Noam Chomsky on Failed States - Part II

AMY GOODMAN: In his first broadcast interview upon the book's publication, Chomsky spoke to us from our Boston studio on Friday.

JUAN GONZALEZ: With public opposition to the Bush administration's policies at record highs, I asked Professor Chomsky to talk about how it is that so much discontent with the government has not translated into larger political mobilization.

NOAM CHOMSKY: First of all, on the fact that advertising is designed to undermine free markets, that everybody knows, anyone who’s ever looked at a television ad. According to what you’re taught in economics courses, our system is based on free markets with entrepreneurial initiative and rational choices by informed consumers. Well, the reality is radically different. A tremendous amount of the entrepreneurial initiative, if you want to call it that, comes from the dynamic state sector on which most of the economy relies to socialize costs and risks and privatize eventual profit. And that's achieved by, if you like, advertising. So, it’s presented under the rubric of defense or some other pretext, but it’s essentially a way for the public to pay the costs of research and development, take the risks and eventually hand over the profit. There’s some entrepreneurial initiative, but not all that much, mostly at the marketing end.

As far as consumers are concerned, I mean, when you look at a television ad, it is not trying to create an informed consumer who’s going to make a rational choice. We all know that. If they were going to do that, General Motors would just list the characteristics of its models and, you know, you’re over, you’re done. The purpose is to delude and deceive by imagery -- it’s transparent -- meaning to ensure that uninformed consumers will make irrational choices.

And that goes straight to the democratic deficit. The U.S. does not have elections in a serious sense. It has advertising campaigns, run by the same industries that sell toothpaste: public relations industry. When they’re selling candidates, they don't tell you -- provide you with information about them, any more than they do about lifestyle drugs or cars. What they do is create imagery to delude and deceive. That's what's called an electoral campaign. The result is that people are just unaware of the stands of candidates on issues.

So to take one critical example, take, say, the Kyoto Protocols. I mean, they’re not the be all and end all, but environmental catastrophe is a serious matter. The public is strongly in favor of the Kyoto Protocols, so strongly in favor that a majority of Bush voters -- Bush voters -- thought that he was in favor of it. They are simply unaware. And it’s not because of mental incapacity or a lack of interest. It’s because that's the way campaigns are presented. They’re presented to keep issues off the agenda. Striking cases.

Take, say, healthcare, one of the worst domestic problem -- most serious domestic problems; for most people, a major problem. I mean, it’s the most inefficient healthcare system in the world, double the per capita cost of other comparable countries, some of the worst health outcomes, mainly because it is privatized. The public is strongly against it. For a long period the public has been in favor of some kind of national healthcare system.

Well, you know, Kerry is supposed to be the candidate of, you know -- speaking for whose constituency calls for social spending, and so on and so forth. The last presidential debate, a couple days before the election, was on domestic issues. And the New York Times had an accurate account of it. It described it as -- it pointed out that Kerry made no mention of any government involvement in any healthcare system. And the reason, according to the Times reporter, is that the idea lacks political support, meaning it only has the support of the overwhelming majority of the population, but it’s opposed by the pharmaceutical corporations, the insurance industry, and so on. That's what counts as political support. So Kerry didn't mention it, and the public didn't know his stand on these issues. And so it goes issue after issue. So, these are not real elections. We’d laugh at them, and they were some third world country.

Now, take the war in Iraq. When you talk about the government propaganda system we have to recognize that that includes the media. It includes the media, the journalists and so on. That’s all part of the propaganda system, very closely linked. There is virtually no criticism of the war in Iraq. Now, that will surprise journalists, I suppose. They think they’re being very critical, but they’re not. I mean, the kinds of criticism of the war in Iraq that are allowed in the doctrinal system, media and so on, are the kind of criticisms you heard about, say, in the German general staff after Stalingrad: it’s not working; it’s costing too much; we made a mistake, we should get a different general; something like that. In fact, it’s about at the level of a high school newspaper cheering the local football team. You don't ask, “Should they win?” You ask, “How are we doing?” You know, “Did the coaches make a mistake? Should we try something else?” That's called criticism.

But there’s a critical question: What right does the U.S. have to invade another country, in gross violation of international law, understanding that it’s probably going to increase the threat of terror and nuclear proliferation? But just, you know, it’s a supreme international crime, in the words of the Nuremburg Tribunal, for which German leaders were hanged. You know, the issue isn't how they are going to win, it’s “What are they doing there in the first place?”

AMY GOODMAN: Do you believe, Noam Chomsky, in immediate withdrawal, that the troops should withdraw immediately?

NOAM CHOMSKY: I think we should estab-- there is a certain principle that we should adhere to. The principle is that invading armies have no rights whatsoever. They have responsibilities. The prime responsibility is to heed the will of the victims and to pay massive reparations to the victims for the crimes they’ve committed. In this case, the crimes go back through the sanctions which were a monstrous crime, through the support for Saddam Hussein, right through his worst atrocities, but particularly, those of the invasion. Those are the two responsibilities of an occupying army.

Well, you know, the population has made it pretty clear. Even U.S. and British polls make that clear. Overwhelming majorities want the U.S. to set a timetable to withdraw and adhere to it. Britain and the United States refuse. Reparations, we can’t even talk about; that's so far from consciousness in the doctrinal system. Well, I think that answers the question. Doesn’t really matter what I think. What matters is what Iraqis think, and I think we know that pretty well. The reason the U.S. and Britain aren’t withdrawing are those I mentioned. You know, the consequences of independence for Iraq would be an ultimate nightmare for them. And they’re going to try to do anything they can to prevent Iraqi democracy, as they’ve been trying in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: And the argument that they will just descend into civil war and that the sectarian violence will increase, and the U.S. went in and now has a responsibility not the leave a mess?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, I mean, the Germans could have given the same argument and occupied Europe, the Russians in the satellites, the Japanese in Asia, and so on. Yeah, they could have all given the same argue: well, we went in, and now we have a responsibility to ensure that terrible things don't happen, and so on. And the argument had some validity. So, when the Germans were driven out of France, let's say, there were thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people killed by -- as collaborators, and in Asia, even more so. But is that an argument for them? No. It’s none of their business.

We don't know what will happen, and it’s not our decision to make. It’s the decision of the victims to make, not our decision. Occupying armies have no right to make the decision. We could have an academic seminar about it, in which we could discuss the likely consequences. But the point is it’s not for us to say. Well, until that enters into the discussion, and the critical issues of the war, like what right do we have to invade in the first place, enter into the discussion, the media and the journalism and so on are simply part of the government propaganda system, as I say, like a high school newspaper or like Pravda during the Afghanistan war.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And what of the role of the American people in this process? Clearly, it seems to me that so much of the antiwar sentiments quickly gets channeled into one or another political candidates, rather than into continuing to build a mass movement that, regardless of the political folks in office, will move to extricate the United States from this invasion.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. But that's our problem. I mean, you cannot expect power centers , whether in the government or in the economic system or in the media, which are all closely linked. I mean, they aren't going to try to stimulate popular movements that will be critical of power and try to erode power. In fact, their task is the opposite. So, yes, this has to be done by a popular movement. I mean, that's the way every constructive change has taken place in the past. I mean, how did we get civil rights to the extent that they exist, minority rights, women's rights, the benefits system that does exist, and so on? I mean, these things are not gifts from above; they are won from below. And it’s going to be the same on this.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, I was going to say, as you talk about popular movements, right now we are in the midst of a kind of groundswell that the -- certainly the U.S. English-speaking media has not dealt with before. And that is this massive level of grassroots protest against immigration policy in this country, some of them not just the largest protests on immigration, but some of the largest protests in the history of this country are taking place, with upwards of a million people protesting in the streets of Los Angeles, tens of thousands in Atlanta and Arizona, the biggest protest perhaps in the history of Chicago. What about this? The walkout of 40,000 high school students?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, these protests did have an effect. The bill that went through the Senate Judiciary Committee, to some extent, reflected them. Power centers cannot ignore public protests and, even worse from their point of view, continuing organization. You know, a demonstration now and then, okay, you can live with it. If it continues and becomes real grassroots organization, developing a functioning political system, in which people actually participate in forming and shaping policy and electing their own candidates, if it gets to that stage, they’re in trouble. And we’re far from that.

In fact, it’s kind of -- it’s terrible irony. We ought to be ashamed of it. But if you want to look for democratic elections in the Western hemisphere these days, you have to look at countries like Bolivia, not the United States. I mean, in Bolivia, they had a real election. It’s the poorest country in South America. Last December, they had an election in which organized -- well-organized masses of the population -- poor people, indigenous people and others -- managed to elect a candidate from their own ranks. There were real serious issues, and people knew the issues. And they voted on the issues. That's dramatically different from here. That's real democracy. You want to talk about democracy promotion, we need it here, and we can learn lessons from them.

Actually, the same is true in Venezuela. Venezuela is bitterly denounced here by the government media propaganda system as totalitarian dictatorship, and so on and so forth. Well, you know, you can think what you like about Chavez -- not our business -- but the question is what do Venezuelans think about him. That's the question, if you believe in democracy. Well, we know the answer. During the Chavez years, support for the elected government has risen very sharply. It is now the highest in Latin America by a considerable margin. He’s managed to win poll after -- election and referendum after election, one after another, about half a dozen, despite intense media opposition of a kind that you can't imagine here, and subversion by the superpower. After all, the U.S. supported a military coup to try to overthrow him, had to back down, partly because it was quickly reversed by popular action, but partly because of a swell of protest throughout Latin America, where they just don't have the same contempt for democracy as the leadership and the media do here and don't like the idea of democratically elected governments being overthrown by the military.

Since then, the U.S. has been dedicated to subversion. It’s very probable that -- the last poll that I saw, a North American poll a couple of weeks ago, asked people who are they going to vote for in the next election. And I think it was about two-thirds said they’d vote for Chavez, and I think 4% for the next highest candidate. Well, in those circumstances, the U.S. is almost certain to turn to the standard operating procedure when you know you’re going to lose an election: try to discredit it, by getting the opposition to boycott it.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you’ll be glad to know that when -- you mentioned Hugo Chavez -- when Amy and I interviewed him several months ago, he mentioned that his favorite American writer was Noam Chomsky, and he cited actually some of your books. So, I guess that we -- there ought to be a poll taken of how many leaders in the third world are reading Noam Chomsky, because you’re obviously having an effect on many of these leaders.

NOAM CHOMSKY: I don’t want to be self-serving, but I actually know quite a few examples.

AMY GOODMAN: What are the other ones, Noam?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, it's unfair to mention them.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask you --

NOAM CHOMSKY: They’ve got their own problems with the U.S. government.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about Haiti. How does this fit he the picture that you’re talking about?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I won’t run through the whole story, but Haiti actually also had a democratic election, of a kind that should put us to shame. They had a real democratic election in 1990, again, like Bolivia. You know, massive grassroots organizations, poor people that nobody was paying any attention to, succeeded in electing their own candidate, to everyone's astonishment. Everyone assumed the U.S.-backed candidate representing the elites and the power centers would easily win. Well, he didn’t. He got 14% of the vote. Very quickly, instantly, the U.S. moved to subvert the election -- instantly -- by what are called democracy promotion measures, meaning supporting the opposition. That’s what U.S. Aid did, and so on, try to support anyone opposed to the government.

Other measures were taken. Pretty soon there’s a military coup, led to years of vicious terror. Contrary to what people believe, the U.S. supported the coup. It continued to trade with the junta and rich elite increasingly under Clinton. Clinton actually authorized the Texaco Oil Company to provide oil to the junta and the elite, overriding formal presidential directives blocking it. Finally, the Clinton administration decided that the public had been tortured enough, sent in the Marines. That was called democracy promotion. However, as Allan Nairn right away pointed out, and others, Aristide was restored on the condition that he accept the policies of the defeated U.S. candidate in the 1990 election, harsh neo-liberal policies, which were bound to destroy the economy, as they did, led to turmoil, disaster, continuing U.S. subversion. Finally, the Bush administration blocked aid. More turmoil and confusion then came the -- by now, the country is kind of falling apart. You can go into the details.

But, finally, the U.S. and France simply intervened and removed the President. France was particularly infuriated, because Aristide had politely called upon France to do something about the crushing debt that had been imposed on Haiti back in 1825 as punishment for their having them -- for liberating themselves from France. They had been bearing this ever since, and naturally that infuriated France. How can the Haitians dare to say this? So, the U.S. and France basically kicked him out. Horrible atrocity since. Now, they’re trying to reconstruct somehow. Again, we owe them enormous reparations, as does France, for the atrocities we have been carrying out there actually for over a century, after we took over the project of torturing Haitians from France. Is there any -- it’s hard to know what the possibilities are. I mean, it’s just -- I mean, the society has been really devastated. It’s one of the poorest in the world.

AMY GOODMAN: And the latest of Aristide being taken out of Haiti, after he was re-elected -- this, of course, February 29, 2004, on a U.S. plane with U.S. military and security and sent to the Central African Republic?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, not only that, but the U.S. won’t even allow him back into the region. I mean, it’s essentially imprison-- insisted that he be imprisoned in South Africa. There was tremendous protest by the Caribbean countries over this. The candidate who won the election is the one who was closest to him; probably if he had been running, he would have won, but the U.S. would never allow that, and, as I say, won’t even allow him into the region. Well, that's just another illustration of the near passionate hatred of democracy, which is consistent and is indeed recognized.

It’s even recognized by the scholarship, of the most prestigious scholarship, by advocates of democracy promotion. They advocated, like Thomas Carothers, head of the Carnegie Endowment Project -- was the most respected -- he advocates it and says it’s wonderful. But he also points out that the U.S. consistently had been opposed to it. There is what he calls a strong line of continuity in all administrations, namely, democracy is promoted if and only if it supports U.S. strategic and economic objectives. In Central America, for example, where he was particularly -- he was involved in the Reagan State Department. He says, yeah, the U.S. opposed democracy and the reason he says is the U.S. would tolerate only top-down forms of democratic structures, in which traditional elites allied to the United States would remain in power in highly undemocratic societies. Yeah, that's a kind of democracy promotion that we promote, that the administration preaches and that the press and journalists hail as magnificent. Again, this is kind of North Korea.

AMY GOODMAN: And another region, of course, back to Israel, the election of Kadima, the media characterizing Kadima as the centrist party that is going to do away with many of the settlements in the West Bank, and then the election of Hamas in the Occupied Territories. Your response?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I would just urge anyone who wants to look into this to compare the lead editorial in the New York Times yesterday with the lead editorial yesterday in the world's leading business journal, the London Financial Times. They’re diametrically opposed. The New York Times says it’s wonderful Israelis agreed to withdraw from the West Bank. Of course, there is the little matter of borders, but they say that's of no importance. You know, minor issue, where the borders are. Yeah, no issue, except for the people who live there. That's the New York Times.

They do -- the Times reported the anguish of the settlers that’ll have to leave. I mean, it’s kind of as if the reporting has been -- as if, say, you know, I broke into your house, took over the whole house, finally agreed -- tortured you, you know, stole everything from you and so on, and then agreed to leave you the attic and the cellar, but keep the rest of the house. And it’s -- I do that with great anguish, because I don't want to leave the attic. I kind of liked it. I mean, that's the way it’s being reported. It’s scandalous.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, world renowned linguist, political analyst, on the publication of his new book, Failed States.

www.democracynow.org
---
source: Democracy Now

Noam Chomsky on Failed States - Part I

The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

AMY GOODMAN: In this first broadcast interview upon publication of his book, Professor Noam Chomsky joins us today from Boston for the hour. We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Noam.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Glad to be with you again.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Failed States, what do you mean?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, over the years there have been a series of concepts developed to justify the use of force in international affairs for a long period. It was possible to justify it on the pretext, which usually turned out to have very little substance, that the U.S. was defending itself against the communist menace. By the 1980s, that was wearing pretty thin. The Reagan administration concocted a new category: terrorist states. They declared a war on terror as soon as they entered office in the early 1980s, 1981. ‘We have to defend ourselves from the plague of the modern age, return to barbarism, the evil scourge of terrorism,’ and so on, and particularly state-directed international terrorism.

A few years later -- this is Clinton -- Clinton devised the concept of rogue states. ‘It’s 1994, we have to defend ourselves from rogue states.’ Then, later on came the failed states, which either threaten our security, like Iraq, or require our intervention in order to save them, like Haiti, often devastating them in the process. In each case, the terms have been pretty hard to sustain, because it's been difficult to overlook the fact that under any, even the most conservative characterization of these notions -- let's say U.S. law -- the United States fits fairly well into the category, as has often been recognized. By now, for example, the category -- even in the Clinton years, leading scholars, Samuel Huntington and others, observed that -- in the major journals, Foreign Affairs -- that in most of the world, much of the world, the United States is regarded as the leading rogue state and the greatest threat to their existence.

By now, a couple of years later, Bush years, same journals’ leading specialists don't even report international opinion. They just describe it as a fact that the United States has become a leading rogue state. Surely, it's a terrorist state under its own definition of international terrorism, not only carrying out violent terrorist acts and supporting them, but even radically violating the so-called "Bush Doctrine," that a state that harbors terrorists is a terrorist state. Undoubtedly, the U.S. harbors leading international terrorists, people described by the F.B.I. and the Justice Department as leading terrorists, like Orlando Bosch, now Posada Carriles, not to speak of those who actually implement state terrorism.

And I think the same is true of the category “failed states.” The U.S. increasingly has taken on the characteristics of what we describe as failed states. In the respects that one mentioned, and also, another critical respect, namely the -- what is sometimes called a democratic deficit, that is, a substantial gap between public policy and public opinion. So those suggestions that you just read off, Amy, those are actually not mine. Those are pretty conservative suggestions. They are the opinion of the majority of the American population, in fact, an overwhelming majority. And to propose those suggestions is to simply take democracy seriously. It's interesting that on these examples that you've read and many others, there is an enormous gap between public policy and public opinion. The proposals, the general attitudes of the public, which are pretty well studied, are -- both political parties are, on most of these issues, well to the right of the population.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Professor Chomsky, in the early parts of the book, especially on the issue of the one characteristic of a failed state, which is its increasing failure to protect its own citizens, you lay out a pretty comprehensive look at what the, especially in the Bush years, the war on terrorism has meant in terms of protecting the American people. And you lay out clearly, especially since the war, the invasion of Iraq, that terrorist, major terrorist action and activity around the world has increased substantially. And also, you talk about the dangers of a possible nuclear -- nuclear weapons being used against the United States. Could you expand on that a little bit?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there has been a very serious threat of nuclear war. It's not -- unfortunately, it's not much discussed among the public. But if you look at the literature of strategic analysts and so on, they're extremely concerned. And they describe particularly the Bush administration aggressive militarism as carrying an “appreciable risk of ultimate doom,” to quote one, “apocalypse soon,” to quote Robert McNamara and many others. And there's good reasons for it, I mean, which could explain, and they explain. That's been expanded by the Bush administration consciously, not because they want nuclear war, but it's just not a high priority. So the rapid expansion of offensive U.S. military capacity, including the militarization of space, which is the U.S.'s pursuit alone. The world has been trying very hard to block it. 95% of the expenditures now are from the U.S., and they're expanding.

All of these measures bring about a completely predictable reaction on the part of the likely targets. They don't say, you know, ‘Thank you. Here are our throats. Please cut them.’ They react in the ways that they can. For some, it will mean responding with the threat or maybe use of terror. For others, more powerful ones, it's going to mean sharply increasing their own offensive military capacity. So Russian military expenditures have sharply increased in response to Bush programs. Chinese expansion of offensive military capacity is also beginning to increase for the same reasons. All of that threatens -- raises the already severe threat of even -- of just accidental nuclear war. These systems are on computer-controlled alert. And we know that our own systems have many errors, which are stopped by human intervention. Their systems are far less secure; the Russian case, deteriorated. These moves all sharply enhance the threat of nuclear war. That's serious nuclear war that I'm talking about.

There's also the threat of dirty bombs, small nuclear explosions. Small means not so small, but in comparison with a major attack, which would pretty much exterminate civilized life. The U.S. intelligence community regards the threat of a dirty bomb, say in New York, in the next decade as being probably greater than 50%. And those threats increase as the threat of terror increases.

And Bush administration policies have, again, consciously been carried out in a way, which they know is likely to increase the threat of terror. The most obvious example is the Iraq invasion. That was undertaken with the anticipation that it would be very likely to increase the threat of terror and also nuclear proliferation. And, in fact, that's exactly what happened, according to the judgment of the C.I.A., National Intelligence Council, foreign intelligence agencies, independent specialists. They all point out that, yes, as anticipated, it increased the threat of terror. In fact, it did so in ways well beyond what was anticipated.

To mention just one, we commonly read that there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq. Well, it's not totally accurate. There were means to develop weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and known to be in Iraq. They were under guard by U.N. inspectors, who were dismantling them. When Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest sent in their troops, they neglected to instruct them to guard these sites. The U.N. inspectors were expelled, the sites were left unguarded. The inspectors continued their work by satellite and reported that over a hundred sites had been looted, in fact, systematically looted, not just somebody walking in, but careful looting. That included dangerous biotoxins, means to hide precision equipment to be used to develop nuclear weapons and missiles, means to develop chemical weapons and so on. All of this has disappeared. One hates to imagine where it's disappeared to, but it could end up in New York.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Noam Chomsky, and we're going to come back with him. His new book, just published, is called Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. We'll be back with Professor Chomsky in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Professor Noam Chomsky, upon the release of his new book, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I'm Amy Goodman, here with Juan Gonzalez. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Professor Chomsky, in your book you also talk about how Iraq has become almost an incubator or a university now for advanced training for terrorists, who then are leaving the country there and going around the world, very much as what happened in the 1980s in Afghanistan. Could you talk about that somewhat?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Actually, that's -- actually, these are just quotes from the C.I.A. and other U.S. intelligence agencies and analysts. Yes, they describe Iraq now as a training ground for highly professionalized terrorists skilled in urban contact. They do compare it to Afghanistan, but say that it's much more serious, because of the high level of training and skill. These are almost entirely Iraqis. There's a small number of foreign fighters drawn to Iraq. Estimates are maybe 5% to 10%. And they are, as in the case of Afghanistan, are expected to spread into throughout many parts of the world and to carry out the kinds of terrorism that they're trained in, as a reaction to -- clearly reaction to the invasion. Iraq was, whatever you thought about it, was free from connections to terror prior to the invasion. It's now a major terror center.

It's not as President Bush says, that terrorists are being concentrated in Iraq so that we can kill them. These are terrorists who had no previous record of involvement in terrorism. The foreign fighters who have come in, mostly from Saudi Arabia, have been investigated extensively by Saudi and Israeli and U.S. intelligence, and what they conclude is that they were mobilized by the Iraq war, no involvement in terrorist actions in the past. And undoubtedly, just as expected, the Iraq war has raised an enormous hostility throughout much of the world, and particularly the Muslim world.

It was the most -- probably the most unpopular war in history, and even before it was fought. Virtually no support for it anywhere, except the U.S. and Britain and a couple of other places. And since the war itself was perhaps one of the most incredible military catastrophes in history, has caused utter disaster in Iraq and has -- and all of that has since simply intensified the strong opposition to the war of the kind that you heard from that Indonesian student of a few moments ago. But that's why it spread, and that's a -- it increases the reservoir of potential support for the terrorists, who regard themselves as a vanguard, attempting to elicit support from others, bring others to join with them. And the Bush administration is their leading ally in this. Again, not my words, the words of the leading U.S. specialists on terror, Michael Scheuer in this case. And definitely, that's happened.

And it's not the only case. I mean, in case after case, the Bush administration has simply downgraded the threat of terror. One example is the report of the 9/11 Commission. Here in the United States, the Bush administration didn't want the commission to be formed, tried to block it, but it was finally formed. Bipartisan commission, gave many recommendations. The recommendations, to a large extent, were not carried out. The commission members, including the chair, were appalled by this, set up their own private commission after their own tenure was completed, and continued to report that the measures are simply not being carried out.

There are many other examples. One of the most striking is the Treasury Department has a branch, the Office of Financial Assets Control, which is supposed to monitor suspicious funding transfers around the world. Well, that's a core element of the so-called war on terror. They've given reports to Congress. It turns out that they have a few officials devoted to al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, but about -- I think it was -- six times that many devoted to whether there are any evasions of the totally illegal U.S. embargo against Cuba.

There was an instance of that just a few months ago, when the U.S. infuriated even energy corporations by ordering a Sheraton Hotel in Mexico City to cancel a meeting between Cuban oil specialists and U.S. oil companies, including some big ones, seeking to explore the development of offshore Cuban oil resources. The government ordered -- this OFAC ordered the hotel, the U.S. hotel, to expel the Cubans and terminate the meeting. Mexico wasn't terribly happy about this. It’s a extraordinary arrogance. But it also reveals the hysterical fanaticism of the goal of strangling Cuba.

And we know why. It's a free country. We have records going from way back, and a rich source of them go back to the Kennedy-Johnson administrations. They had to carry out a terrorist war against Cuba, as they did, and try to strangle Cuba economically, because of Cuba's -- what they called Cuba's successful defiance of U.S. policies, going back to the Monroe Doctrine. No Russians, but the Monroe Doctrine, 150 years back at that time. And the goal was, as was put very plainly by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, to make the people of Cuba suffer. They are responsible for the fact that the government is in place. We therefore have to make them suffer and starve, so that they'll throw out the government. It's a policy, which is pretty consistent. It’s being applied right now in Palestine. It was applied under the Iraqi sanctions, plot in Chile, and so on. It’s savage.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Noam Chomsky, his new book, after he wrote Hegemony or Survival, one of scores of books, if not a hundred books that Professor Chomsky has written, his new one is called Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.

You mention Israel, Palestine, and I wanted to ask you about this new study that's come out. A dean at Harvard University and a professor at the University of Chicago are coming under intense criticism for publishing an academic critique of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. The paper charges that the United States has willingly set aside its own security and that of many of its allies, in order to advance the interests of Israel. In addition, the study accuses the pro-Israel lobby, particularly AIPAC, the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, of manipulating the U.S. media, policing academia and silencing critics of Israel by labeling them as anti-Semitic. The study also examines the role played by the pro-Israel neoconservatives in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The authors are the Stephen Walt, a dean at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. They, themselves, are now being accused of anti-Semitism. In Washington, a Democratic congressman, Eliot Engle of New York, described the professors as dishonest so-called intellectuals and anti-Semites. The Harvard professor, Ruth Wisse, called for the paper to be withdrawn. Harvard Law School professor, Alan Dershowitz, described the study as trash that could have been written by neo-Nazi David Duke. The New York Sun reported Harvard has received several calls from pro-Israel donors, expressing concern about the paper, and Harvard has already taken steps to distance itself from the report. Last week, it removed the logo of the Kennedy School of Government from the paper and added a new disclaimer to the study. The report is 81 pages. It was originally published on Harvard's website and an edited version appeared in the London Review of Books.

The controversy comes less than a year after Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz attempted to block the publication of Norman Finkelstein’s book Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. Now, this goes into a lot of issues: the content of the study, what you think of it, the response to it and also the whole critique. In this country, what happens to those who criticize the policies of the state of Israel? Noam Chomsky.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the answer to your last question is well described in Norman Finkelstein's quite outstanding book and also in the record of Dershowitz’s attempts to prevent its publication. Some of the documents were just published in the Journal of Palestine Studies. Finkelstein's book gives an extensive detailed account, the best one we have, of a frightening record of Israeli crimes and abuses, where he relies on the most respectable sources, the major human rights organizations, Israeli human rights organizations and others, and demonstrates, just conclusively, that Alan Dershowitz's defense of these atrocities, based on no evidence at all, is outrageous and grotesque.

Nevertheless, Finkelstein comes under tremendous attack for being anti-Semitic, and so on. Now that's pretty normal. It goes back, I suppose, to the distinguished diplomat, Abba Eban -- it must be thirty years ago -- wrote in an American Jewish journal that “the task of Zionists,” he said, “is to show that all political anti-Zionism” – that means criticism of the policies of the state of Israel – “is either anti-Semitism or Jewish self-hatred.” Well, okay, that excludes all possible criticism, by definition. As examples of neurotic Jewish self-hatred, I should declare an interest. He mentioned two people. I was one; the other was Izzy Stone.

Once you release the torrent of abuse, you don't need arguments and evidence, you can just scream. And Professors Walt and Mearsheimer deserve credit for publishing a study, which they knew was going to elicit the usual streams of abuse and hysteria from supporters of Israeli crimes and violence. However, we should recognize that this is pretty uniform. Try to say a sane and uncontroversial word about any other issue dear to the hearts of the intellectual elite that they've turned into holy writ, you get the same reaction. So – and there's no lobby, which does raise one of a few minor points that raises questions about the validity of the critique.

It's a serious, careful piece of work. It deserves to be read. They deserve credit for writing it. But it still it leaves open the question of how valid the analysis is, and I notice that there's a pretty subtle question involved. Everyone agrees, on all sides, that there are a number of factors that enter into determining U.S. foreign policy. One is strategic and economic interests of the major power centers within the United States. In the case of the Middle East, that means the energy corporations, arms producers, high-tech industry, financial institutions and others. Now, these are not marginal institutions, particularly in the Bush administration. So one question is to what extent does policy reflect their interests. Another question is to what extent is it influenced by domestic lobbies. And there are other factors. But just these two alone, yes, they are – you find them in most cases, and to try to sort out their influence is not so simple. In particular, it's not simple when their interests tend to coincide, and by and large, there's a high degree of conformity. If you look over the record, what's called the national interest, meaning the special interests of those with -- in whose hands power is concentrated, the national interest, in that sense, tends to conform to the interests of the lobbies. So in those cases, it's pretty hard to disentangle them.

If the thesis of the book – the thesis of the book is that the lobbies have overwhelming influence, and the so-called “national interest” is harmed by what they do. If that were the case, it would be, I would think, a very hopeful conclusion. It would mean that U.S. policy could easily be reversed. It would simply be necessary to explain to the major centers of power, like the energy corporations, high-tech industry and arms producers and so on, just explain to them that they've – that their interests are being harmed by this small lobby that screams anti-Semitism and funds congressmen, and so on. Surely those institutions can utterly overwhelm the lobby in political influence, in finance, and so on, so that ought to reverse the policy.

Well, it doesn't happen, and there are a number of reasons for it. For one thing, there's an underlying assumption that the so-called national interest has been harmed by these policies. Well, you know, you really have to demonstrate that. So who's been harmed? Have the energy corporations been harmed by U.S. policy in the Middle East over the last 60 years? I mean, they're making profits beyond the dream of avarice, as the main government investigation of them reported. Even more today – that was a couple years ago. Has the U.S. – the main concern of the U.S. has been to control what the State Department 60 years ago called “a stupendous source of strategic power,” Middle East oil. Yeah, they’ve controlled it. There have been – in fact, the invasion of Iraq was an attempt to intensify that control. It may not do it. It may have the opposite effect, but that's a separate question. It was the intent, clearly.

There have been plenty of barriers. The major barrier is the one that is the usual one throughout the world: independent nationalism. It’s called “radical nationalism,” which was serious. It was symbolized by Nasser, but also Kassem in Iraq, and others. Well, the U.S. did succeed in overcoming that barrier. How? Israel destroyed Nasser. That was a tremendous service to the United States, to U.S. power, that is, to the energy corporations, to Saudi Arabia, to the main centers of power here, and in fact, it's in – that was 1967, and it was after that victory that the U.S.-Israeli relations really solidified, became what's called a “strategic asset.”

It's also then that the lobby gained its force. It's also then, incidentally, that the educated classes, the intellectual political class entered into an astonishing love affair with Israel, after its demonstration of tremendous power against a third-world enemy, and in fact, that's a very critical component of what's called the lobby. Walt and Mearsheimer mention it, but I think it should be emphasized. And they are very influential. They determine, certainly influence, the shaping of news and information in journals, media, scholarship, and so on. My own feeling is they're probably the most influential part of the lobby. Now, we sort of have to ask, what's the difference between the lobby and the power centers of the country?

But the barriers were overcome. Israel has performed many other services to the United States. You can run through the record. It's also performed secondary services. So in the 1980s, particularly, Congress was imposing barriers to the Reagan administration's support for and carrying out major terrorist atrocities in Central America. Israel helped evade congressional restrictions by carrying out training, and so on, itself. The Congress blocked U.S. trade with South Africa. Israel helped evade the embargo to all the – both the racist regimes of Southern Africa, and there have been many other cases. By now, Israel is virtually an offshore U.S. military base and high-tech center in the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, we have to break for stations to identify themselves, but we'll come back. Professor Noam Chomsky is our guest for the hour. His latest book has just been published, and it’s called Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today is Professor Noam Chomsky. His new book is Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. Noam Chomsky, longtime professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, world-renowned linguist and political analyst. I'm Amy Goodman, here with Juan Gonzalez. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Professor Chomsky, in your book you have a fascinating section, where you talk about the historical basis of the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, and also its relationship to empire or to the building of a U.S. empire. And you go back, you mention a historian, John Lewis Gaddis, who the Bush administration loves, because he's actually tried to find the historical rationalization for this use, going back to John Quincy Adams and as Secretary of State in the invasion by General Andrew Jackson of Florida in the Seminole Wars, and how this actually is a record of the use of this idea to continue the expansionist aims of the United States around the world.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah, that's a very interesting case, actually. John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale. And he wrote the one, so far, book-length investigation into the roots of the Bush Doctrine, which he generally approves, the usual qualifications about style and so on. He traces it is back, as you say, to his hero, the great grand strategist, John Quincy Adams, who wrote a series of famous state papers back in 1818, in which he gave post facto justification to Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida. And it's rather interesting.

Gaddis is a good historian. He knows the sources, cites all the right sources. But he doesn't tell you what they say. So what I did in the book is just add what they say, what he omitted. Well, what they describe is a shocking record of atrocities and crimes carried out against what were called runaways Negros and lawless Indians, devastated the Seminoles. There was another major Seminole war later, either exterminated them or drove them into the marshes, completely unprovoked. There were fabricated pretexts. Gaddis talks about the threat of England. There was no threat from England. England didn't do a thing. In fact, even Adams didn't claim that. But it was what Gaddis calls an -- it established what Gaddis calls the thesis that expansion is the best guarantee of security. So you want to be secure, just expand, conquer more. Then you'll be secure.

And he says, yes, that goes right through all American administrations -- he's correct about that -- and is the centerpiece of the Bush Doctrine. So he says the Bush Doctrine isn't all that new. Expansion is the key to security. So we just expand and expand, and then we become more secure. Well, you know, he doesn't mention the obvious precedents that come to mind, so I'll leave them out, but you can think of them. And there's some truth to that, except for what he ignores and, in fact, denies, namely the huge atrocities that are recorded in the various sources, scholarly sources that he cites, which also point out that Adams, by giving this justification for Jackson's war -- he was alone in the administration to do it, but he managed to convince the President -- he established the doctrine of executive wars without congressional authorization, in violation of the Constitution. Adams later recognized that and was sorry for it, and very sorry, but that established it and, yes, that's been consistent ever since then: executive wars without congressional authorization. We know of case after case. It doesn't seem to bother the so-called originalists who talk about original intent.

But that aside, he also -- the scholarship that Gaddis cites but doesn't quote also points out that Adams established other principles that are consistent from then until now, namely massive lying to the public, distortion, evoking hysterical fears, all kinds of deceitful efforts to mobilize the population in support of atrocities. And yes, that continues right up to the present, as well. So there's very interesting historical record. What it shows is almost the opposite of what Gaddis claims and what the Reagan -- the Bush administration -- I think I said Reagan -- the Bush administration likes. And it's right out of the very sources that he refers to, the right sources, the right scholarship. He simply ignores them. But, yes, the record is interesting.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, I wanted to ask you a question. As many people know, you're perhaps one of the most cited sources or analysis in the world. And I thought this was an interesting reference to these citations. This was earlier this month, program, Tim Russert, Meet the Press, questioning the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace.

TIM RUSSERT: Mr. Jaafari said that one of his favorite American writers is Professor Noam Chomsky, someone who has written very, very strongly against the Iraq war and against most of the Bush administration foreign policy. Does that concern you?

GEN. PETER PACE: I hope he has more than one book on his nightstand.

TIM RUSSERT: So it troubles you?

GEN. PETER PACE: I would be concerned if the only access to foreign ideas that the Prime Minister had was that one author. If, in fact, that's one of many, and he's digesting many different opinions, that's probably healthy.

AMY GOODMAN: That's General Peter Pace, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, being questioned by Tim Russert, talking about Jaafari, who at this very moment is struggling to be -- again, to hold on to his position as prime minister of Iraq. Your response, Noam Chomsky?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I, frankly, rather doubt that General Pace recognized my name or knew what he was referring to, but maybe he did. The quote from Tim Russert, if I recall, was that this was a book that was highly critical of the Iraq war. Well, that shouldn't surprise a prime minister of Iraq. After all, according to U.S. polls, the latest ones I've seen reported, Brookings Institution, 87%, 87% of Iraqis want a timetable for withdrawal. That's an astonishing figure. If it really is all Iraqis, as was asserted. That means virtually everyone in Arab Iraq, the areas where the troops are deployed. I, frankly, doubt that you could have found figures like that in Vichy, France, or, you know, Poland under -- when it was a Russian satellite.

What it means essentially is that virtually everyone wants a timetable for withdrawal. So, would it be surprising that a prime minister would read a book that's critical of the war and says the same thing? It's interesting that Bush and Blair, who are constantly preaching about their love of democracy, announce, declare that there will be no timetable for withdrawal. Well, that part probably reflects the contempt for democracy that both of them have continually demonstrated, them and their colleagues, virtually without exception.

But there are deeper reasons, and we ought to think about them. If we're talking about exit strategies from Iraq, we should bear in mind that for the U.S. to leave Iraq without establishing a subordinate client state would be a nightmare for Washington. All you have to do is think of the policies that an independent Iraq would be likely to pursue, if it was mildly democratic. It would almost surely strengthen its already developed relations with Shiite Iran right next door. Any degree of Iraqi autonomy stimulates autonomy pressures across the border in Saudi Arabia, where there's a substantial Shiite population, who have been bitterly repressed by the U.S.-backed tyranny but is now calling for more autonomy. That happens to be where most of Saudi oil is. So, what you can imagine -- I'm sure Washington planners are having nightmares about this -- is a potential -- pardon?

JUAN GONZALEZ: I would like to ask you, in terms of this whole issue of democracy, in your book you talk about the democracy deficit. Obviously, the Bush administration is having all kinds of problems with their -- even their model of democracy around the world, given the election results in the Palestinian territories, the situation now in Iraq, where the President is trying to force out the Prime Minister of the winning coalition there, in Venezuela, even in Iran. Your concept of the democracy deficit, and why this administration is able to hold on in the United States itself?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there are two aspects of that. One is, the democracy deficit internal to the United States, that is, the enormous and growing gap between public opinion and public policy. Second is their so-called democracy-promotion mission elsewhere in the world. The latter is just pure fraud. The only evidence that they're interested in promoting democracy is that they say so. The evidence against it is just overwhelming, including the cases you mentioned and many others. I mean, the very fact that people are even willing to talk about this shows that we're kind of insisting on being North Koreans: if the Dear Leader has spoken, that establishes the truth; it doesn't matter what the facts are. I go into that in some detail in the book.

The democracy deficit at home is another matter. How have -- I mean, they have an extremely narrow hold on political power. Their policies are strongly opposed by most of the population. How do they carry this off? Well, that's been through an intriguing mixture of deceit, lying, fabrication, public relations. There's actually a pretty good study of it by two good political scientists, Hacker and Pearson, who just run through the tactics and how it works. And they have barely managed to hold on to political power and are attempting to use it to dismantle the institutional structure that has been built up over many years with enormous popular support -- the limited benefits system; they’re trying to dismantle Social Security and are actually making progress on that; to the tax cuts, overwhelmingly for the rich, are creating -- are purposely creating a future situation, first of all, a kind of fiscal train wreck in the future, but also a situation in which it will be virtually impossible to carry out the kinds of social policies that the public overwhelmingly supports.

And to manage to carry this off has been an impressive feat of manipulation, deceit, lying, and so on. No time to talk about it here, but actually my book gives a pretty good account. I do discuss it in the book. That's a democratic deficit at home and an extremely serious one. The problems of nuclear war, environmental disaster, those are issues of survival, the top issues and the highest priority for anyone sensible. Third issue is that the U.S. government is enhancing those threats. And a fourth issue is that the U.S. population is opposed, but is excluded from the political system. That's a democratic deficit. It's one we can deal with, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, we're going to have to leave it there for now. But part two of our interview will air next week.

Professor Noam Chomsky's new book, just published, is called Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.

---
source: Information Clearing House

The Israel Lobby?

By Noam Chomsky

03/28/06 "ZNet" -- -- I've received many requests to comment on the article by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (henceforth M-W), published in the London Review of Books, which has been circulating extensively on the internet and has elicited a storm of controversy. A few thoughts on the matter follow.

It was, as noted, published in the London Review of Books, which is far more open to discussion on these issues than US journals -- a matter of relevance (to which I'll return) to the alleged influence of what M-W call "the Lobby." An article in the Jewish journal Forward quotes M as saying that the article was commissioned by a US journal, but rejected, and that "the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful that he and co-author Stephen Walt would never have been able to place their report in a American-based scientific publication." But despite the fact that it appeared in England, the M-W article aroused the anticipated hysterical reaction from the usual supporters of state violence here, from the Wall St Journal to Alan Dershowitz, sometimes in ways that would instantly expose the authors to ridicule if they were not lining up (as usual) with power.

M-W deserve credit for taking a position that is sure to elicit tantrums and fanatical lies and denunciations, but it's worth noting that there is nothing unusual about that. Take any topic that has risen to the level of Holy Writ among "the herd of independent minds" (to borrow Harold Rosenberg's famous description of intellectuals): for example, anything having to do with the Balkan wars, which played a huge role in the extraordinary campaigns of self-adulation that disfigured intellectual discourse towards the end of the millennium, going well beyond even historical precedents, which are ugly enough. Naturally, it is of extraordinary importance to the herd to protect that self-image, much of it based on deceit and fabrication. Therefore, any attempt even to bring up plain (undisputed, surely relevant) facts is either ignored (M-W can't be ignored), or sets off most impressive tantrums, slanders, fabrications and deceit, and the other standard reactions. Very easy to demonstrate, and by no means limited to these cases. Those without experience in critical analysis of conventional doctrine can be very seriously misled by the particular case of the Middle East(ME).

But recognizing that M-W took a courageous stand, which merits praise, we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion. I've reviewed elsewhere what the record (historical and documentary) seems to me to show about the main sources of US ME policy, in books and articles for the past 40 years, and can't try to repeat here. M-W make as good a case as one can, I suppose, for the power of the Lobby, but I don't think it provides any reason to modify what has always seemed to me a more plausible interpretation. Notice incidentally that what is at stake is a rather subtle matter: weighing the impact of several factors which (all agree) interact in determining state policy: in particular, (A) strategic-economic interests of concentrations of domestic power in the tight state-corporate linkage, and (B) the Lobby.

The M-W thesis is that (B) overwhelmingly predominates. To evaluate the thesis, we have to distinguish between two quite different matters, which they tend to conflate: (1) the alleged failures of US ME policy; (2) the role of The Lobby in bringing about these consequences. Insofar as the stands of the Lobby conform to (A), the two factors are very difficult to disentagle. And there is plenty of conformity.

Let's look at (1), and ask the obvious question: for whom has policy been a failure for the past 60 years? The energy corporations? Hardly. They have made "profits beyond the dreams of avarice" (quoting John Blair, who directed the most important government inquiries into the industry, in the '70s), and still do, and the ME is their leading cash cow. Has it been a failure for US grand strategy based on control of what the State Department described 60 years ago as the "stupendous source of strategic power" of ME oil and the immense wealth from this unparalleled "material prize"? Hardly. The US has substantially maintained control -- and the significant reverses, such as the overthrow of the Shah, were not the result of the initiatives of the Lobby. And as noted, the energy corporations prospered. Furthermore, those extraordinary successes had to overcome plenty of barriers: primarily, as elsewhere in the world, what internal documents call "radical nationalism," meaning independent nationalism. As elsewhere in the world, it's been convenient to phrase these concerns in terms of "defense against the USSR," but the pretext usually collapses quickly on inquiry, in the ME as elsewhere. And in fact the claim was conceded to be false, officially, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Bush's National Security Strategy (1990) called for maintaining the forces aimed at the ME, where the serious "threats to our interests... could not be laid at the Kremlin's door" -- now lost as a pretext for pursuing about the same policies as before. And the same was true pretty much throughout the world.

That at once raises another question about the M-W thesis. What were "the Lobbies" that led to pursuing very similar policies throughout the world? Consider the year 1958, a very critical year in world affairs. In 1958, the Eisenhower administration identified the three leading challenges to the US as the ME, North Africa, and Indonesia -- all oil producers, all Islamic. North Africa was taken care of by Algerian (formal) independence. Indonesia and the were taken care of by Suharto's murderous slaughter (1965) and Israel's destruction of Arab secular nationalism (Nasser, 1967). In the ME, that established the close US-Israeli alliance and confirmed the judgment of US intelligence in 1958 that a "logical corollary" of opposition to "radical nationalism" (meaning, secular independent nationalism) is "support for Israel" as the one reliable US base in the region (along with Turkey, which entered into close relations with Israel in the same year). Suharto's coup aroused virtual euphoria, and he remained "our kind of guy" (as the Clinton administration called him) until he could no longer keep control in 1998, through a hideous record that compares well with Saddam Hussein -- who was also "our kind of guy" until he disobeyed orders in 1990. What was the Indonesia Lobby? The Saddam Lobby? And the question generalizes around the world. Unless these questions are faced, the issue (1) cannot be seriously addressed.

When we do investigate (1), we find that US policies in the ME are quite similar to those pursued elsewhere in the world, and have been a remarkable success, in the face of many difficulties: 60 years is a long time for planning success. It's true that Bush II has weakened the US position, not only in the ME, but that's an entirely separate matter.

That leads to (2). As noted, the US-Israeli alliance was firmed up precisely when Israel performed a huge service to the US-Saudis-Energy corporations by smashing secular Arab nationalism, which threatened to divert resources to domestic needs. That's also when the Lobby takes off (apart from the Christian evangelical component, by far the most numerous and arguably the most influential part, but that's mostly the 90s). And it's also when the intellectual-political class began their love affair with Israel, previously of little interest to them. They are a very influential part of the Lobby because of their role in media, scholarship, etc. From that point on it's hard to distinguish "national interest" (in the usual perverse sense of the phrase) from the effects of the Lobby. I've run through the record of Israeli services to the US, to the present, elsewhere, and won't review it again here.

M-W focus on AIPAC and the evangelicals, but they recognize that the Lobby includes most of the political-intellectual class -- at which point the thesis loses much of its content. They also have a highly selective use of evidence (and much of the evidence is assertion). Take, as one example, arms sales to China, which they bring up as undercutting US interests. But they fail to mention that when the US objected, Israel was compelled to back down: under Clinton in 2000, and again in 2005, in this case with the Washington neocon regime going out of its way to humiliate Israel. Without a peep from The Lobby, in either case, though it was a serious blow to Israel. There's a lot more like that. Take the worst crime in Israel's history, its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 with the goal of destroying the secular nationalist PLO and ending its embarrassing calls for political settlement, and imposing a client Maronite regime. The Reagan administration strongly supported the invasion through its worst atrocities, but a few months later (August), when the atrocities were becoming so severe that even NYT Beirut correspondent Thomas Friedman was complaining about them, and they were beginning to harm the US "national interest," Reagan ordered Israel to call off the invasion, then entered to complete the removal of the PLO from Lebanon, an outcome very welcome to both Israel and the US (and consistent with general US opposition to independent nationalism). The outcome was not entirely what the US-Israel wanted, but the relevant observation here is that the Reaganites supported the aggression and atrocities when that stand was conducive to the "national interest," and terminated them when it no longer was (then entering to finish the main job). That's pretty normal.

Another problem that M-W do not address is the role of the energy corporations. They are hardly marginal in US political life -- transparently in the Bush administration, but in fact always. How can they be so impotent in the face of the Lobby? As ME scholar Stephen Zunes has rightly pointed out, "there are far more powerful interests that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does AIPAC [or the Lobby generally], such as the oil companies, the arms industry and other special interests whose lobbying influence and campaign contributions far surpass that of the much-vaunted Zionist lobby and its allied donors to congressional races."

Do the energy corporations fail to understand their interests, or are they part of the Lobby too? By now, what's the distinction between (1) and (2), apart from the margins?

Also to be explained, again, is why US ME policy is so similar to its policies elsewhere -- to which, incidentally, Israel has made important contributions, e.g., in helping the executive branch to evade congressional barriers to carrying out massive terror in Central America, to evade embargoes against South Africa and Rhodesia, and much else. All of which again makes it even more difficult to separate (2) from (1) -- the latter, pretty much uniform, in essentials, throughout the world.

I won't run through the other arguments, but I don't feel that they have much force, on examination.

The thesis M-W propose does however have plenty of appeal. The reason, I think, is that it leaves the US government untouched on its high pinnacle of nobility, "Wilsonian idealism," etc., merely in the grip of an all-powerful force that it cannot escape. It's rather like attributing the crimes of the past 60 years to "exaggerated Cold War illusions," etc. Convenient, but not too convincing. In either case.

---
source: Information Clearing House

The re-declared War on Terror

Amnesty International Annual Lecture hosted by TCD, delivered by Noam Chomsky at Shelbourne Hall, the Royal Dublin Society, January 18, 2006.

By Noam Chomsky

"Terror" is a term that rightly arouses strong emotions and deep concerns. The primary concern should, naturally, be to take measures to alleviate the threat, which has been severe in the past, and will be even more so in the future. To proceed in a serious way, we have to establish some guidelines. Here are a few simple ones:

(1) Facts matter, even if we do not like them.

(2) Elementary moral principles matter, even if they have consequences that we would prefer not to face.

(3) Relative clarity matters. It is pointless to seek a truly precise definition of "terror," or of any other concept outside of the hard sciences and mathematics, often even there. But we should seek enough clarity at least to distinguish terror from two notions that lie uneasily at its borders: aggression and legitimate resistance.

If we accept these guidelines, there are quite constructive ways to deal with the problems of terrorism, which are quite severe. It's commonly claimed that critics of ongoing policies do not present solutions. Check the record, and I think you will find that there is an accurate translation for that charge: "They present solutions, but I don't like them."

Suppose, then, that we accept these simple guidelines. Let's turn to the "War on Terror." Since facts matter, it matters that the War was not declared by George W. Bush on 9/11, but by the Reagan administration 20 years earlier.

They came into office declaring that their foreign policy would confront what the President called "the evil scourge of terrorism," a plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age" (Secretary of State George Shultz). The campaign was directed to a particularly virulent form of the plague: state-directed international terrorism. The main focus was Central America and the Middle East, but it reached to southern Africa and Southeast Asia and beyond.

A second fact is that the war was declared and implemented by pretty much the same people who are conducting the re-declared war on terrorism. The civilian component of the re-declared War on Terror is led by John Negroponte, appointed last year to supervise all counterterror operations. As Ambassador in Honduras, he was the hands-on director of the major operation of the first War on Terror, the contra war against Nicaragua launched mainly from US bases in Honduras. I'll return to some of his tasks. The military component of the re-declared War led by Donald Rumsfeld. During the first phase of the War on Terror, Rumsfeld was Reagan's special representative to the Middle East. There, his main task was to establish close relations with Saddam Hussein so that the US could provide him with large-scale aid, including means to develop WMD, continuing long after the huge atrocities against the Kurds and the end of the war with Iran. The official purpose, not concealed, was Washington's responsibility to aid American exporters and "the strikingly unanimous view" of Washington and its allies Britain and Saudi Arabia that "whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression" -- New York Times Middle East correspondent Alan Cowell, describing Washington's judgment as George Bush I authorized Saddam to crush the Shi'ite rebellion in 1991, which probably would have overthrown the tyrant.

Saddam is at last on trial for his crimes. The first trial, now underway, is for crimes he committed in 1982. 1982 happens to be an important year in US-Iraq relations. It was in 1982 that Reagan removed Iraq from the list of states supporting terror so that aid could flow to his friend in Baghdad. Rumsfeld then visited Baghdad to confirm the arrangements. Judging by reports and commentary, it would be impolite to mention any of these facts, let alone to suggest that some others might be standing alongside Saddam before the bar of justice. Removing Saddam from the list of states supporting terrorism left a gap. It was at once filled by Cuba, perhaps in recognition of the fact that the US terrorist wars against Cuba from 1961 had just peaked, including events that would be on the front pages right now in societies that valued their freedom, to which I'll briefly return. Again, that tells us something about the real elite attitudes towards the plague of the modern age.

Since the first War on Terror was waged by those now carrying out the redeclared war, or their immediate mentors, it follows that anyone seriously interested in the re-declared War on Terror should ask at once how it was carried out in the 1980s. The topic, however, is under a virtual ban. That becomes understandable as soon as we investigate the facts: the first War on Terror quickly became a murderous and brutal terrorist war, in every corner of the world where it reached, leaving traumatized societies

that may never recover. What happened is hardly obscure, but doctrinally unacceptable, therefore protected from inspection. Unearthing the record is an enlightening exercise, with enormous implications for the future.

These are a few of the relevant facts, and they definitely do matter. Let's turn to the second of the guidelines: elementary moral principles. The most elementary is a virtual truism: decent people apply to themselves the same standards that they apply to others, if not more stringent ones. Adherence to this principle of universality would have many useful consequences. For one thing, it would save a lot of trees. The principle would radically reduce published reporting and commentary on social and political affairs. It would virtually eliminate the newly fashionable discipline of Just War theory. And it would wipe the slate almost clean with regard to the War on Terror. The reason is the same in all cases: the principle of universality is rejected, for the most part tacitly, though sometimes explicitly. Those are very sweeping statements. I purposely put them in a stark form to invite you to challenge them, and I hope you do. You will find, I think, that although the statements are somewhat overdrawn--purposely -- they nevertheless are uncomfortably close to accurate, and in fact very fully documented. But try for yourselves and see.

This most elementary of moral truisms is sometimes upheld at least in words. One example, of critical importance today, is the Nuremberg Tribunal. In sentencing Nazi war criminals to death, Justice Robert Jackson, Chief of Counsel for the United States, spoke eloquently, and memorably, on the principle of universality. "If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes," he said, "they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us....We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well."

That is a clear and honorable statement of the principle of universality. But the judgment at Nuremberg itself crucially violated this principle. The Tribunal had to define "war crime" and "crimes against humanity." It crafted these definition very carefully so that crimes are criminal only if they were not committed by the allies. Urban bombing of civilian concentrations was excluded, because the allies carried it out more barbarically than the Nazis. And Nazi war criminals, like Admiral Doenitz, were able to plead successfully that their British and US counterparts had carried out the same practices. The reasoning was outlined by Telford Taylor, a distinguished international lawyer who was Jackson's Chief Counsel for War Crimes. He explained that "to punish the foe--especially the vanquished foe--for conduct in which the enforcing nation has engaged, would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws themselves." That is correct, but the operative definition of "crime" also discredits the laws themselves. Subsequent Tribunals are discredited by the same moral flaw, but the self-exemption of the powerful from international law and elementary moral principle goes far beyond this illustration, and reaches to just about every aspect of the two phases of the War on Terror.

Let's turn to the third background issue: defining "terror" and distinguishing it from aggression and legitimate resistance. I have been writing about terror for 25 years, ever since the Reagan administration declared its War on Terror. I've been using definitions that seem to be doubly appropriate: first, they make sense; and second, they are the official definitions of those waging the war. To take one of these official definitions, terrorism is "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature...through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear," typically targeting civilians. The British government's definition is about the same: "Terrorism is the use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public and is for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause." These definitions seem fairly clear and close to ordinary usage. There also seems to be general agreement that they are appropriate when discussing the terrorism of enemies.

But a problem at once arises. These definitions yield an entirely unacceptable consequence: it follows that the US is a leading terrorist state, dramatically so during the Reaganite war on terror. Merely to take the most uncontroversial case, Reagan's state-directed terrorist war against Nicaragua was condemned by the World Court, backed by two Security Council resolutions (vetoed by the US, with Britain politely abstaining). Another completely clear case is Cuba, where the record by now is voluminous, and not controversial. And there is a long list beyond them.

We may ask, however, whether such crimes as the state-directed attack against Nicaragua are really terrorism, or whether they rise to the level of the much higher crime of aggression. The concept of aggression was defined clearly enough by Justice Jackson at Nuremberg in terms that were basically reiterated in an authoritative General Assembly resolution. An "aggressor," Jackson proposed to the Tribunal, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as "Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State," or "Provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another State, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded State, to take in its own territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection." The first provision unambiguously applies to the US-UK invasion of Iraq. The second, just as clearly, applies to the US war against Nicaragua. However, we might give the current incumbents in Washington and their mentors the benefit of the doubt, considering them guilty only of the lesser crime of international terrorism, on a huge and unprecedented scale.

It may also be recalled the aggression was defined at Nuremberg as "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole"--all the evil in the tortured land of Iraq that flowed from the US-UK invasion, for example, and in Nicaragua too, if the charge is not reduced to international terrorism. And in Lebanon, and all too many other victims who are easily dismissed on grounds of wrong agency--right to the present. A week ago (January 13), a CIA predator drone attacked a village in Pakistan, murdering dozens of civilians, entire families, who just happened to live in a suspected al-Qaeda hideout. Such routine actions elicit little notice, a legacy of the poisoning of the moral culture by centuries of imperial thuggery.

The World Court did not take up the charge of aggression in the Nicaragua case. The reasons are instructive, and of quite considerable contemporary relevance. Nicaragua's case was presented by the distinguished Harvard University law professor Abram Chayes, former legal adviser to the State Department. The Court rejected a large part of his case on the grounds that in accepting World Court jurisdiction in 1946, the US had entered a reservation excluding itself from prosecution under multilateral treaties, including the UN Charter. The Court therefore restricted its deliberations to customary international law and a bilateral US-Nicaragua treaty, so that the more serious charges were excluded. Even on these very narrow grounds, the Court charged Washington with "unlawful use of force"--in lay language, international terrorism--and ordered it to terminate the crimes and pay substantial reparations. The Reaganites reacted by escalating the war, also officially endorsing attacks by their terrorist forces against "soft targets," undefended civilian targets. The terrorist war left the country in ruins, with a death toll equivalent to 2.25 million in US per capita terms, more than the total of all wartime casualties in US history combined. After the shattered country fell back under US control, it declined to further misery. It is now the second poorest country in Latin America after Haiti--and by accident, also second after Haiti in intensity of US intervention in the past century. The standard way to lament these tragedies is to say that Haiti and Nicaragua are "battered by storms of their own making," to quote the Boston Globe, at the liberal extreme of American journalism. Guatemala ranks third both in misery and intervention, more storms of their own making.

In the Western canon, none of this exists. All is excluded not only from general history and commentary, but also quite tellingly from the huge literature on the War on Terror re-declared in 2001, though its relevance can hardly be in doubt.

These considerations have to do with the boundary between terror and aggression. What about the boundary between terror and resistance? One question that arises is the legitimacy of actions to realize "the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of people forcibly deprived of that right..., particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation..." Do such actions fall under terror or resistance? The quoted word are from the most forceful denunciation of the crime of terrorism by the UN General Assembly; in December 1987, taken up under Reaganite pressure. Hence it is obviously an important resolution, even more so because of the near-unanimity of support for it. The resolution passed 153-2 (Honduras alone abstaining). It stated that "nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence," as characterized in the quoted words.
The two countries that voted against the resolution explained their reasons at the UN session. They were based on the paragraph just quoted. The phrase "colonial and racist regimes" was understood to refer to their ally apartheid South Africa, then consummating its massacres in the neighboring countries and continuing its brutal repression within. Evidently, the US and Israel could not condone resistance to the apartheid regime, particularly when it was led by Nelson Mandela's ANC, one of the world's "more notorious terrorist groups," as Washington determined at the same time. Granting legitimacy to resistance against "foreign occupation" was also unacceptable. The phrase was understood to refer to Israel's US-backed military occupation, then in its 20 th year. Evidently, resistance to that occupation could not be condoned either, even though at the time of the resolution it scarcely existed: despite extensive torture, degradation, brutality, robbery of land and resources, and other familiar concomitants of military occupation, Palestinians under occupation still remained "Samidin," those who quietly endured.

Technically, there are no vetoes at the General Assembly. In the real world, a negative US vote is a veto, in fact a double veto: the resolution is not implemented, and is vetoed from reporting and history. It should be added that the voting pattern is quite common at the General Assembly, and also at the Security Council, on a wide range of issues. Ever since the mid-1960s, when the world fell pretty much out of control, the US is far in the lead in Security Council vetoes, Britain second, with no one else even close. It is also of some interest to note that a majority of the American public favors abandonment of the veto, and following the will of the majority even if Washington disapproves, facts virtually unknown in the US, or I suppose elsewhere. That suggests another conservative way to deal with some of the problems of the world: pay attention to public opinion.

Terrorism directed or supported by the most powerful states continues to the present, often in shocking ways. These facts offer one useful suggestion as to how to mitigate the plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age": Stop participating in terror and supporting it. That would certainly contribute to the proclaimed objections. But that suggestion too is off the agenda, for the usual reasons. When it is occasionally voiced, the reaction is reflexive: a tantrum about how those who make this rather conservative proposal are blaming everything on the US.

Even with careful sanitization of discussion, dilemmas constantly arise. One just arose very recently, when Luis Posada Carriles entered the US illegally. Even by the narrow operative definition of "terror," he is clearly one of the most notorious international terrorists, from the 1960s to the present. Venezuela requested that he be extradited to face charges for the bombing of a Cubana airliner in Venezuela, killing 73 people. The charges are admittedly credible, but there is a real difficulty. After Posada miraculously escaped from a Venezuelan prison, the liberal Boston Globe reports, he "was hired by US covert operatives to direct the resupply operation for the Nicaraguan contras from El Salvador"--that is, to play a prominent role in terrorist atrocities that are incomparably worse than blowing up the Cubana airliner. Hence the dilemma. To quote the press: "Extraditing him for trial could send a worrisome signal to covert foreign agents that they cannot count on unconditional protection from the US government, and it could expose the CIA to embarrassing public disclosures from a former operative." Evidently, a difficult problem.

The Posada dilemma was, thankfully, resolved by the courts, which rejected Venezuela's appeal for his extradition, in violation of the US-Venezuela extradition treaty. A day later, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, urged Europe to speed US demands for extradition: "We are always looking to see how we can make the extradition process go faster," he said. "We think we owe it to the victims of terrorism to see to it that justice is done efficiently and effectively." At the Ibero-American Summit shortly after, the leaders of Spain and the Latin American countries "backed Venezuela's efforts to have [Posada] extradited from the United States to face trial" for the Cubana airliner bombing, and again condemned the "blockade" of Cuba by the US, endorsing regular near-unanimous UN resolutions, the most recent with a vote of 179-4 (US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau). After strong protests from the US Embassy, the Summit withdrew the call for extradition, but refused to yield on the demand for an end to the economic warfare. Posada is therefore free to join his colleague Orlando Bosch in Miami. Bosch is implicated in dozens of terrorist crimes, including the Cubana airliner bombing, many on US soil. The FBI and Justice Department wanted him deported as a threat to national security, but Bush I took care of that by granting him a presidential pardon.

There are other such examples. We might want to bear them in mind when we read Bush II's impassioned pronouncement that "the United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support them, because they're equally as guilty of murder," and "the civilized world must hold those regimes to account." This was proclaimed to great applause at the National Endowment for Democracy, a few days after Venezuela's extradition request had been refused. Bush's remarks pose another dilemma. Either the US is part of the civilized world, and must send the US air force to bomb Washington; or it declares itself to be outside the civilized world. The logic is impeccable, but fortunately, logic has been dispatched as deep into the memory hole as moral truisms.

The Bush doctrine that "those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves" was promulgated when the Taliban asked for evidence before handing over people the US suspected of terrorism--without credible evidence, as the FBI conceded many months later. The doctrine is taken very seriously. Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison writes that it has "already become a de facto rule of international relations," revoking "the sovereignty of states that provide sanctuary to terrorists." Some states, that is, thanks to the rejection of the principle of universality.

One might also have thought that a dilemma would have arisen when John Negroponte was appointed to the position of head of counter-terrorism. As Ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, he was running the world's largest CIA station, not because of the grand role of Honduras in world affairs, but because Honduras was the primary US base for the international terrorist war for which Washington was condemned by the ICJ and Security Council (absent the veto). Known in Honduras as "the Proconsul," Negroponte had the task of ensuring that the international terrorist operations, which reached remarkable levels of savagery, would proceed efficiently. His responsibilities in managing the war on the scene took a new turn after official funding was barred in 1983, and he had to implement White House orders to bribe and pressure senior Honduran Generals to step up their support for the terrorist war using funds from other sources, later funds illegally transferred from US arms sales to Iran. The most vicious of the Honduran killers and torturers was General Alvarez Martínez, the chief of the Honduran armed forces at the time, who had informed the US that "he intended to use the Argentine method of eliminating suspected subversives." Negroponte regularly denied gruesome state crimes in Honduras to ensure that military aid would continue to flow for international terrorism. Knowing all about Alvarez, the Reagan administration awarded him the Legion of Merit medal for "encouraging the success of democratic processes in Honduras." The elite unit responsible for the worst crimes in Honduras was Battalion 3-16, organized and trained by Washington and its Argentine neo-Nazi associates. Honduran military officers in charge of the Battalion were on the CIA payroll. When the government of Honduras finally tried to deal with these crimes and bring the perpetrators to justice, the Reagan-Bush administration refused to allow Negroponte to testify, as the courts requested.

There was virtually no reaction to the appointment of a leading international terrorist to the top counter-terrorism position in the world. Nor to the fact that at the very same time, the heroine of the popular struggle that overthrew the vicious Somoza regime in Nicaragua, Dora María Téllez, was denied a visa to teach at the Harvard Divinity School, as a terrorist. Her crime was to have helped overthrow a US-backed tyrant and mass murderer. Orwell would not have known whether to laugh or weep. So far I have been keeping to the kinds of topics that would be addressed in a discussion of the War on Terror that is not deformed to accord with the iron laws of doctrine. And this barely scratches the surface. But let us now adopt prevailing Western hypocrisy and cynicism, and keep to the operative definition of "terror." It is the same as the official definitions, but with the Nuremberg exception: admissible terror is your terror; ours is exempt..
Even with this constraint, terror is a major problem, undoubtedly. And to mitigate or terminate the threat should be a high priority. Regrettably, it is not. That is all too easy to demonstrate, and the consequences are likely to be severe.

The invasion of Iraq is perhaps the most glaring example of the low priority assigned by US-UK leaders to the threat of terror. Washington planners had been advised, even by their own intelligence agencies, that the invasion was likely to increase the risk of terror. And it did, as their own intelligence agencies confirm. The National Intelligence Council reported a year ago that "Iraq and other possible conflicts in the future could provide recruitment, training grounds, technical skills and language proficiency for a new class of terrorists who are `professionalized' and for whom political violence becomes an end in itself," spreading elsewhere to defend Muslim lands from attack by "infidel invaders" in a globalized network of "diffuse Islamic extremist groups," with Iraq now replacing the Afghan training grounds for this more extensive network, as a result of the invasion. A high-level government review of the "war on terror" two years after the invasion `focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple years. Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called "the bleed out" of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe. "It's a new piece of a new equation," a former senior Bush administration official said. "If you don't know who they are in Iraq, how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or London?"' ( Washington Post).

Last May the CIA reported that "Iraq has become a magnet for Islamic militants similar to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan two decades ago and Bosnia in the 1990s," according to US officials quoted in the New York Times. The CIA concluded that "Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat." Shortly after the London bombing last July, Chatham House released a study concluding that "there is `no doubt' that the invasion of Iraq has `given a boost to the al-Qaida network' in propaganda, recruitment and fundraising,` while providing an ideal training area for terrorists"; and that "the UK is at particular risk because it is the closest ally of the United States" and is "a pillion passenger" of American policy" in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is extensive supporting evidence to show that -- as anticipated -- the invasion increased the risk of terror and nuclear proliferation. None of this shows that planners prefer these consequences, of course. Rather, they are not of much concern in comparison with much higher priorities that are obscure only to those who prefer what human rights researchers sometimes call "intentional ignorance."

Once again we find, very easily, a way to reduce the threat of terror: stop acting in ways that--predictably--enhance the threat. Though enhancement of the threat of terror and proliferation was anticipated, the invasion did so even in unanticipated ways. It is common to say that no WMD were found in Iraq after exhaustive search. That is not quite accurate, however. There were stores of WMD in Iraq: namely, those produced in the 1980s, thanks to aid provided by the US and Britain, along with others. These sites had been secured by UN inspectors, who were dismantling the weapons. But the inspectors were dismissed by the invaders and the sites were left unguarded. The inspectors nevertheless continued to carry out their work with satellite imagery. They discovered sophisticated massive looting of these installations in over 100 sites, including equipment for producing solid and liquid propellant missiles, biotoxins and other materials usable for chemical and biological weapons, and high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear and chemical weapons and missiles. A Jordanian journalist was informed by officials in charge of the Jordanian-Iraqi border that after US-UK forces took over, radioactive materials were detected in one of every eight trucks crossing to Jordan, destination unknown.

The ironies are almost inexpressible. The official justification for the US-UK invasion was to prevent the use of WMD that did not exist. The invasion provided the terrorists who had been mobilized by the US and its allies with the means to develop WMD -- namely, equipment they had provided to Saddam, caring nothing about the terrible crimes they later invoked to whip up support for the invasion. It is as if Iran were now making nuclear weapons using fissionable materials provided by the US to Iran under the Shah -- which may indeed be happening. Programs to recover and secure such materials were having considerable success in the '90s, but like the war on terror, these programs fell victim to Bush administration priorities as they dedicated their energy and resources to invading Iraq.

Elsewhere in the Mideast too terror is regarded as secondary to ensuring that the region is under control. Another illustration is Bush's imposition of new sanctions on Syria in May 2004, implementing the Syria Accountability Act passed by Congress a few months earlier. Syria is on the official list of states sponsoring terrorism, despite Washington's acknowledgment that Syria has not been implicated in terrorist acts for many years and has been highly cooperative in providing important intelligence to Washington on al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups. The gravity of Washington's concern over Syria's links to terror was revealed by President Clinton when he offered to remove Syria from the list of states sponsoring terror if it agreed to US-Israeli peace terms. When Syria insisted on recovering its conquered territory, it remained on the list. Implementation of the Syria Accountability Act deprived the US of an important source of information about radical Islamist terrorism in order to achieve the higher goal of establishing in Syria a regime that will accept US-Israeli demands.

Turning to another domain, the Treasury Department has a bureau (OFAC, Office of Foreign Assets Control) that is assigned the task of investigating suspicious financial transfers, a central component of the "war on terror." In April 2004, OFAC informed Congress that of its 120 employees, four were assigned to tracking the finances of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while almost two dozen were occupied with enforcing the embargo against Cuba. From 1990 to 2003 there were 93 terrorism-related investigations with $9000 in fines; and 11,000 Cuba-related investigations with $8 million in fines. The revelations received the silent treatment in the US media, elsewhere as well to my knowledge.

Why should the Treasury Department devote vastly more energy to strangling Cuba than to the "war on terror"? The basic reasons were explained in internal documents of the Kennedy-Johnson years. State Department planners warned that the "very existence" of the Castro regime is "successful defiance" of US policies going back 150 years, to the Monroe Doctrine; not Russians, but intolerable defiance of the master of the hemisphere, much like Iran's crime of successful defiance in 1979, or Syria's rejection of Clinton's demands. Punishment of the population was regarded as fully legitimate, we learn from internal documents. "The Cuban people [are] responsible for the regime," the Eisenhower State Department decided, so that the US has the right to cause them to suffer by economic strangulation, later escalated to direct terror by Kennedy. Eisenhower and Kennedy agreed that the embargo would hasten Fidel Castro's departure as a result of the "rising discomfort among hungry Cubans." The basic thinking was summarized by State Department official Lester Mallory: Castro would be removed "through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship so every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba in order to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government." When Cuba was in dire straits after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington intensified the punishment of the people of Cuba, at the initiative of liberal Democrats. The author of the 1992 measures to tighten the blockade proclaimed that "my objective is to wreak havoc in Cuba" (Representative Robert Torricelli). All of this continues until the present moment.

The Kennedy administration was also deeply concerned about the threat of Cuban successful development, which might be a model for others. But even apart from these standard concerns, successful defiance in itself is intolerable, ranked far higher as a priority than combating terror. These are just further illustrations of principles that are well-established, internally rational, clear enough to the victims, but scarcely perceptible in the intellectual world of the agents.

If reducing the threat of terror were a high priority for Washington or London, as it certainly should be, there would be ways to proceed--even apart from the unmentionable idea of withdrawing participation. The first step, plainly, is to try to understand its roots. With regard to Islamic terror, there is a broad consensus among intelligence agencies and researchers. They identify two categories: the jihadis, who regard themselves as a vanguard, and their audience, which may reject terror but nevertheless regard their cause as just. A serious counter-terror campaign would therefore begin by considering the grievances , and where appropriate, addressing them, as should be done with or without the threat of terror. There is broad agreement among specialists that al-Qaeda-style terror "is today less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries" (Robert Pape, who has done the major research on suicide bombers). Serious analysts have pointed out that bin Laden's words and deeds correlate closely. The jihadis organized by the Reagan administration and its allies ended their Afghan-based terrorism inside Russia after the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan, though they continued it from occupied Muslim Chechnya, the scene of horrifying Russian crimes back to the 19 th century. Osama turned against the US in 1991 because he took it to be occupying the holiest Arab land; that was later acknowledged by the Pentagon as a reason for shifting US bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq. Additionally, he was angered by the rejection of his effort to join the attack against Saddam.

In the most extensive scholarly inquiry into the jihadi phenomenon, Fawaz Gerges concludes that after 9/11, "the dominant response to Al Qaeda in the Muslim world was very hostile," specifically among the jihadis, who regarded it as a dangerous extremist fringe. Instead of recognizing that opposition to Al Qaeda offered Washington "the most effective way to drive a nail into its coffin" by finding "intelligent means to nourish and support the internal forces that were opposed to militant ideologies like the bin Laden network," he writes, the Bush administration did exactly what bin Laden hoped it would do: resort to violence, particularly in the invasion of Iraq. Al-Azhar in Egypt, the oldest institution of religious higher learning in the Islamic world, issued a fatwa, which gained strong support, advising "all Muslims in the world to make jihad against invading American forces" in a war that Bush had declared against Islam. A leading religious figure at al-Azhar, who had been "one of the first Muslim scholars to condemn Al Qaeda [and was] often criticized by ultraconservative clerics as a pro-Western reformer, ruled that efforts to stop the American invasion [of Iraq] are a `binding Islamic duty'." Investigations by Israeli and Saudi intelligence, supported by US strategic studies institutes, conclude that foreign fighters in Iraq, some 5-10% of the insurgents, were mobilized by the invasion, and had no previous record of association with terrorist groups. The achievements of Bush administration planners in inspiring Islamic radicalism and terror, and joining Osama in creating a "clash of civilizations," are quite impressive.

The senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden from 1996, Michael Scheuer, writes that "bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world." Osama's concern "is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world," Scheuer writes: "He is a practical warrior, not an apocalyptic terrorist in search of Armageddon." As Osama constantly repeats, "Al Qaeda supports no Islamic insurgency that seeks to conquer new lands." Preferring comforting illusions, Washington ignores "the ideological power, lethality, and growth potential of the threat personified by Osama bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been given by the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq, [which is] icing on the cake for al Qaeda." "U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, [Scheuer adds,] it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable ally."

The grievances are very real. A Pentagon advisory Panel concluded a year ago that "Muslims do not `hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our policies," adding that "when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy." The conclusions go back many years. In 1958, President Eisenhower puzzled about "the campaign of hatred against us" in the Arab world, "not by the governments but by the people," who are "on Nasser's side," supporting independent secular nationalism. The reasons for the "campaign of hatred" were outlined by the National Security Council: "In the eyes of the majority of Arabs the United States appears to be opposed to the realization of the goals of Arab nationalism. They believe that the United States is seeking to protect its interest in Near East oil by supporting the status quo and opposing political or economic progress." Furthermore, the perception is understandable: "our economic and cultural interests in the area have led not unnaturally to close U.S. relations with elements in the Arab world whose primary interest lies in the maintenance of relations with the West and the status quo in their countries," blocking democracy and development.

Much the same was found by the Wall Street Journal when it surveyed the opinions of "moneyed Muslims" immediately after 9/11: bankers, professionals, businessmen, committed to official "Western values" and embedded in the neoliberal globalization project. They too were dismayed by Washington's support for harsh authoritarian states and the barriers it erects against development and democracy by "propping up oppressive regimes." They had new grievances, however, beyond those reported by the NSC in 1958: Washington's sanctions regime in Iraq and support for Israel's military occupation and takeover of the territories. There was no survey of the great mass of poor and suffering people, but it is likely that their sentiments are more intense, coupled with bitter resentment of the Western-oriented elites and corrupt and brutal rulers backed by Western power who ensure that the enormous wealth of the region flows to the West, apart from enriching themselves. The Iraq invasion only intensified these feelings further, much as anticipated.

There are ways to deal constructively with the threat of terror, though not those preferred by "bin Laden's indispensable ally," or those who try to avoid the real world by striking heroic poses about Islamo-fascism, or who simply claim that no proposals are made when there are quite straightforward proposals that they do not like. The constructive ways have to begin with an honest look in the mirror, never an easy task, always a necessary one.

---

source: Information Clearing House