[Peace-discuss] Chomsky on fascism, Congress, the war, odious debt, etc.

[C. G. Estabrook]

{Among other things, Chomsky here suggests why what AWARE does is so 
important: "The mainstream Democrats by now are kind of liberal
Republicans. It’s very hard to make a distinction..."  --CGE]

	Noam Chomsky interviewed by Michael Shank
	May 16, 2007

Michael Shank: Given that the U.S. Congress is no longer calling for
binding timelines for troop withdrawal, how is this indicative of a
broader struggle between the executive and legislative branches?

Noam Chomsky: There are a number of issues. One is the unitary executive
conception. The Republican Party happens to be right now in the hands of
a very extreme fringe. That goes from the legal system and the
Federalist Society to the executive and so on. What they basically want,
to put it simply, is a kind of an elective dictatorship. The chief
executive should have total control over the executive branch. And the
executive branch should dominate the other branches. That’s an effective
mode of authoritarian control, natural for those whose dislike of
democracy goes beyond the norm.

There’s a real fascist streak there, definitely. And Congress, to some
extent, is trying to recreate more of a balance between the executive
and legislative branch. So that’s part of the struggle. Part of it is
just that neither party is willing to face the consequences of a
withdrawal from Iraq. It’s not a trivial matter. First of all, there’s
almost no public discussion of the issues involved in the war. Why did
we invade? Why don’t we want to get out?

Shank: Right, it is minutiae now; it is troop numbers, timelines, etc.

Chomsky: That’s right. I was listening to the National Public Radio
tribute to David Halberstam the other day, and they had on Neil Sheehan,
David Greenway, and others. They were talking correctly about these
young reporters in Vietnam who with great courage stood up against power
and told truth to power. Which is correct, but what truth did they tell
to power? The truth they told to power was, "You’re not winning the
war." I listened through the hour and there were never any questions
like, Should you be fighting the war or should you be invading another
country? The answer to that is not the kind of truth you tell to power.

In fact, it’s rather similar to what critical journalists in the Soviet
Union were saying in the 1980s. They were saying, “Yeah, we’re not
winning the war in Afghanistan.” From my point of view, that’s not
telling truth to power. Truth to power would be, Why are you invading
Afghanistan -- what right do you have to commit crimes against peace and
against humanity? But that question never came up. And the same is true
in the discussion of Iraq. The question of whether it’s legitimate to
have a victory doesn’t even arise. In fact, the current debate about
Iraq reminds me very much of the dove/hawk debate over Vietnam.

Take, for example, Arthur Schlesinger, leading historian, Kennedy
advisor, and so on. He was originally a strong supporter of the war
during the Kennedy years. But by the mid-1960s, there was a mood
spreading in the country generally, but also among the elites, that the
war is not wise, it’s harming us. Then he had a book that came out in
1966 called Bitter Heritage, which is very much like what’s happening
today. He was one of the extreme liberal critics of the war by then. He
said, “We all pray that the hawks will be correct in thinking that
sending more troops will bring us victory. And if they are, we’ll be
praising the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government in
winning a victory in a land that they’ve left in wreck and ruin. But it
doesn’t look like it’s going to work.”

You can translate that almost verbatim into the liberal dove critique of
the war today. There’s no question about whether we are justified in
invading another country. The only question is, Is this tactic going to
work, or is some other tactic going to work, or maybe no tactic and it’s
costing us too much. And those are the limits of the presidential
debates, the congressional discussion, and the media discussion.

That’s why you can have debates such as those going on now about whether
Iran is interfering in Iraq. You can only have that debate on the
assumption that the United States owns the world. You couldn’t debate in
1943 whether the Allies were interfering in occupied France. It was
conquered and occupied by a foreign power. Who can interfere in it? In
fact, it’s the right thing to do, interfering. Or, say, Russia’s
Afghanistan: is the United States interfering in Afghanistan while the
Russians conquered it? You’d crack up in laughter if you heard that
question.

Those are the limits of discussion here. That’s part of the reason the
outcomes of the debates are so inconclusive. The issues are not discussable.

First of all there is the issue of legitimacy. Invading Iraq was the
kind of crime for which Nazi war criminals were hanged at Nuremberg.
They were hanged, primarily, for crimes against peace, i.e. aggression,
the supreme international crime. Von Ribbentrop, foreign minister, was
hanged. One of the main charges was that he supported a preemptive war
against Norway. It’s kind of striking that at the end of the Nuremberg
tribunal, the chief counsel for the prosecution Justice Robert Jackson,
an American justice, made some pretty eloquent speeches about the nature
of the tribunal. After the sentencing, he said, “We’re handing the
defendants a poisoned chalice and if we sip from it we must be subject
to the same charges and sentencing or else we’re just showing that the
proceedings are a farce.” So if they mean anything the principles have
to apply to us.

Try to find a discussion of that anywhere, either in the case of Vietnam
or in the case of Iraq, or any other aggression.

Shank: Another schism opened up recently between the two branches with
Cheney’s comment that Pelosi’s trip to Syria was bad behavior. Do you
think Pelosi has a right to speak to Syria?

Chomsky: Of course she does. If you don’t believe in an elective
dictatorship, everyone has that right, even the local congressman, even
you and I. If it’s a free democratic country you don’t have to follow
the orders of the dear leader. The whole discussion is ridiculous. And
the fact that she has to defend herself is ridiculous.

The question is, Are we living in an elective dictatorship? Or is it
supposed to be a free country in which people pursue their interests?

Shank: How much will that [unitary executive] foundation shift if/when
the Democrats take over the executive branch in 2008? Will it be more open?

Chomsky: It’ll be more open, but I don’t think there will be fundamental
changes. The basic fundamentals are shared by the parties. But the Bush
administration happens to be on the very extreme end of a pretty narrow
spectrum. So if liberal Republicans were in [the White House] it would
also change. The mainstream Democrats by now are kind of liberal
Republicans. It’s very hard to make a distinction.

So sure, it would soften the edges. The parties have different
constituencies, and you give something to your constituency. The
Democratic constituency is more of the general population, the working
people and so on. So you give something to them and maybe less to the
super rich. But the framework of thinking is almost the same.

Shank: Is the foundation on which the current unitary executive stands
beginning to erode? Given the corruption charges facing Paul Wolfowitz
at the World Bank, the scandal surrounding Alberto Gonzales, the Justice
Department’s firing of attorneys, and the indictment of Scooter Libby?

Chomsky: The struggle over the unitary executive and the elective
dictatorship -- that’s beginning to erode from internal corruption
primarily, not because what it did was wrong. Yes, of course, some of
things were wrong, like firing a prosecutor, but that is so minor
compared to the array of crimes committed by the administration. It
gains its significance because of the conflict over legislative and
executive powers.

Take Wolfowitz. The charges against Wolfowitz are maybe correct but
pretty minor compared to his record. Forget his involvement in the Iraq
war, let’s put that aside, though it was surely significant. He was the
ambassador to Indonesia under Reagan. He was one of the strongest
supporters of Suharto, who was one of the worst monsters in the modern
period, comparable to Saddam Hussein. When Wolfowitz was appointed to
the World Bank, Indonesian human rights and democracy activists were
bitterly critical because he never lifted his finger to help them when
he was ambassador. In fact, he harmed them and they explained how he did it.

Here’s a man who strongly opposes democracy, who strongly opposes human
rights. That’s not the myth. The myth is his great ideals. But in his
actions, he supported a hideous dictator and in fact he supported
extreme corruption. Transparency International ranked Suharto’s
Indonesia as the world champion in corruption. This is the man he was
defending while at the same time saying that he was going to the World
Bank to do something about corruption.

His record with regard to democracies is also outlandish. You may recall
in Turkey, to everyone’s surprise, the government went along with the
will of 95% of the population and did not let U.S. troops use the
country as a base for the war against Iraq. There was bitter
condemnation of Turkey in the United States, from Colin Powell and
others. But the most extreme was Wolfowitz. He berated the Turkish
military for permitting this to happen. He said, “look, you have power,
you can force the civilian government to do what we want them to do. The
idea that they should listen to 95% of the population is outrageous.”
Then he demanded that Turkey apologize to the United States and in fact
say that it understands its job to help the United States. A couple of
months later he was being hailed as the “idealist-in-chief” leading the
crusade for democracy.

Shank: So why is he going down now for a salary?

Chomsky: He’s very much disliked in the Bank. Apparently he’s very
authoritarian. So they picked an issue on which to expel him: a kind of
corruption issue and a governance issue. And that’s okay. It’s good to
see corrupt people go down. But those are not the issues. It’s just like
in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Shank: Analysts in the media are questioning whether or not the Bank can
redeem itself post-Wolfowitz. Can it redeem itself or is it done?

Chomsky: Redeem itself from what? Through the 1970s, the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund were pressuring countries to take loans,
borrow, and create huge debt. They argued that it was the right thing to
do. In the early 1980s, with the Volcker regime in Washington, the whole
system collapsed and the countries that had taken the debts were hung
out to dry. Then the World Bank and the IMF pressured them strongly to
introduce structural adjustment programs -- which means that the poor
have to pay off the debts incurred by the rich. And of course there was
economic disaster all over the world.

That’s the World Bank. They’ve done some good things. I’ve seen some
World Bank projects that I think are great. For example, in Colombia the
World Bank has supported very interesting projects run partly by the
church, partly by human rights organizations. They are trying to create
zones of peace, which means communities that separate themselves from
the various warring factions and ask the military, paramilitaries, and
guerillas to leave them alone. The people that are doing that are very
brave, honorable people. It’s very constructive work, and it’s supported
by the World Bank.

So again, I think that’s good. But if you look at the overall range of
the Bank’s policies, it hasn’t been benign by any means. The Bank would
have a long way to go to “redeem itself.”

Shank: So it’s the same problem facing Iraq, the whole conversation is
wrong?

Chomsky: The conversation is too narrow. Within the narrow framework,
yes, it’s a good thing to get rid of corruption and press for good
governance. But there’s a much wider framework . . .

Shank: . . . that’s not being talked about.

Chomsky: Right. Take the IMF. The IMF is not the World Bank, but it’s
closely related. The IMF’s former U.S. executive director Karin
Lissakers accurately described the Fund as the credit community’s
enforcer. The IMF is very anti-capitalist. For example, suppose I lend
you money. And I know that you’re a risky borrower, so I insist on a
high-interest rate. Now, suppose that you can’t pay me back. In a
capitalist system, it’s my problem. I made a risky loan. I got a lot of
profit from the interest. You defaulted. It’s my problem.

That’s not what the IMF is about. What the IMF is saying, to put it in
personal terms, is that your friends and neighbors have to pay off the
loan. They didn’t borrow the money, but they have to pay it back. And my
friends and neighbors have to pay me to make sure that I don’t lose any
money. That’s essentially what the IMF is.

If Argentina takes out an IMF loan with huge interest rates because it’s
risky and then they default, the IMF comes along and says the workers
and peasants and other people in Argentina have to pay for that. They
may not have borrowed it, it may have been borrowed by a military
dictatorship, but they have to pay it back. That’s what structural
adjustment is. And the IMF will ensure that western taxpayers pay off
the bank. It’s radically anti-capitalist, whether you like that or not.
The whole system has no legitimacy. In fact the whole debt system in the
world, which is crushing much of the world, most of it is fake debt.

If Suharto, one of the biggest debtors in the world, borrows money and
ends up the richest man in Indonesia or maybe the world, why is it the
responsibility of the farmers in Indonesia to pay it off? They didn’t
borrow it; they didn’t get anything from it. They were repressed, but
they have to pay it off. And the IMF makes sure that the lenders don’t
lose money on their risky loan after making a lot of profit from it. Why
should the system even exist?

Shank: The micro version of that in the United States with sub-prime
lending is coming back to bite us pretty quickly.

Chomsky: Exactly.

Shank: Are we going to have that kind of awareness on the global scale?
Because I think people are realizing that sub-prime lending isn’t working.

Chomsky: It’s bad because vulnerable people were exploited. But at least
you can say that the sub-prime borrowers did borrow the money. In the
South the people didn’t borrow the money. It was their leadership that
did. What do the people of Indonesia have to do with Suharto borrowing
money from the Bank?

Take Duvalier in Haiti. He fled with U.S. help, with most of the
treasury. Why do the people of Haiti have to pay off the debt? Most debt
is just illegitimate. In fact, the United States itself has instituted
an international regime that regards these debts as totally
illegitimate. They’re called odious debts. It’s the notion that the
United States introduced when we “liberated” Cuba. The United States
didn’t want to pay off the debts to Spain, so they were dismissed
accurately as illegitimate, later called odious debts. The people of
Cuba had no responsibility for them.

A huge amount of the debt in the global south is odious debt. Why should
anybody pay it?

Michael Shank is a doctoral student at the Institute for Conflict
Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University and a frequent
contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org ).

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