9-11 (7 page)

Economic globalization has spread the Western model all over the world, and the U.S.A. has been its prime supporter, sometimes with questionable means, often humiliating local cultures. Are we facing the consequences of the last decades of American strategic policy? Is America an innocent victim?

This thesis is commonly advanced. I don’t agree. One reason is that the Western model—notably, the U.S. model—is based on vast state intervention into the economy. The “neoliberal rules” are like those of earlier eras. They are double-edged: market discipline is good for you, but not for me, except for temporary advantage, when I am in a good position to win the competition.

Secondly, what happened on September 11 has virtually nothing to do with economic globalization, in my opinion. The reasons lie elsewhere. Nothing can justify crimes such as those of September 11, but we can think of the United States as an “innocent victim” only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret.

Everybody agrees that nothing will be the same after 9-11, from a restriction of rights in daily life up to global strategy with new alliances and new enemies. What is your opinion about this?

[
Editor’s note: Chomsky’s response to this question, edited here, began by reiterating a point made in an earlier interview that September 11 was the first time since the War of 1812 that the national territory of the U.S. was attacked by foreign forces. See
this page
.]

I do not think it will lead to a long-term restriction of rights internally in any serious sense. The cultural and institutional barriers to that are too firmly rooted, I believe. If the U.S. chooses to respond by escalating the cycle of violence, which is most likely what bin Laden and his associates hope for, then the consequences could be awesome. There are, of course, other ways, lawful and constructive ones. And there are ample precedents for them. An aroused public within the more free and democratic societies can direct policies towards a much more humane and honorable course.

Worldwide intelligence services and the international systems of control
(
Echelon, for example
)
could not foresee what was going to happen, even if the international Islamic terrorism network was not unknown. How is it possible that the Big Brother’s eyes were shut? Do we have to fear, now, a Bigger Big Brother?

I frankly have never been overly impressed with concerns widely voiced in Europe over Echelon as a system of control.
As for worldwide intelligence systems, their failures over the years have been colossal, a matter I and others have written about and that I cannot pursue here.

That is true even when the targets of concern are far easier to deal with than the bin Laden network, which is no doubt so decentralized, so lacking in hierarchical structure, and so dispersed throughout much of the world as to have become largely impenetrable. The intelligence services will no doubt be given resources to try harder. But a serious effort to reduce the threat of this kind of terrorism, as in innumerable other cases, requires an effort to understand and to address the causes.

Bin Laden, the devil: is this an enemy or rather a brand, a sort of logo which identifies and personalizes the evil?

Bin Laden may or may not be directly implicated in these acts, but it is likely that the network in which he was a prime figure is—that is, the forces established by the United States and its allies for their own purposes and supported as long as they served those purposes. It is much easier to personalize the enemy, identified as the symbol of ultimate evil, than to seek to understand what lies behind major atrocities. And there are, naturally, very strong temptations to ignore one’s own role—which in this case, is not difficult to unearth, and indeed is familiar to everyone who has any knowledge of the region and its recent history.

Doesn’t this war risk becoming a new Vietnam? That trauma is still alive
.

That is an analogy that is often raised. It reveals, in my opinion, the profound impact of several hundred years of imperial violence on the intellectual and moral culture of the West. The war in Vietnam began as a U.S. attack against South Vietnam, which was always the main target of the U.S. wars, and ended by devastating much of Indochina. Unless we are willing to face that elementary fact, we cannot talk seriously about the Vietnam war. It is true that the war proved costly to the U.S., though the impact on Indochina was incomparably more awful. The invasion of Afghanistan also proved costly to the U.S.S.R., but that is not the problem that comes to the fore when we consider that crime.

4.
Crimes of State

Based on excerpts from an interview with David Barsamian on September 21, 2001.

Q: As you know, there is rage, anger and bewilderment in the U.S. since the September
11
events. There have been murders, attacks on mosques and even a Sikh temple. The University of Colorado, which is located here in Boulder, a town which has a liberal reputation, has graffiti saying, “Go home, Arabs,” “Bomb Afghanistan,” and “Go Home, Sand Niggers.” What’s your perspective on what has evolved since the terrorist attacks?

CHOMSKY:
It’s mixed. What you’re describing certainly exists. On the other hand, countercurrents exist. I know they do where I have direct contacts, and hear the same from others.

[
Editor’s note: Chomsky’s response, edited here, echoes a comment he made in a previous interview in which he describes the mood in New York City and the emergence of a peace movement. See
this page
.]

That’s another kind of current, also supportive of people who are being targeted here because they look dark or
have a funny name. So there are countercurrents. The question is, what can we do to make the right ones prevail?

Do you think it’s more than problematic to engage in alliances with individuals who are called “unsavory characters,” drug traffickers and assassins, in order to achieve what is said to be a noble end?

Remember that some of the most unsavory characters are in the governments of the region, as well as in our own government, and the governments of our allies. If we’re serious about it, we also have to ask, What is a noble end? Was it a noble end to draw the Russians into an “Afghan trap” in 1979, as Zbigniew Brzezinski claims he did? Supporting resistance against the Russian invasion in December 1979 is one thing. But inciting the invasion, as Brzezinski claims proudly that he did, and organizing a terrorist army of Islamic fanatics for your own purposes, is a different thing.

Another question we should be asking now is, What about the alliance that’s being formed, that the U.S. is trying to put together? We should not forget that the U.S. itself is a leading terrorist state. What about the alliance between the U.S., Russia, China, Indonesia, Egypt, Algeria, all of whom are delighted to see an international system develop sponsored by the U.S. which will authorize them to carry out their own terrorist atrocities? Russia, for example, would be very happy to have U.S. backing for its murderous war in Chechnya. You have the same Afghanis fighting against Russia, also probably carrying
out terrorist acts within Russia. As would perhaps India, in Kashmir. Indonesia would be delighted to have support for its massacres in Aceh. Algeria, as just announced on the broadcast we heard, would be delighted to have authorization to extend its own state terrorism. [
Editor’s note: The broadcast Chomsky is referring to was the news report that aired immediately before his and Barsamian’s live interview on KGNU
(
Boulder, Colorado
).] The same with China, fighting against separatist forces in its western provinces, including “Afghanis” who China and Iran had organized to fight the war against the Russians, beginning maybe as early as 1978, some reports indicate. And that runs through the world.

Not everyone will be admitted so easily into the coalition, however: we must, after all, maintain some standards. “The Bush administration warned [on October 6] that the leftist Sandinista party in Nicaragua, which hopes to return to power in elections next month, has maintained ties” with terrorist states and organizations, and therefore “cannot be counted on to support the international antiterrorism coalition the administration has been attempting to forge” (George Gedda, AP, October 6). “As we stated previously there is no middle ground between those who oppose terrorism and those who support it,” State Department spokeswoman Eliza Koch declared. Though the Sandinistas claim to have “abandoned the socialist policies and anti-American rhetoric of the past, Koch’s statement [of October 6] indicated the administration has doubts about the claims of moderation.” Washington’s doubts are understandable. After all, Nicaragua had so outrageously
attacked the U.S. that Ronald Reagan was compelled to declare a “national emergency” on May 1, 1985, renewed annually, because “the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” He also announced an embargo against Nicaragua “in response to the emergency situation created by the Nicaraguan Government’s aggressive activities in Central America,” namely its resistance to U.S. attack; the World Court dismissed as groundless Washington’s claims of other activities. A year earlier, Reagan had designated May 1 as “Law Day,” a celebration of our “200-year-old partnership between law and liberty,” adding that without law there can be only “chaos and disorder.” The day before, he celebrated Law Day by announcing that the United States would disregard the proceedings of the World Court, which went on to condemn his administration for its “unlawful use of force” and violation of treaties in its attack against Nicaragua, instantly escalated in response to the Court order to terminate the crime of international terrorism. Outside the U.S., of course, May 1 is a day of solidarity with the struggles of American workers.

It is, then, understandable that the U.S. should seek firm guarantees of good behavior before allowing a Sandinista-led Nicaragua to join the alliance of the just led by Washington, which is now welcoming others to join the war it has been waging against terrorism for 20 years: Russia, China, Indonesia, Turkey, and other worthy states, though of course not everyone.

Or, take the “Northern Alliance” that the U.S. and Russia
are now jointly supporting. This is mostly a collection of warlords who carried out such destruction and terror that much of the population welcomed the Taliban. Furthermore, they are almost certainly involved in drug trafficking into Tajikistan. They control most of that border, and Tajikistan is reported to be a—maybe the—major transit point for the flow of drugs eventually to Europe and the United States. If the U.S. proceeds to join Russia in arming these forces heavily and launching some kind of offensive based on them, the drug flow is likely to increase under the ensuing conditions of chaos and refugee flight. The “unsavory characters” are, after all, familiar from a rich historical record, and the same is true of the “noble ends.”

Your comment that the U.S. is a “leading terrorist state” might stun many Americans. Could you elaborate on that?

The most obvious example, though far from the most extreme case, is Nicaragua. It is the most obvious because it is uncontroversial, at least to people who have even the faintest concern for international law. [
Editor’s note: See
this page
for Chomsky’s more detailed elaboration on this point
.] It is worth remembering—particularly since it has been so uniformly suppressed—that the U.S. is the only country that was condemned for international terrorism by the World Court and that rejected a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law.

The United States continues international terrorism. There are also what in comparison are minor examples. Everybody here was quite properly outraged by the Oklahoma
City bombing, and for a couple of days the headlines read, “Oklahoma City Looks Like Beirut.” I didn’t see anybody point out that Beirut also looks like Beirut, and part of the reason is that the Reagan administration had set off a terrorist bombing there in 1985 that was very much like Oklahoma City, a truck bombing outside a mosque timed to kill the maximum number of people as they left. It killed 80 and wounded 250, mostly women and children, according to a report in the
Washington Post
three years later. The terrorist bombing was aimed at a Muslim cleric whom they didn’t like and whom they missed. It was not very secret. I don’t know what name you give to the policies that are a leading factor in the death of maybe a million civilians in Iraq and maybe a half a million children, which is the price the Secretary of State says we’re willing to pay. Is there a name for that? Supporting Israeli atrocities is another one.

Supporting Turkey’s crushing of its own Kurdish population, for which the Clinton administration gave the decisive support, 80 percent of the arms, escalating as atrocities increased, is another. And that was a truly massive atrocity, one of the worst campaigns of ethnic cleansing and destruction in the 1990s, scarcely known because of the primary U.S. responsibility—and when impolitely brought up, dismissed as a minor “flaw” in our general dedication to “ending inhumanity” everywhere.

Or take the destruction of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, one little footnote in the record of state terror, quickly forgotten. What would the reaction have been if the bin Laden network had blown up half the
pharmaceutical supplies in the U.S. and the facilities for replenishing them? We can imagine, though the comparison is unfair: the consequences are vastly more severe in Sudan. That aside, if the U.S. or Israel or England were to be the target of such an atrocity, what would the reaction be? In this case we say, “Oh, well, too bad, minor mistake, let’s go on to the next topic, let the victims rot.” Other people in the world don’t react like that. When bin Laden brings up that bombing, he strikes a resonant chord, even among those who despise and fear him; and the same, unfortunately, is true of much of the rest of his rhetoric.