[Peace-discuss] Chomsky on 9-11 Commission, etc.

[C. G. Estabrook]

The whole front-page controversy is, in my opinion, not only diversionary
but a real tribute to the success of indoctrination. There is a simple
point that seems obvious to Iraqis, but is unmentionable here in the
mainstream: the conquest of Iraq, if successful, is a tremendous
achievement for US power.

As pretext after pretext for the war has collapsed, commentators have had
to scurry to take the next one seriously. The latest, after the collapse
of all others, is that the US goal was to establish democracy in Iraq,
indeed the whole Middle East. The assumption is taken for granted in news
reporting, and accepted even by the harshest critics, who laud the noble
vision but think it is beyond our means, etc. Only Iraqis seem to reject
it; in recent polls, 1% of people in Baghdad think the US invaded to
defend democracy, 5% to help Iraqis, while most of the rest assume that
the goal was to take control of Iraq's resources and to reorganize the
region for US power interests -- an option that is virtually inexpressible
here, though it sounds pretty simple and obvious.

Surely Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, etc., understand the significance of obtaining
the first secure military base in a dependable client state at the heart
of the world's main energy reserves, a tremendous lever of world control.
By any rational calculation, within their framework, that vastly outweighs
the possibility that thousands of Americans might be killed by terror -- a
prospect that has clearly been understood since 1993. We know perfectly
well from other evidence that their priorities are ranked this way: the
invasion of Iraq, for example, was expected to increase the threat of
terror, and did. Therefore, it is only natural that they should have
downgraded terror in favor of invading Iraq, from the start, and that
Wolfowitz and the rest should have hounded the CIA to provide them with
some shred of evidence -- WMD, connections with terror, whatever -- to use
as a pretext for the real goal. The revelations of Clarke, the memos,
etc., tell us virtually nothing that was not clear enough before. The
hullabaloo about them derives primarily from our inability to say, even to
think, what seems obvious to Iraqis -- for good reason.

Seems to me worth thinking about all of this rather carefully.

Posted by Noam Chomsky at April 13, 2004 11:04 AM