[Peace-discuss] New Noam

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Interview with Noam Chomsky
	by Noam Chomsky and David McNeill
	January 31, 2005


Jan. 4, 2005 at his office in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
Cambridge, MA. Transcript lightly edited by Noam Chomsky for clarity.



        David McNeill: Can you give me your views on the current war in
Iraq? As you know, many critics of the war are now saying the invasion was
a historic mistake, on a par with the US invasion of Vietnam.

         

        Noam Chomsky: Well, I don't think that Vietnam was a mistake; I
think it was a success. This is somewhere where I disagree with just about
everyone, including the left, right, friends and so on.

         

        To determine whether it was a failure you have to first look at
what the goals were. In the case of Indo-china, the US is a very free
country; we have an incomparably rich documentary record of internal
planning, much richer than any other country that I know of. So we can
discover what the goals were. In fact it is clear by around 1970,
certainly by the time the Pentagon Papers came out, the primary concern
was the one that shows up in virtually all intervention: Guatemala,
Indonesia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, just about everywhere you look at. The
concern is independent nationalism which is unacceptable in itself because
it extricates some part of the world that the US wants to dominate. And it
has an extra danger if it is likely to be successful in terms that are
likely to be meaningful to others who are suffering from the same
conditions.

         

        So in the former colonial world, the Third World and the south,
the problem was what planners called the rotten apple that might spoil the
barrel or a virus that might infect others. The virus is independent
nationalism that seems as though it may be successful in terms that are
meaningful to others that are suffering similar problems. That's a theme
that goes through the entire documentary record and it was a concern in
Vietnam. So the US, during the late 1940s, hadn't really decided whether
to support the French in their re-conquest of the former colony or to take
the path that they did in Indonesia in 1948 and support the independence
movement against the Dutch. But the issue was: suppose Vietnam turns out
to be an independence movement that is out of control. They knew it was
not run by the Russians and the Chinese: that was for public show. It was
clearly an independent nationalist movement which could turn out to be
successful. So in the 1950s they became increasingly concerned that North
Vietnam was developing in ways that could be meaningful for others in the
region. A fully independent Vietnam could truly dominate Indochina, which
could become an independent nationalist force, a rotten apple which would
affect others: Thailand, Malaya, which was a big problem at the time,
possibly Indonesia. They were deeply concerned about Indonesian
nationalism under Sukarno, which was going off on its own independent
course and was a pillar of the non-aligned movement. If this infection of
independent nationalism spread the concern was it might ultimately lead to
Japan -- the "superdomino," as Asia historian John Dower called it. Not
that Japan would be affected by it but that Japan would be induced to, as
they put it, accommodate to independent Asian nationalism in SE Asia,
maybe spreading from Vietnam, Indonesia, China, which was by then a huge
rotten apple. And if Japan were to accommodate to Asian independent
nationalism and offer itself as the technological and commercial and
financial and industrial center it would effectively have won the Second
World War. The Second World War was fought in the Pacific phase to prevent
Japan from establishing a new order in Asia in which it would be the
center. And it would be an independent force in world affairs. Well in the
1950s the US was not prepared to lose the Second World War and so it took
a nuanced position. It first supported Sukarno then quickly turned against
him. In 1958, US President [Dwight] Eisenhower was supporting the break up
of Indonesia. It quickly in 1950 decided to support the French in Vietnam.
And it just goes on from there. You can go through the steps, but
effectively this is what happened.

         

        By around 1960 the US recognized that it could not maintain a
client state in Vietnam. The client state, which had already killed maybe
60,000 people, had engendered resistance which it could not control. So in
1962 Kennedy simply invaded the country outright. That's when US bombing
started, chemical warfare, attempts to drive people into concentration
camps and so on, and from then on it just escalated. By 1967 South Vietnam
was practically destroyed. Bernard Fall, who is a very respected and
rather hawkish military analyst and Vietnam specialist, was writing by
1967 that he wondered whether Vietnam could survive as a historic and
cultural entity under the assault of the biggest military machine of all
time. There was very little protest at that time. The US and England and
the rest were just content to see Vietnam destroyed. That was much worse
than anything happening in Iraq. It looked at that point as if they would
conquer Vietnam. The Tet Offensive [a major national offensive by anti-US
Vietnamese forces in early 1968] made it clear it was going to be a long
war. At that point the business world turned against the war and decided
this is just not worth it. They said we have already achieved the main
objectives and Vietnam is not going to undergo successful independent
development. It will be lucky if it survives. So it is pointless; why
waste the money on it. The main goal had been achieved by the early
seventies.

         

        You start reading in the Far Eastern Economic Review that this was
a pointless enterprise, you guys have basically won so just go home and
quit. Why ruin your economy, spoil your situation in the world scene and
so on. And they assumed that now that it is destroyed it will sooner or
later be absorbed into our system, which is in fact what happened. Well
that's a partial victory not a defeat. The defeat was that they didn't
achieve their maximal goal which was to turn all of Indochina into
something like Guatemala or the Philippines, and that they didn't achieve,
but they did achieve their main goal.

         

        Now Iraq is nothing like that. There's no point in destroying
Iraq. Iraq is worth owning, unlike Vietnam. I mean Eisenhower did contrive
stories about the rubber and the tin and so forth but that was mostly for
propaganda purposes. Vietnamese resources were not of that much
significance. Iraq is totally different. It is the last corner of the
world in which there are massive petroleum resources pretty much
unexplored, maybe the largest in the world or close to it. Now they are
very easy to gain access to. The profits from that must flow primarily to
the right pockets, that is, US and secondarily UK energy corporations. And
controlling that resource puts the US in a very powerful position, even
more powerful than today, to exert influence over the world.

         

        I mean, serious planners are well aware of this. [Former National
Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew] Brzezinski
recently pointed out that victory and control in Iraq would give the US
what he called critical leverage over Asian and European economies, so the
US will have its hand on the spigot. I mean it already does to a
substantial extent but this will be much greater. In fact, back in the
1940s the Middle East was described as a stupendous source of strategic
power, the most strategically important area in the world, and the US
remained an oil exporter into the 1970s but still pursued the same
policies. You have got to control that massive resource, it is a source of
world control. If the US or UK were to shift to renewable energy it would
still stick to the same policies. It doesn't really need...I mean it does
use the oil but it has other sources and the oil goes on the market anyway
so it doesn't matter. But control over it does matter. And the profit from
it also matters, and having bases there that allow you to organize the
region in your own interests, of course that matters. So this is nothing
like Vietnam. It is totally different. In Vietnam the US basically won its
major goals.

         

        What about Iraq? Well I must say it is a very surprising result
what has happened. It should have been one of the easier military
occupations in history. First of all I thought the war itself would be
over in two days and then that the occupation would immediately succeed.

         

        Why?

         

        Well, first of all the country was destroyed; it was known to be
the weakest country in the region; the US never would have invaded
otherwise. That's why nobody feared it outside the United States. The
people who most despised Saddam Hussein like Iran and Kuwait weren't
afraid of him. They knew it is the weakest country in the region, held
together with scotch tape. The sanctions had killed hundreds of thousands
of people and compelled the people to rely on Saddam for survival
otherwise they probably would have overthrown him. He probably would have
gone the same way as [former Romanian dictator Nicolae] Ceausescu,
Suharto, [former Congo dictator Sese Seki] Mobutu and a whole series of
other gangsters, many quite comparable to him.

         

        But in this case, as [former UN humanitarian coordinators for
Iraq] Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck kept pointing out, the
population is compelled to rely on him for survival so he is strengthened,
the population is devastated, the country has no military force. I mean
the country is obviously going to fall apart as soon as you push it. So it
looked like a fairly easy invasion and then the invasion gets rid of two
vicious regimes: Saddam Hussein and the sanctions which were destroying
the country. I mean, how could it fail? And any resistance is going to
have no outside support, a trickle but nothing significant. And the US has
such enormous resources it should be able to easily reconstruct the
destruction of the last 15 years or so. Iraq had been a very advanced
society by Third World standards prior to the first Gulf war. I mean it
looked as if it should maybe have been one of the easiest military
occupations history, but in fact it is proving harder than the German
occupation of Europe in the Second World War. I mean the Nazis didn't have
this much trouble in Europe. They didn't run the occupied countries. They
were run by others. Vichy France was run by the French, the political
structure was French, the political and administrative structure was
French, the security forces were French. It was the same right throughout
occupied Europe. The Germans were in the background if anything gets out
of control. The partisans were significant but the partisans would have
been completely crushed if they hadn't had outside support. It was the
same with the Russians in Eastern Europe. The Russians had very few
problems running Eastern Europe. They ran it with local political
authority, local bureaucrats, local security forces. Occasionally they had
to move in, in Berlin, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, but not very often. And
there were again hostile forces surrounding them. In this case there is
nothing, no opposition. Every possible reason for it to succeed, but
somehow they have managed to turn it into an unbelievable catastrophe.
[London Independent Middle-east correspondent] Bob Fisk has been
describing it all along. About a year ago I happened to meet a friend who
I can't identity but who is a high official in one of the major relief
organizations. He has experience all over the world and has worked in the
most horrible places. His description of Iraq was that he had simply never
seen such a combination of arrogance, ignorance and incompetence. They
somehow succeeded in creating an opposition, one which is spreading. Now
at first the US intended to run it like a pure colony. I mean the Bremer
laws [named after former US Viceroy in Iraq Paul Bremer] that were passed
apart from being illegal were just grotesque. I mean they opened up the
whole economy to foreign takeover. It was a joke: Iraqi businesses would
not have been able to survive. Nothing. Iraq has a long history of
militancy and labor organization but the US forces just destroyed the
unions; smashed the offices, arrested the leaders, blacked them out. They
were not even going to allow the pretence of political purposes. But they
have been compelled by Iraqi resistance, and here I don't mean the people
throwing bombs. I mean the people for whom Sistani [Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, Iraq's most powerful Shiite Muslim cleric] is kind of a symbol
and who simply refused to accept the demands of the occupation
authorities. They've been compelled step by step to back off and to allow
some kinds of elections which they certainly didn't want and to back away
from the most extreme measures.

         

        I don't see any possibility of Britain and the US allowing a
sovereign independent Iraq, that's almost inconceivable. If you think what
its policies would be likely to be. But there has been an astonishing
failure to achieve what was pretty clearly the original war aim: to make
sure that Iraqis don't rule Iraq. If they'd wanted Iraqis to rule Iraq
they would not have supported [former Iraqi dictator] Saddam Hussein when
he crushed the Shiite rebellion in 1991 and they would not have imposed
the kinds of sanctions that made it impossible to send him the same way as
other tyrants. But it looks as if that goal might not be attainable,
amazingly. I don't think it is obvious any more. The constellation of
forces is such that it should have been easy. But I still find it hard to
imagine that the US cannot crush the armed resistance, which has limited
internal support and almost no external support. It takes real genius to
be incapable of crushing such weak opposition.

         

        It is difficult though to defeat these kinds of guerrilla
struggles though, isn't it, as the UK has found in NI [Northern Ireland]?

         

        Well, first of all the IRA was being supported from abroad, right
here in Boston for example. Churches in New England were collecting money
for the IRA and the FBI didn't interfere with them. They weren't doing
what they demanded Saudi Arabia do. And the Irish population outside
Ireland is far greater than inside Ireland so they had plenty of
sympathetic supporters. I mean nobody was supporting blowing up trains and
killing people but there was a reservoir of support in NI itself and
furthermore it wasn't that hard to stop the terror. I mean, Britain did
have NI under control and as soon as Britain had the intelligence to pay
attention to the grievances, instead of just responding with more
violence, there was real progress. NI is not heaven today but West Belfast
is not the place it was 10 years ago. The immediate grievances could be
alleviated. My guess is the MIT electrical engineering department could
have had the energy system running in Iraq by now. It's hard to imagine
that degree of incompetence and failure and it is partly because of the
way they are treating people. They have been treating people in such a way
that engenders resistance and hatred and fear. But I still find it hard to
imagine that they can't crush guerrilla-style resistance. Whether they
will be able to impose the kind of rule they want is not so clear. Iraqis
have been very steadfast in refusing to accept external domination. It is
not unfamiliar to them. Britain granted them nominal independence and what
was called an independent government with a nice looking constitution and
so on, but Britain ruled behind the scenes. It was no big secret. And
certainly Iraqis who are familiar with that don't want to relive that
experience. Whether the US can impose it or not, I don't know. On the
other hand it is very hard to imagine that the US would allow an
independent, sovereign Iraq. I mean, just ask what its policies would be
like. It will have a Shiite majority. Probably as a first step it will try
to reconstitute relations with Iran. It's not that they are pro-
[Ayatullah Ruhollah] Khomeini, they'll want to be independent. But it's a
natural relationship and in fact even under Saddam they were beginning to
restore relations with Iran. It is entirely possible that an independent
Iraq under Shiite leadership would be a virus in the sense of US planners.
It might instigate some pressures for autonomy in the largely Shiite
regions of Saudi Arabia which happens to be where most of the oil is,
right on the border. You can project not too far in the future a possible
Shiite-dominated region including Iran, Iraq, oil-producing regions of
Saudi Arabia which really would monopolize the main sources of the world's
oil. Is the US going to permit that? I mean it is out of the question.
Furthermore, an independent Iraq would try to restore its position as a
great, perhaps leading power in the Arab world, which is the position you
would expect it to maintain as it had that position far back in history,
going back to the bible. So it will probably try to restore that, which
means it will try to rearm and confront the regional enemy, which is
Israel; virtually an offshore US military base by now. It may well develop
WMD to counter Israel's. It is just inconceivable that the US and the UK
will permit any of this. Talk about a sovereign, independent, democratic
Iraq is a poor joke. The US has already been forced to concede some of the
formal mechanisms of democracy which is a good thing, but to concede true
democracy and sovereign rights is virtually inconceivable. The US has
never allowed that in any country in its own area of domination. Look at
Cuba for example, Nicaragua, Haiti, take your choice. As a country moves
toward some sort of sovereignty it gets crushed. Britain was exactly the
same when it ran most of the world, France too. That's the way dominant
powers work. And Iraq is not Nicaragua...it's much more important.

         

        Let me ask you about some of the criticism that has come your way
from the left since 9/11. You've been accused, notably by Christopher
Hitchens and by others, including the Independent's Johann Hari, of making
excuses for Islamic fascism and of drawing 'moral equivalency' in your
discussions of 9/11 and US crimes. How do you respond?

         

        Can they give a source? I don't care what sort of ranting and
tantrums people have. If they refer to something, fine. The phrase moral
equivalence is used only by totalitarians. It was invented I think by
[Jeane] Kirkpatrick [UN ambassador under Reagan] to try to prevent
critical discussion of US foreign policy to use as a barrier to any
criticism of the massive atrocities her administration was then beginning
to carry out, primarily in Central America. If anyone started to discuss
the massacres in Guatemala, and Salvador and Nicaragua they screamed moral
equivalence. I mean it's the kind of thing you might have expected in
Stalinist Russia, but we can't pay attention to it. There is no moral
equivalence. We happen to be particularly responsible for our own actions.
That is a moral truism. If you want to blame someone else for what they do
that's okay but there is nothing moral about that. Our actions happen to
be severe and we can change them. I can't stop people killing each other
in Eastern Congo but I can stop our atrocities. So of course you
concentrate on those if you are at all serious. Furthermore, we all
understand this when we talk about enemies. Let's take the Soviet Union.
There were plenty of people who criticized US crimes. Were we impressed
when Soviet Commissars criticized US crimes? Did we care? We cared about
the people who concentrated on Soviet crimes, even if the US crimes at the
time happened to be worse. We should pay attention to what we're
responsible for, what we can influence and change. That's so elementary it
is embarrassing to discuss. What about equating 9/11 with US crimes. What
does that mean? You can't even equate 9/11 with what they call the other
9/11 south of the border. In 9/11 1973, in Chile, the president was
killed, the oldest democracy in Latin America was destroyed, the official
number killed was 3000 people. The actual number is probably double that.
In per capita terms in relation to the US that would be about 100,000
people. We've just learned that the number of tortured people was in the
order of 30,000 or about 700,000 in terms of the US. It set up a brutal,
vicious dictatorship which was a virus. It spread throughout much of the
rest of Latin America and helped induce a tremendous wave of terror.
Operation Condor was carrying out terrorism all over the region and in
fact in Europe and the US. That's pretty serious. How does that compare
with September 11, 2001? If you want to count numbers and social
consequences it is much worse. But it doesn't make any sense to compare
them. I mean they are each atrocities on their own. And the ones we are
concerned with primarily are the ones that we can stop. We were involved
in 9/11 1973 and we are involved in the next atrocity that is going to
take place in the US.

         

        Meaning?

         

        I mean when Britain and the US invaded Iraq it was with the
reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror,
as in fact it has. This means that they are again contributing to terror
of the 9/11 variety which is likely to hit the US, which could be awesome.
I mean sooner of later Jihadist style terror and WMD are going to come
together and the consequences could be horrendous and they are
contributing to that. So if we care about Jihadist-style terror we don't
want to be contributing to it. If fact, what we want to do is diminish the
threat, but that is going to take measures like the British finally took
in NI. Pay some attention to the grievances. I mean just about every
specialist I've read and every intelligence agency I know of says the same
thing. If you want to deal with this kind of terror you have to have a
dual program. The terrorist acts are criminal acts so you treat them that
way. You apprehend the guilty, use force if necessary, bring them to a
fair trial. That's the way to deal with criminal acts. But these are a
kind of vanguard. They want to appeal to the reservoir of understanding
for what they're doing, even from people who hate and fear them. If they
can mobilize that reservoir they win. We can help them mobilize that
reservoir by violence or we can reduce it by dealing with legitimate
grievances.

         

        Hitchens and others (Johann Hari) are influenced by George
Orwell's response to the war against fascism in the 1930s/40s. They seem
to believe there is some sort of civil war going on in Islamic culture
between reactionary and moderate elements and it is the duty of the US to
intervene there.

         

        I agree, but the way you intervene is not by helping the
Jihadists, which is their policy. Take a look at the record. Every resort
to violence has just been a gift to the Jihadists, who after all we
organized. It's not my opinion. The best study of Al Qaida that I know of
is Jason Burke's. He just keeps pointing it out step after step. Read
Richard Clarke or Israeli intelligence or anyone else. They say respond
with violence which hits civilians and you're just giving a gift to Osama
Bin Laden. You're giving him the propaganda weapon he wants so that he can
say: 'We have to defend Islam against the Western infidels that are trying
to destroy it. We're fighting a war of defense.' If you want to mobilize
that constituency that is the way to intervene. But there is another way
to intervene and that is to pay some attention to the legitimate
grievances as they did finally in NI. I mean you should deal with them
anyway quite apart from terrorism. You undercut the support for terrorism.
That's intervention too. Orwell has precisely zero to do with this,
nothing.

         

        What has been the impact of 9/11 on US politics.

         

        9/11 had a complex effect on the US which I don't think is
appreciated abroad. The picture abroad is that it turned everyone into a
raving jingoist and that is absolutely not true. It opened people's minds.
This is a very insular society. People in the US don't know anything about
the outside world. They may not know where France is, literally. It's a
huge country, everything has been focused internally. 9/11 made a lot of
people think: 'We'd better figure out what is going on in the world. We'd
better figure out what our role is and why things like that are happening.
And the result was a huge increase in interest and concern. Huge
audiences. I spend probably an hour a night just turning down requests for
interviews from all over the place. They're not necessarily agreeing but
they're thinking about what is going on. This is a very polled society and
right before the November elections two of the major polling institutions,
Program on International Policy Attitudes in Maryland and the Chicago
Council on Foreign Relations, both published major studies of popular
attitudes and they were extremely interesting. What they showed is that
the two political parties are far to the right of the population on issue
after issue. What's happened is that the public is far removed from the
bipartisan political system and intellectual culture and that is a
reflection of changes that have taken place for many years. I was just
reading a very interesting review of a book that is coming out on the
post-9/11 world and it says that in the US everyone sort of collapsed and
turned into a flag-waving maniac. That's just complete nonsense. Small
publishers have been reprinting texts they haven't released since the
1970s. It had a very complex effect.

         

        E-mail question: What do you make of the various conspiracies that
have flourished online since the terror attacks?

         

        On the conspiracy theories about 9/11, I'll comment, but
reluctantly. There are far more important things to be concerned about,
and these things can become an awful waste of time.

        As for the theories, I don't think they can be taken very
seriously. I think they are based on a misunderstanding of the nature of
evidence, and also failure to think through the issues clearly. I really
am rushed, so I hope you won't mind if I just paste in [see below] one of
the 100s of letters I've written about this, in response to a deluge of
queries: it really is an industry. I should say, however, that I never
become publicly involved in these matters, if I can help it.

         

        I might perhaps add that all of this reminds me of a 1998 DOD
report on declassification decisions. Among other things, it suggested
that information about the JFK assassination should be released now and
then as a "diversion," as "distraction material," which could keep people
busy on wild goose chases so they wouldn't investigate the serious
questions. A smart decision on the part of US intelligence. You can find
the details in an excellent book by British political scientist Richard
Aldrich, The Hidden Hand (p. 7), the best study by far of British
intelligence (with a lot about US intelligence too, for one reason,
because the British were of course spying on the Americans, just as
conversely).

         

        [Comment pasted in by Noam Chomsky from an e-mail response to a
query:]

         

        There's by now a small industry on the thesis that the
administration had something to do with 9-11. I've looked at some of it,
and have often been asked. There's a weak thesis that is possible though
extremely unlikely in my opinion, and a strong thesis that is close to
inconceivable. The weak thesis is that they knew about it and didn't try
to stop it. The strong thesis is that they were actually involved. The
evidence for either thesis is, in my opinion, based on a failure to
understand properly what evidence is. Even in controlled scientific
experiments one finds all sorts of unexplained phenomena, strange
coincidences, loose ends, apparent contradictions, etc. Read the letters
in technical science journals and you'll find plenty of samples. In real
world situations, chaos is overwhelming, and these will mount to the sky.
That aside, they'd have had to be quite mad to try anything like that. It
would have had to involve a large number of people, something would be
very likely to leak, pretty quickly, they'd all be lined up before firing
squads and the Republican Party would be dead forever. That would have
happened whether the plan succeeded or not, and success was at best a long
shot; it would have been extremely hard to predict what would happen.

        One part of the standard story is that they exploited the tragedy
for their own purposes, which is certainly true, and was completely
predictable; I pointed out in my first interviews a few hours later that
every power system in the world would do that, including Washington, as
they all did -- one of the easiest predictions. So that shows nothing.

         
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