9-11 (11 page)

I doubt that it would have made any difference. It would have been a terrible crime even if the toll had been much smaller. The Pentagon is more than a “symbol,” for reasons that need no comment. As for the World Trade Center, we scarcely know what the terrorists had in mind when they bombed it in 1993 and destroyed it on September 11. But we can be quite confident that it had little to do with such matters as “globalization,” or “economic imperialism,” or “cultural values,” matters that are utterly unfamiliar to bin Laden and his associates, or other radical Islamists like those convicted for the 1993 bombings, and of no concern to them, just as they are, evidently, not concerned by the fact that their atrocities over the years have caused great
harm to poor and oppressed people in the Muslim world and elsewhere, again on September 11.

Among the immediate victims are Palestinians under military occupation, as the perpetrators surely must have known. Their concerns are different, and bin Laden, at least, has been eloquent enough in expressing them in many interviews: to overthrow the corrupt and repressive regimes of the Arab world and replace them with properly “Islamic” regimes, to support Muslims in their struggles against “infidels” in Saudi Arabia (which he regards as under U.S. occupation), Chechnya, Bosnia, western China, North Africa, and Southeast Asia; maybe elsewhere.

It is convenient for Western intellectuals to speak of “deeper causes” such as hatred of Western values and progress. That is a useful way to avoid questions about the origin of the bin Laden network itself, and about the practices that lead to anger, fear, and desperation throughout the region, and provide a reservoir from which radical Islamic terrorist cells can sometimes draw. Since the answers to these questions are rather clear, and are inconsistent with preferred doctrine, it is better to dismiss the questions as “superficial” and “insignificant,” and to turn to “deeper causes” that are in fact more superficial, even insofar as they are relevant.

Should we call what is happening now a war?

There is no precise definition of “war.” People speak of the “war on poverty,” the “drug war,” etc. What is taking shape is not a conflict among states, though it could become one.

Can we talk of the clash between two civilizations?

This is fashionable talk, but it makes little sense. Suppose we briefly review some familiar history. The most populous Islamic state is Indonesia, a favorite of the United States ever since Suharto took power in 1965, as army-led massacres slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people, mostly landless peasants, with the assistance of the U.S. and with an outburst of euphoria from the West that is so embarrassing in retrospect that it has been effectively wiped out of memory. Suharto remained “our kind of guy,” as the Clinton administration called him, as he compiled one of the most horrendous records of slaughter, torture, and other abuses of the late 20th century. The most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state, apart from the Taliban, is Saudi Arabia, a U.S. client since its founding. In the 1980s, the U.S. along with Pakistani intelligence (helped by Saudi Arabia, Britain, and others), recruited, armed, and trained the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists they could find to cause maximal harm to the Soviets in Afghanistan. As Simon Jenkins observes in the London
Times
, those efforts “destroyed a moderate regime and created a fanatical one, from groups recklessly financed by the Americans” (most of the funding was probably Saudi). One of the indirect beneficiaries was Osama bin Laden.

Also in the 1980s, the U.S. and U.K. gave strong support to their friend and ally Saddam Hussein—more secular, to be sure, but on the Islamic side of the “clash”—right through the period of his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds, and beyond.

Also in the 1980s the U.S. fought a major war in Central America, leaving some 200,000 tortured and mutilated corpses, millions of orphans and refugees, and four countries devastated. A prime target of the U.S. attack was the Catholic Church, which had committed the grievous sin of adopting “the preferential option for the poor.”

In the early 90s, primarily for cynical power reasons, the U.S. selected Bosnian Muslims as their Balkan clients, hardly to their benefit.

Without continuing, exactly where do we find the divide between “civilizations.” Are we to conclude that there is a “clash of civilizations” with the Latin American Catholic Church on one side, and the U.S. and the Muslim world, including its most murderous and fanatic religious elements, on the other side? I do not of course suggest any such absurdity. But exactly what are we to conclude, on rational grounds?

Do you think we are using the word “civilization” properly? Would a really civilized world lead us to a global war like this?

No civilized society would tolerate anything I have just mentioned, which is of course only a tiny sample even of U.S. history, and European history is even worse. And surely no “civilized world” would plunge the world into a major war instead of following the means prescribed by international law, following ample precedents.

The attacks have been called an act of hate. Where do you think this hate comes from?

For the radical Islamists mobilized by the CIA and its associates, the hate is just what they express. The U.S. was happy to support their hatred and violence when it was directed against U.S. enemies; it is not happy when the hatred it helped nurture is directed against the U.S. and its allies, as it has been, repeatedly, for 20 years. For the population of the region, quite a distinct category, the reasons for their feelings are not obscure. The sources of those sentiments are also quite well known.

What do you suggest the citizens of the Western world could do to bring back peace?

That depends what these citizens want. If they want an escalating cycle of violence, in the familiar pattern, they should certainly call on the U.S. to fall into bin Laden’s “diabolical trap” and massacre innocent civilians. If they want to reduce the level of violence, they should use their influence to direct the great powers in a very different course, the one I outlined earlier, which, again, has ample precedents. That includes a willingness to examine what lies behind the atrocities. One often hears that we must not consider these matters, because that would be justification for terrorism, a position so foolish and destructive as scarcely to merit comment, but unfortunately common. But if we do not wish to contribute to escalating the cycle of violence, with targets among the rich and powerful as well, that is exactly what we must do, as in all other cases, including those familiar enough in Spain. [
Editor’s note: Chomsky is being interviewed by the Spanish press, and thus his references to Spain
.]

Did the U.S. “ask for” these attacks? Are they consequences of American politics?

The attacks are not “consequences” of U.S. policies in any direct sense. But indirectly, of course they are consequences; that is not even controversial. There seems little doubt that the perpetrators come from the terrorist network that has its roots in the mercenary armies that were organized, trained, and armed by the CIA, Egypt, Pakistan, French intelligence, Saudi Arabian funding, and others. The backgrounds of all of this remain somewhat murky. The organization of these forces started in 1979, if we can believe President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. He claimed, maybe he was just bragging, that in mid-1979 he had instigated secret support for Mujahidin fighting against the government of Afghanistan in an effort to draw the Russians into what he called an “Afghan trap,” a phrase worth remembering. He’s very proud of the fact that they did fall into the “Afghan trap” by sending military forces to support the government six months later, with consequences that we know. The United States, along with its allies, assembled a huge mercenary army, maybe 100,000 or more, and they drew from the most militant sectors they could find, which happened to be radical Islamists, what are called here Islamic fundamentalists, from all over, most of them not from Afghanistan. They’re called “Afghanis,” but like bin Laden, many come from elsewhere.

Bin Laden joined sometime in the 1980s. He was involved in the funding networks, which probably are the
ones which still exist. They fought a holy war against the Russian occupiers. They carried terror into Russian territory. They won the war and the Russian invaders withdrew. The war was not their only activity. In 1981, forces based in those same groups assassinated President Sadat of Egypt, who had been instrumental in setting them up. In 1983, one suicide bomber, maybe with connections to the same forces, essentially drove the U.S. military out of Lebanon. And it continued.

By 1989, they had succeeded in their Holy War in Afghanistan. As soon as the U.S. established a permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden and the rest announced that from their point of view, that was comparable to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and they turned their guns on the Americans, as had already happened in 1983 when the U.S. had military forces in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia is a major enemy of the bin Laden network, just as Egypt is. That’s what they want to overthrow, what they call the un-Islamic governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, other states of the Middle East, and North Africa. And it continued.

In 1997 they murdered roughly sixty tourists in Egypt and destroyed the Egyptian tourist industry. And they’ve been carrying out activities all over the region, North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, western China, Southeast Asia, the U.S., for years. That’s one group. And that is an outgrowth of the wars of the 1980s and, if you can believe Brzezinski, even before, when they set the “Afghan trap.” Furthermore, as is common knowledge among anyone who pays attention to the
region, the terrorists draw from a reservoir of desperation, anger, and frustration that extends from rich to poor, from secular to radical Islamist. That it is rooted in no small measure in U.S. policies is evident and constantly articulated to those willing to listen.

You said that the main practitioners of terrorism are countries like the U.S. that use violence for political motives. When and where?

I find the question baffling. As I’ve said elsewhere, the U.S. is, after all, the only country condemned by the World Court for international terrorism—for “the unlawful use of force” for political ends, as the Court put it—ordering the U.S. to terminate these crimes and pay substantial reparations. The U.S. of course dismissed the Court’s judgment with contempt, reacting by escalating the terrorist war against Nicaragua and vetoing a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law (and voting alone, with Israel and in one case El Salvador, against similar General Assembly resolutions). The terrorist war expanded in accordance with the official policy of attacking “soft targets”—undefended civilian targets, like agricultural collectives and health clinics—instead of engaging the Nicaraguan army. The terrorists were able to carry out these instructions, thanks to the complete control of Nicaraguan air space by the U.S. and the advanced communications equipment provided to them by their supervisors.

It should also be recognized that these terrorist actions were widely approved. One prominent commentator, Michael Kinsley, at the liberal extreme of the mainstream,
argued that we should not simply dismiss State Department justifications for terrorist attacks on “soft targets”: a “sensible policy” must “meet the test of cost-benefit analysis,” he wrote, an analysis of “the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end”—“democracy” as the U.S. understands the term, an interpretation illustrated quite clearly in the region. It is taken for granted that U.S. elites have the right to conduct the analysis and pursue the project if it passes their tests.

Even more dramatically, the idea that Nicaragua should have the right to defend itself was considered outrageous across the mainstream political spectrum in the United States. The U.S. pressured allies to stop providing Nicaragua with arms, hoping that it would turn to Russia, as it did; that provides the right propaganda images. The Reagan administration repeatedly floated rumors that Nicaragua was receiving jet fighters from Russia—to protect its airspace, as everyone knew, and to prevent U.S. terrorist attacks against “soft targets.” The rumors were false, but the reaction was instructive. The doves questioned the rumors, but said that if they are true, of course we must bomb Nicaragua, because it will be a threat to our security. Database searches revealed that there was scarcely a hint that Nicaragua had the right to defend itself. That tells us quite a lot about the deep-seated “culture of terrorism” that prevails in Western civilization.

This is by no means the most extreme example; I mention it because it is uncontroversial, given the World Court decision, and because the failed efforts of Nicaragua to pursue
lawful means, instead of setting off bombs in Washington, provide a model for today, not the only one. Nicaragua was only one component of Washington’s terrorist wars in Central America in that terrible decade, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and four countries in ruins.

During the same years the U.S. was carrying out large-scale terrorism elsewhere, including the Middle East: to cite one example, the car bombing in Beirut in 1985 outside a mosque, timed to kill the maximum number of civilians, with 80 dead and 250 casualties, aimed at a Muslim sheikh, who escaped. And it supported much worse terror: for example, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that killed some 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, not in self-defense, as was conceded at once; and the vicious “iron fist” atrocities of the years that followed, directed against “terrorist villagers,” as Israel put it. And the subsequent invasions of 1993 and 1996, both strongly supported by the U.S. (until the international reaction to the Qana massacre in 1996, which caused Clinton to draw back). The post-1982 toll in Lebanon alone is probably another 20,000 civilians.