[Peace-discuss] The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux

[C. G. Estabrook]

Noam Chomsky - The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux: Using Privilege to 
Challenge the State

Since we often cannot see what is happening before our eyes, it is perhaps not 
too surprising that what is at a slight distance removed is utterly invisible. 
We have just witnessed an instructive example: President Obama's dispatch of 79 
commandos into Pakistan on May 1 to carry out what was evidently a planned 
assassination of the prime suspect in the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, Osama 
bin Laden. Though the target of the operation, unarmed and with no protection, 
could easily have been apprehended, he was simply murdered, his body dumped at 
sea without autopsy. The action was deemed "just and necessary" in the liberal 
press. There will be no trial, as there was in the case of Nazi criminals---a 
fact not overlooked by legal authorities abroad who approve of the operation but 
object to the procedure. As Elaine Scarry reminds us, the prohibition of 
assassination in international law traces back to a forceful denunciation of the 
practice by Abraham Lincoln, who condemned the call for assassination as 
"international outlawry" in 1863, an "outrage," which "civilized nations" view 
with "horror" and merits the "sternest retaliation."

In 1967, writing about the deceit and distortion surrounding the American 
invasion of Vietnam, I discussed the responsibility of intellectuals, borrowing 
the phrase from an important essay of Dwight Macdonald's after World War II. 
With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 arriving, and widespread approval in the 
United States of the assassination of the chief suspect, it seems a fitting time 
to revisit that issue. But before thinking about the responsibility of 
intellectuals, it is worth clarifying to whom we are referring.

The concept of intellectuals in the modern sense gained prominence with the 1898 
"Manifesto of the Intellectuals" produced by the Dreyfusards who, inspired by 
Emile Zola's open letter of protest to France's president, condemned both the 
framing of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason and the 
subsequent military cover-up. The Dreyfusards' stance conveys the image of 
intellectuals as defenders of justice, confronting power with courage and 
integrity. But they were hardly seen that way at the time. A minority of the 
educated classes, the Dreyfusards were bitterly condemned in the mainstream of 
intellectual life, in particular by prominent figures among "the immortals of 
the strongly anti-Dreyfusard Académie Française," Steven Lukes writes. To the 
novelist, politician, and anti-Dreyfusard leader Maurice Barrès, Dreyfusards 
were "anarchists of the lecture-platform." To another of these immortals, 
Ferdinand Brunetière, the very word "intellectual" signified "one of the most 
ridiculous eccentricities of our time---I mean the pretension of raising 
writers, scientists, professors and philologists to the rank of supermen," who 
dare to "treat our generals as idiots, our social institutions as absurd and our 
traditions as unhealthy."

Who then were the intellectuals? The minority inspired by Zola (who was 
sentenced to jail for libel, and fled the country)? Or the immortals of the 
academy? The question resonates through the ages, in one or another form, and 
today offers a framework for determining the "responsibility of intellectuals." 
The phrase is ambiguous: does it refer to intellectuals' moral responsibility as 
decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance 
the causes of freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and other such sentimental 
concerns? Or does it refer to the role they are expected to play, serving, not 
derogating, leadership and established institutions?

. . .

One answer came during World War I, when prominent intellectuals on all sides 
lined up enthusiastically in support of their own states.
In their "Manifesto of 93 German Intellectuals," leading figures in one of the 
world's most enlightened states called on the West to "have faith in us! 
Believe, that we shall carry on this war to the end as a civilized nation, to 
whom the legacy of a Goethe, a Beethoven, and a Kant, is just as sacred as its 
own hearths and homes." Their counterparts on the other side of the intellectual 
trenches matched them in enthusiasm for the noble cause, but went beyond in 
self-adulation. In The New Republic they proclaimed, "The effective and decisive 
work on behalf of the war has been accomplished by . . . a class which must be 
comprehensively but loosely described as the 'intellectuals.'" These 
progressives believed they were ensuring that the United States entered the war 
"under the influence of a moral verdict reached, after the utmost deliberation 
by the more thoughtful members of the community." They were, in fact, the 
victims of concoctions of the British Ministry of Information, which secretly 
sought "to direct the thought of most of the world," but particularly the 
thought of American progressive intellectuals who might help to whip a pacifist 
country into war fever.

John Dewey was impressed by the great "psychological and educational lesson" of 
the war, which proved that human beings---more precisely, "the intelligent men 
of the community"---can "take hold of human affairs and manage them . . . 
deliberately and intelligently" to achieve the ends sought, admirable by definition.

Not everyone toed the line so obediently, of course. Notable figures such as 
Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht were, like 
Zola, sentenced to prison. Debs was punished with particular severity---a 
ten-year prison term for raising questions about President Wilson's "war for 
democracy and human rights." Wilson refused him amnesty after the war ended, 
though Harding finally relented. Some, such as Thorstein Veblen, were chastised 
but treated less harshly; Veblen was fired from his position in the Food 
Administration after preparing a report showing that the shortage of farm labor 
could be overcome by ending Wilson's brutal persecution of labor, specifically 
the International Workers of the World. Randolph Bourne was dropped by the 
progressive journals after criticizing the "league of benevolently imperialistic 
nations" and their exalted endeavors.

The pattern of praise and punishment is a familiar one throughout history: those 
who line up in the service of the state are typically praised by the general 
intellectual community, and those who refuse to line up in service of the state 
are punished. Thus in retrospect Wilson and the progressive intellectuals who 
offered him their services are greatly honored, but not Debs. Luxemburg and 
Liebknecht were murdered and have hardly been heroes of the intellectual 
mainstream. Russell continued to be bitterly condemned until after his 
death---and in current biographies still is.

In the 1970s prominent scholars distinguished the two categories of 
intellectuals more explicitly. A 1975 study, The Crisis of Democracy, labeled 
Brunetière's ridiculous eccentrics "value-oriented intellectuals" who pose a 
"challenge to democratic government which is, potentially at least, as serious 
as those posed in the past by aristocratic cliques, fascist movements, and 
communist parties." Among other misdeeds, these dangerous creatures "devote 
themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority," and 
they challenge the institutions responsible for "the indoctrination of the 
young." Some even sink to the depths of questioning the nobility of war aims, as 
Bourne had. This castigation of the miscreants who question authority and the 
established order was delivered by the scholars of the liberal internationalist 
Trilateral Commission; the Carter administration was largely drawn from their ranks.

Like The New Republic progressives during World War I, the authors of The Crisis 
of Democracy extend the concept of the "intellectual" beyond Brunetière's 
ridiculous eccentrics to include the better sort as well: the "technocratic and 
policy-oriented intellectuals," responsible and serious thinkers who devote 
themselves to the constructive work of shaping policy within established 
institutions and to ensuring that indoctrination of the young proceeds on course.

It took Dewey only a few years to shift from the responsible technocratic and 
policy-oriented intellectual of World War I to an anarchist of the 
lecture-platform, as he denounced the "un-free press" and questioned "how far 
genuine intellectual freedom and social responsibility are possible on any large 
scale under the existing economic regime."

What particularly troubled the Trilateral scholars was the "excess of democracy" 
during the time of troubles, the 1960s, when normally passive and apathetic 
parts of the population entered the political arena to advance their concerns: 
minorities, women, the young, the old, working people . . . in short, the 
population, sometimes called the "special interests." They are to be 
distinguished from those whom Adam Smith called the "masters of mankind," who 
are "the principal architects" of government policy and pursue their "vile 
maxim": "All for ourselves and nothing for other people." The role of the 
masters in the political arena is not deplored, or discussed, in the Trilateral 
volume, presumably because the masters represent "the national interest," like 
those who applauded themselves for leading the country to war "after the utmost 
deliberation by the more thoughtful members of the community" had reached its 
"moral verdict."

To overcome the excessive burden imposed on the state by the special interests, 
the Trilateralists called for more "moderation in democracy," a return to 
passivity on the part of the less deserving, perhaps even a return to the happy 
days when "Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a 
relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers," and democracy 
therefore flourished.

The Trilateralists could well have claimed to be adhering to the original intent 
of the Constitution, "intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check 
the democratic tendencies of the period" by delivering power to a "better sort" 
of people and barring "those who were not rich, well born, or prominent from 
exercising political power," in the accurate words of the historian Gordon Wood. 
In Madison's defense, however, we should recognize that his mentality was 
pre-capitalist. In determining that power should be in the hands of "the wealth 
of the nation," "a the more capable set of men," he envisioned those men on the 
model of the "enlightened Statesmen" and "benevolent philosopher" of the 
imagined Roman world. They would be "pure and noble," "men of intelligence, 
patriotism, property, and independent circumstances" "whose wisdom may best 
discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of 
justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial 
considerations." So endowed, these men would "refine and enlarge the public 
views," guarding the public interest against the "mischiefs" of democratic 
majorities. In a similar vein, the progressive Wilsonian intellectuals might 
have taken comfort in the discoveries of the behavioral sciences, explained in 
1939 by the psychologist and education theorist Edward Thorndike:

It is the great good fortune of mankind that there is a substantial correlation 
between intelligence and morality including good will toward one's fellows . . . 
. Consequently our superiors in ability are on the average our benefactors, and 
it is often safer to trust our interests to them than to ourselves.

A comforting doctrine, though some might feel that Adam Smith had the sharper eye.

. . .

Since power tends to prevail, intellectuals who serve their governments are 
considered responsible, and value-oriented intellectuals are dismissed or 
denigrated. At home that is.

With regard to enemies, the distinction between the two categories of 
intellectuals is retained, but with values reversed. In the old Soviet Union, 
the value-oriented intellectuals were the honored dissidents, while we had only 
contempt for the apparatchiks and commissars, the technocratic and 
policy-oriented intellectuals. Similarly in Iran we honor the courageous 
dissidents and condemn those who defend the clerical establishment. And 
elsewhere generally.

The honorable term "dissident" is used selectively. It does not, of course, 
apply, with its favorable connotations, to value-oriented intellectuals at home 
or to those who combat U.S.-supported tyranny abroad. Take the interesting case 
of Nelson Mandela, who was removed from the official terrorist list in 2008, and 
can now travel to the United States without special authorization.

Twenty years earlier, he was the criminal leader of one of the world's "more 
notorious terrorist groups," according to a Pentagon report. That is why 
President Reagan had to support the apartheid regime, increasing trade with 
South Africa in violation of congressional sanctions and supporting South 
Africa's depredations in neighboring countries, which led, according to a UN 
study, to 1.5 million deaths. That was only one episode in the war on terrorism 
that Reagan declared to combat "the plague of the modern age," or, as Secretary 
of State George Shultz had it, "a return to barbarism in the modern age." We may 
add hundreds of thousands of corpses in Central America and tens of thousands 
more in the Middle East, among other achievements. Small wonder that the Great 
Communicator is worshipped by Hoover Institution scholars as a colossus whose 
"spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly 
ghost," recently honored further by a statue that defaces the American Embassy 
in London.

The Latin American case is revealing. Those who called for freedom and justice 
in Latin America are not admitted to the pantheon of honored dissidents. For 
example, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, six leading Latin American 
intellectuals, all Jesuit priests, had their heads blown off on the direct 
orders of the Salvadoran high command. The perpetrators were from an elite 
battalion armed and trained by Washington that had already left a gruesome trail 
of blood and terror, and had just returned from renewed training at the John F. 
Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The 
murdered priests are not commemorated as honored dissidents, nor are others like 
them throughout the hemisphere. Honored dissidents are those who called for 
freedom in enemy domains in Eastern Europe, who certainly suffered, but not 
remotely like their counterparts in Latin America.

The distinction is worth examination, and tells us a lot about the two senses of 
the phrase "responsibility of intellectuals," and about ourselves. It is not 
seriously in question, as John Coatsworth writes in the recently published 
Cambridge University History of the Cold War, that from 1960 to "the Soviet 
collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and 
executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded 
those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites." Among the executed 
were many religious martyrs, and there were mass slaughters as well, 
consistently supported or initiated by Washington.

Why then the distinction? It might be argued that what happened in Eastern 
Europe is far more momentous than the fate of the South at our hands. It would 
be interesting to see the argument spelled out. And also to see the argument 
explaining why we should disregard elementary moral principles, among them that 
if we are serious about suffering and atrocities, about justice and rights, we 
will focus our efforts on where we can do the most good---typically, where we 
share responsibility for what is being done. We have no difficulty demanding 
that our enemies follow such principles.

Few of us care, or should, what Andrei Sakharov or Shirin Ebadi say about U.S. 
or Israeli crimes; we admire them for what they say and do about those of their 
own states, and the conclusion holds far more strongly for those who live in 
more free and democratic societies, and therefore have far greater opportunities 
to act effectively. It is of some interest that in the most respected circles, 
practice is virtually the opposite of what elementary moral values dictate.

But let us conform and keep only to the matter of historical import.

The U.S. wars in Latin America from 1960 to 1990, quite apart from their 
horrors, have long-term historical significance. To consider just one important 
aspect, in no small measure they were wars against the Church, undertaken to 
crush a terrible heresy proclaimed at Vatican II in 1962, which, under the 
leadership of Pope John XXIII, "ushered in a new era in the history of the 
Catholic Church," in the words of the distinguished theologian Hans Küng, 
restoring the teachings of the gospels that had been put to rest in the fourth 
century when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the religion of 
the Roman Empire, instituting "a revolution" that converted "the persecuted 
church" to a "persecuting church." The heresy of Vatican II was taken up by 
Latin American bishops who adopted the "preferential option for the poor." 
Priests, nuns, and laypersons then brought the radical pacifist message of the 
gospels to the poor, helping them organize to ameliorate their bitter fate in 
the domains of U.S. power.

That same year, 1962, President Kennedy made several critical decisions. One was 
to shift the mission of the militaries of Latin America from "hemispheric 
defense"---an anachronism from World War II---to "internal security," in effect, 
war against the domestic population, if they raise their heads. Charles 
Maechling, who led U.S. counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 
1961 to 1966, describes the unsurprising consequences of the 1962 decision as a 
shift from toleration "of the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American 
military" to "direct complicity" in their crimes to U.S. support for "the 
methods of Heinrich Himmler's extermination squads." One major initiative was a 
military coup in Brazil, planned in Washington and implemented shortly after 
Kennedy's assassination, instituting a murderous and brutal national security 
state. The plague of repression then spread through the hemisphere, including 
the 1973 coup installing the Pinochet dictatorship, and later the most vicious 
of all, the Argentine dictatorship, Reagan's favorite. Central America's 
turn---not for the first time---came in the 1980s under the leadership of the 
"warm and friendly ghost" who is now revered for his achievements.

The murder of the Jesuit intellectuals as the Berlin wall fell was a final blow 
in defeating the heresy, culminating a decade of horror in El Salvador that 
opened with the assassination, by much the same hands, of Archbishop Óscar 
Romero, the "voice for the voiceless." The victors in the war against the Church 
declare their responsibility with pride. The School of the Americas (since 
renamed), famous for its training of Latin American killers, announces as one of 
its "talking points" that the liberation theology that was initiated at Vatican 
II was "defeated with the assistance of the US army."

Actually, the November 1989 assassinations were almost a final blow. More was 
needed.

A year later Haiti had its first free election, and to the surprise and shock of 
Washington, which like others had anticipated the easy victory of its own 
candidate from the privileged elite, the organized public in the slums and hills 
elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a popular priest committed to liberation 
theology. The United States at once moved to undermine the elected government, 
and after the military coup that overthrew it a few months later, lent 
substantial support to the vicious military junta and its elite supporters. 
Trade was increased in violation of international sanctions and increased 
further under Clinton, who also authorized the Texaco oil company to supply the 
murderous rulers, in defiance of his own directives.

I will skip the disgraceful aftermath, amply reviewed elsewhere, except to point 
out that in 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the United 
States, joined by Canada, forcefully intervened, kidnapped President Aristide 
(who had been elected again), and shipped him off to central Africa. He and his 
party were effectively barred from the farcical 2010--11 elections, the most 
recent episode in a horrendous history that goes back hundreds of years and is 
barely known among the perpetrators of the crimes, who prefer tales of dedicated 
efforts to save the suffering people from their grim fate.

Another fateful Kennedy decision in 1962 was to send a special forces mission to 
Colombia, led by General William Yarborough, who advised the Colombian security 
forces to undertake "paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against 
known communist proponents," activities that "should be backed by the United 
States." The meaning of the phrase "communist proponents" was spelled out by the 
respected president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, 
former Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vázquez Carrizosa, who wrote that the 
Kennedy administration "took great pains to transform our regular armies into 
counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads," 
ushering in

what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine. . . . [not] 
defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment 
the masters of the game . . . [with] the right to combat the internal enemy, as 
set forth in the Brazilian doctrine, the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan 
doctrine, and the Colombian doctrine: it is the right to fight and to 
exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not 
supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists. 
And this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.

In a 1980 study, Lars Schoultz, the leading U.S. academic specialist on human 
rights in Latin America, found that U.S. aid "has tended to flow 
disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens . 
. . to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human 
rights." That included military aid, was independent of need, and continued 
through the Carter years. Ever since the Reagan administration, it has been 
superfluous to carry out such a study. In the 1980s one of the most notorious 
violators was El Salvador, which accordingly became the leading recipient of 
U.S. military aid, to be replaced by Colombia when it took the lead as the worst 
violator of human rights in the hemisphere. Vázquez Carrizosa himself was living 
under heavy guard in his Bogotá residence when I visited him there in 2002 as 
part of a mission of Amnesty International, which was opening its year-long 
campaign to protect human rights defenders in Colombia because of the country's 
horrifying record of attacks against human rights and labor activists, and 
mostly the usual victims of state terror: the poor and defenseless. Terror and 
torture in Colombia were supplemented by chemical warfare ("fumigation"), under 
the pretext of the war on drugs, leading to huge flight to urban slums and 
misery for the survivors. Colombia's attorney general's office now estimates 
that more than 140,000 people have been killed by paramilitaries, often acting 
in close collaboration with the U.S.-funded military.

Signs of the slaughter are everywhere. On a nearly impassible dirt road to a 
remote village in southern Colombia a year ago, my companions and I passed a 
small clearing with many simple crosses marking the graves of victims of a 
paramilitary attack on a local bus. Reports of the killings are graphic enough; 
spending a little time with the survivors, who are among the kindest and most 
compassionate people I have ever had the privilege of meeting, makes the picture 
more vivid, and only more painful.

This is the briefest sketch of terrible crimes for which Americans bear 
substantial culpability, and that we could easily ameliorate, at the very least.

But it is more gratifying to bask in praise for courageously protesting the 
abuses of official enemies, a fine activity, but not the priority of a 
value-oriented intellectual who takes the responsibilities of that stance seriously.

The victims within our domains, unlike those in enemy states, are not merely 
ignored and quickly forgotten, but are also cynically insulted. One striking 
illustration came a few weeks after the murder of the Latin American 
intellectuals in El Salvador. Vaclav Havel visited Washington and addressed a 
joint session of Congress. Before his enraptured audience, Havel lauded the 
"defenders of freedom" in Washington who "understood the responsibility that 
flowed from" being "the most powerful nation on earth"---crucially, their 
responsibility for the brutal assassination of his Salvadoran counterparts 
shortly before.

The liberal intellectual class was enthralled by his presentation. Havel reminds 
us that "we live in a romantic age," Anthony Lewis gushed. Other prominent 
liberal commentators reveled in Havel's "idealism, his irony, his humanity," as 
he "preached a difficult doctrine of individual responsibility" while Congress 
"obviously ached with respect" for his genius and integrity; and asked why 
America lacks intellectuals so profound, who "elevate morality over 
self-interest" in this way, praising us for the tortured and mutilated corpses 
that litter the countries that we have left in misery. We need not tarry on what 
the reaction would have been had Father Ellacuría, the most prominent of the 
murdered Jesuit intellectuals, spoken such words at the Duma after elite forces 
armed and trained by the Soviet Union assassinated Havel and half a dozen of his 
associates---a performance that is inconceivable.

The assassination of bin Laden, too, directs our attention to our insulted 
victims. There is much more to say about the operation---including Washington's 
willingness to face a serious risk of major war and even leakage of fissile 
materials to jihadis, as I have discussed elsewhere---but let us keep to the 
choice of name: Operation Geronimo. The name caused outrage in Mexico and was 
protested by indigenous groups in the United States, but there seems to have 
been no further notice of the fact that Obama was identifying bin Laden with the 
Apache Indian chief. Geronimo led the courageous resistance to invaders who 
sought to consign his people to the fate of "that hapless race of native 
Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious 
cruelty, among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one 
day bring [it] to judgement," in the words of the grand strategist John Quincy 
Adams, the intellectual architect of manifest destiny, uttered long after his 
own contributions to these sins. The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of 
the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: 
Apache, Blackhawk, Cheyenne . . . We might react differently if the Luftwaffe 
were to call its fighter planes "Jew" and "Gypsy."

Denial of these "heinous sins" is sometimes explicit. To mention a few recent 
cases, two years ago in one of the world's leading left-liberal intellectual 
journals, The New York Review of Books, Russell Baker outlined what he learned 
from the work of the "heroic historian" Edmund Morgan: namely, that when 
Columbus and the early explorers arrived they "found a continental vastness 
sparsely populated by farming and hunting people . . . . In the limitless and 
unspoiled world stretching from tropical jungle to the frozen north, there may 
have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants." The calculation is off by 
many tens of millions, and the "vastness" included advanced civilizations 
throughout the continent. No reactions appeared, though four months later the 
editors issued a correction, noting that in North America there may have been as 
many as 18 million people---and, unmentioned, tens of millions more "from 
tropical jungle to the frozen north." This was all well known decades 
ago---including the advanced civilizations and the "merciless and perfidious 
cruelty" of the "extermination"---but not important enough even for a casual 
phrase. In London Review of Books a year later, the noted historian Mark Mazower 
mentioned American "mistreatment of the Native Americans," again eliciting no 
comment. Would we accept the word "mistreatment" for comparable crimes committed 
by enemies?

. . .

If the responsibility of intellectuals refers to their moral responsibility as 
decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance 
the cause of freedom, justice, mercy, and peace---and to speak out not simply 
about the abuses of our enemies, but, far more significantly, about the crimes 
in which we are implicated and can ameliorate or terminate if we choose---how 
should we think of 9/11?

The notion that 9/11 "changed the world" is widely held, understandably. The 
events of that day certainly had major consequences, domestic and international. 
One was to lead President Bush to re-declare Ronald Reagan's war on 
terrorism---the first one has been effectively "disappeared," to borrow the 
phrase of our favorite Latin American killers and torturers, presumably because 
the consequences do not fit well with preferred self images. Another consequence 
was the invasion of Afghanistan, then Iraq, and more recently military 
interventions in several other countries in the region and regular threats of an 
attack on Iran ("all options are open," in the standard phrase). The costs, in 
every dimension, have been enormous. That suggests a rather obvious question, 
not asked for the first time: was there an alternative?

A number of analysts have observed that bin Laden won major successes in his war 
against the United States. "He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive 
the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans 
into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them," 
the journalist Eric Margolis writes.

The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed 
right into bin Laden's trap. . . . Grotesquely overblown military outlays and 
debt addiction . . . . may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought 
he could defeat the United States.

A report from the Costs of War project at Brown University's Watson Institute 
for International Studies estimates that the final bill will be $3.2--4 
trillion. Quite an impressive achievement by bin Laden.
That Washington was intent on rushing into bin Laden's trap was evident at once. 
Michael Scheuer, the senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking bin Laden from 
1996 to 1999, writes, "Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons 
he is waging war on us." The al Qaeda leader, Scheuer continues, "is out to 
drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world."

And, as Scheuer explains, bin Laden largely succeeded: "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, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States 
of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable ally." And arguably remains 
so, even after his death.

There is good reason to believe that the jihadi movement could have been split 
and undermined after the 9/11 attack, which was criticized harshly within the 
movement. Furthermore, the "crime against humanity," as it was rightly called, 
could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to 
apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognized in the immediate aftermath of 
the attack, but no such idea was even considered by decision-makers in 
government. It seems no thought was given to the Taliban's tentative offer---how 
serious an offer, we cannot know---to present the al Qaeda leaders for a 
judicial proceeding.

At the time, I quoted Robert Fisk's conclusion that the horrendous crime of 9/11 
was committed with "wickedness and awesome cruelty"---an accurate judgment. The 
crimes could have been even worse. Suppose that Flight 93, downed by courageous 
passengers in Pennsylvania, had bombed the White House, killing the president. 
Suppose that the perpetrators of the crime planned to, and did, impose a 
military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands. 
Suppose the new dictatorship established, with the support of the criminals, an 
international terror center that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states 
elsewhere, and, as icing on the cake, brought in a team of economists---call 
them "the Kandahar boys"---who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst 
depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.

As we all should know, this is not a thought experiment. It happened. I am, of 
course, referring to what in Latin America is often called "the first 9/11": 
September 11, 1973, when the United States succeeded in its intensive efforts to 
overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military 
coup that placed General Pinochet's ghastly regime in office. The dictatorship 
then installed the Chicago Boys---economists trained at the University of 
Chicago---to reshape Chile's economy. Consider the economic destruction, the 
torture and kidnappings, and multiply the numbers killed by 25 to yield per 
capita equivalents, and you will see just how much more devastating the first 
9/11 was.

The goal of the overthrow, in the words of the Nixon administration, was to kill 
the "virus" that might encourage all those "foreigners [who] are out to screw 
us"---screw us by trying to take over their own resources and more generally to 
pursue a policy of independent development along lines disliked by Washington. 
In the background was the conclusion of Nixon's National Security Council that 
if the United States could not control Latin America, it could not expect "to 
achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world." Washington's "credibility" 
would be undermined, as Henry Kissinger put it.

The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was "nothing of 
very great consequence," Kissinger assured his boss a few days later. And 
judging by how it figures in conventional history, his words can hardly be 
faulted, though the survivors may see the matter differently.

These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that 
destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. As 
already discussed, the first 9/11 was just one act in the drama that began in 
1962 when Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American militaries to 
"internal security." The shattering aftermath is also of little consequence, the 
familiar pattern when history is guarded by responsible intellectuals.

. . .

It seems to be close to a historical universal that conformist intellectuals, 
the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, 
are honored and privileged in their own societies, and the value-oriented 
punished in one or another way. The pattern goes back to the earliest records. 
It was the man accused of corrupting the youth of Athens who drank the hemlock, 
much as Dreyfusards were accused of "corrupting souls, and, in due course, 
society as a whole" and the value-oriented intellectuals of the 1960s were 
charged with interference with "indoctrination of the young."

In the Hebrew scriptures there are figures who by contemporary standards are 
dissident intellectuals, called "prophets" in the English translation. They 
bitterly angered the establishment with their critical geopolitical analysis, 
their condemnation of the crimes of the powerful, their calls for justice and 
concern for the poor and suffering. King Ahab, the most evil of the kings, 
denounced the Prophet Elijah as a hater of Israel, the first "self-hating Jew" 
or "anti-American" in the modern counterparts. The prophets were treated 
harshly, unlike the flatterers at the court, who were later condemned as false 
prophets. The pattern is understandable. It would be surprising if it were 
otherwise.

As for the responsibility of intellectuals, there does not seem to me to be much 
to say beyond some simple truths. Intellectuals are typically 
privileged---merely an observation about usage of the term. Privilege yields 
opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has 
choices.

/http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.5/noam_chomsky_responsibility_of_intellectuals_redux.php
/
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