[Reader-list] Chomsky @ NDTV

[Joy Chatterjee]

US is a leading terrorist state: Noam Chomsky
http://ndtv.com/exclusive/showexclusive.asp?id=718

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, Professor 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 them in the mainstream. So, you are in the wrong country, maybe 
somewhere else.

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