S. is going to have a much harder time, because of its economic decline and its capital deficits. Another consequence of the Soviet withdrawal from the scene is that the Soviet Union had a big military force: although it was not much of an economic power, as a military force it _deterred_ the U.S. Now, in Western ideology and propaganda, the U.S. deterred and contained the Soviet Union, but in the real world it was the other way around--the Soviet Union deterred and contained the U.S. The U.S. is a global power; it is carrying out intervention all through the world in areas where it does not have a conventional force advantage. That can be dangerous. There was always a limit on the use of force by the U.S. because there was always the fear that it might turn into a superpower confrontation, which would be extremely dangerous, and that imposed limits on the use of U.S. power. So in Indochina, in the Middle East (West Asia) and, in fact, every part of the world, there was a deterrent effect of Soviet power. Furthermore, the Soviet Union provided some degree of support to targets of U.S. attack, which made it harder to destroy them. Now that is all gone, and for the last several years, U.S. strategists have been generally exulting over the fact that they are no longer deterred by Soviet power. Again, Western intellectuals who are deeply subservient to state power are not permitted to see these fact, but they are trivial and any ten-year-old can understand them. The U.S. is now much more free to use force than it has been in the past. We see that in the Middle East: 10 to 15 years ago, the U.S. and Britain, the two warrior- states, would not have been able to put large conventional forces in the region because it would just be dangerous. A Middle East confrontation could lead to a confrontation with the Russians and the forces would simply be exposed to destruction. Nowadays they do not have to worry. There is no deterrent: they can do anything they like. This is said quite openly by the U.S. strategists, I should say, and has been for several years. I can give you examples if you like. To put this together, what do we have? We have a New World Order, in which the strength of the U.S. is certainly not diplomacy. The policies that it is pursuing are extremely unpopular. In the region, say from Morocco to Indonesia, popular support for U.S.- British policies is extremely low, to put it mildly. They get support >from family dictatorships and so on but certainly not from the general population. The same is true in Latin America and Africa and elsewhere--the U.S. and British policies are not popular and therefore diplomacy is ruled out. That is why the U.S. and, following it, Britain, are almost always opposed to diplomacy and try to undermine it. Economic power _used_ to be the strength of the U.S., but that is less and less the case. By now that is not the strong card--others have economic power. What is left is force--the U.S. has a virtual monopoly of force and no deterrent. At a much lower scale, the same is true for Britain. The British right-wing press is quite perceptive on this topic. It points out that Britain cannot compete economically with Germany and Japan: in fact, it can barely compete with Italy. But when it comes to what they call "national character," Britain reigns supreme. That is a way of saying that Britain has several centuries of experience in smashing the natives in the face, and it know how to do that. It has the martial spirit, and therefore, its sturdy national character still ranks supreme, not like these cowardly Germans and Japanese, who just make money. That is the right-wing variant, and it is basically correct--that Britain hopes to kind of recover its feelings of imperial glory by trailing along after the big guys across the ocean. For the U.S., its comparative advantage in the world is essentially its monopoly of force, and therefore the natural posture for it to adopt is that of a mercenary state. Somebody has got to control and subdue the Third World--the industrial countries understand that--you have to keep them under control, you have to block independent nationalism, you have to make sure they are readily exploitable. However, they no longer have the economic base for it. Therefore they have to be a mercenary. The U.S. is becoming a mercenary state. It carries out the military interventions--it has the force--and others are supposed to pay for it. Well, who is going to pay for it? Germany and Japan want the services, but they do not want to pay for it. They have no particular interest in propping up the economies of their rivals, the U.S. and England. They will grudgingly give a little bit of support to the mercenaries, but not much. There is only one other major source of capital in the world, besides Germany and Japan, and that is petrodollars. The way the New World Order is shaping up you have to block diplomacy, and you have to block reliance on economic power, because the U.S. is not ruling now. You have to shift confrontation to the arena of force, where the U.S. reigns supreme. You need a world ruled by force, and somebody has got to pay for it. The primary source has to be oil production, the colossal profits from energy. This policy, incidentally, was pretty explicit in the 1950s and you can actually read it in the declassified secret documents of both Britain and the U.S. in the 1950s. Now it is much broader. Again disciplined intellectuals do not look at these questions, because they are just much too revealing, they tell you too much about the truth. But for anyone who wants to understand what is going on in the Gulf today the first thing to look at is the declassified record of secret documents of Britain and the U.S. in the 1950s. They are now more or less open. There has been a lot of censorship but there are a lot of them that are available and they are very clear. The crucial point to look at is 1958, when there was a nationalist officers revolution in Iraq. That was the first break in the Anglo- American condominium over oil production and naturally there was great fury in England and the U.S. We know what they did publicly. The U.S. sent the Marines to Lebanon the next day and Eisenhower authorised the use of any weapons whatsoever--meaning nuclear weapons- -if anyone moved into Kuwait, that is, if the nationalist revolution spread to Kuwait. Secretly, now revealed, British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd flew to Washington for consultations and the British and the Americans decided at that point to give Kuwait a kind of nominal independence in order to deter the threat of a nationalist uprising there. They followed the principles that were outlined by Lord Curzon and others back in the 1920s, namely to "rule behind an Arab facade," quoting Lord Curzon, and to disguise absorption behind constitutional fictions like "buffer state" or "sphere of influence." That is traditional British policy--it is much more cost-effective and cheap to rule behind an Arab facade and to disguise domination and absorption by fictions than it is to exercise direct rule. That was the policy decided on for Kuwait. Britain and the U.S. reserved the right to intervene--or, as the British Foreign Secretary put it secretly, ruthlessly to intervene-- in case anything went wrong. The U.S. reserved the same right elsewhere in the region. The National Security Council has a memorandum calling for the use of force if necessary to ensure that British-American interests in the region are protected. They were also explicit about those interests, and it is revealing. The interests, with regard to Kuwait, were that the profits from Kuwaiti oil be used to prop up the sterling. The British economy was ailing, it was a weak economy, and at that time it very badly needed both the oil and the profits from Kuwaiti investments in order to meet its liabilities. So the imperial arrangement had to be that the profits >from oil production not be used for the Arab peoples--of course, they could be used for the family dictatorships, so far as it did not amount to much--but mainly go to the West, primarily to England and later to the U.S. Well, that is what is going on. By the 1970s, the U.S. also was beginning to be in a degree of trouble: it was following England, many decades behind, and it needed this capital resource. In fact, that is one of the reasons why the U.S. and England actually were pretty much supportive of the oil price rise in the early 1970s. It actually benefited their economies. The international business press was quite open about it at the time. These are two high-cost oil producers--North Sea and Alaska are high- cost oil--and they could be brought into production profitably when the prices went high enough. That continues to be the case. Capital resources from the Gulf oil producers by now are a very substantial contribution to the two ailing economies. Britain and the U.S. to their Treasury securities, financial institutions and so on. There is a joke going around Wall Street now that more or less captures the story, and it goes like this. Question: Why do Kuwait and the United States need each other? Answer: Kuwait is a banking system without a country and the United States is a country without a banking system. Like a lot of jokes, it is not a joke. The Savings and Loan crisis is probably going to run over a trillion dollars (Savings and Loans institutions in the U.S. lend money to local people to buy homes). The banks are beginning to go, and that is a much more serious business. The biggest bank in New England just collapsed a few weeks ago, and others are tottering. They need capital and the only place they are going to get it is from the oil producers: there is no other source of capital that is going to prop up the U.S. economy. It is a debtor economy, the deficit is growing. George Bush and the planners haven't an idea in their heads about how to deal with the domestic economic problem--you could see that from the State of the Union message. That's the New World Order. Q: Saddam Hussein is a relatively new entrant into U.S. administration demonology. Would you comment on this rapid transition >from "moderate" to his present standing? A: If you know U.S. history, this is just playing an old record. Let us just go back to 1917: in the First World War the U.S. became some kind of global power instead of just a regional power. The first relevant event was Mussolini's march on Rome and the institution of fascism in Italy. That was very much applauded in the U.S., they thought it was wonderful. Mussolini was a "moderate." He was destroying the unions, he was breaking up parliamentary democracy. The U.S. regarded Italy as more or less a Third World country, on the border between the first and the Third World. The idea was that Italians, like all Third World people, liked discipline and authority. So when strong, disciplined leader comes in, they are happy--it makes the wops happy, is the way they put it. Mussolini was wonderful: the liberals loved him and the Republicans thought he was marvelous. The labour unions thought he was great--he was breaking strikes, he was destroying class struggle and getting rid of the Bolsheviks. They described him as a "moderate" standing between the extremists of Right and Left. (The extremists of the Left are socialists and labour leaders and so on and the extremists of the Right are some sort of fanatics who want to kill everybody instead of just instituting fascism). So he was a moderate. He stayed a moderate: Roosevelt called him that "admirable Italian gentleman" and that continued right through the 1930s. When he attacked France, of course, that was too much. Then he became the devil and remained the devil until the U.S. liberated Italy. ################################################################## Date: Mon, 24 Feb 92 00:49:07 EST From: Vicki Subject: Chomsky article (3rd) To: Harel Barzilai X-Acknowledge-To: [Part 3:] Hitler was described as a moderate, standing between the extremists of the Left and the Right. They approved of him: when he opposed U.S. interests too much, he became the devil. That is the constant pattern and in the Third World, it happens over and over again. In the Dominican Republic, Trujillo remained a moderate for about 30 years. He massacred people, he killed 20,000 Haitian workers in 1936, he tortured, destroyed--he was a moderate, we loved him. Then, by the 1950s, he began to get a little too big for his breeches. He started to interfere with U.S. business interests. He was buying up too much of the country for himself, not realising that it really had to be owned by U.S. corporations. He became a devil and had to be destroyed, so we had to try to assassinate him. Marcos, dictator in the Philippines, was a moderate: we supported him up until the time when the army turned against him. Then all of a sudden he became a devil and we had to kick him out. We can go on and on: Duvalier, Somoza--every gangster in the Third World is fine as long as they are working for us. But typically, these people get out of hand. The most recent one was Noriega. Noriega was a very minor killer and thug is comparison with these others, but he was bad enough: he was running drugs, he was killing opponents, he was stealing elections. That was all fine, he was just wonderful, the U.S. backed him, he was on the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) payroll. Then he got out of hand. The worst thing that he did was to support the Contradora treaty, the peace efforts of the Latin American democracies. As always, the U.S. was strongly opposed to diplomacy in Central America, and when Noriega began to back that, he was already in trouble. He also was not helping enough in the war against Nicaragua, so he had to be destroyed. He became the next monster. The same happened with Saddam Hussein: it is replaying the old record. Up until August 1, though he was a murderous killer, he could institute maybe the worst tyranny in the world, torture dissidents, gas the Kurds. He could do anything he felt like, he was still an admirable Iraqi gentleman, he was a moderate whose behaviour was improving. The U.S. became his largest trading partner, gave him enormous credits (in fact, second only to Mexico in agricultural credits), he was good for business, he was just fine. The U.S. even virtually told him right on the eve of the invasion that if he were to rectify border issues by force it would not object. (That was essentially the meaning of the diplomatic contacts right on the even of the invasion.) But he went too far. He showed that he was an independent nationalist and he crossed U.S. interests. The U.S. simply invoked its traditional policy, that is, ruthlessly to intervene if anything goes wrong. Then he became a devil and he had to be destroyed. This is a standard pattern. You support any gangster you like, but if they turn against you, they become reincarnations of Genghis Khan and then you can use their monstrous record of atrocities as a weapon against them. Let us take Suharto in Indonesia. He puts all of these people, including Saddam Hussein, to shame: they look Boy Scouts compared to Suharto. Here is a man who came into power with the massacre of about 700,000 people, _strongly_ supported by the U.S. The U.S. was absolutely enthusiastic about it, and if you read the _New York Times_, it was called the "gleam of light in Asia," "hope where there was none." He killed off about maybe half a million or a million people, mostly landless peasants, wiped out the only mass political party in the country--how would you be against him? You have to applaud--that's fantastic. People in India do not have to be told that Western hypocrisy is just unparalleled. This transition from moderate to monster is absolutely standard, it happens all the time, and it takes disciplined Western intellectual not to see it. Q: As a person who is also concerned with the vocabulary of U.S. politics, how do you view Bush's characterisation of the war that the U.S. administration and military machine are waging as a "just" war? A: When Joshua conquered the land of Canaan and tried to murder every living person, it was described as a just war. If we had the records, we would probably find that the Mongol invasions were justified as just wars. When Saddam Hussein sends Scud missiles to Israel he says it is a just war. He parrots George Bush word by word, and his arguments are just as good as Bush's. It takes disciplined intellectuals not to see this triviality. Here is what Saddam Hussein says when he talks about sending Scud missiles to Israel: my heart is torn by the sufferings of the Palestinians; I can't stand it. I can't sleep at night thinking about their suffering. Israel has annexed the Syrian Golan Heights over the unanimous condemnation of the Security Council, a terrible violation of international law. They have attacked Lebanon, killed 20,000 people. They still hold southern Lebanon, right now, there are Israeli rockets hitting Lebanon. He says: how can I stand this? I am such a great lover of international law and human rights, my heart is breaking. I have waited for sanctions, but you cannot have sanctions, because the U.S. vetoes them. I have tried diplomacy, but you cannot have diplomacy, because the U.S. vetoes it. I have waited not five months, but years and years, my heart breaking over these atrocities. What can I do, I have to use force. Well, that is George Bush, except that it is a stronger argument. So it is a just war. Yes, of course. Q: In what direction do you see the war proceeding now? A: If the U.S. could simply follow military strategy--if there were no considerations beyond military considerations--they would just continue to bomb. Bomb the supply lines and bomb the troops, and ultimately they will be destroyed. However, there are two big problems. One is financial. The U.S. and Britain cannot pay for it and they cannot have a long war for simple financial reasons. The other reason, in my view more significant, is political. George Bush can stand up and say "World against Saddam Hussein!" but his advisers know perfectly well that if you count noses, it is more like the world against George Bush, especially if you count noses in the relevant regions, from Morocco to Indonesia. (You will notice that the U.S.- British military effort is called the "allies" here--that is war propaganda, an attempt to try to bring with it the favourable connotations of the war against the Nazis. In fact, it is the U.S. and Britain, two radical militarist states, not the "allies.") The British and the Americans have support from the family dictatorships that they set up as an Arab facade to run the Gulf for them. There is weak support elsewhere, very weak. Egypt is marginally supporting it, and Turkey marginally supporting, but even in these countries they cannot keep their populations under control. In Egypt it has reached the point where schools and universities are closed and they have even cancelled sporting events, because they are afraid to let people get together in the street. In Morocco, which technically is supporting the war, there was a pro-Iraqi general strike a few days ago and the Government was forced to endorse it. In Pakistan, according to the British, about 80 per cent of the population not only opposes the U.S.-British effort, but actually supports Saddam Hussein. Indonesia has not condemned the Iraqi invasion because they are afraid of their own population. The whole region is in a ferment and the longer the war goes on, the more danger there is that even the dictatorships are not going to be able to control their own populations. In particular, if the war goes on long enough to get into Ramadan or, worse than that, into the Hajj, then they are in deep trouble It is very unlikely that Saudi Arabia can permit the Hajj, because if they allow Muslims into Saudi Arabia, they are going to tear the country to pieces. They can control their own population, but they are not going to be able to control millions of pilgrims from the rest of the world. If they have to _cancel_ the Hajj, that could be just disastrous for the Saudi Arabian elite. They are supposed to be the protectors of the holy places. They are getting into a real bind on that one. The war has to be over, well over, before these events occur. For that reason, the U.S. is not going to be able to be guided by military strategy alone. It is going to be forced to do something to try to win fast, for political reasons and for economic reasons. I suspect that that means they will move to a ground offensive before military strategy would dictate that it is the right thing to do. At that point, nobody knows what is going to happen, least of all the generals, who never know anything and certainly do not know anything now. It is possible that when the U.S. and British forces undertake a ground offensive, they will really be walking into a meat-grinder. The U.S. and Britain are not willing to take casualties; they are willing to kill plenty of other people, but they do not like to take casualties themselves. If they start to take casualties, there is only one way they can react, and that is by sharply escalating the level of weaponry, and that could be very, very ugly. Q: Do you think that the U.S. administration will actually consider the use of nuclear weapons? A: Yeah, sure. If the U.S. begins to take heavy casualties, they will probably move right on to nuclear weapons. Q: Independent of whether or not Saddam Hussein presses the chemical button? A: Has this ever deterred the West in the past? I mean let's be serious--we're talking about the West, the most savage civilisation in world history. They do what they feel like. Just look at the history of Iraq, and that will tell you. I do not know how many people in India know this history--again, this is suppressed by Western intellectuals--but the records are there. Britain took over Iraq at the time of the First World War. Britain was in a weakened state at that time. It did not have enough troops to hold down the empire and therefore it got much more violent. That is when the Amritsar massacre took place, for example. In Iraq they did not have ground forces, so what did they do? They turned to terror-bombing, the first time that terror-bombing was used to control civilians. It was used precisely to attack villages and to kill women and children: that was the purpose, you can read it in the records. It was even used to collect taxes; they would terrorise and intimidate people by terror-bombing and make them pay the taxes. The RAF (Royal Air Force) general command in Cairo asked for authorisation in 1919 to use chemical weapons "against recalcitrant Arabs as experiment." (This was right after the First World War-- "chemical weapons" meant poison gas, which was the ultimate horror at the time. The Germans had used it and it was considered the worst atrocity ever.) The India Office thought it might not be a good idea because of political problems. It went back to the War Department, where the official in charge denounced the India Office for what he called its "squeamishness" over the use of chemical weapons. He said, "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." He said the use of gas will cause "a lively terror," it is just the application of modern science to warfare, nothing wrong with it, and he said that it would be "improper to deny our troops any weapon at all" that would allow them to put down the unrest in the frontier. That gentleman was named Winston Churchill, a great hero of the West. Incidentally, the British had already used poison gas. They used it against the Bolsheviks in the intervention in Russia. In fact the British GHQ, the high command, attributed some of its early successes to the effective use of poison gas. Poison gas after the First World War was like nuclear weapons after the Second World War. There is nothing that the West will not do it if wants. Who is going to stop it? Are Western intellectuals going to protest? You'll wait a long time till you hear that. They won't even tell you what happened int he past, let alone protest about what is happening today. Q: You have had experience in the peace movement, as an organiser and a participant, for the last 25 years. How would you compare the nature and composition of the peace movement in the U.S. today with the movement against the Vietnam war? A: That movement was extremely narrow and marginal. It was mostly young people. There are a lot of delusions about it. After the war started getting costly, everyone suddenly announced that they had been an early opponent of the war, but that is all fraud. In fact, everyone supported the war, especially the liberal intellectuals, until it got costly. When the peace movement was really serious, it was young people, young students mostly. That is a significant group, but socially marginal. IN the 1970s, the movements extended, they got broader based, and they became really rooted in the society. They turned to different things, like the feminist movement, which is a very significant movement, though there are a lot of differences, or the ecological and environmental movements or the anti-nuclear movement. These became middle-class mass movements. In the 1980s, it spread even further. The solidarity movements with regard to Central America were very powerful: these were the first real Third World solidarity movements in the U.S. You find those more in churches in Kansas than you would in the universities in the north- east. That was a mainstream American, middle-class movement, very largely rotted in churches. That is what it is like now. The opposition to the war now is not particularly students. You will not find it so much on campus; you find more in mainstream America. As I mentioned, the National Council of Churches--which is a very mainstream organisation--is the one which came out immediately condemning the sanctions for being much too harsh. Virtually every organised religious group, with the exception of the Jewish groups, has come out in opposition to the war. In the Bishops' Council you will find much more opposition to the war than you will find in the Harvard Faculty Club. Q: Who, in your opinion, will be the gainers and who the losers --in economic, social and also in moral and human terms--of this war? A: It depends on how it turns out. If the U.S. and British strategy works and they can win a relatively quick victory, the gainers will be the Gulf dictatorships, U.S. banks, which will get a big flow of capital from the Gulf dictatorships, and the ailing U.S. and British economies. The gainers will be those who want to see the U.S. and Britain as mercenary forces, which sell their services as killers to other people in the world and thereby prop up their collapsing economies. They will be the gainers. The losers will be most of the people in the world, as happens in every war. Q: In terms of international relations, what do countries like Egypt, Israel, Turkey expect to gain? A: That is a different story. Egypt hopes to get a huge pay- off, in fact they already have got one. Egypt is in very bad trouble; they are hoping to get tens of billions of dollars of aid and support, and they are getting it. Israel hopes to see the Arab world destroyed--that would be terrific, wouldn't it? Israel is very happy, actually. A big Arab force is being destroyed, and the U.S. is forcing Russian Jews to go to Israel. (It is not that they are being _allowed_ to go to Israel, they are being _forced_ to go to Israel, and the U.S. changed its immigration laws so as to deny them free choice. If they had free choice, they would come to the U.S.) Israel very much wants Europeans--blonde-blue-eyed types--and they are going there. Israel has for a long time rejected any political settlement and now it feels that, you know, the facts are going to make it win. It will have this huge flow of immigrants coming in, and will be able to crush the indigenous Palestinian population, who will starve to death or, if they wanted jobs, will be forced to emigrate. The U.S. will of course continue to block any political settlement. Israel will be left with its huge nuclear weapons capacity and its major military force while the rest of the Arab world declines, except for the Gulf dictatorships, and they are note really anti-Israel. These are totalitarians who have no records about what happens internally but I am sure that if we had such a record, we would find that the Saudi Arabian elite is rather happy that Israel is there as a threat against what is called radical Arab nationalism. You will have the alliance that has existed int he past--Israel and Saudi Arabia and the U.S. in the background, with Britain tagging along pretending as usual that it is doing something. Turkey is an interesting case. Turkey wants to be able to ensure that it can crush its Kurdish minority and that it can maintain its control over northern Cyprus. It probably has its eyes on the Mosul province, which the Turks have always believed--with some justice-- was stolen from them by the British in the Imperial Settlement. (That is where there is a lot of oil.) If Iraq is rally dismembered, which is a possibility, Turkey might just move into the Mosul province (probably killing every Kurd in sight as they go along) and take over the oil. That is a possibility. ################################################################## Date: Mon, 24 Feb 92 00:52:10 EST From: Vicki Subject: Chomsky article (4th) To: Harel Barzilai X-Acknowledge-To: [Part 4, and end:] The Kurdish issue--quite apart from the horror of it--is an interesting issue. The U.S. has a very simple way of weakening the Iraqi army in Kuwait, namely, by supporting a Kurdish insurrection. If you support a Kurdish insurrection in the north, Iraq would have to draw off substantial troops from the south to put it down. According to Kurdish sources, they have been asking for support for insurrection and they have been denied. That is quite interesting; of course, you do not care how many Iraqis you fill, but you are supposed to care how many Americans you dill, that is supposed to count. The Bush administration is willing to see American soldiers killed in order not to support a Kurdish insurrection in the north. The reason for that is to placate Turkey. Turkey is suppressing its own huge Kurdish population and the last thing it wants is a Kurdish uprising next door. In order to allow to help Turkey repress its own Kurds, the U.S. is willing to keep the Iraqi army in the south facing an American ground onslaught. Again, the disciplined American intellectuals will not mention this fact. The only mention of it that I have seen is in the _Wall Street Journal_, which is a business newspaper, so a little less constrained than some of the others. The Arab states, even the ones supporting the U.S., are not very happy about the destruction of Iraq, because they have other problems. One of their problems is Iran. The conflict between Iran and the Arab states goes back to the biblical period and it continues. They consider Iraq as a kind of barrier against Iran and they know that if Iraq is destroyed they are going to be open to Iranian pressures, so they have mixed feelings about that. War takes on its own pace: you cannot fine-tune it. You cannot decide: I am going to destroy Iraq, but only up to the point where it still remains a barrier to Iran. Once war gets started, it goes its own way. Q: Last question. Given its performance in the Gulf and West Asia, what does the New World Order augur for the people of your other area of interest, Central America? A: It is a catastrophe. Throughout the Third World it has been an utter catastrophe in the last 10 or 20 years. People talk about the disaster of communism; but the catastrophes of capitalism make communism look like a paradise. In fact, I have just done a couple of survey articles reviewing the state of the people who supposedly won the Cold War. Let us run through the victims of the Cold War: Latin America, Africa, Asia--go through it country after country, it is a total catastrophe. It has gotten a lot worse in the last 10 years. The U.S. won a big victory in Central America. There was a chance of democracy and social reform back in the late 1970s and that has been crushed. They have murdered a couple of hundred thousand people, countries are in chaos, countries are destroyed, they have been beaten back to the level of 30 or 40 years ago. Many of these countries may not even survive. What the U.S. did in Central America is to establish the effectiveness of the rule of terror and violence. It is now trying to establish the same lesson globally. In the Middle East, if that works, the consequences for the rest of the Third World are grim. This war is basically another war in the Vasco da Gama era of world history, to use an India-related term for it. For the last 500 years Europe has been savagely conquering the world and this is another one of those episodes. For the victims, most of the world outside Europe (Europe now means Europe, the U.S. and Japan), the future is very grim. ================================================================= [Inset at beginning of article:] January 15, 1991 ("deadline" day for George Bush), 7:30 p.m., lecture hall 10-250 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Students holding sacks at the entrance to the hall, in optimistic anticipation of donations to fund the work of the MIT Initiative for Peace in the Middle East (West Asia). The amphitheatre-like hall is packed with hundreds of people and is overflowing. A student activist, Amita Gupta, is at the microphone making campaign announcements. The announcements completed, the diminutive young organiser looks up at the gathered audience, pauses a moment, and says, "with no further ado, here's Noam." Applause--cheering, clapping, foot-stomping--fills the hall. Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor at MIT, pioneer in the field of linguistic science, social and political activist, commentator and theorist--described once in _The New York Times_ as "arguably the most important intellectual alive" and on another occasion in the same paper as "perhaps the clearest voice of dissent in American history"- -steps up, unfazed, to the speaking-platform. As the applause fades away, he begins by admonishing the audience: this is not an occasion for cheering, he says, for we stand on the threshold of war. There are certain conspicuous features of a public political speech by Chomsky. The first is that there is an argument, precisely structured and dense with citation and factual detail. He does not speak from notes, even when he quotes. The presentation is characterised by a controlled passion, the rage showing through in the use of sledgehammer sarcasm, and there is no artifice or grandstanding in the style. I have heard him on Central America, on Palestine, on the elections in Nicaragua and on the crisis in the Gulf, and every time without fail, as I leave the MIT buildings, step into the night air, and descend the staircase to the bus stop on Massachusetts Avenue, I am full of the rage that Noam Chomsky's clear, rational voice of dissent has ignited. Chomsky's work in linguistics is not easily accessible to a layperson (and indeed, what follows in this paragraph is from a summary given to me by an Indian student of linguistics at the University of Chicago). Chomsky was the first to propose, in the mid- 1950s, a way of looking at language and cognition that was in radical contrast to the descriptivist and strictly behavioural approaches to language that were then dominant in the United States. In "Syntactic Structures," published in 1957, he first made explicit the idea of Generative Grammar as a formalised Cartesian way of characterising the grammar of a language. In this and in subsequent major works-- "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" (1965), "Language and Mind" (1968), "Lectures on Government and Binding" (1981) and "Knowledge of Language" (1986), to name a few--he has continued to develop the idea of a grammar as the explicit formulation, and one that has explanatory as well as descriptive power, of the knowledge of a language as acquired (rather than consciously learned) by a native speaker. The larger goal of his approach is to arrive at Universal Grammar, the innate system of principles and parameters that underlie any human language. Chomsky's work has, of course, significant inter- disciplinary implications: for study, for instance, in philosophy, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and computer science. From the mid-1960s, Chomsky has been an important participant on the U.S. political scene. He is an analyst of socio-political events and trends and an activist, active particularly in the peace and Third World solidarity movements. Chomsky has worked on, among other fields, the Cold War and on U.S. policy in Vietnam, Central America and West Asia. He has written extensively on the role of business and Government elites and the "secular priesthood"--principally journalists and academics--in the construction of dominant ideologies, in manufacturing consent and generally in not telling people the truth. He has worked on conformity in U.S. intellectual life and on the role of the intellectual in public affairs. Chomsky has been a powerful influence on left-of-centre groups of different types in the United States and elsewhere, even on those who do not share his libertarian-socialist and anarchist views. In a recent scholarly paper, the political philosophers Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers have attempted thus to characterise Chomsky's contribution to social thought: ....Nothing that we know about human nature is inconsistent with the contention that aspirations to freedom and decency are fundamental features of that nature; and nothing that we know about social order defeats the hope that the pursuit of these aspirations will produce significant improvement in human circumstances. The fact that such hopefulness is consistent with the evidence enables children of the Enlightenment to be optimists of the will, without condemning themselves to be irrationalists of the intellect. It is C's insistence on this point, his commitment to both reason and moral hope, that we take to be his signal contribution to social thought.