Noam Chomsky
first gained academic acclaim in the 60s and 70s with his theories about how
people learn language. He then studied the workings of the
US government
in all their gory detail, producing an avalanche of books, ranging from US
foreign policy and imperialism to the brainwashing role of the corporate media.
Chomsky is now known as one of
America’s leading
voices of dissent. SchNEWS went to interview him on
his recent trip to London, but we didn’t know what to expect. Condescending
academic? Rabble-rousing revolutionary? What we found
was neither of these, but simply an intelligent, honest man with a lot of
knowledge about the rhetoric and motives fuelling Bush’s
America. It was
like talking to your grandfather who just happens to have a dead-on critique of
the American war machine. So here’s a partial transcript of the interview that
took place between Chomsky, SchNEWS, Comedian Mark
Thomas (who set the whole thing up) and a collection of other British trouble
makers.
Mark Thomas: If we can start with US
foreign policy in relation to Iraq and the War
on Terror, what do you think is going on at the moment?
Noam Chomsky: First of all I think we ought to
be very cautious about using the phrase ‘War on Terror’. There can’t be a War on
Terror. It’s a logical impossibility. The
US is one of
the leading terrorist states in the world. The guys who are in charge right now
were all condemned for terrorism by the
World
Court. They would have been
condemned by the U.N. Security Council except they vetoed the resolution, with
Britain abstaining
of course. These guys can’t be conducting a war on terror. It’s just out of the
question. They declared a war on terror 20 years ago and we know what they did.
They destroyed Central
America. They killed a million and a
half people in southern Africa. We can go
on through the list. So there’s no ‘War on Terror’.
There was a terrorist
act, September 11th, very unusual, a real historic event, the first time in
history that the west received the kind of attack that it carries out routinely
in the rest of the world. September 11th did change policy undoubtedly, not just
for the US, but across
the board. Every government in the world saw it as an opportunity to intensify
their own repression and atrocities, from
Russia and
Chechnya, to the
West imposing more discipline on their populations.
This had big effects
- for example take Iraq. Prior to
September 11th, there was a longstanding concern of the
US toward
Iraq - that is
it has the second largest oil reserves in the world. So one way or another the
US was going
to do something to get it, that’s clear. September 11th gave the pretext.
There’s a change in the rhetoric concerning
Iraq after
September 11th – ‘We now have an excuse to go ahead with what we’re planning.’
It kinda stayed like that up to September of this year when
Iraq suddenly
shifted... to ‘An imminent threat to our existence.’ Condoleeza Rice [US National Security Advisor] came out with
her warning that the next evidence of a nuclear weapon would be a mushroom cloud
over New
York. There was a big media
campaign with political figures – we needed to destroy Saddam this winter or
we’d all be dead. You’ve got to kind of admire the intellectual classes not to
notice that the only people in the world who are afraid of Saddam Hussien are Americans. Everybody hates him and Iraqis are
undoubtedly afraid of him, but outside of
Iraq and the
United
States, no one’s afraid of him. Not
Kuwait, not
Iran, not
Israel, not
Europe. They hate
him, but they’re not afraid of him.
In the
United
States people are very much afraid,
there’s no question about it. The support you see in US polls for the war is
very thin, but it’s based on fear. It’s an old story in the
United
States. When my kids were in
elementary school 40 years ago they were taught to hide under desks in case of
an atom bomb attack. I’m not kidding. The country is always in fear of
everything. Crime for example: Crime in the
United
States is roughly comparable with
other industrial societies, towards the high end of the spectrum. On the other
hand, fear of crime is way beyond other industrial societies...
It’s very
consciously engendered. These guys now in office,
remember they’re almost entirely from the 1980s. They’ve been through it already
and they know exactly how to play the game. Right through the 1980s they
periodically had campaigns to terrify the population…
To create fear is
not that hard, but this time the timing was so obviously for the Congressional
campaign that even political commentators got the message. The presidential
campaign is going to be starting in the middle of next year. They’ve got to have
a victory under their belt. And on to the next
adventure. Otherwise, the population’s going to pay attention to what’s
happening to them, which is a big assault, a major assault on the population,
just as in the 1980s. They’re replaying the record almost exactly. First thing
they did in the 1980s, in 1981, was drive the country into a big deficit. This
time they did it with a tax cut for the rich and the biggest increase in federal
spending in 20 years.
This happens to be an unusually corrupt
administration, kind of like an Enron administration, so there’s a tremendous
amount of profit going into the hands of an unusually corrupt group of
gangsters. You can’t really have all this stuff on the front pages, so you have
to push it off the front pages. You have to keep people from thinking about it.
And there’s only one way that anybody ever figured out to frighten people and
they’re good at it.
So there’s domestic
political factors that have to do with timing. September 11th gave the pretext
and there’s a long term, serious interest [in
Iraq]. So
they’ve gotta go to war... my speculation would be
that they would like to have it over with before the presidential campaign.
The problem is that when you’re in a war, you don’t know what’s going to
happen. The chances are it’ll be a pushover, it ought to be, there’s no Iraqi
army, the country will probably collapse in two minutes, but you can’t be sure
of that. If you take the CIA warnings seriously, they’re pretty straight about
it. They’re saying that if there’s a war,
Iraq may respond
with terrorist acts…
US adventurism
is just driving countries into developing weapons of mass destruction as a
deterrent - they don’t have any other deterrent. Conventional forces don’t work
obviously, there’s no external deterrent. The only way anyone can defend
themselves is with terror and weapons of mass destruction. So it’s plausible to
assume that they’re doing it. I suppose that’s the basis for the CIA analysis
and I suppose the British intelligence are saying the same thing.
But
you don’t want to have that happen in the middle of a presidential campaign...
There is the problem about what to do with the effects of the war, but that’s
easy. You count on journalists and intellectuals not to talk about it. How many
people are talking about Afghanistan?
Afghanistan’s back
where it was, run by warlords and gangsters and who’s writing about it? Almost nobody. If it goes back to what it was no one cares,
everyone’s forgotten about it.
If
Iraq turns into
people slaughtering each other, I could write the articles right now. ‘Backward
people, we tried to save them but they want to murder each other because they’re
dirty Arabs.’ By then, I presume, I’m just guessing, they [the
US] will be
onto the next war, which will probably be either
Syria or
Iran.
The fact is that war with
Iran is probably
underway. It’s known that about 12% of the Israeli airforce is in south eastern
Turkey. They’re
there because they’re preparing for the war against
Iran. They don’t
care about Iraq.
Iraq they
figure’s a pushover, but Iran has always
been a problem for Israel. It’s the
one country in the region that they can’t handle and they’ve been after the
US to take it
on for years. According to one report, the Israeli airforce is now flying at the Iranian border for
intelligence, provocation and so on. And it’s not a small airforce. It’s bigger than the British airforce, bigger than any NATO power other than the
US. So it’s
probably underway. There are claims that there are efforts to stir up Asseri separatism, which makes some sense. It’s what the
Russians tried to do in 1946, and that would separate
Iran, or what’s
left of Iran, from the
Caspian oil producing centres. Then you could partition it. That will probably
be underway at the time and then there’ll be a story about how
Iran’s going to
kill us tomorrow, so we need to get rid of them today. At least that’s been the
pattern.
Campaign Against Arms Trade: How far do you see the vast
military production machine that is
America requiring
war as an advertisement for their equipment?
Chomsky: You have to remember that what’s
called military industry is just hi-tech industry. The military is a kind of
cover for the state sector in the economy. At MIT [Massachusetts Institute of
Technology] where I am, everybody knows this except the economists. Everybody
else knows it because it pays their salaries. The money comes into places like
MIT under military contract to produce the next generation of the hi-tech
economy. If you take a look at what’s called the new economy - computers,
internet - it comes straight out of places like MIT under federal contracts for
research and development under the cover of military production. Then it gets
handed to IBM when you can sell something.
At MIT the surrounding area
used to have small electronics firms. Now it has small biotech firms. The reason
is that the next cutting edge of the economy is going to be biology based. So
funding from the government for biology based research is vastly increasing. If
you want to have a small start-up company that will make you a
huge amount of money when somebody buys it someday, you do it in genetic
engineering, biotechnology and so on. This goes right through history. It’s
usually a dynamic state sector that gets economies going.
One of the
reasons the US wants to
control the oil is because profits flow back, and they flow in a lot of ways.
Its not just oil profits, it’s also military sales. The biggest purchaser of US
arms and probably British arms is either
Saudi
Arabia or
United Arab
Emirates, one of the rich oil
producers. They take most of the arms and that’s profits for hi-tech industry in
the Unites States. The money goes right back to the
US treasury
and treasury securities. In various ways, this helps prop up primarily the
US and British
economies.
I don’t know if you’ve looked at the records, but in 1958 when
Iraq broke the
Anglo-American condominium on oil production,
Britain went
totally crazy. The British at that time were still very reliant on Kuwaiti
profits. Britain needed the
petrodollars for supporting the British economy and it looked as if what
happened in Iraq might
spread to Kuwait. So at that
point Britain and the
US decided to
grant Kuwait nominal
autonomy, up to then it was just a colony. They said you can run your own post
office, pretend you have a flag, that sort of thing.
The British said that if anything goes wrong with this we will ruthlessly
intervene to ensure maintaining control and the
US agreed to
the same thing in Saudi
Arabia and the
Emirates.
CAAT: There’s
also the suggestion that it’s a way of
America controlling
Europe and the
Pacific rim.
Chomsky: Absolutely. The smarter guys like
George Kenneth were pointing out that control over the energy resources of the
middle east gives the US what he called ‘veto power’ over other countries. He
was thinking particularly of Japan. Now the
Japanese know this perfectly well so they’ve been working very hard to try to
gain independent access to oil, that’s one of the reasons they’ve tried hard,
and succeeded to an extent, to establish relations with Indonesia and Iran and
others, to get out of the West-controlled system.
Actually one of the
purposes of the [post World War II] Marshall Plan, this great benevolent plan,
was to shift Europe and
Japan from coal
to oil. Europe and
Japan both had
indigenous coal resources but they switched to oil in order to give the
US control.
About £2bn out of the £13bn Marshall Plan dollars went straight to the oil
companies to help convert Europe and
Japan to oil
based economies. For power, it’s enormously significant to control the resources
and oil’s expected to be the main resource for the next couple of
generations.
The National Intelligence Council, which is a collection of
various intelligence agencies, published a projection in 2000 called ‘Global
Trends 2015.’ They make the interesting prediction that terrorism is going to
increase as a result of globalisation. They really say it straight. They say
that what they call globalisation is going to lead to a widening economic
divide, just the opposite of what economic theory predicts, but they’re
realists, and so they say that it’s going to lead to increased disorder, tension
and hostility and violence, a lot of it directed against the
United
States.
They also predict
that Persian
Gulf oil will be increasingly
important for world energy and industrial systems but that the
US won’t rely
on it. But it’s got to control it. Controlling the oil resources is more of an
issue than access. Because control equals
power.
MT: How do
you think the current anti-war movement that’s building up compares with
Vietnam? What do
you think we can achieve as people involved in direct action and protest? Do you
think there’s a possibility of preventing a war from occurring?
NC: I think that’s really hard because the
timing is really short. You can make it costly, which is important. Even if it
doesn’t stop, it’s important for the war to be costly to try to stop the next
one.
Compared with the Vietnam War movement, this movement is just
incomparably ahead now. People talk about the Vietnam War movement, but they
forget or don’t know what it was actually like. The war in
Vietnam started in
1962, publicly, with a public attack on
South
Vietnam – air force, chemical
warfare, concentration camps, the whole business. No protest... the protest that
did build up four or five years later was mostly about the bombing of the North,
which was terrible but was a sideshow. The main attack was against
South
Vietnam and there was never any
serious protest against that.
This time there’s protest before the war
has even got started. I can’t think of an example in the entire history of
Europe, including
the United
States, when there was ever protest
of any substantial level before a war. Here you’ve got massive protest before
war’s even started. It’s a tremendous tribute to changes in popular culture that
have taken place in Western countries in the last 30 or 40 years. It’s just
phenomenal.
SchNEWS: It sometimes seems that as
soon as protest breaks out of quite narrow confines, a march every six months
maybe, you get attacked. People protesting against the war recently in
Brighton were pepper
sprayed and batoned for just sitting down in a
street.
Chomsky: The more
protest there is the more tightening there’s going to be, that’s routine. When
the Vietnam War protests really began to build up, so did the repression. I was
very close to a long jail sentence myself and it was stopped by the Tet Offensive. After the Tet
Offensive, the establishment turned against the war and they called off the
trials. Right now a lot of people could end up in
Guantanamo
Bay and people
are aware of it.
If there’s protest in a country then there’s going to be
repression. Can they get away with it? - it depends a
lot on the reaction. In the early 50s in the
US, there was
what was called Macarthyism and the only reason it
succeeded was that there was no resistance to it. When they tried the same thing
in the 60s it instantly collapsed because people simply laughed at it so they
couldn’t do it. Even a dictatorship can’t do everything it wants. It’s got to
have some degree of popular support. And in a more democratic country, there’s a
very fragile power system. There’s nothing secret about this, it’s history. The question in all of these things is how much
popular resistance there’s going to be.
* This is an edited version. If
you want to see the whole video, contact Undercurrents 01865 203661, [EMAIL PROTECTED].