chomsky ( as humourless as we like him)

Atilio A. Boron Interviews Noam Chomsky

14/6/03 (APR)

Atilio A. Boron: Looking at the recent US policies in Iraq,
What do you think was the real goal behind this war?

Noam Chomsky: Well, we can be quite confident on one thing. Reasons
we are given can't possibly be the reasons. And we know that, because
they are internally contradictory. So one day, Bush and Powell would
claim that "the single question," as they put it, is whether Iraq would
disarm and the next day they would say it doesn't matter whether Iraq
disarms because they will go on and invade anyway. And the next day
would be that if Saddam and his group get out then the problem will be
solved; and then, the next day for example, at the Azores, at the summit

when they made an ultimatum to the United Nations, they said that even
if Saddam and his group get out they would go on and invade anyway.
And they went on like that. When people give you contradictory reasons
every time they speak, all they are saying is: "don't believe a word I
say."
So we can dismiss the official reasons.

And the actual reasons I think are not very obscure. First of all,
there's a long standing interest. That does not account for the timing
but it does account for the interest. And that is that Iraq has the
second large oil reserves in the World and controlling Iraqi oil and
even ending up probably with military bases in Iraq will place the
United States in an extremely strong position to dominate the global
energy system even more than it does today. That's a very powerful
lever of world control, quite apart from the profits that comes from it.

And the US probably doesn't intend to access the oil of Iraq; it intends

to use primarily safer Atlantic basin resources for itself (Western
Hemisphere, West Africa). But to control the oil has been a leading
principle of US foreign policies since the Second World War, and Iraq
is particularly significant in this respect. So that's a long standing
interest. On the other hand it doesn't explain the timing.

If you want to look at the timing, I think that it became quite clear
that the massive propaganda for the war began in September of last year,

September 2002. Before that there was a condemnation of Iraq but no
effort to whip people into war fever. So we asked what else happened
then September 2002. Well, two important things happened. One was the
opening of the mid term congressional campaign, and the Bush's campaign
manager, Karl Rove, was very clearly explaining what should be obvious
to anybody anyway: that they could not possible enter the campaign with
a focus on social and economic issues. The reason is that they are
carrying out policies which are quite harmful to the general population
and favourable to an extremely narrow sector of corporate power and the
corrupt sectors as well, and they can't face the electorate on that. As
he pointed out, if we can make the primary issue national security then
we will be able win because people will flock to power if they feel
frightened. And that is second nature to these people; that's the way
they have ran the country - right through the 1980 s - with very
unpopular domestic programs but accustomed to press into the panic
button - Nicaragua, Grenada, crime, one thing after another. And Rove
also pointed out that something similar would be needed for the
presidential election.

And that's true and what they want do is not just to stay in office but
they would like to institutionalise the very regressive program put
forward domestically, a program which will basically unravel whatever is

left of New Deal social democratic systems and turn the country almost
completely into a passive undemocratic society, controlled totally by
high concentration of capitals. This means slashing public medical
assistance, social security; probably schools; and increasing state
power. These people are not conservatives, they brought the country
into a federal deficit with the largest increase in federal spending in
20
years, that is since their last term in office and huge tax cuts for the

rich, and they want to institutionalise these programs. They are seeking

a "fiscal train wreck" that will make it impossible to fund the
programs. They know they cannot face an election declaring that they
want to destroy very popular programs, but they can throw up their hands

in despair and say, "What can we do, there's no money," after they have
made sure there would be no money by huge tax cuts for the rich and
sharp increase in spending for military (including high tech industry)
and other programs beneficial to corporate power and the wealthy. So
that's the second, that's the domestic factor and in fact, there was a
spectacular propaganda achievement on that. After the government-media
propaganda campaign began in September they succeeded in convincing a
majority of the population very quickly that Iraq was an imminent threat

to the security of the United States, and even that Iraq was responsible

for September 11th. I mean, there is not a grain of truth in all that,
but by now majority of the population believes those things and those
attitudes are correlated strongly with the commitment to war, which is
understandable. If people think they are threatened with destruction by
an enemy who's already attacked them it is likely that they'll go to
war. In effect, if you look at the press today they describe soldiers as

saying: "we are here for revenge - you know - because they blew up the
World Trade Centre, they will attack us," or something. Well, these
beliefs are completely unique to the United States.

No one in the World believes anything like this. In Kuwait and Iran
people hate Saddam Hussein, but they are not afraid of him, they know
they're the weakest country in the region. In any event the
government-media propaganda campaign worked brilliantly as the
population was frightened and to a large extent it was willing to
support the war despite the fact that there was a lot of opposition. And

that's the second factor.

And there was a third factor which was even more important. In
September the government announced the national security strategy.
That is not completely without precedent, but it is quite new as a
formulation of state policy. What is stated is that we are tearing the
entire system of the international law to shreds, the end of UN charter,

and that we are going to carry out an aggressive war - which we will
call "preventive" - and at any time we choose and that we will rule the
world by force. In addition, we will assure that there is never any
challenge to our domination because we are so overwhelmingly powerful
in military force that we will simply crush any potential challenge.

Well, you know, that caused shudders around the world, including the
foreign policy elite at home which was appalled by this. I mean it is
not that things like that haven't been heard in the past. Of course they

had, but it had never been formulated as an official national policy. I
suspect you will have to go back to Hitler to find an analogy to that.
Now, when you propose new norms in the international behaviour and
new policies you have to illustrate it, you have to get people to
understand
that you mean it. Also you have to have what a Harvard historian called
an "exemplary war", a war of example, which shows that we really mean
what we say.

And we have to choose the right target. The target has to have several
properties. First it has to be completely defenceless. No one would
attack anybody who might be able to defend themselves. That would be
not prudent. Iraq meets that perfectly: it is the weakest country in the

region, it's been devastated by sanctions and almost completely disarmed

and the US knows every inch of the Iraq territory by satellite
surveillance and overflights, and more recently U-2 flights. So, yes,
Iraq it is extremely weak and satisfied the first condition.

And secondly, it has to be important. So there will be no point
invading Burundi, you know, for example, it has to be a country
worthwhile controlling, owning, and Iraq has that property too. It's, as

mentioned, the second largest oil producer in the world. So it's perfect

example and a perfect case for this exemplary war, intending to put the
world on notice saying that this is what we're going do, any time we
choose. We have the power. We have declared that our goal is domination
by force and that no challenge will be accepted. We've showed you what
we are intending to do and be ready for the next. We will proceed on to
the next operation. Those various conditions fold together and they make

a war a very reasonable choice in taking to a test some principles.

Atilio A. Boron: According to your analysis then the question is: who
is next? Because you don't believe that they are going to stop in Iraq,
wouldn't you?

Noam Chomsky: No, they already made this clear. For one thing they
need something for the next presidential election. And that will
continue.
Through their first twelve years office this continued year after year;
and it will continue until they manage to institutionalise the domestic
policies to which they are committed and to ensure the global system
they want. So what's the next choice? Well the next choice has to meet
similar conditions. It has to be valuable enough to attack, and it has
to be weak enough to be defenceless. And there are choices, Syria is a
possible choice. There Israel will be delighted to participate. Israel
alone is a small country, but it's an offshore US military base, so it
has an enormous military force, apart from having hundreds of nuclear
weapons (and probably a kind of chemical and biological weapons), its
air and armed forces are larger and more advanced that those in any Nato

power, and the US is behind it overwhelmingly.

So Syria is a possibility. Iran is a more difficult possibility because
it's a harder country to dominate and control. Yet there is a reason to
believe that for a year or two now, efforts have been under way to try
dismantle Iran, to break it into internally warring groups. These US
dismantling efforts have been based partly in Eastern Turkey, the US
bases in Eastern Turkey apparently flying surveillance over Iranian
borders. That's another possibility. There is a third possibility that
can not be considered lightly, and is the Andean region. The Andean
region has a lot of resources and it's out of control. There are US
military bases surrounding the region, and US forces are there already.
And the control of Latin-America is of course extremely important. With
the developments in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia it's
clear that US domination is challenged and that can't be accepted, in
particular in a region so close and so crucial because of its resource
base. So that is another possibility.

Atilio A. Boron: This is really frightening. Now the question is, do
you think that this situation in Iraq, the invasion and the aftermath
would affect in a non-reparable manner the political stability of the
region? What are likely to be the side effects of this invasion in
countries with a very fragile political constitution like the South
Arabia or even Syria, Iran or even the Kurds? What may be the
future of the Palestine question, which still is of paramount importance

in the area?

Noam Chomsky: Well, what's going to happen in the Arab world is
extremely hard to predict. It's a disorganised and chaotic world
dominated by highly authoritarian and brutal regimes. We know what the
attitudes are. The US is very concerned with attitudes in the region so
they have pretty good studies made by US Middle East scholars on the
attitudes in the region, and the results are pretty dramatic. One of the

more recent ones, a University of Maryland study covering from Morocco
to the Gulf to Lebanon, the entire area, shows that a very large
majority of the population wants religious leaders to have a greater
role in government. It also shows that approximately another 95% believe

that the sole US interest in the region is taking its oil, strengthening

Israel and humiliating the Arabs. That means near unanimity. If there is

any popular voice allowed in the region, any moves toward democracy, it
could become sort of like Algeria ten years ago, not necessarily radical

Islamists but a government with some stronger Islamist currents. This is

the last thing the US wants, so chances of any kind of democratic
opening very likely will be immediately opposed.

The voices of secular democracy will also be opposed. If they speak up
freely, about violation of UN resolutions for example, they will bring
up the case of Israel, which has a much worse record than Iraq in this
respect but is protected by the United States. And they will have
concerns for independence that the US will not favour, so it will
continue to support oppressive and undemocratic regimes, as in the past,

and as in Latin America for many years, unless it can be assured that
they will keep closely to Washington's priorities.

On the other hand these chaotic popular movements are so difficult to
predict. I mean, even the participants can't or don't know what they
want. What we know is this tremendous hatred, antagonisms and fear -
probably more than ever before - on the Israel-Palestine issue that is,
of course, the core issue in the Arab world. The Bush administration has

been very careful not to take any position, though there are actions,
which undermine the prospects for peaceful resolution: funding more
Israeli settlement programs, for example.

They don't say anything significant. The most they say is that we have
a "vision," or something equally meaningless. Meanwhile the actions have

been taken, and the US had continued to support the more extremist
positions within Israel. So what the press describes as George Bush's
most significant recent statements, then later reiterated by Colin
Powell, was the statement that said that settlement in the occupied
territories can continue until the United State determines that the
conditions for peace have been established, and you can move forward
on this mythical "Road Map."

The statement that was hailed as "significant" in fact amounts to a
shift in policy, to a more extremist form. Up until now the official
position has been that there should be no more settlements. Of course,
that's hypocritical of the United States because meanwhile it continues
to provide the military, and economic, and diplomatic support for more
settlements, but the official position has been opposed to it. Now the
official position is in favour of it, until such time as the US
determines unilaterally that the "peace process" has made enough
progress, which means, basically indefinitely. Also it wasn't very well
noticed that last December, at the UN General Assembly, the Bush
administration shifted the US policy crucially on an important issue. Up

until that time, until last December, the US has always officially
endorsed the Security Council resolutions of 1968 opposing Israel's
annexation of Jerusalem, and ordering Israel to withdraw the moves to
take over East Jerusalem and to expand Jerusalem, which is now a huge
area.

The US had always officially opposed that, although, again
hypocritically. As of last December the Bush administration came out in
support of it. This was a pretty sharp change in policy, and it is also
significant that it was not reported in the United States. But it took
place. So this is the only concrete act, and continues like that. The US

has in the past vetoed the European efforts to place international
monitors in the territories, which would be a way of reducing political,

violent confrontations. The US undermined the December 2001 meetings in
Geneva to implement the Geneva conventions and as almost all the other
contracting parties appeared the US refused and that, essentially,
blocked it. Bush then declared Sharon to be "a man of peace" and
supported his repressive activities, as was pretty obvious. So the
indications are that the US will move towards a very harsh policy in the

territories, granting the Palestinians at most some kind of meaningless
formal status as a "state". Of course, this would dress up as democracy,

and peace, and freedom, and so on. They have a huge public relations
operation and it would be presented in that way, but I don't think the
reality looks very promising.

Atilio A. Boron: I have two more questions to go. One is about the
future of the United Nations system. An article by Henry Kissinger
recently reproduced in Argentina argued that multilateralism is over and

that the world has to come to terms with the absolute superiority of the

American armed forces and that we've better go alone with that because
the old system is dead. What is your reflection on the international
arena?

Noam Chomsky: Well you know, it's a little bit like financial and
industrial strategy. It is a more brazen formulation of policies which
have always been carried out. The unilateralism with regard to the
United Nations, as Henry Kissinger knows perfectly well, goes far back.
Was there any UN authorisation for the US invasion of South Vietnam
40 years ago? In fact, the issue could not even come up at the United
Nations. The UN and all the countries were in overwhelming opposition
to the US operations in Vietnam, but the issue could literally never
arise
and it was never discussed because everyone understood that if the
issues were discussed the UN would simply be dismantled.

When the World Court condemned the United States for its attack on
Nicaragua, the official response of the Reagan administration, which is
the same people now in office, the official response when they rejected
World Court jurisdiction was that other nations do not agree with us and

therefore we will reserve to ourselves the right to determine what falls

within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States. I am quoting it.
In this case, that was an attack on Nicaragua. You can hardly have a
more extreme unilateralism than that. And American elites accepted that,

and so it was applauded and, in fact, quickly forgotten. In your next
trip to the US take a poll in the Political Science Department where you

are visiting and you will find people who never heard of it. It's as
wiped out as this. As is the fact that the US had to veto the Security
Council's resolutions supporting the Court's decision and calling on all

states to observe international law. Well, you know that is
unilateralism in its extreme, and it goes back before that.

Right after the missile crisis, which practically brought the world to
a terminal nuclear war, a major crisis, the Kennedy administration
resumed its terrorist activities against Cuba and its economic warfare
which was the background for the crisis and Dean Acheson, a respected
statesman and Kennedy advisor at the liberal end of the spectrum, gave
an important address to the American Society of International Law in
which he essentially stated the Bush Doctrine of September 2002. What
he said is that no "legal issue" arises in the case of a US response to
a
challenge to its "power, position, and prestige." Can't be more extreme
than that. The differences with September 2002 is that instead of being
operative policy now it became official policy. That is the difference.
The UN has been irrelevant to the extent that the US refused to allow it

to function. So, since the mid 1960's when the UN had become somewhat
more independent, because of decolonisation and the recovery of other
countries of the world from the ravages of the war, since 1965 the US is

far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions on a wide range
of issues - Britain is second - and no one else is even close. All that
renders the UN ineffective. It means, you do as we say or else we will
kick you in the pants. Now it is more brazen.

The only correct statement that Kissinger is making is that now we will
not conceal the policies that we are carrying out.

Atilio A. Boron: OK. Here is my last question: What has been the impact
of the Iraqi War on the freedoms and public liberties of the American
public? We have heard horrific stories about librarians being forced to
indicate the names of people checking out books regarded as suspicious
or subversives. What has been the real impact of the war in the domestic

politics of the US?

Noam Chomsky: Well, those things are taking place but I don't think
they are specifically connected with the Iraq War. The Bush
administration, let me repeat it again, they are not conservatives; they

are statist reactionaries. They want a very powerful state, a huge state

in fact, a violent state and one that enforces obedience on the
population. There is a kind of quasi-fascist spirit there, in the
background, and they have been attempting to undermine civil rights
in many ways. That's one of their long term objectives, and they have to

do it quickly because in the US there is a strong tradition of
protection
of civil rights. But the kind of surveillance you are talking about of
libraries and so on is a step towards it. They have also claimed the
right to place a person - even an American citizen - in detention
without charge, without access to lawyers and family, and to hold them
there indefinitely, and that in fact has been upheld by the Courts,
which is pretty shocking. But they have a new proposal, sometimes called

Patriot II, a 80-page document inside the Justice department. Someone
leaked it and it reached the press. There have been some outraged
articles by law professors about it. This is only planned so far, but
they would like to implement as secretly as they can. These plans would
permit the Attorney General to remove citizenship from any individual
whom the attorney general believes is acting in a way harmful to the US
interests. I mean, this is going beyond anything contemplated in any
democratic society. One law professor at New York University has written

that this administration evidently will attempt to take away any civil
rights that it can from citizens and I think it s basically correct.
That fits in with their reactionary statist policies which have a
domestic aspect in the economy and social life but also in political
life.

Atilio A. Boron: Professor Chomsky, it was a great pleasure to have you
expressing your words for the Argentine audience. I want to thank you
very much for this interview and I hope that we can be in touch again in

the future. Have a good day!

� Copyright 2003 APR
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