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US is a leading terrorist state: Noam Chomsky
Interviewed by Sreenivasan Jain
As America launches attacks on Afghanistan, the question all over the world is, 'Where are the voices of dissent in America?' At a time like this we are fortunate enough to be joined in India by Prof Noam Chomsky, who some describe as the fiercest critics of American foreign policy. He teaches linguistics at MIT, Boston. His writings and lectures on international affairs, US foreign policy and his constant exposé of media manipulation that have won him a huge world-wide following.
America says that it is fighting a war against terrorism. I take it that you have problems with all the terms of that definition.
Well, I am quite happy to accept the definition of terrorism -- the official definition that one finds in the US code and in Army manuals. In fact for 20 years I have been writing on international terrorism and I constantly use that definition. I think it's the right definition.
Terrorism is defined officially as the "calculated use of violence typically against civilians for the purpose of intimidation and coercion to attain political, religious, ideological or other ends." That's a good definition. I agree with it. There are terrorist states, there are non-state terrorist actors and in fact the State Department has a list of terrorist states.
Well, that definition can't be applied and can't be used because it is the literal definition. There are two reasons why it can't be applied. One is that it's a virtual paraphrase of official US doctrine, which is called counter-insurgency or low intensity conflict. If you look at army manuals, you find that's defined in approximately the same way. But that's official policy.
Now the second reason why it can't be applied is that if you do apply it, it very quickly turns out that the United States is a leading terrorist state exactly as you would expect of the most powerful state in the world. I mean, it's a great analytical error to describe terrorism as a weapon of the weak. Like most weapons, its primarily a weapon of the strong and always has been.
Elaborate on that Prof Chomsky, because that's also been the subject of one of your recent books Rogue States, in which you have forcefully argued that America emerges, looking at the history of its foreign policy interventions as a rogue state, in contradiction to the other countries that America has classified as "rogue" -- whether it's Iran or Afghanistan.
Well, I don't think it's in contrast. In fact it's generally the case that the most powerful states are the most brutal and the ones that are able to act as rogue states. A rogue state is after all a state that acts as it chooses in defiance of international law and international opinion and other constraints. And who is able to do that? Well, the most powerful states.
If you go back to the 19th century, Britain was one of the major rogue states. In the latter part of the 20th century, the United States is supreme in these respects and not surprisingly it behaves like the others. I mean Andorra would be a rogue state if it could get away with it, but it can't.
The record is extremely clear on that. We can take a case that is totally uncontroversial because we can appeal to the decisions of the highest international authorities -- the International Court of Justice and the Security Council of the United Nations. So this is an uncontroversial case. The world court has condemned one state for international terrorism, namely the United States. The victim -- Nicaragua. This was not a minor act of terrorism. This left tens of thousands of people killed and the country virtually destroyed. It may not recover.
Nicaragua took the case to the world court. They won at the world court. The United States dismissed the decision with total contempt. The US was ordered to desist from terrorism and it reacted by immediately escalating the war.
But some would argue that no country, least of all a superpower like America would take an attack like the one on September 11, lying down, without any retaliation. Where do you think America has gone wrong in the manner in which it has retaliated?
Well, you could say the same about Nicaragua. And Nicaragua is by no means that worst case. In fact, far from it. I mentioned it because it's an uncontroversial case, given the decisions of the highest authorities. So how should Nicaragua have reacted when it was under terrorist attack that practically destroyed the country and killed tens of thousands of people?
Well, the way it didn't react is the way it was supposed to react. It couldn't get anywhere because it was confronting a rogue state, which happens to be a dominant rogue state. If the US pursued that course, nobody would block it. There would be, in fact in this particular case it is kind of striking, because the US could have gotten a Security Council resolution -- not for very pretty reasons, but it could have.
The reason is that the five states would veto. They are however all terrorist states -- strong, powerful and violent terrorist states. And for their own reasons, they would have supported the US in order to gain US support for their own terrorism. I mean Britain follows the US reflexively; France wouldn't raise any objections. Russia is delighted to have US support for its massacres and atrocities in Chechnya. China would be quite happy, in fact is happy to have US support for its violent repressions of Muslims in western China. There wouldn't have been any veto.
But the US didn't want a Security Council resolution because it didn't want to act like a rogue state. It wanted to act without authorization. So there is a way to proceed. I mean I wouldn't have approved of that Security Council resolution because of the reasons for which it would have been passed.
But would there have been another way, which is perhaps not the air strikes, not the Security Council resolution, which as you say comes replete with its own hypocrisies. Is there another alternative that the US could have pursued?
Yes. You do what you do when a crime takes place. No matter whether it's a small crime or a huge crime. Whether it's a robbery on the streets or an attack on another country like the terrorist attack on Nicaragua. You try to find the perpetrators, you present evidence against them and you bring them to justice. Actually, that's what Nicaragua did. It had no difficulty in finding the perpetrators and finding evidence.
The US could do the same thing. It chose to do something different. Namely, not to attack the perpetrators. The people killed in Afghanistan are not terrorists. They are the population of Afghanistan. There's a lot of concentration on what they call collateral damage, that people will get killed if a bomb goes in the wrong place. That's bad. But the reason there's concentration on it is because it's very small, it's a trivial part of the atrocities.
The main atrocities that have been well understood and have been known since the beginning are imposing a conscious and purposeful imposition of mass starvation on huge numbers of people. It may be millions of people. That was the initial decision instantly these people are going to die of starvation and already are. They are not the Taliban and not supporters of the Taliban, but most probably the victims of the Taliban.
To those of us watching from India the kind of views that you are voicing are completely invisible in the American mainstream media -- just as invisible as they were during the Gulf war. Has there been any change in the way that mainstream American media networks or newspapers are reporting this war?
They are a little bit more open than they used to be in the past. So for example, take the Vietnam war. I mean at that time there was not a word of criticism permitted, it was totally closed. It's the 1960s that changed the society as it became a much more open and many ways a civilized society. That affected the media and they have become somewhat more open.
But in this particular case, for example, it's the first time in my memory of 50 years of activism that there has been any opening to the media at all -- not to the national media, so not to in the US sense liberal media meaning social democrat, not national public radio, not the New York Times. But when you move out of that domain, yes there is some opening and a fair amount of discussion.
Why is that? What do you think has changed this time?
A number of things. For one thing people are, contrary to the headlines, the population is frightened, angry of course, perplexed, confused, concerned about the background, they want to hear about the issues that have been swept under the rug and have never been discussed.
When you move to say the business press like the Wall Street Journal, they have from immediately after September 11 been running pretty serious articles on the attitudes in the Muslim world towards US foreign policy, recognizing that that's a part of the background. It isn't just the terrorists but it is part of the reservoir of at least tacit support on which they grow terrorists, grow from some kind of basis of support. Otherwise they wouldn't survive.
Now the terrorist groups themselves have a different story and nobody knows them better than the CIA. The CIA helped them and in fact nurtured them for 10 years. It's not just the CIA but the British intelligence, the French intelligence, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan organized the huge mercenary army. Only after the best killers they could find who happened to be the extreme, radical Islamists that they could round up in north Africa and Saudi Arabia and so on. They armed them, they trained them, they nurtured them. The point was to harass the Russian as much as possible.
You know, they didn't care about Afghanistan. In fact they left it a wreck. These people were following their own agenda from the beginning, it wasn't secret. I mean they assassinated President Sadat of Egypt 20 years ago and the record of terrorism ever since. They were fine as long as their terrorist actions and hatreds and fanaticisms could be used for US purposes. It has changed later. In fact how little it changed is pretty astonishing. I mean this attack on the World Trade Center, remember is the second. There was another one in 1993. It almost worked. It came pretty close and they had much bigger plans -- blowing up the UN building, tunnels, FBI building.
One of the people who is now in jail for that terrorist attack is an Egyptian cleric who was brought into the United States just three years before that over the objection of the Immigration and National Service by the intervention of the CIA because he was one of their people. They wanted him in. He was under indictment in Egypt for terrorism, they let him in.
But coming back to the point we were talking about earlier. These contradictions do exist. You say they are finding greater voice in the American media but .
Not in the media so much but in the general population, yes. And to some extent in the media.
What the rest of the world is watching, especially on major American television networks, is now what has become a familiar choreography of war reportage. You see planes taking off, you see State Department briefings and so on. That kind of questioning, the kind of contradictions you are pointing out still continue to be absent.
As in every country I don't know of a historical exception. Do you know of a case of a country that was using violence and its own national media was exposing that. It doesn't happen. The United States is not different from other states. I mean I have actually spent a lot of time since September 11. I have been doing almost nothing but either giving talks or having radio television interviews around the world. The differences are quite striking.
As for example, take the Irish Sea. An interview on Irish national radio or television and British national radio and television are quite different. And the assumptions that are made and you can understand why. It depends who has been holding the lash for 500 years and who has been under the lash for 500 years. It gives you a different picture of the world and the same is true around the world but a criticism of one's own state and its own violence is extremely rare historically.
It's actually a debate that we confronted with here in India when a few years ago we fought a kind of mini-war with Pakistan, the Kargil war as you know and a lot of these same questions came up. National interest, media, the extent to which we could criticize our government for intelligence failure, for perhaps not acting swiftly enough.
How about criticizing the government for outright terrorism. Say for example the major international human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have reams of material on Indian state terrorism in Kashmir and in fact elsewhere.
And these issues are reported in the mainstream media. Perhaps not as much as they should be but they are?
Very little. You hear very little about India as a terrorist state and a sponsor of terrorism because it established terrorist paramilitary groups. For that matter take India's support of the Northern Alliance that's public. What's Northern Alliance? That's a group of warlords who were in control of Afghanistan in fact in the early 1990s and Human Rights Watch describes that as the worst period in Afghanistan's history. I mean they killed about 50,000 people, conducting mass rapes and in fact they were so horrendous that the Taliban were actually welcomed when they came in and drove them out.
So yes, India is like Russia. And now the United States is supporting that terrorist organisation. That's by no means the only case. These are the topics that ought to be in the forefront of attention in every country. No matter what country you are or who you are. I mean in personal life too, you should be concerned with what you are doing. It is easy to condemn someone else's crimes but first look in the mirror. You find a lot when you look there. In the case of right in front of your eyes what we see in that the United States, Britain, India happen to be supporting a massive atrocity against civilians right now. Huge atrocities. Not the collateral damage, not the bombing of a hospital but just imposing, purposefully imposing, purposely because they know all about it -- imposing massive starvation.
I mean, the country was already on the verge of disaster. Even before the bombing there was an estimate of maybe five or six million people just on the edge of starvation, surviving on food aid. When the threat of bombing came that became much worse, the aid agencies withdrew, food was withdrawn, people fled and so on and became much worse. With the bombing it became much more serious. In fact even the New York Times estimated that the number of people facing starvation increased by about 50 per cent from 5 million to 7.5 million. That's two-and-a-half million people that they are adding to their expectation of starvation.
It's worse than that. The Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations announced, it wasn't reported in the United States, but they announced that not only is there a humanitarian catastrophe impending because of the cutbacks but also the bombing has disrupted the planting of 80 per cent of the crops, meaning will be an even worse famine next year. These are purposeful, conscious acts. They are acts of massive violence and terror. None of that justifies the atrocities of September 11. They were an enormous atrocity too but it happens that the twenty-first century is beginning with two huge atrocities and we are involved in one of them.
Are you worried, Professor Chomsky, when you address audiences within America or you travel all over the world and you give lectures and interviews that to some extent you are preaching to the converted. That the sort of people who come and listen to you are the ones who already share those views. And those who are taking those policy decisions that you question aren't?
I hope that's true because the audiences are immense. I mean just before I came I gave talks in the city where I live which had an audience of two or three thousand people with overflows and so on.
In Boston?
Yes. And over the internet and many more. I was on for the first time ever on national cable television. That's the mass popular medium for a question and answer programme with a live audience. Almost every question was serious. I wouldn't say I agreed with him when I would expect him to but serious questions, thoughtful questions, the right questions, I thought good interchange. If that's the converted then an awful lot are converted out there and everyone else who's involved as I am finds the same thing.
So, in context of your earlier writings where you, to use your own phrase, you talked about a secular priesthood within the American intelligence that in a way builds public opinion or shapes public opinion.
Tries to.
Or tries to shape public opinion?
Tries to. There is a big difference between trying to and succeeding. It typically does not succeed. It doesn't happen to matter very much because the country is; it's an elite run system. Technically, it's a democracy but the public is mostly marginalized. So, there is a narrower sector of decision-making but if you look, for years they have been very separate from public.
Take the Vietnam war, a huge issue. For about 30 years now, there have been regular detailed polls on public attitude towards the Vietnam war. Consistently, about 2/3rd to 70 per cent when asked what they think about the war they say, fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. There's virtually no one in the intelligence who says that.
This figure of 70 per cent is astonishing because every one of those people made it up for themselves. They didn't read it anywhere; they didn't hear it anywhere unless they are part of the activist movement. The most critical that you can be in the mainstream, this includes left intellectuals, is that the war began, well to quote the most left wing commentator in the New York times, Anthony Louis, the war began with blundering efforts to do good but by 1969 after south Vietnam was wiped out practically, it was clear that it was a mistake, it was too costly to ourselves. Now, that's the intelligentsia view, the general population's is totally different.
Do you see that happening again with this war where the secular priesthood is trying to manufacture consent?
Yes, trying. In fact, everything I've just said to you, you'll never find in the mainstream discussion including the respectable left liberal press, liberal in the US sense, kind of social democratic. So, there is just a word necessarily. The population is, I wouldn't say the population just agrees, they're just confused.
For example, very little of the population can be aware of the fact that the target of the war is Afghan civilians. To know that you have to find out what is being said by the aid agencies, by the Red Cross, by the World Food Programme, by the special reporter for food in the United Nations, by Mary Robinson and I find in the press. So, Mary Robinson for example, the High Commissioner of Human Rights, her plea literally received three sentences in the entire US press, three scattered sentences. How can anybody know?
Lastly, Prof Chomsky, as someone who has always challenged institutions, are you worried about becoming somewhat of an institution yourself?
No, I don't think there's too much danger there. I'm not unique by any means. There are many people who live the same kind of life as I do and have for many years, many before I got started and younger ones.
Well, you are being modest because the New York Times has called you arguably one of the most important intellectuals alive.
People often quote that sentence but they don't quote the next sentence, which was, how can you say such terrible things about the US foreign policy. But it's the same everywhere. I mean, I don't know of any country where there isn't an articulate group of dissident critics who are marginalized naturally because they oppose power systems, often have a good deal of resonant interaction with the general public. But who you won't find in the mainstream. So, you are in the wrong country, maybe somewhere else.
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