The disclosure that a US official attended a meeting to conspire against Venezuela corroborates the predictions that Washington intends to augment pressures against Caracas in 2006.
According to the regional Telesur TV channel, a Peruvian-born major of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), whose surname is Thomas, recently met with former Venezuelan military coupists in Bogota, Colombia.
A source, who asked for anonymity, said Thomas attended a meeting at the Colombian Administrative Security Department (DAS), as confirmed in a video later broadcast by a US channel.
The disclosure provided evidence for Venezuelan authorities´ accusations over the US involvement in subversive plans to overthrow the government of President Hugo Chavez, given the opposition has failed to defeat him in elections.
Regarding the Colombia meeting, Chavez himself submitted evidence to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who later admitted an official headquarter had been used for the plotting.
Nestor Gonzalez, a former Venezuelan general involved in the anti-Chavez coup, also participated in the secretive gathering.
Government officials have warned a probable increase of destabilizing actions by a radical opposition sector, backed up by the US, due to the lack of alternatives to defeat Chavez democratically.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Kurds plan to invade South
KIRKUK, Iraq — Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.
Five days of interviews with Kurdish leaders and troops in the region suggest that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq before withdrawing American troops by training and equipping a national army aren't gaining traction. Instead, some troops that are formally under U.S. and Iraqi national command are preparing to protect territory and ethnic and religious interests in the event of Iraq's fragmentation, which many of them think is inevitable.
The soldiers said that while they wore Iraqi army uniforms they still considered themselves members of the Peshmerga — the Kurdish militia — and were awaiting orders from Kurdish leaders to break ranks. Many said they wouldn't hesitate to kill their Iraqi army comrades, especially Arabs, if a fight for an independent Kurdistan erupted.
"It doesn't matter if we have to fight the Arabs in our own battalion," said Gabriel Mohammed, a Kurdish soldier in the Iraqi army who was escorting a Knight Ridder reporter through Kirkuk. "Kirkuk will be ours."
Five days of interviews with Kurdish leaders and troops in the region suggest that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq before withdrawing American troops by training and equipping a national army aren't gaining traction. Instead, some troops that are formally under U.S. and Iraqi national command are preparing to protect territory and ethnic and religious interests in the event of Iraq's fragmentation, which many of them think is inevitable.
The soldiers said that while they wore Iraqi army uniforms they still considered themselves members of the Peshmerga — the Kurdish militia — and were awaiting orders from Kurdish leaders to break ranks. Many said they wouldn't hesitate to kill their Iraqi army comrades, especially Arabs, if a fight for an independent Kurdistan erupted.
"It doesn't matter if we have to fight the Arabs in our own battalion," said Gabriel Mohammed, a Kurdish soldier in the Iraqi army who was escorting a Knight Ridder reporter through Kirkuk. "Kirkuk will be ours."
The Sorrow of Haiti
On February 28, 2004, in the middle of the night, the US again invaded Haiti. It abducted and forcibly removed democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide by its staged coup d'etat and flew him against his will to the Central African Republic. Aristide today remains in exile in South Africa but vows to return. The Haitian people demand he be allowed back and restored as their rightful and legal president.
With the US already stretched beyond its capacity in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and currently condemned worldwide for flouting international law, inviolable Geneva Conventions it's a signatory to, and our own sacred Bill of Rights, why now Haiti. The country is very small [about 3 times the size of Los Angeles], has a population of about 7.5 million and is the poorest country in the Americas. Why did the US intervene with so much else on its plate? Think back to the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 when the US asserted its exclusive right to dominate the Americas. Now update to the present and a reinterpretation of that Doctrine has arrogantly expanded to cover the entire planet - and outer space. Think of it, the US will tolerate no rival and has now staked its claim [an exclusive franchise] to dominate all other nations and the oceans and the heavens. In an inversion or perversion of Woody Guthrie's great song for the people - "This Land Is Your Land" - a fitting anthem for US arrogance might be "This Earth is My Earth ... this earth [and the outer space above it] was made and now belongs to the USA." That includes Haiti, and sadly for its people that tiny, poor country lies much too close to the US The lament and aphorism of Mexican dictator [from 1876 - 1910] Porfirio Diaz who said......"Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the US" is also true for Haiti and all other countries in the region as well.
With the US already stretched beyond its capacity in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and currently condemned worldwide for flouting international law, inviolable Geneva Conventions it's a signatory to, and our own sacred Bill of Rights, why now Haiti. The country is very small [about 3 times the size of Los Angeles], has a population of about 7.5 million and is the poorest country in the Americas. Why did the US intervene with so much else on its plate? Think back to the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 when the US asserted its exclusive right to dominate the Americas. Now update to the present and a reinterpretation of that Doctrine has arrogantly expanded to cover the entire planet - and outer space. Think of it, the US will tolerate no rival and has now staked its claim [an exclusive franchise] to dominate all other nations and the oceans and the heavens. In an inversion or perversion of Woody Guthrie's great song for the people - "This Land Is Your Land" - a fitting anthem for US arrogance might be "This Earth is My Earth ... this earth [and the outer space above it] was made and now belongs to the USA." That includes Haiti, and sadly for its people that tiny, poor country lies much too close to the US The lament and aphorism of Mexican dictator [from 1876 - 1910] Porfirio Diaz who said......"Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the US" is also true for Haiti and all other countries in the region as well.
Chicago Turns Down Discounted Venezuelan Oil
As Chicago's poorest face an increase to already-high public transit fees, the city is ignoring an offer of discounted diesel fuel to benefit low-income people.
Chicago, Dec 28 - The Chicago Transit Authority is refusing an opportunity to alleviate commuting costs for hundreds of thousands in the Windy City's low-income neighborhoods. Instead of accepting deeply discounted fuel from the Venezuela-owned Citgo Petroleum Corporation, the city is instead raising fares to solve budget shortfalls.
In an October meeting with representatives from the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), the city's Department of Energy and other city officials, Citgo unveiled a plan to provide the Chicago with low-cost diesel fuel. The company's stipulation, at the bidding of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, was that the CTA, in turn, pass those savings on to poor residents in the form free or discounted fare cards.
But two months later, despite claims of a looming budget crisis, the CTA president "has no intent or plan to accept the offer," according to CTA spokesperson Ibis Antongiorgi. She gave no explanation.
According to Venezuela’s consul general in Chicago, Martin Sanchez, the CTA has yet to inform his office of its decision to decline the discount offer.
In place of the proposed discount, which the CTA apparently does not want Chicagoans to even know about, budget shortfalls will be addressed by fair hikes. Chicagoans who are unaware of the Venezuela offer will be hit with an increase of 25 cents per ride next month, and discounted route-to-route transfers will be eliminated for passengers paying cash.
"This is going to hurt the poor and the minority people, like me," said Dorothy Chew, resident of Humboldt Park, where one-third of residents live below the federally recognized poverty level – currently just $16,000 for a family of three. Chew relies on the CTA to get to work and to Chicago Commons, where she attends classes daily in preparation for taking her GED. Since she rarely has money to invest in a fare card, she will be forced to pay for transfers the majority of the time.
Chew's classmate, Linda Cox, works a minimum-wage job and has been a Public Aid recipient for 15 years. She also relies heavily on public transportation.
"I only earn $560 a month and of that, over $200 a month goes to my bus fare," Cox told The NewStandard. "I have a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old who also need to get to school. If they change the prices and take away transfers, there are going to be a lot of days missed. I already see no money at the end of the month."
The offer of discount fuel is not just confined to Chicago. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, the first of Venezuela's "oil-for-the-poor" programs in the US was launched. Citgo struck a deal with three nonprofit organizations in the Bronx to deliver 5 million gallons of heating oil at 45 percent below the market price. The deal will amount to a savings of $4 million for the 8,000 low-income households slated to benefit from the plan.
"This is going to hurt the poor and the minority people, like me." -- Dorothy Chew
Citgo has made a similar arrangement with Citizens Energy Corp. in Boston for the sale and distribution of 12 million gallons, saving low-income and elderly residents there a total of $10 million. The company's website says that it expects to expand the program to other boroughs in New York City and that it is exploring the possibility of offering discounted fuel to residents in Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.
However, in all of Illinois, only about 12,000 households use heating oil.
So instead of fuel for heat, Citgo representatives offered the CTA a 40-50 percent discount on diesel fuel for buses to benefit Chicagoans most in need of relief from soaring oil and gas prices this winter.
"We didn't know how else to reach enough people," said Consul Sanchez.
Another difference between the Chicago offer and the programs enacted in the Northeast is that Citgo proposed to work with a government agency, rather than nonprofit organizations. The CTA relies on the US federal government – which is in a constant war of words with Venezuelan President Chavez – for much of its funding. In fact, just weeks after Citgo made its offer to the CTA, Congress signed the Federal Transportation Appropriations bill, allocating $89 million in infrastructure project funds the CTA had been seeking for years.
Representatives from the US State Department and city officials, including Aldermen involved in the negotiations and the Chicago Mayor's Office, refused to respond to queries about whether international politics played any part in the CTA's rejection of Citgo's offer.
Some critics of President Chavez say his offer of cheap fuel to low-income communities in the US is a political ploy to win the support of the American people. Larry Birns, executive director of the progressive think tank, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, said Chavez is trying to counter Bush administration criticisms with "petro-diplomacy." Birns, who criticizes both US policy toward Venezuela and Chavez’s confrontational style, told TNS, "There is a certain amount of humor involved in needling the Bush administration for neglecting it's own while attempting to stand tall in Latin America."
However, as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research – another progressive think tank – pointed out, the Venezuelan government has been providing cheap fuel to several countries in Latin America. Weisbrot is a staunch supporter of the Chavez administration.
"It is part of [Venezuela's] policy to compensate for the impact of the high oil prices on poor people," he said. "They don't have any grudge against the American people; it's just the Bush administration that they don't like."
Consul Sanchez echoed this sentiment. "Any corporation that makes a big profit in a community owes that community something in return," he said. With one of Citgo's three light-oil refineries located in nearby Lemont, 30 minutes outside the city, Sanchez said, Venezuela has "a special relationship with people and community organizations in Chicago."
There remains no sign, however, that the government of Chicago will take Citgo and Venezuela up on the unilateral offer.
Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons
Iraq has shown the hubris of a geostrategy that welds the philosophy of the Leviathan to military and technological power
The tragic irony of the 21st century is that just as faith in technology collapsed on the world's stock markets in 2000, it came to power in the White House and Pentagon. For the Project for a New American Century's ambition of "full-spectrum dominance" - in which its country could "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars" - was a monster borne up by the high tide of techno euphoria of the 1990s.
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The problem for the US today is that Leviathan has shot his wad. Iraq revealed the hubris of the imperial geostrategy. One small nation can tie down a superpower. Air and space supremacy do not give command on the ground. People can't be terrorised into identification with America. The US has proved able to destroy massively - but not create, or even control. Afghanistan and Iraq lie in ruins, yet the occupiers cower behind concrete mountains.
The socialist president-elect of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has said he will cut his salary by half when he takes office next month.
The socialist president-elect of Bolivia, Evo Morales, has said he will cut his salary by half when he takes office next month.
Mr Morales said his cabinet would follow suit and that members of Bolivia's parliament would be expected to cut their allowances.
He also reaffirmed his commitment to change Bolivia's economic system.
At the moment, Mr Morales, an Aymara Indian born into poverty, rents a single room in a shared house.
When he moves into the presidential palace next month, Mr Morales is not planning to switch to a jet-set lifestyle.
Wealth tax
Announcing the salary cut, he said that in a country as poor as Bolivia, the president and his cabinet should share the burden.
The money saved will go on social programmes, particularly in the field of education.
Mr Morales also confirmed that his government plans to introduce a new tax on the wealthy as soon as possible.
His advisors say they are planning to revoke a decree from 1985 which switched Bolivia to the sort of free-market economy recommended by Washington.
These announcements will go down well with the poor voters who gave Mr Morales a resounding election victory.
Huge expectations
The real task for the president-elect, however, is to manage the huge expectations he has generated in Bolivia.
Mr Morales will be able to point to the sort of measures unveiled on Tuesday if, as seems likely, he moves more slowly on other pledges such as nationalisation of the gas industry or easing restrictions on growing the coca plant.
Mr Morales also announced that his first foreign trip as president-elect would be to Cuba, a country he has long admired.
This visit will be closely watched in Washington, which fears the potential influence in Latin America of an alliance between Cuba, Bolivia and oil-rich Venezuela.
Mr Morales said his cabinet would follow suit and that members of Bolivia's parliament would be expected to cut their allowances.
He also reaffirmed his commitment to change Bolivia's economic system.
At the moment, Mr Morales, an Aymara Indian born into poverty, rents a single room in a shared house.
When he moves into the presidential palace next month, Mr Morales is not planning to switch to a jet-set lifestyle.
Wealth tax
Announcing the salary cut, he said that in a country as poor as Bolivia, the president and his cabinet should share the burden.
The money saved will go on social programmes, particularly in the field of education.
Mr Morales also confirmed that his government plans to introduce a new tax on the wealthy as soon as possible.
His advisors say they are planning to revoke a decree from 1985 which switched Bolivia to the sort of free-market economy recommended by Washington.
These announcements will go down well with the poor voters who gave Mr Morales a resounding election victory.
Huge expectations
The real task for the president-elect, however, is to manage the huge expectations he has generated in Bolivia.
Mr Morales will be able to point to the sort of measures unveiled on Tuesday if, as seems likely, he moves more slowly on other pledges such as nationalisation of the gas industry or easing restrictions on growing the coca plant.
Mr Morales also announced that his first foreign trip as president-elect would be to Cuba, a country he has long admired.
This visit will be closely watched in Washington, which fears the potential influence in Latin America of an alliance between Cuba, Bolivia and oil-rich Venezuela.
New Bolivian President Vows to Take Action Against US
It didn't take long for the newly elected Bolivian President to intensify his verbal attacks against the United States. But the new Bolivian leader, an avowed Socialist and friend of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro of Cuba, is going even further than rhetoric. He's threatening to take action against the US.
President Evo Morales, according to a news story in the Washington Times, leveled allegations at the United States that its advisors secretly removed Chinese-made anti-aircraft missiles from Bolivia. US military and law enforcement personnel serve as advisors to the Bolivians in their drug control activities and counterterrorism training.
Morales, an Indian and former coca farmer, has pledged to end United States drug eradication programs in the country. The US had been invited to help Bolivian authorities by the previous administration which was more centrist than the incoming neo-Marxists. A Morales campaign promise to legalize coca plant cultivation is expected to increase cocaine production in the region.
Bolivia's new President is leader of the Movement to Socialism (MAS). He was quoted in press reports this week as saying he would evict US military advisers from Bolivia and punish those responsible for the removal from the country this year of 28 HN-SA hand-held surface-to-air missiles (SAM).
The missiles are similar to the U.S. "Stinger" missiles used by Afghan insurgents with devastating effectiveness against low-flying Russian aircraft during the Russian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
"I will press for a full investigation to establish responsibilities. We cannot tolerate international intervention," Mr. Morales was quoted as saying of the missile incident.
President Evo Morales, according to a news story in the Washington Times, leveled allegations at the United States that its advisors secretly removed Chinese-made anti-aircraft missiles from Bolivia. US military and law enforcement personnel serve as advisors to the Bolivians in their drug control activities and counterterrorism training.
Morales, an Indian and former coca farmer, has pledged to end United States drug eradication programs in the country. The US had been invited to help Bolivian authorities by the previous administration which was more centrist than the incoming neo-Marxists. A Morales campaign promise to legalize coca plant cultivation is expected to increase cocaine production in the region.
Bolivia's new President is leader of the Movement to Socialism (MAS). He was quoted in press reports this week as saying he would evict US military advisers from Bolivia and punish those responsible for the removal from the country this year of 28 HN-SA hand-held surface-to-air missiles (SAM).
The missiles are similar to the U.S. "Stinger" missiles used by Afghan insurgents with devastating effectiveness against low-flying Russian aircraft during the Russian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
"I will press for a full investigation to establish responsibilities. We cannot tolerate international intervention," Mr. Morales was quoted as saying of the missile incident.
Venezuela may repay World Bank, IADB debt in 2006
CARACAS, Venezuela, Dec 27 (Reuters) - Venezuela may repay its debt in full to international institutions such as World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank next year, a senior legislator said.
State news agency ABN quoted Rodrigo Cabezas, president of the National Assembly's finance commission, as saying late on Monday an expected balance of payments surplus of $3 billion this year and $4 billion projected for next year should allow the country to pay all its debt to the lenders.
Venezuela owes around $3 billion to the World Bank, the IADB and the Caracas-based multilateral Andean Development Corp. (CAF), another lender that Venezuela should pay in full, according to Cabezas.
He said there should also be enough resources to refinance domestic debt and repurchase some of the foreign debt.
"I believe that in three years, we may be able to cut our foreign debt by 25 percent," he said. Cabezas said left-wing President Hugo Chavez "is happy with the idea" of paying in full Venezuela's debts to international lenders.
Earlier this month, Argentina and Brazil announced their decisions to pay off their entire debt to the International Monetary Fund -- a move Chavez praised and partly supported by buying Argentine bonds. Venezuela has no IMF debt.
Venezuela's foreign debt is around $28 billion, while the government's domestic debt is about $15 billion.
Economists say Venezuela's willingness to repay its debts and ability to keep bankrolling numerous social projects may be undermined if oil prices slide next year from their near record levels. But Cabezas estimated the price of Venezuela's crude should remain strong at around $50 per barrel.
Venezuela is the world's No. 5 crude exporter and the populist government of President Hugo Chavez has been pouring billions of dollars in oil revenues into projects for the poor.
Also on Tuesday, the finance ministry invited interested investors and capital market operators to present their proposals for financing and refinancing domestic debt instruments in 2006.
State news agency ABN quoted Rodrigo Cabezas, president of the National Assembly's finance commission, as saying late on Monday an expected balance of payments surplus of $3 billion this year and $4 billion projected for next year should allow the country to pay all its debt to the lenders.
Venezuela owes around $3 billion to the World Bank, the IADB and the Caracas-based multilateral Andean Development Corp. (CAF), another lender that Venezuela should pay in full, according to Cabezas.
He said there should also be enough resources to refinance domestic debt and repurchase some of the foreign debt.
"I believe that in three years, we may be able to cut our foreign debt by 25 percent," he said. Cabezas said left-wing President Hugo Chavez "is happy with the idea" of paying in full Venezuela's debts to international lenders.
Earlier this month, Argentina and Brazil announced their decisions to pay off their entire debt to the International Monetary Fund -- a move Chavez praised and partly supported by buying Argentine bonds. Venezuela has no IMF debt.
Venezuela's foreign debt is around $28 billion, while the government's domestic debt is about $15 billion.
Economists say Venezuela's willingness to repay its debts and ability to keep bankrolling numerous social projects may be undermined if oil prices slide next year from their near record levels. But Cabezas estimated the price of Venezuela's crude should remain strong at around $50 per barrel.
Venezuela is the world's No. 5 crude exporter and the populist government of President Hugo Chavez has been pouring billions of dollars in oil revenues into projects for the poor.
Also on Tuesday, the finance ministry invited interested investors and capital market operators to present their proposals for financing and refinancing domestic debt instruments in 2006.
Congress petitioned for return of Geronimo's remains stolen by Prescott Bush and the Skull and Bones Society
SAN CARLOS, Ariz. - American Indians are petitioning Congress to investigate the elite Skull and Bones society at Yale University and return the remains of Chiricahua Apache warrior Geronimo to Apaches for reburial.
The online petition describes the desecration of Geronimo's grave in 1918 by members of the society, including President George W. Bush's grandfather, Sen. Prescott Bush. The men removed Geronimo's head and a prized silver bridle, which had been buried with him.
''Using acid and amid laughter, they stripped Geronimo's head of hair and flesh. They then took their 'trophies' back to Yale University and put them on display in the clubhouse of the secret fraternity 'Skull and Bones,''' states the petition.
Outraged American Indian tribal members from across the nation and indigenous people from around the world are signing the petition with plans to pressure Congress to act.
Apache leaders want Geronimo to be buried, as he requested, in tribal lands in the mountains of San Carlos.
''Geronimo left his rifle and peace pipe here when they took him away,'' Thompson said. ''When Geronimo was taken from this land, he wanted to come back and be buried on San Carlos in the Triplet Mountains.''
Skull and Bones admitted to San Carlos Apache leaders almost 20 years ago that it was in possession of a skull it called Geronimo's in its secret ''museum'' in New Haven, Conn.
Raleigh Thompson, who served as San Carlos Apache tribal councilman for 16 years, told Indian Country Today that he was among the Apache tribal leaders with whom Skull and Bones officials met in New York in a series of meetings beginning in 1986. He said the society, of which Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, are members, admitted that it held Geronimo's remains.
San Carlos Apache Chairman Ned Anderson and tribal attorney Joe Sparks were also members of the Apache delegation that met with the society in New York. Anderson and Thompson said the delegation met with Skull and Bones officials and Jonathan Bush, brother of George H.W. Bush.
Thompson said Prescott Bush was among a group of six Army soldiers who dug up Geronimo's remains at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1918. The San Carlos Apache Tribe received a copy of a logbook describing the graverobbing and a photograph of a skull on display before meeting with the board in New York.
Thompson said the society attempted to return a skull - that of a child - which the Apache delegation rejected. Skull and Bones members subsequently threatened legal action if the photograph were not returned.
Attorney Endicott Davison, representing Skull and Bones, denied that the society had Geronimo's skull. He claimed the logbook was a hoax.
Alexandra Robbins, a former staff member of The New Yorker magazine and author of ''Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League and the Hidden Paths of Power,'' told ICT that her research supports the Apache leaders' statements. Robbins believes that Geronimo's skull is in the society's tomb.
The petition for the return and reburial of Geronimo's skull states that Skull and Bones is a secret society founded at Yale in 1832. Its history is intertwined with that of the German Illuminati and the Nazi Party, according to the petition.
''They maintain a windowless building called 'The Tomb' at 64 High Street, New Haven, Connecticut. The club's assets are controlled by a front company, The Russell Trust Association Inc. Every year, 15 Yale juniors are 'tapped' for Skull & Bones membership. They are indoctrinated into the cultish society with elaborate rituals steeped in satanic theatricism and latent homosexuality.
''The goal of this fraternity is to create the ultimate network of 'good ole boys' around the world. Their alumni include Prescott Bush's son [George H.W.] and grandson [George W.] as well as heads of state and leaders of numerous intelligence agencies, trading companies, business empires and law firms,'' according to the petition.
Since the initial leak of information to the Apache leaders, other sources have confirmed that Geronimo's skull is, as asserted in the petition, indeed on display in The Tomb and considered the ''mascot'' of this ''club'' on High Street.
The petition further states that the ''undersigned are horrified with this display of elitist, racist witchcraft'' and asks Congress, with the assistance of whatever law enforcement necessary, to launch an immediate investigation into the theft and possession of human remains by Skull and Bones, Russell Trust Association Inc. and any members of the U.S. government involved, past or present.
Stephen Flute, Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, signed the petition and said, ''If the situation were reversed, someone would be in jail or would have been executed. It wouldn't even matter to them if the right person were in jail, as long as one of 'us' paid the price.''
Sheri Big Back Bement, Northern Cheyenne/Apache, said Geronimo remains respected. ''You will never see an Indian dig up the bones of the dead. We know what respect is. Their ignorance and stupidity will come back on them and their families.''
Mohawk Sakaronhiotane Ricky Diabo signed with this message: ''When you mess with the spirits you shall be punished by the spirits.''
View the petition and signatures online at www.petitiononline.com/Geronimo/petition.html.
The online petition describes the desecration of Geronimo's grave in 1918 by members of the society, including President George W. Bush's grandfather, Sen. Prescott Bush. The men removed Geronimo's head and a prized silver bridle, which had been buried with him.
''Using acid and amid laughter, they stripped Geronimo's head of hair and flesh. They then took their 'trophies' back to Yale University and put them on display in the clubhouse of the secret fraternity 'Skull and Bones,''' states the petition.
Outraged American Indian tribal members from across the nation and indigenous people from around the world are signing the petition with plans to pressure Congress to act.
Apache leaders want Geronimo to be buried, as he requested, in tribal lands in the mountains of San Carlos.
''Geronimo left his rifle and peace pipe here when they took him away,'' Thompson said. ''When Geronimo was taken from this land, he wanted to come back and be buried on San Carlos in the Triplet Mountains.''
Skull and Bones admitted to San Carlos Apache leaders almost 20 years ago that it was in possession of a skull it called Geronimo's in its secret ''museum'' in New Haven, Conn.
Raleigh Thompson, who served as San Carlos Apache tribal councilman for 16 years, told Indian Country Today that he was among the Apache tribal leaders with whom Skull and Bones officials met in New York in a series of meetings beginning in 1986. He said the society, of which Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, are members, admitted that it held Geronimo's remains.
San Carlos Apache Chairman Ned Anderson and tribal attorney Joe Sparks were also members of the Apache delegation that met with the society in New York. Anderson and Thompson said the delegation met with Skull and Bones officials and Jonathan Bush, brother of George H.W. Bush.
Thompson said Prescott Bush was among a group of six Army soldiers who dug up Geronimo's remains at Fort Sill, Okla., in 1918. The San Carlos Apache Tribe received a copy of a logbook describing the graverobbing and a photograph of a skull on display before meeting with the board in New York.
Thompson said the society attempted to return a skull - that of a child - which the Apache delegation rejected. Skull and Bones members subsequently threatened legal action if the photograph were not returned.
Attorney Endicott Davison, representing Skull and Bones, denied that the society had Geronimo's skull. He claimed the logbook was a hoax.
Alexandra Robbins, a former staff member of The New Yorker magazine and author of ''Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League and the Hidden Paths of Power,'' told ICT that her research supports the Apache leaders' statements. Robbins believes that Geronimo's skull is in the society's tomb.
The petition for the return and reburial of Geronimo's skull states that Skull and Bones is a secret society founded at Yale in 1832. Its history is intertwined with that of the German Illuminati and the Nazi Party, according to the petition.
''They maintain a windowless building called 'The Tomb' at 64 High Street, New Haven, Connecticut. The club's assets are controlled by a front company, The Russell Trust Association Inc. Every year, 15 Yale juniors are 'tapped' for Skull & Bones membership. They are indoctrinated into the cultish society with elaborate rituals steeped in satanic theatricism and latent homosexuality.
''The goal of this fraternity is to create the ultimate network of 'good ole boys' around the world. Their alumni include Prescott Bush's son [George H.W.] and grandson [George W.] as well as heads of state and leaders of numerous intelligence agencies, trading companies, business empires and law firms,'' according to the petition.
Since the initial leak of information to the Apache leaders, other sources have confirmed that Geronimo's skull is, as asserted in the petition, indeed on display in The Tomb and considered the ''mascot'' of this ''club'' on High Street.
The petition further states that the ''undersigned are horrified with this display of elitist, racist witchcraft'' and asks Congress, with the assistance of whatever law enforcement necessary, to launch an immediate investigation into the theft and possession of human remains by Skull and Bones, Russell Trust Association Inc. and any members of the U.S. government involved, past or present.
Stephen Flute, Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, signed the petition and said, ''If the situation were reversed, someone would be in jail or would have been executed. It wouldn't even matter to them if the right person were in jail, as long as one of 'us' paid the price.''
Sheri Big Back Bement, Northern Cheyenne/Apache, said Geronimo remains respected. ''You will never see an Indian dig up the bones of the dead. We know what respect is. Their ignorance and stupidity will come back on them and their families.''
Mohawk Sakaronhiotane Ricky Diabo signed with this message: ''When you mess with the spirits you shall be punished by the spirits.''
View the petition and signatures online at www.petitiononline.com/Geronimo/petition.html.
2006: The Year the Chickenhawks Will Go Home to Roost by Cindy Sheehan
Since hot, hot Camp Casey in August, some amazing grass roots actions have taken place all over the country. People are starting to speak up and Congress has begun to take action against the criminal and neo-Fascist regime that tried to take over America.
From Camp Casey to Katrina to use of chemical weaponry and extraordinary rendition to illegally spying on American citizens without due process, Bushco has miserably failed our country and the world. We as Americans said "enough is enough." We sacrificed a lot when we showed up in DC and other cities around the country in the hundreds of thousands to protest against and show that we withdraw any consent to be governed by murderous thugs. We started to peacefully, but forcefully resist the notion that this government has any right to govern us when they have betrayed their offices and their sacred trusts as "defenders" of the Constitution so horribly.
This was also the year that we also began to hold such Republicans in Democratic clothing like: Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, and Diane Feinstein (list is by no means all inclusive) accountable for their support of what George is doing in Iraq. When we as Democrats elect our leaders we expect them to reject and loudly repudiate the murderous and corrupt policies of this administration: not support and defend them.
There are Camp Caseys in front of Hillary's and Chuck Schumer's offices in Long Island every Friday, as well as one in front of Diane Feinstein's Los Angeles office on Fridays, also. There has been a Camp Casey in front of Kay Bailey Hutchinson's office in Dallas since August. Several protestors have been arrested in Dallas exercising their First Amendment rights. We need to let these warmongers, as well as the Republican warmongers, know that we mean business when we say "bring them home now." Set up Camp Caseys in front of your Senator's or Congress person's office if they support George in his wars of aggression.
Gold Star Families for Peace (www.gsfp.org) is planning many activities for the first part of 2006. I would like to give you all a heads up on them, so you can make your plans accordingly to support us and to join us if at all possible.
On January 31st, we will be in Washington, DC for the State of the Union address when George gets in front of Congress and the world and lies through his teeth about how great everything is going in Iraq and here at home. His idiotic policies have ruined Iraq and New Orleans and made the world a more dangerous place...allowing that terrorist attacks have tripled world wide since he decided to "fight them over there." He also may be laying the ground work for further acts of needless aggression against Syria and Iraq. GSFP and representatives from other peace organizations and refugees from New Orleans will be gathering in DC to give the "Real State of the Union." Check our website for place and time.
For the Love of God, Can't you Make Him Stop? Recently, it was revealed that George only interacts with four people: Laura, Condi, Karen Hughes and his Mom. His Mom, the Ice Queen who didn't want her "pretty mind" burdened with the images of flag draped coffins coming home, lives in Houston. On President's Day, (Feb. 20) we will be demonstrating in front of her house to implore her to forget about the obscene profits that her family and their friends are making off of this occupation and to beg her to finally do the right thing and make her son stop this insane war OF terror against the world. George and Dick are defiling the highest offices of the world and they need to resign. On President's Day, when we have the day off, we need to demonstrate against the ones who are illegitimately in power, anyway. If you can't make it to Houston, organize your own President's Day protest.
The Camp Casey Peace Foundation will hold its first annual Peace Festival and Concert on April 4, 2006. April 4th is the day Casey and Martin Luther King, Jr were killed. We want to turn it into a true day for celebrating peace. The Camp Casey Peace Foundation will be awarding the Casey Sheehan Peace Prize, a cash prize, to a young peace activist every year. We want to foster the growth of solving problems non-violently and young people are the ones who get killed in the gray haired old men's wars. We are working on an exciting event and we will announce more details as the event draws closer.
Camp Casey Easter edition: We will be heading back to our leased land in Crawford April 11th to Easter, which is April 16th. Easter is a time of renewal and hopeful promises. Casey was killed on Palm Sunday and his body was returned to us in the cargo section of a United Airlines flight on Holy Saturday and we buried him two days after Easter. Last Easter Season was so painful to us. This Easter we will again be demonstrating in front of the man's home who is responsible for such pain and abject heartache in the world. But, we will be there with a renewed sense of hope that the Chickenhawks will be sent out to pasture this year. Like Michael Moore, I want to be a fly on the wall when Bush and company are hauled out of the White House in handcuffs. Impeachment is not necessary for people who never were elected...eviction is what is needed. If you can't join us in Crawford, set up your own Camp Casey near you.
In 2005, we learned that we have the power. We learned that we can't rely on the propaganda media or the empty promises of most of our elected leadership. We learned that we need to be the change that we desire to see.
We learned that one person can and does make a difference.
We cannot relax in 2006. We cannot slip back into the evil of apathy and complacency that the neocons rejoice in. We need to keep pounding, working, and fighting. We need to support organizations like Gold Star Families for Peace, Veterans for Peace (www.VFP.org), Code Pink (www.codepink4peace.org) and Iraq Veterans Against the War (www.IVAW.net), or the Peace organization of your choice so we can continue our struggle for peace with justice. We need to support true American patriots like John Conyers who is calling for an investigation and censure for the lies that have cost us so much of our national human treasure.
2006 will be a great year for the people of our country. I know it.
It won't be easy, but we will prevail and the struggle will be worth it.
Cindy Sheehan
Camp Casey Peace Mom
Founder of Gold Star Families for Peace
Founder of Camp Casey Peace Foundation
From Camp Casey to Katrina to use of chemical weaponry and extraordinary rendition to illegally spying on American citizens without due process, Bushco has miserably failed our country and the world. We as Americans said "enough is enough." We sacrificed a lot when we showed up in DC and other cities around the country in the hundreds of thousands to protest against and show that we withdraw any consent to be governed by murderous thugs. We started to peacefully, but forcefully resist the notion that this government has any right to govern us when they have betrayed their offices and their sacred trusts as "defenders" of the Constitution so horribly.
This was also the year that we also began to hold such Republicans in Democratic clothing like: Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, and Diane Feinstein (list is by no means all inclusive) accountable for their support of what George is doing in Iraq. When we as Democrats elect our leaders we expect them to reject and loudly repudiate the murderous and corrupt policies of this administration: not support and defend them.
There are Camp Caseys in front of Hillary's and Chuck Schumer's offices in Long Island every Friday, as well as one in front of Diane Feinstein's Los Angeles office on Fridays, also. There has been a Camp Casey in front of Kay Bailey Hutchinson's office in Dallas since August. Several protestors have been arrested in Dallas exercising their First Amendment rights. We need to let these warmongers, as well as the Republican warmongers, know that we mean business when we say "bring them home now." Set up Camp Caseys in front of your Senator's or Congress person's office if they support George in his wars of aggression.
Gold Star Families for Peace (www.gsfp.org) is planning many activities for the first part of 2006. I would like to give you all a heads up on them, so you can make your plans accordingly to support us and to join us if at all possible.
On January 31st, we will be in Washington, DC for the State of the Union address when George gets in front of Congress and the world and lies through his teeth about how great everything is going in Iraq and here at home. His idiotic policies have ruined Iraq and New Orleans and made the world a more dangerous place...allowing that terrorist attacks have tripled world wide since he decided to "fight them over there." He also may be laying the ground work for further acts of needless aggression against Syria and Iraq. GSFP and representatives from other peace organizations and refugees from New Orleans will be gathering in DC to give the "Real State of the Union." Check our website for place and time.
For the Love of God, Can't you Make Him Stop? Recently, it was revealed that George only interacts with four people: Laura, Condi, Karen Hughes and his Mom. His Mom, the Ice Queen who didn't want her "pretty mind" burdened with the images of flag draped coffins coming home, lives in Houston. On President's Day, (Feb. 20) we will be demonstrating in front of her house to implore her to forget about the obscene profits that her family and their friends are making off of this occupation and to beg her to finally do the right thing and make her son stop this insane war OF terror against the world. George and Dick are defiling the highest offices of the world and they need to resign. On President's Day, when we have the day off, we need to demonstrate against the ones who are illegitimately in power, anyway. If you can't make it to Houston, organize your own President's Day protest.
The Camp Casey Peace Foundation will hold its first annual Peace Festival and Concert on April 4, 2006. April 4th is the day Casey and Martin Luther King, Jr were killed. We want to turn it into a true day for celebrating peace. The Camp Casey Peace Foundation will be awarding the Casey Sheehan Peace Prize, a cash prize, to a young peace activist every year. We want to foster the growth of solving problems non-violently and young people are the ones who get killed in the gray haired old men's wars. We are working on an exciting event and we will announce more details as the event draws closer.
Camp Casey Easter edition: We will be heading back to our leased land in Crawford April 11th to Easter, which is April 16th. Easter is a time of renewal and hopeful promises. Casey was killed on Palm Sunday and his body was returned to us in the cargo section of a United Airlines flight on Holy Saturday and we buried him two days after Easter. Last Easter Season was so painful to us. This Easter we will again be demonstrating in front of the man's home who is responsible for such pain and abject heartache in the world. But, we will be there with a renewed sense of hope that the Chickenhawks will be sent out to pasture this year. Like Michael Moore, I want to be a fly on the wall when Bush and company are hauled out of the White House in handcuffs. Impeachment is not necessary for people who never were elected...eviction is what is needed. If you can't join us in Crawford, set up your own Camp Casey near you.
In 2005, we learned that we have the power. We learned that we can't rely on the propaganda media or the empty promises of most of our elected leadership. We learned that we need to be the change that we desire to see.
We learned that one person can and does make a difference.
We cannot relax in 2006. We cannot slip back into the evil of apathy and complacency that the neocons rejoice in. We need to keep pounding, working, and fighting. We need to support organizations like Gold Star Families for Peace, Veterans for Peace (www.VFP.org), Code Pink (www.codepink4peace.org) and Iraq Veterans Against the War (www.IVAW.net), or the Peace organization of your choice so we can continue our struggle for peace with justice. We need to support true American patriots like John Conyers who is calling for an investigation and censure for the lies that have cost us so much of our national human treasure.
2006 will be a great year for the people of our country. I know it.
It won't be easy, but we will prevail and the struggle will be worth it.
Cindy Sheehan
Camp Casey Peace Mom
Founder of Gold Star Families for Peace
Founder of Camp Casey Peace Foundation
Steroid-infused Shadow President Dick Cheney Axes That 70's Show by Maureen Dowd
WASHINGTON We start the new year with the same old fear: Dick Cheney.
The vice president, who believes in unwarranted, unlimited snooping, is so pathologically secretive that if you use Google Earth's database to see his official residence, the view is scrambled and obscured. You can view satellite photos of the White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol - but not of the Lord of the Underworld's lair.
Vice is literally a shadow president. He's obsessive about privacy - but, unfortunately, only his own.
Google Earth users alerted The Times to this latest bit of Cheney concealment after a front-page story last week about the international fears inspired by free Google software that features detailed displays of things like government and military sites around the world.
"For a brief period," they reported, "photos of the White House and adjacent buildings that the United States Geological Survey provided to Google Earth showed up with certain details obscured." So Google replaced those images with unaltered photographs taken by a private company.
Even though the story did not mention the Cheney residence - and even though it's not near the White House - The Times ran a clarifying correction yesterday that said, "The view of the vice president's residence in Washington remains obscured."
Fitting, since Vice has turned America into a camera obscura, a dark chamber with a lens that turns things upside down.
Guys argue that women tend to stew and hold grudges more, sometimes popping up to blow the whistle on a man's bad behavior years later, like a missile out of the night, as Alan Simpson said of Anita Hill.
Yet look at Cheney and Rummy. Their steroid-infused power grabs stem from their years stewing in the Ford White House, a time when they felt emasculated because they were stripped of prerogatives.
Rummy, a Ford chief of staff who became defense secretary, and his protégé, Cheney, who succeeded him as chief of staff, felt diminished by the post-Watergate laws and reforms that reduced the executive branch's ability to be secretive and unilateral, tilting power back toward Congress.
The 70's were also a heady period for the press, which reached the zenith of its power when it swayed public opinion on Vietnam and exposed Watergate. Reporters got greater access to government secrets with a stronger Freedom of Information Act.
Chenrummy thought the press was running amok, that leaks should be plugged and that Congress was snatching power that rightfully belonged to the White House.
So these two crusty pals spent 30 years dreaming of inflating the deflated presidential muscularity. Cheney christened himself vice president and brought in Rummy for the most ridiculously pumped-up presidency ever. All this was fine with W., whose family motto is: "We know best. Trust us."
The two regents turned back the clock to the Nixon era, bringing back presidential excesses like wiretapping along with presidential power. As attorney general, John Ashcroft clamped down on the Freedom of Information Act. For two years, the Pentagon has been sitting on a request from The Times's Jeff Gerth to cough up a secret 500-page document prepared by Halliburton on what to do with Iraq's oil industry - a plan it wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.). Very convenient.
Defending warrantless wiretapping last week, the vice president spoke of his distaste for the erosion of presidential authority in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam.
"I do believe that, especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats we face, it was true during the cold war, as well as I think what is true now, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," he intoned. Translation: Back off, Congress and the press.
Checks, balances, warrants, civil liberties - they're all so 20th century. Historians must now regard the light transitional tenure of Gerald Ford as the petri dish of this darkly transformational presidency.
Consider this: when Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, supported by President Ford, pushed a plan to have the government help develop alternative sources of energy and reduce our dependence on oil and Saudi Arabia, guess who helped scotch it?
Dick Cheney. Then and now, the man is a menace.
Topplebush.com
Posted: December 28, 2005
The vice president, who believes in unwarranted, unlimited snooping, is so pathologically secretive that if you use Google Earth's database to see his official residence, the view is scrambled and obscured. You can view satellite photos of the White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol - but not of the Lord of the Underworld's lair.
Vice is literally a shadow president. He's obsessive about privacy - but, unfortunately, only his own.
Google Earth users alerted The Times to this latest bit of Cheney concealment after a front-page story last week about the international fears inspired by free Google software that features detailed displays of things like government and military sites around the world.
"For a brief period," they reported, "photos of the White House and adjacent buildings that the United States Geological Survey provided to Google Earth showed up with certain details obscured." So Google replaced those images with unaltered photographs taken by a private company.
Even though the story did not mention the Cheney residence - and even though it's not near the White House - The Times ran a clarifying correction yesterday that said, "The view of the vice president's residence in Washington remains obscured."
Fitting, since Vice has turned America into a camera obscura, a dark chamber with a lens that turns things upside down.
Guys argue that women tend to stew and hold grudges more, sometimes popping up to blow the whistle on a man's bad behavior years later, like a missile out of the night, as Alan Simpson said of Anita Hill.
Yet look at Cheney and Rummy. Their steroid-infused power grabs stem from their years stewing in the Ford White House, a time when they felt emasculated because they were stripped of prerogatives.
Rummy, a Ford chief of staff who became defense secretary, and his protégé, Cheney, who succeeded him as chief of staff, felt diminished by the post-Watergate laws and reforms that reduced the executive branch's ability to be secretive and unilateral, tilting power back toward Congress.
The 70's were also a heady period for the press, which reached the zenith of its power when it swayed public opinion on Vietnam and exposed Watergate. Reporters got greater access to government secrets with a stronger Freedom of Information Act.
Chenrummy thought the press was running amok, that leaks should be plugged and that Congress was snatching power that rightfully belonged to the White House.
So these two crusty pals spent 30 years dreaming of inflating the deflated presidential muscularity. Cheney christened himself vice president and brought in Rummy for the most ridiculously pumped-up presidency ever. All this was fine with W., whose family motto is: "We know best. Trust us."
The two regents turned back the clock to the Nixon era, bringing back presidential excesses like wiretapping along with presidential power. As attorney general, John Ashcroft clamped down on the Freedom of Information Act. For two years, the Pentagon has been sitting on a request from The Times's Jeff Gerth to cough up a secret 500-page document prepared by Halliburton on what to do with Iraq's oil industry - a plan it wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.). Very convenient.
Defending warrantless wiretapping last week, the vice president spoke of his distaste for the erosion of presidential authority in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam.
"I do believe that, especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats we face, it was true during the cold war, as well as I think what is true now, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," he intoned. Translation: Back off, Congress and the press.
Checks, balances, warrants, civil liberties - they're all so 20th century. Historians must now regard the light transitional tenure of Gerald Ford as the petri dish of this darkly transformational presidency.
Consider this: when Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, supported by President Ford, pushed a plan to have the government help develop alternative sources of energy and reduce our dependence on oil and Saudi Arabia, guess who helped scotch it?
Dick Cheney. Then and now, the man is a menace.
Topplebush.com
Posted: December 28, 2005
40 + Jewish & Palestinian organisations defy EU secrecy
Dismayed by the refusal of EU to publish their own Ramallah and East Jerusalem Heads of Mission findings regarding Israeli state actions towards non Jewish residents of East Jerusalem, Jewish and other peace groups and Palestinian Solidarity campaigns around Europe have decided they must take matters into their own hands.
Every organisation listed below will publish the Report on their websites. A copy of the report can be found on the PSC www.palestinecampaign.org
The day after the report was shelved by EU foreign ministers at their GAERC meeting in Brussels on December 12th - for fear of alienating Israel and reducing the EUs influence - Israel announced, in violation of its Road Map obligations, the building of 300 new homes in the Maale Adumim settlement, the largest in the occupied territories.
Pierre Galand, Senator in the Belgian Parliament and Chairman of the European Co-ordinating Committee of NGOs on the question of Palestine (ECCP) said: “European diplomats in East Jerusalem and Ramallah had the courage to stress the alarming situation in East Jerusalem. Their report corroborates the ICJ advisory opinion ruling on the Wall and the illegal settlements, which led the ECCP to initiate the “European Campaign for Sanctions against the Israeli Occupation”. In order to force the EU member states to respect their own commitment to International Law and Human Rights, we will publish the report on East Jerusalem on our websites, despite the EU refusal to do so.”
Dan Judelson, Secretary of European Jews for a Just Peace said "The EU are burying their heads in the sand and are thus co-responsible while East Jerusalem residents face repeated violations of international law and of simple standards of humanity, all at the hands of the Israeli state. This is not a time for thumb twiddling or inaction; if the EU sits on this report, we see it as our duty to make it as widely available as we can."
Betty Hunter, General Secretary of the UK Palestinian Solidarity Campaign said: "It is 17 months since the International Court of Justice declared the apartheid Wall to be an illegal act by an occupying force and that settlement building should end. While Israel defies this decision, Palestinians are losing their homes, land and livelihood in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. If European countries continue to collude with this, they are also guilty of oppressing the Palestinian people."
To read the report "European Jews for a Just Peace"
On the Iraq Election Noam Chomsky interviewed by Andy Clark
Andy Clark: Let's start off by talking about the elections in Iraq. Let's hear how President Bush was billing them just a few days ahead of the vote.
President Bush: "By helping Iraqis build a strong democracy, we're adding to our own security and, like a generation before us, we are laying the foundation of peace for generations to come. Not far from here, where we gather today is a symbol of freedom familiar to all Americans - the Liberty Bell. When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public, the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration and a witness said: 'It rang as if it meant something.' Today the call of liberty is being heard in Baghdad and Basra, and other Iraqi cities, and its sound is echoing across the broader Middle East, from Damascus to Tehran, people hear it and they know it means something. It means that days of tyranny and terror are ending and a new day of hope and freedom is dawning."
Andy Clark: President Bush there, speaking at the Philadelphia World Affairs Council, just a few days ago. I mean the sentiment is very clear there from the President, that the US is bringing hope and democracy to Iraq and that the elections are crucial in this. After the vote, the President has called the elections an important milestone. Professor Chomsky, how do you see the elections? Do you see them as an important milestone for Iraq?
Noam Chomsky: Actually I do, but before talking about that, I should just bring up a kind of a truism. No rational person pays the slightest attention to declarations of benign intent on the part of leaders, no matter who they are. And the reason is they're completely predictable, including the worst monsters, Stalin, Hitler the rest. Always full of benign intent. Yes that's their task. Therefore, since they're predictable, we disregard them, they carry no information. What we do is, look at the facts. That's true if they're Bush or Blair or Stalin or anyone else. That's the beginning of rationality. All right, the basic facts we know: when Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, the reason was what they insistently called a 'single question.' That was repeated by Jack Straw, by Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, everyone. 'Will Iraq eliminate its weapons of mass destruction?' That was the single question, that was the basis on which both Bush and Blair got authorization to use force. Within a few months this single question was answered and the answer came out the wrong way and then all of sudden...
Andy Clark: This was weapons of mass destruction you're talking about?
Noam Chomsky: Yes. Then very quickly it turned out that that wasn't the reason of the invasion. The reason was what the President's liberal press calls his 'Messianic Mission' to bring democracy to Iraq and immediately everyone had to leap on the democratisation bandwagon and it began to be described as the most noble war in history and so on and so forth. Well, anyone with a particle of sense would know that you can't take that seriously and, in fact, if you look at the events that followed, it just demonstrated that. The US tried, in every possible way, to prevent elections in Iraq. They offered effort after effort to evade the danger of elections. Finally, they were compelled to accept elections by mass non-violent resistance, for which the Ayatollah Sistani [moderate Shi'ite leader] was a kind of a symbol. Mass outpourings of people demanding elections. Finally, Bush and Blair had to agree to elections. The next step is to subvert them and they started immediately. They're doing it right now. Elections mean you pay some - in a democracy at least - you pay some attention to the will of the population. Well, the crucial question for an invading army is: 'do they want us to be here?' Well, we know the answer to that. The British Ministry of Defence carried out a poll a couple of months ago, it was secret, but it leaked to the British Press - I don't think it's been reported in the US. They found that 82 percent of the population wanted the coalition forces, British and US forces to leave. One percent of the population said that they were increasing security.
Andy Clark: But isn't this the start of a process that could see the occupying troops from America and Britain leaving? We've seen an awful lot of Iraqis taking part in the elections, two thirds, we're told. The turnout was quite high…
Noam Chomsky: But hold on a second, the US and Britain announced at once, at once, we will not have a timetable to withdraw. So yes, you can all want us to leave, but we won't have a timetable for withdrawal. Now of course, there's a conflict, the Iraqis have forced the occupying powers to allow some kind of electoral process. What the occupying powers are doing now is perfectly clear and very familiar, very familiar. We've had a long history of this in Central America, the British ran an empire, the Japanese ran an empire, and the Russians ran an empire in Eastern Europe. The way they want it to work - standard procedure - you want the local forces to run their own countries, so Poland under the Russians, the Polish army runs it, the Polish civilians are the bureaucrats, Russians are in the background. The same in say, El Salvador, the US-run state terrorist forces are the military, the civilians are local, and the US is in the background. If anything goes wrong, they move in, the same with the British in India, the same with the Japanese in South Korea.
Andy Clark: So you see this is a step to set up a sort of puppet government and not something that's really representative of ordinary Iraqis?
Noam Chomsky: That's what they are trying to do, but there's always a conflict about that. Many of the Western backed or Russian or Eastern or other backed tyrants rose up. However, it is as clear as a bell that the US, and Britain behind it, are doing everything they can to prevent a sovereign, more or less democratic Iraq. And they are being dragged into it step by step. Now there's a good reason why the US cannot tolerate a sovereign, more or less democratic Iraq. We're not allowed to talk about it because there's a party line. The party line we have to rigidly adhere to says you're not allowed to talk about the reasons for invading Iraq. We're supposed to believe that the US would've invaded Iraq if it was an island in the Indian Ocean and its main exports were pickles and lettuce. This is what we're supposed to believe. Now the truth of the matter, obvious to anyone not committed to the party line, is that Iraq has huge oil resources, maybe the second in the world, mostly untapped, that it's right in the middle of the main energy-producing region of the world and that taking control of Iraq will strengthen enormously the US's control over the major energy resources of the world. It will, in fact, give the US critical leverage over its competitors, Europe and Asia, that's Zbigniew Brzezsinski's [President Carter's national Security Adviser] accurate observation. That's the reason. Now suppose that Iraq were to become sovereign and democratic, what would happen? Just think of the policies they would undertake. I mean, we can run through them, it would be a nightmare for the US.
Andy Clark: You maintain that they would want to maintain control. This is an email from a listener, sent to us on the eve of the elections from Iraq, who just simply calls himself Mohammed:
Mohammed's email: "Tomorrow it's going to be us who decide and I can feel the greatness of the responsibility because the result will draw the shape of our future and will determine how long it will take till we can announce victory in this war; our war against the past, against the past's illusions and the past's mistakes."
Andy Clark: What would you say to a comment like that? We hear that a lot from Iraqis. I spoke to some people from the Iraqi community here in the Netherlands just a few weeks ago and they were expressing very similar sentiments that they felt they were in some way having their destiny in their own hands for the first time.
Noam Chomsky: That's exactly what I've been saying for the last three years and I just said it again here. The victory of the non-violent resistance in Iraq, which compelled the occupying forces to allow elections, that's a major victory. That's one of the major triumphs of non-violent resistance that I know of. It wasn't the insurgents that did it - the US doesn't care about violence, they have more violence. What it can't control is non-violence and the non-violent movements in Iraq, partially with Sistani as a kind of figurehead, but it's much broader than that, it compelled the occupying forces to allow elections and some limited, very limited degree of sovereignty. And yet we should be trying to help them in these endeavours.
Andy Clark: In that sense you see that there's a positive influence from these elections and you see that those forces can grow out of these elections and take more control in Iraq?
Noam Chomsky: I certainly hope so, but they're going to have to be fighting Britain and the US tooth and nail all the way. The question is what Westerners will do about it. Will we be on the side of the occupying forces, which are trying to prevent democracy and sovereignty? Or will we be on the side of the Iraqi people, who want democracy and sovereignty? But in order to ask that question we first have to free ourselves of the doctrinal blinders, which prevent us from understanding what is actually happening.
Andy Clark: OK, let's hear some more messages from listeners. This is an argument we hear an awful lot.
Listener in Canada Reg Pollock's email: "I don't think the Americans had any right to go into Iraq, but now there are there and removed the government they are stuck until there is a body which can maintain the country. As bad a Saddam was he did control three peoples. It's not the same as Vietnam. They (the US) have a tiger by the tail."
Listener Mark Humphreys from Ireland: "The 'anti-war' movement destroyed Vietnam, and far from being ashamed of it, they are proud of it, and they want to do the same thing to Iraq. They want to abandon Iraq to the Jihadis and the Baathists and civil war. All they care about is that no white people are involved."
Andy Clark: That's an argument we hear an awful lot of. You know, the Americans have to now see the job out as it were. What's your reaction to that?
Noam Chomsky: That's like saying the Russians invaded Afghanistan and they can't just leave it to the Jihadis so therefore they have to stay there. I mean I was strongly opposed to that, I assume every listener was, and that we should be. An invading army has no right whatsoever, none. It has responsibilities. Its primary responsibility is to act in a way that the population of the country demands. They are to keep to the will of the population. They don't have any right to stay there because they want to. Well as far as we know, and there's fair amount of information. The Iraqi population wants the occupying forces to leave. As I mentioned, as shown by the last British Ministry of Defence poll, one percent think the occupying forces are contributing to security; most of them think they're increasing insecurity. So yes, they should be withdrawing, as the population wants them to, instead of trying desperately to set up a client regime with military forces that they can control. That's what's happening. As for the comment on Vietnam, yes that's probably...probably you would've heard that from some super Stalinist in Moscow in the case of Afghanistan. The fact of the matter is the US invaded South Vietnam in 1962, practically destroyed it, then expanded the war to the rest of Indochina. It ended up killing maybe three or four million people in Indochina, destroying the country. The anti-war movement succeeded in building up enough opposition so that the country at least survived, barely, although the US won a tremendous victory by destroying the country. Yes, you will find the equivalent of Stalinists in the US who will give that party line, but simply just take a look at the facts; they're well known and well understood.
Andy Clark: But what do you think would happen if the process now goes forward and the Iraqi government is formed and the new parliament turns around and passes a majority motion for the coalition-led troops to withdraw within six months? What do you think would happen?
Noam Chomsky: In other words, suppose that the parliament, instead of being an elite force, dominating the population, suppose the parliament represents popular will, say the popular will of 80 percent of Iraqis who want the occupying forces to withdraw, according to the British Ministry of Defence. Suppose that happens? Well then the occupying forces should immediately initiate withdrawal and leave it to the Iraqis. Now there's a good reason why Washington and London are not contemplating that. It has nothing to do with the fate of the Iraqis, quite the contrary. Just think for a minute. What would an independent Iraq be likely to do, an independent, more or less democratic Iraq? Think. I mean if you're going to have a Shi'ite majority. Therefore the Shi'ites will have a lot of influence in policy, probably a dominant influence. The Shi'ite population in the south, which is where most of the oil is, would much prefer warm relations to Iran over hostile relations to Iran. Furthermore they are very close relations already, the Badr brigade, which is the militia that mostly controls the south, was trained in Iran. The clerics have long-standing relations with Iran; the Ayatollah Sistani actually grew up there. Chances are pretty strong, they'll move towards a some sort of a loose Shi'ite alliance, with Iraq and Iran. Furthermore right across the border in Saudi Arabia, there's a substantial Shi'ite population, which has been bitterly oppressed by the US-backed tyranny in Saudi Arabia, the fundamentalist tyranny. Any move towards independence in Iraq is likely to increase the efforts to gain a degree of autonomy and justice. That happens to be where most of Saudi Arabia's oil is. So you can see not far in the future a loose Shi'ite alliance controlling most of the world's oil, independent of the US. Furthermore, it is beginning to turn toward the East. Iran has pretty much given up on Western Europe, it assumes that Western Europe is too cowardly to act independently of the US, well it has options. It can turn to the East. China can't be intimidated. That's why the US is so frightened of China. It cannot be intimidated. In fact, they're already establishing relations with Iran and in fact even with Saudi Arabia, both military and economic. There is an Asian energy security grid based on Asia and Russia but bringing in India, Korea and others. If Iran moves in that direction, having abandoned any hope in Europe, it can become the lynchpin of the Asian energy security grid.
Andy Clark: And you say that this may be part of an attraction for the Shi'ite groups in Iraq as well to sort of join this movement away from the Western world influence as it were?
Noam Chomsky: Yes, they have every reason to. In fact it might even happen in Saudi Arabia. From the point of view of Washington planners, that is the ultimate nightmare.
Andy Clark: And that's why you say they won't be prepared to leave...
Noam Chomsky: That is why they're fighting tooth and nail to prevent democracy and sovereignty in Iraq. The Iraqi people have resisted and it's a very impressive resistance. I'm not talking about insurgency. I'm talking about popular, non-violent resistance under bitter conditions. There's a labour movement forming, which is a very important one. The US insists on keeping Saddam's bitter anti-labour laws, but the labour movement doesn't like it. Their activists are being killed. Nobody knows by whom, maybe by insurgents, maybe by former Baathists, maybe by somebody else. But they're working. There's the basis of a popular democracy being developed there, much to the horror of the occupying forces, but it's going on and it could have very long term consequences in their national affairs, which is why Bush and Blair have so desperately been trying to prevent democracy and any form of sovereignty and have been forced to back off step by step. This is also going on with the economic arrangements. The US moved in and immediately tried to open up the economy to foreign take-over by imposing outrageous and in fact illegal laws for privatisation. You know, Iraqis don't want that, they want to take control of their own economy and resources. There's a battle going on about that.
Andy Clark: Let's hear another message from a listener. This is from Miguel C. Alvarez, who is a Spanish ex-patriot living in the UK:
Miguel's email: "Forget about the US and EU governments: they're hopeless. Where to for 'the people?' How can the insanity be stopped? Or will it have to run its course and get much worse before it can get better?"
Andy Clark: What's your take on that?
Noam Chomsky: The violence in Iraq is a serious problem for the Iraqis and I tend to agree with, apparently the majority of Iraqis, that it's the occupation forces that are stimulating the violence. The fact that an insurgency even developed in Iraq is astonishing. I mean it's an amazing fact that the US has had more trouble controlling Iraq than the Germans had in controlling occupied Europe or the Russians in controlling Eastern Europe. After all, the countries under Nazi or Russian occupation were run by domestic forces, domestic police, domestic armies, and domestic civilian forces. The Nazis and the Kremlin were in the background and if needed, they came in, but mostly it was domestically run. There were partisans in Western Europe and they were very courageous, but they would've been wiped out very quickly if it hadn't been for enormous foreign support and, of course, Germany was at war.
Well, in Iraq none of these circumstances prevailed, there was no outside support for the resistance. The little support that has arisen, and it is very slight, is mostly engendered by the invasion. But there's no outside support. The country had been devastated by sanctions. The US was coming in with enormous resources to rebuild it and they have turned it into a total catastrophe. It's one of the worst military catastrophes in history. You look at figures for something like, say malnutrition; malnutrition is way up since the US took over, that's unbelievable. It's one of the few wars that can't be reported, not because reporters are cowards, but because it's too dangerous. Reporters are mostly in the Green Zone or else they go out with a platoon of marines. There are some, like Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and a couple of others who are independent and brave it, but not many. This is an incredible catastrophe. But it's very likely, and I tend to agree with apparent opinion of most Iraqis on this, that it's the invading armies themselves that are engendering the violence. Well, they're carrying out plenty of it, but the violence of the insurgents would probably recline if they left and allowed Iraqis to be on their own.
Andy Clark: Another message, this is from Charles Harlich, from New Jersey in the US:
Charles' email: "I have a relative who is now serving as a soldier in Iraq. What advice would you give to him?"
Noam Chomsky: Look, I have plenty of correspondence with soldiers in Iraq and all you can do is offer them your sympathy. You hope that they make it safely and that their leaders will get them out of there. The same kind of advice you would've given to Russian soldiers in Afghanistan. You have to sympathize with them; it's not their fault. It's the fault of their commanders. I don't mean their military commanders, I mean the civilians in the Pentagon, in the White House and their counterparts in England.
Andy Clark: This is from Steve Brown in Mexico:
Steve's email:" No one is talking anymore about oil. Isn't that still the main reason the US invaded Iraq and are Iraq's large reserves now under control of US corporations?"
Noam Chomsky: Nobody was talking about oil all along if you look. It was considered outrageous to talk about oil. If anyone talked about oil, Tony Blair would have a tantrum about conspiracy theories.
Andy Clark: Plenty of the protestors said it was a war for oil all along...
Noam Chomsky: Protesters did, but take a look at the mainstream. It was considered a conspiracy theory, Marxist, delusional and so on to talk about oil. Although every sane person knows that that was the reason, if Iraq had been producing pickles and lettuce, would they have been invaded? I mean, let's be serious. Of course it's oil. Furthermore the Iraqis know that. Right after the president gave his dramatic speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, announcing his 'Messianic Mission' to bring democracy to Iraq, after the collapse of the 'single question,' right after that a poll was reported. Gallup, the main polling organisation in the US, took a poll in Baghdad and asked people in Baghdad why they think the US invaded, about one percent agreed, with 100 percent of educated Western opinion, to bring democracy, one percent agreed to bring democracy, five percent said to help Iraqis. Most of the rest said the obvious: to take control of Iraq's resources and to strengthen the US strategic position in the region. And incidentally, going back to the writer, it's not so much a matter of gaining access to Iraq's resources, you can get access even if you don't control a country. I mean the oil market is something of a market. What matters is control, not access. It's a very big difference. The main theme of US policy since the Second World War has been to control the resources of the Middle East, the energy resources. That would give what George Cannon, one of the early planners, called 'veto power' over their allies, they wouldn't get out of line because we'd have our hand on the spicket. Now at that time, for about 30 years, North America was the major oil exporter. The US wasn't using any Middle East oil, but it nevertheless was dedicated and it was the main theme of US policy to maintain control over it. If you look at US intelligence projections for the future, they project that the US must control Middle East oil, but that it itself will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources, Western Africa, Western Hemisphere resources. Europe and Japan will rely on the less stable Middle East resources, but the US will control them. That's the way you prevent independence from developing. That's why the Asian Energy Security Grid and the Shanghai Cooperation Council are regarded as such a threat by the US. The meetings right now, the Malaysian meetings, East Asian meetings, that's a threat, it's a coalescence of power moving independently of the US. You look back through the history of the Cold War, and it was the same with regard to Europe, a major concern throughout the Cold War was what was called European Third Force, which might find a way independent of the US in Europe, and there was every effort made to prevent that. A long story, and that makes sense if you want to run the world, you want to make sure there are not independent forces out of your control.
Andy Clark: This is a message from L. Douglas Raymond in the US:
"With the war in Iraq, it seems we are viewing the US's engagement in some bold, in your face, strategic geopolitical chess. In your opinion, what is the US's next likely international move?"
Noam Chomsky: My own guess frankly, was that the invasion of Iraq would be over in about three days and that the US would install a stable client regime. It should have been one of the easiest military victories in history. But they did turn it into a catastrophe. My guess back at that time was that the next place the US would move would be the Andes in the Western Hemisphere. This is a traditional region of US domination, but from Venezuela down to Argentina, the region is pretty much out of control and that's a very serious worry for US planners. They expect the Western Hemisphere to be obedient and placid. And if you look at modern history the US has intervened violently and brutally throughout the Western Hemisphere for a long time to ensure obedience, overthrowing democratic governments, installing murderous military dictatorships, carrying out large-scale terror and it goes on pretty much to the present. It is somewhat out of control. Venezuela is increasingly going on an independent path and Venezuela is very important, the US took it from the British in 1921, kicked the British out at the time of the beginning of the oil-based economy because it was recognized that Venezuela had enormous oil resources, also others. And it has been one of the main oil suppliers under US control ever since, but it's moving towards independence. Chavez is enormously popular in Venezuela; in fact, support for the elected government is higher in Venezuela than in any other Latin American country. Venezuela is beginning to diversify its international relations; it's starting to export oil to China and may do so even more soon. The same is true of the other raw materials exporters, Brazil and Chile, not to the extent of Venezuela, but increasing. Furthermore, the region has left of centre governments. All through the regions, a few exceptions but almost all of them, and some of them are defying the IMF. Argentina simply defied IMF orders, told them to get lost, and did very well as a result. Furthermore, there's a large Indian population in Latin America from Bolivia up to Ecuador, very large, and they're beginning to organise and become independent. They may actually win an election in Bolivia [left wing leader Evo Morales has now won that election]. They've overthrown a couple of governments in Ecuador. They're also calling for an Indian nation throughout this region. Now, they do not want their resources taken from them, they have plenty of resources, a lot of oil. They want either to control their own resources, rather than having it taken over by foreigners, or - many of them - don't even want resources to be developed, so there are plenty of indigenous people in Ecuador who don't particularly want their lifestyle disrupted so that people drive SUVs in New York City.
Andy Clark: This is an area, you think, that will be an area of concern for the US?
Noam Chomsky: It's of deep concern. There are more US military in Latin America today than at the height of the Cold War. For the first time the number of US military in Latin America exceeds the combined number of civilians in key federal agencies, aid, state departments and others. Furthermore, the training of the Latin American military, which has always been under US control, has recently shifted; the Congress shifted it from the State Department to the Pentagon. Now that's quite important. The State Department has a terrible record of atrocities and torture and crime - everyone should know about that - but under the State Department, military training was under some Congressional supervision, had some human rights conditions, some democracy conditions. Under the Pentagon, it has no conditions. Furthermore, the military is now being trained to deal with, what are called social problems, social unrest.
Andy Clark: It plays into an e-mail we received from somebody in Peru.
Gonzalo Alvarado, Peru: "Do you see any serious alternative to the Bush administration for next elections, in order to change the US foreign policy? How do you think the US will deal with the regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia? In Peru, we have a presidential candidate with the same profile, Humala. He is growing in the polls for next presidential elections. His tactic? Blaming imperialism and the free market for making us poorer."
Noam Chomsky: It certainly doesn't like them [the regimes in Bolivia and Venezuela]. Incidentally, we should stop talking about the free market, that's another ideological trick. The US does not believe in a free market. The US itself is a largely state-based economy. You use computers and the Internet and telecommunications and lasers and aeroplanes and so on, most of it comes out of the dynamic state sector. The economy is handed over to private businesses if they make some profit out of it, but mostly state-based and same is true of pharmaceuticals and biology-based industries and so on. So, we should have no illusions about this. Even the free trade agreements, so-called, are highly protectionists, the extra-ordinary intellectual property rights go way beyond anything existed in the past those are purely protectionist. They are designed to maintain monopoly rights for major corporations. If the currently rich countries had ever been faced with such rules, the US would now be exporting fish and fur. So there's no free market. But how the US is planning to deal with it, well we know. Let's take Venezuela; there was a military coup in Venezuela in 2002. The US supported the military coup, the US had to back down very quickly because there was an overwhelming uproar in Latin America, where democracy is taken much more seriously than it is in Washington and there was great protest about US support for a military coup overthrowing a democratic government, so Washington had to back down and the military coup was quickly reversed. The US then moved into the next step, which is subversion; if you can't carry out a military coup, try to subvert the government. So the US had been pouring in aid into what are called officially 'anti-Chavez, pro-democracy elements.' That's where the money is going. The implication is: you can't be a pro-Chavez, pro-democracy element; you can't because the US says so. The fact that Venezuela leads Latin America in support for democracy and support for the elected government, going up very sharply since Chavez took over in 1998, that's just irrelevant, we decide what's democracy, not the people - that's just subversion. We saw it in the last election just a couple of days ago. It was clear the US candidate was going to do very badly, so the opposition, almost surely with US initiative or support, pulled out of the election to try to de-legitimate the election, well, that's a very standard tactic, the US used the same tactic in Haiti a couple of years ago. It was clear that Aristide, who they didn't like, was going to easily win the election, so they got together with the opposition and got the opposition, which was quite small, to pull out and then they could say, well look it's not legitimate, he's a tyrant. The most striking example of this was 1984 in Nicaragua. There was an election in Nicaragua in 1984, we're not allowed to admit that, but there was one. It was very heavily observed including a Dutch government team, very hostile, rightwing Dutch government observation team. There was a big delegation of Latin American scholars and US and British parliamentary human rights group and others. Probably the most heavily monitored elections in history and they regarded it as a pretty fair election, not magnificent, but fair by Latin American standards. Well Washington didn't want that election, so it got its own candidate to pull out. He happened to be on the CIA pay roll, it turned out, to de-legitimate the election and claim that the election didn't take place. You take a look at American press and journals and the same in Western Europe, they say there was never any election, the first election was in 1990. That's the way you de-legitimate elections when you know you're going to lose them.
And that's what just happened in Venezuela. My guess was if Iraq had been successful, the US would simply have invaded. But by now they have lost the capacity to carry out military action.
Andy Clark: There's been a lot of talk recently about how far the US should go in questioning suspected terrorists. If we can talk a little bit about the War on Terror. You know persistent allegations have been made of torture, and allegations were also made that there were secret CIA prisoners in Eastern Europe. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was keen to dispel the torture allegations during her recent trip to Europe.
We've also seen the Bush Administration accepting the bill put forward by Senator John McCain within the past few days, which will ban US interrogators from using, and I quote: 'cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of detainees in the war on terror.' Earlier, Vice-President Dick Cheney had lobbied to try and have an exception for the CIA from this, but the government has now backed away from that. Professor Chomsky, what do you make of the McCain bill being accepted?
Noam Chomsky: To the extent the McCain bill is accepted, which hasn't happened, that is saying that what Condoleezza Rice just said is a lie, she claimed it wasn't happening. The discussion of the McCain bill is saying, yes it did happen, but we won't do it any more. OK, that allows us to dismiss Condoleezza Rice's statement.
Andy Clark: Are they saying that really, or are they saying "we want a safeguard against it happening in the future?"
Noam Chomsky: Yes that meant it happened in the past, they're conceding it. Of course they don't have to concede it, there's overwhelming evidence for it. Just read American legal journals, full of discussion on it. Take a look at Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, extensive evidence. Of course they've been torturing. Condoleezza Rice was very careful to say we don't send people to countries where we believe they're going to be tortured, so we send them to Egypt and Syria, but we don't believe they're going to be tortured there. How can you listen to that without laughing? What are they sending them there for? Why aren't they sending them to Holland? But why aren't they leaving them in the US? Do we have to even know what's going on in Guantanamo? I mean Guantanamo is a horror chamber - there's plenty of evidence, but did we need that evidence? Why are they even in Guantanamo? Why aren't they in a prison in New York? There's no security reason for that. The reason they're sent to Guantanamo is elementary, any child can understand it, Guantanamo they can claim, is not under US judicial jurisdiction, so therefore they can do to people whatever they want, without habeas corpus, without judges and so on. If they weren't torturing them, they would put them in New York, where they'd be under the legal system and the rendition, which is a shocking crime, is obviously to send people to places where they can be tortured. What Condoleezza Rice actually said is: 'we take the word of the countries to which we're sending them that they're not going to torture them,' meaning we know they torture everybody, but we're going to take their word they're not going to torture these people. We're just sending them there for a vacation because we want them to have a good time, you know at a ritzy resort. How can we even listen to these words?
Andy Clark: Let's hear from two listeners on torture.
Noel Smyth, Dublin, Ireland: "Can the people of this country believe anything that the US says about torture not being committed on their behalf in EU countries?"
R. Kurt, Oak Ridge, Tennessee: "Why isn't Europe more critical of the Bush administration's policy on torture and human rights?"
Andy Clark: What about that second question and Europe not being more forthright in that listener's viewpoint?
Noam Chomsky: When you talk about a country you have to differentiate. Do you mean the elite sectors, the political class?
Andy Clark: I guess he does, he's talking about the European Union, I guess.
Noam Chomsky: Well, talking about the elite sectors, the reason they don't protest is they more or less agree. The general population doesn't agree. The question: can you believe what the US says? Of course not, you don't believe what any government say, you don't believe what corporate leaders say. The role of people in power is to deceive, it's not just the US, I mean, we all know that. When you look at an ad on television, do you believe it's telling the truth? I mean, after all, systems of power are dedicated to deceit and delusion, to maintain power and to pursue their interests. That's elementary; we should learn that in elementary school. So sure, you don't believe what, you know, the benign, grandiose statements that are made by leaders. As I said before, they're predictable, they carry no information, it doesn't matter whether it's the US or anyone else. You look at the practices, when you look at the practices, it stares you in the face, even without the volumes of evidence that we have. As for why Europe accepts it, I don't think that Europe does. If you mean by Europe, the people of Europe. In fact, the US doesn't accept it, if you mean the people of the US, they don't like these policies. In fact, there's an enormous gulf in the US between public attitudes and public policy, not just on this issue, but on a host of issues. Take another one, which is right on the front pages now, the Montreal Conference, the Kyoto protocols, you read everywhere that the US refused to accept Kyoto and broke up the Montreal meetings. Well, that's true if you understand the US to exclude its population. The population of the US is overwhelmingly in favour of those agreements. In fact, so strongly that a majority of Bush voters think that he's in favour of them because it's so obviously right to be in favour of them. But when you have an enormous gulf between public policy and public opinion, we can mislead ourselves by saying Europe doesn't want, the US doesn't want and so on. No, we mean sectors that happen to concentrate power and keep the population out of their hair. What that means there's a very serious democratic deficit in western countries, the US in particular. The population plays a very little role in policy and is often very strongly opposed to it.
Andy Clark: Professor Chomsky, your outspoken comments always provoke equally outspoken criticism. And when people have been e-mailing into our web page, there was, of course, criticism, too. So let me put some of these e-mails to you. I'm sure you've heard these arguments many a time before but it's always interesting to hear your answer to them as well.
Michael Molluck, who is in Philadelphia in the US: "Noam Chomsky has a pathological hatred for the United States. Like all haters, he is blinded to everything that does not support his bigotry. It must kill him and his followers to constantly be so smart, so wrong and consistently on the wrong side of history."
Andy Clark: That is an accusation that's levelled against you that you are unpatriotic and that you have a hatred of the US What do you say to that?
Noam Chomsky: Well, since it's just a tantrum, there's nothing that you can say. If people want to have tantrums, that's fine. There is a history of that; the writer should at least know what company he's keeping. He's keeping the company of Stalinist commissars, that's exactly what they said about every dissident. So, Sakharov and the rest had a pathological hatred of Russia, they were on the wrong side of history and so on. That's the stand of the commissars. In fact, it's the stand of their counterparts in every country. It has a long history. I don't know if the writer has religious education, but maybe he's heard of something called the Bible, which is the source of this. The Bible is the source of the concept of hating your country. At that point, it meant hating Israel. King Ahab, who was the epitome of evil in the Bible, condemned the prophet Elijah as a hater of Israel. What did he mean by that? What did he mean by saying Elijah had a pathological hatred of Israel? What he meant is Elijah was condemning the acts of the evil king, not of the people of Israel, but of the evil king. And the king, like every totalitarian, identified himself with the people, the society, the country and so on. So you can love your country more than anyone else, but you have a pathological hatred of it if you criticize the acts of leadership. That's the attitude of those who totally subordinate themselves to power, like Soviet commissars and others. So yes, it's a familiar complaint, it goes through history, as in this case, it's not presented with any argument or evidence, because there isn't any, it's presented as a tantrum, like King Ahab.
Andy Clark: This is from Jude Kirkham from Vancouver in Canada:
Jude's email: "My problem with Mr Chomsky and the left in general regarding Iraq is that they oversimplify and fail to put forth realistic solutions. When I see a crowd of hippies parading around with giant paper-mace puppets of George Bush and Tony Blair, how on earth am I supposed to take them seriously? The invasion went well, insofar as it overthrew Saddam Hussein. The occupation was and is a disaster. Simply withdrawing is not going to happen because it would be political suicide. The answer is to reform the occupation, taking more a Colin Powell approach rather than Rumsfield one."
Andy Clark: What's your reaction to that?
Noam Chomsky: Well, forget about the hippies and so on and so forth. The person who proposed it has an idea, it's the very same idea that was proposed by moderate communists in Russia during the Afghanistan years. They said Russia was originally successful, the invasion, took it over, it turned into a disaster. We obviously can't leave; it would be politically impossible for the Kremlin. So there we have to reform it, it doesn't matter what the Afghans want. That's a point of view, to say, what he calls, the left doesn't have a point of view is completely wrong, they have a clear point of view, he just doesn't like it. The clear point of view is what I said before: let the people of Iraq decide. An invasion is a crime, in fact it's the supreme crime, which includes, with it supreme international crime, which contains within it, all the evil that follows, I'm quoting from the Nuremberg judgements. Yes, it's a supreme crime. I'm not saying we should hang the criminals who carried out the crimes, as it was done at Nuremberg, rather we should get rid of them. But once the crime has been committed, a very clear policy, whether the writer likes it or not, is to recognise that the invaders have no rights. They have responsibilities. There is the prime responsibility, one responsibility is to pay huge reparations to the people invaded for all the destruction they caused and that would include the sanctions, which were monstrous. The second one, as much as you can, is to keep to their will. If the large majority of the population, let's say the British Defence Ministry poll is more or less accurate, if 80 percent of the population wants the invaders to leave, good, they should be preparing to leave. That's a plan. When the writer said it's politically impossible, meaning in Washington and in London, well if so, that's a problem in Washington and London. That's a problem in the US and Canada and England, we should deal with that problem because it's our problem. Our problem is we can't control our leaders. Iraqis don't have to suffer for that. But the solution, the proposals that are coming from what he calls the left, are very clear, precise, belief in democracy, belief in freedom. He just doesn't happen to like them. That doesn't mean the proposals aren't there.
Andy Clark: Another criticism that is sometimes levelled against you goes back to Cambodia and some of your writings there. This is from Noah Cooperman from Florida in the US
Noah's email: "Does the Professor harbour any feelings of guilt for acting as an apologist for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge during the period of the genocide in Cambodia. Or is mass murder by leftwing extremists still acceptable?"
Noam Chomsky: I would ask the listener whether he harbours any guilt for having supported Hitler and the Holocaust and insisting the Jews be sent to extermination camps. It has the same answer. Since it never happened, I obviously can't have any guilt for it. He's just repeating propaganda he heard. If you ask him, you'll discover that he never read one word I wrote. Try it. What I wrote was, and I don't have any apologies for it because it was accurate, I took the position that Pol Pot was a brutal monster, from the beginning was carrying out hideous atrocities, but the West, for propaganda purposes, was creating and inventing immense fabrications for its own political goals and not out of interest for the people of Cambodia. And my colleague and I with whom I wrote all this stuff simply ran through the list of fanatic lies that were being told and we took the most credible sources, which happened to be US intelligence, who knew more than anyone else. And we said US intelligence is probably accurate. In retrospect, that turns out to be correct, US intelligence was probably accurate. I think we were the only ones who quoted it. The fabrications were fabrications and should be eliminated. In fact, we also discussed, and I noticed nobody ever talks about this, we discussed fabrications against the US. For example a standard claim in the major works was that the US bombings had killed 600,000 people in 1973. We looked at the data and decided it was probably 200,000. So we said let's tell the truth about it. It's a crime, but it's not like anything you said. It's interesting that nobody ever objects to that. When we criticize fabrications about US crimes, that's fine, when we criticize and in fact expose much worse fabrications about some official enemy, that's horrible, it becomes apologetics. We should learn something about ourselves. If you're interested in the truth, which you ought to be, tell the truth about yourself and tell the truth about others. These fabrications had an obvious political purpose. Incidentally, we continually criticize the Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese invasion. After the Vietnamese invasion, which finally threw them out thankfully, the US and Britain immediately turned to support Pol Pot. Well, we criticized that, too, we said, no, you shouldn't be supporting this monster. So yes, our position was consistent throughout. There's been a huge literature trying to show that there was something wrong in what we said. To my knowledge, nobody's even found a comma that's misplaced. And therefore what you have is immense gossip. My guess is that the person who just wrote this in has never seen anything we wrote, but has heard a lot of gossip about it.
Andy Clark: This is from Jeremy Raskin in Los Angeles:
"What then do you make of the trend currently underway in the Middle East to move towards more democratic national institutions - for example, the growing strength of the anti-Syrian opposition in Lebanon and the recent elections in Egypt and Iraq? Can we succeed in remaking the states of the Middle East by encouraging this trend? Or does America give up 'spreading the gospel' of democratic institutions?"
Noam Chomsky: US policy in these countries has always been and remains to deter democracy. There are a lot of popular democratic forces, all over the Middle East, they've been there for a long time and they're not just starting now. We should stop preventing them. Take; say Egypt, the Kafiya movement is significant. The US is opposed to it. The Kafiya movement began with ... its immediate roots were outrage over the US backed Israeli atrocities in the West Bank in 2000, which were extreme. That's the origins of the Kafiya movement. Of course it has deeper origins and Egyptian democratic tendencies, which go far back. That was the origins of Kafiya and then it gained even more strength from the enormous opposition to the US invasion of Iraq. Now, it's trying to break through to give some opening to the US backed Mubarak dictatorship. And yes, I think that instead of opposing Democracy in Egypt, as we've always been doing and still are, we should be supporting it. In Lebanon, there's a long history. The issue right now is the Syrian involvement in Lebanon. Syria entered Lebanon in 1976 with the approval of the US and Israel, open approval because their task at the time was to murder Palestinians. They stayed there. In 1990, George Bush no 1, gave them further authorisation to stay in Lebanon because he wanted them as allies in the war against Iraq. By the early part of this millennium, they were becoming the one state in the region, which was not obeying US orders, so the US turned against them and wanted them out. Well how did they get out? I think they should've been out all along. Congress passed legislation to condemn Syria and impose sanctions and so on and in that resolution, if you look at it, here you see the ultimate cynicism. They appeal to a UN resolution, correctly, which said every country should allow Lebanon to run its own affairs and that all foreign forces should get out. That was the resolution they appealed to. Take a look at that resolution, it was directed against Israel in 1980. It said Israel should get out of Lebanon. Instead, Israel invaded Lebanon again and extended its role in Lebanon and stayed there until the year 2000. So here we use a resolution that was directed against Israel for its occupation of Lebanon for 22 years, parts of Lebanon. And we say that resolution says Syria should get out. Not a word in the Congressional discussion, not a word in the debate. I mean the cynicism is just mind-boggling. Yes, Syria should get out; of course, they should have been out in 1976, when we helped bring them in. The immediate impetus for getting Syria out was a car bombing of Rafik Hariri. Unless the CIA was involved in that bombing, the US has nothing to do with getting Syria out of Lebanon. There was a very important development in Lebanon of democratic forces, complex. One of the strongest forces in Lebanon is Hezbollah, which has a strong Shi'ite support. The US, of course, is opposed to it. But yes, we should permit for the first time, we should permit democracy to function in Lebanon, meaning getting our dirty hands out of their affairs. You could say the same about Iraq. Iraq has a long democratic tradition, goes back a century. It was crushed by the British invasion, but it continued to function in many different ways. There was some hope for it with the 1958 revolution, which was a kind of populist revolution which threw out the British and began to introduce social measures and so on and so forth. It introduced the constitution, which is far more liberal than the current one. Well the US and Britain couldn't stand that, so they backed and maybe initiated a coup, a military coup to put the Baath party in. That crushed Iraqi democracy for years. We should let Iraqi democratic forces, which go way back, to flourish and develop internally. We can say the same thing right throughout the region.
Andy Clark: One final email, we're almost out of time, this is from Jasmin:
"Politicians are rarely great minds or intellectuals, they are 'scoundrels' as Samuel Johnson said. So my question to Mr Chomsky is, what effect do intellectuals or great minds have in the politics of today, and has he ever been able to influence any major decision of the political leaders in the past few decades?
Noam Chomsky: First of all, we should have no illusions. History is written by intellectuals, almost by definition. So if you look at history intellectuals look pretty good. On the other hand, if you look at the actual history, the role of intellectuals has typically been awful. I mention the Bible as an example, but it's a good example that pattern replicates. There were people in the biblical period who we would call dissident intellectuals, they're called Prophets. It's a bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word. But if you look at what the Prophets were saying, it's what we would call dissident intellectuals. Geopolitical critique, a call for justice and freedom and so on. Yes, that's dissident intellectuals. How were they treated? Well? No, they were denounced as haters of Israel. They were driven into the desert, they were imprisoned, reviled. Now, there were intellectuals at that time who were very highly respected, namely the flatterers at the court. Hundreds of years later they were called false prophets. That's the way it works. It's the flatterers at the court who are typically the mainstream of the intellectuals. It runs all the way through history, very few exceptions. So, you don't look to intellectuals to influence policy. Dissident intellectuals often have many things to say, but they're usually pretty badly treated, varying in different societies. What makes things better is popular movements. That is what effects policy, that's how we've gained the freedoms that we have and we have a lot of freedom, but it didn't come from above and it didn't come from intellectuals. It came from organised popular movements, which demanded more freedom, like the non-violent resistance in Iraq, which forced the US and Britain to permit elections. That's how we got the right to vote here. That's how we got women's rights, that's how we got freedom of speech and so on. Constant struggle, that's why there are such efforts to break up popular movements and to atomise people and separate them from one another and to create enormous gulfs between public opinion and public policy. It's a constant battle and, yes, that's the way to make things better as in the past, plenty of concrete ways to do it. We're much more able to than in the past because of the freedoms that have been won. We have a legacy of freedom, which has been won. We can use it, improve it, carry it forward or we can abandon it. But you're not going to look to intellectuals to save you.
Andy Clark: Professor Chomsky, as ever, a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much for joining us.
Noam Chomsky: Good to be with you.
President Bush: "By helping Iraqis build a strong democracy, we're adding to our own security and, like a generation before us, we are laying the foundation of peace for generations to come. Not far from here, where we gather today is a symbol of freedom familiar to all Americans - the Liberty Bell. When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public, the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration and a witness said: 'It rang as if it meant something.' Today the call of liberty is being heard in Baghdad and Basra, and other Iraqi cities, and its sound is echoing across the broader Middle East, from Damascus to Tehran, people hear it and they know it means something. It means that days of tyranny and terror are ending and a new day of hope and freedom is dawning."
Andy Clark: President Bush there, speaking at the Philadelphia World Affairs Council, just a few days ago. I mean the sentiment is very clear there from the President, that the US is bringing hope and democracy to Iraq and that the elections are crucial in this. After the vote, the President has called the elections an important milestone. Professor Chomsky, how do you see the elections? Do you see them as an important milestone for Iraq?
Noam Chomsky: Actually I do, but before talking about that, I should just bring up a kind of a truism. No rational person pays the slightest attention to declarations of benign intent on the part of leaders, no matter who they are. And the reason is they're completely predictable, including the worst monsters, Stalin, Hitler the rest. Always full of benign intent. Yes that's their task. Therefore, since they're predictable, we disregard them, they carry no information. What we do is, look at the facts. That's true if they're Bush or Blair or Stalin or anyone else. That's the beginning of rationality. All right, the basic facts we know: when Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, the reason was what they insistently called a 'single question.' That was repeated by Jack Straw, by Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, everyone. 'Will Iraq eliminate its weapons of mass destruction?' That was the single question, that was the basis on which both Bush and Blair got authorization to use force. Within a few months this single question was answered and the answer came out the wrong way and then all of sudden...
Andy Clark: This was weapons of mass destruction you're talking about?
Noam Chomsky: Yes. Then very quickly it turned out that that wasn't the reason of the invasion. The reason was what the President's liberal press calls his 'Messianic Mission' to bring democracy to Iraq and immediately everyone had to leap on the democratisation bandwagon and it began to be described as the most noble war in history and so on and so forth. Well, anyone with a particle of sense would know that you can't take that seriously and, in fact, if you look at the events that followed, it just demonstrated that. The US tried, in every possible way, to prevent elections in Iraq. They offered effort after effort to evade the danger of elections. Finally, they were compelled to accept elections by mass non-violent resistance, for which the Ayatollah Sistani [moderate Shi'ite leader] was a kind of a symbol. Mass outpourings of people demanding elections. Finally, Bush and Blair had to agree to elections. The next step is to subvert them and they started immediately. They're doing it right now. Elections mean you pay some - in a democracy at least - you pay some attention to the will of the population. Well, the crucial question for an invading army is: 'do they want us to be here?' Well, we know the answer to that. The British Ministry of Defence carried out a poll a couple of months ago, it was secret, but it leaked to the British Press - I don't think it's been reported in the US. They found that 82 percent of the population wanted the coalition forces, British and US forces to leave. One percent of the population said that they were increasing security.
Andy Clark: But isn't this the start of a process that could see the occupying troops from America and Britain leaving? We've seen an awful lot of Iraqis taking part in the elections, two thirds, we're told. The turnout was quite high…
Noam Chomsky: But hold on a second, the US and Britain announced at once, at once, we will not have a timetable to withdraw. So yes, you can all want us to leave, but we won't have a timetable for withdrawal. Now of course, there's a conflict, the Iraqis have forced the occupying powers to allow some kind of electoral process. What the occupying powers are doing now is perfectly clear and very familiar, very familiar. We've had a long history of this in Central America, the British ran an empire, the Japanese ran an empire, and the Russians ran an empire in Eastern Europe. The way they want it to work - standard procedure - you want the local forces to run their own countries, so Poland under the Russians, the Polish army runs it, the Polish civilians are the bureaucrats, Russians are in the background. The same in say, El Salvador, the US-run state terrorist forces are the military, the civilians are local, and the US is in the background. If anything goes wrong, they move in, the same with the British in India, the same with the Japanese in South Korea.
Andy Clark: So you see this is a step to set up a sort of puppet government and not something that's really representative of ordinary Iraqis?
Noam Chomsky: That's what they are trying to do, but there's always a conflict about that. Many of the Western backed or Russian or Eastern or other backed tyrants rose up. However, it is as clear as a bell that the US, and Britain behind it, are doing everything they can to prevent a sovereign, more or less democratic Iraq. And they are being dragged into it step by step. Now there's a good reason why the US cannot tolerate a sovereign, more or less democratic Iraq. We're not allowed to talk about it because there's a party line. The party line we have to rigidly adhere to says you're not allowed to talk about the reasons for invading Iraq. We're supposed to believe that the US would've invaded Iraq if it was an island in the Indian Ocean and its main exports were pickles and lettuce. This is what we're supposed to believe. Now the truth of the matter, obvious to anyone not committed to the party line, is that Iraq has huge oil resources, maybe the second in the world, mostly untapped, that it's right in the middle of the main energy-producing region of the world and that taking control of Iraq will strengthen enormously the US's control over the major energy resources of the world. It will, in fact, give the US critical leverage over its competitors, Europe and Asia, that's Zbigniew Brzezsinski's [President Carter's national Security Adviser] accurate observation. That's the reason. Now suppose that Iraq were to become sovereign and democratic, what would happen? Just think of the policies they would undertake. I mean, we can run through them, it would be a nightmare for the US.
Andy Clark: You maintain that they would want to maintain control. This is an email from a listener, sent to us on the eve of the elections from Iraq, who just simply calls himself Mohammed:
Mohammed's email: "Tomorrow it's going to be us who decide and I can feel the greatness of the responsibility because the result will draw the shape of our future and will determine how long it will take till we can announce victory in this war; our war against the past, against the past's illusions and the past's mistakes."
Andy Clark: What would you say to a comment like that? We hear that a lot from Iraqis. I spoke to some people from the Iraqi community here in the Netherlands just a few weeks ago and they were expressing very similar sentiments that they felt they were in some way having their destiny in their own hands for the first time.
Noam Chomsky: That's exactly what I've been saying for the last three years and I just said it again here. The victory of the non-violent resistance in Iraq, which compelled the occupying forces to allow elections, that's a major victory. That's one of the major triumphs of non-violent resistance that I know of. It wasn't the insurgents that did it - the US doesn't care about violence, they have more violence. What it can't control is non-violence and the non-violent movements in Iraq, partially with Sistani as a kind of figurehead, but it's much broader than that, it compelled the occupying forces to allow elections and some limited, very limited degree of sovereignty. And yet we should be trying to help them in these endeavours.
Andy Clark: In that sense you see that there's a positive influence from these elections and you see that those forces can grow out of these elections and take more control in Iraq?
Noam Chomsky: I certainly hope so, but they're going to have to be fighting Britain and the US tooth and nail all the way. The question is what Westerners will do about it. Will we be on the side of the occupying forces, which are trying to prevent democracy and sovereignty? Or will we be on the side of the Iraqi people, who want democracy and sovereignty? But in order to ask that question we first have to free ourselves of the doctrinal blinders, which prevent us from understanding what is actually happening.
Andy Clark: OK, let's hear some more messages from listeners. This is an argument we hear an awful lot.
Listener in Canada Reg Pollock's email: "I don't think the Americans had any right to go into Iraq, but now there are there and removed the government they are stuck until there is a body which can maintain the country. As bad a Saddam was he did control three peoples. It's not the same as Vietnam. They (the US) have a tiger by the tail."
Listener Mark Humphreys from Ireland: "The 'anti-war' movement destroyed Vietnam, and far from being ashamed of it, they are proud of it, and they want to do the same thing to Iraq. They want to abandon Iraq to the Jihadis and the Baathists and civil war. All they care about is that no white people are involved."
Andy Clark: That's an argument we hear an awful lot of. You know, the Americans have to now see the job out as it were. What's your reaction to that?
Noam Chomsky: That's like saying the Russians invaded Afghanistan and they can't just leave it to the Jihadis so therefore they have to stay there. I mean I was strongly opposed to that, I assume every listener was, and that we should be. An invading army has no right whatsoever, none. It has responsibilities. Its primary responsibility is to act in a way that the population of the country demands. They are to keep to the will of the population. They don't have any right to stay there because they want to. Well as far as we know, and there's fair amount of information. The Iraqi population wants the occupying forces to leave. As I mentioned, as shown by the last British Ministry of Defence poll, one percent think the occupying forces are contributing to security; most of them think they're increasing insecurity. So yes, they should be withdrawing, as the population wants them to, instead of trying desperately to set up a client regime with military forces that they can control. That's what's happening. As for the comment on Vietnam, yes that's probably...probably you would've heard that from some super Stalinist in Moscow in the case of Afghanistan. The fact of the matter is the US invaded South Vietnam in 1962, practically destroyed it, then expanded the war to the rest of Indochina. It ended up killing maybe three or four million people in Indochina, destroying the country. The anti-war movement succeeded in building up enough opposition so that the country at least survived, barely, although the US won a tremendous victory by destroying the country. Yes, you will find the equivalent of Stalinists in the US who will give that party line, but simply just take a look at the facts; they're well known and well understood.
Andy Clark: But what do you think would happen if the process now goes forward and the Iraqi government is formed and the new parliament turns around and passes a majority motion for the coalition-led troops to withdraw within six months? What do you think would happen?
Noam Chomsky: In other words, suppose that the parliament, instead of being an elite force, dominating the population, suppose the parliament represents popular will, say the popular will of 80 percent of Iraqis who want the occupying forces to withdraw, according to the British Ministry of Defence. Suppose that happens? Well then the occupying forces should immediately initiate withdrawal and leave it to the Iraqis. Now there's a good reason why Washington and London are not contemplating that. It has nothing to do with the fate of the Iraqis, quite the contrary. Just think for a minute. What would an independent Iraq be likely to do, an independent, more or less democratic Iraq? Think. I mean if you're going to have a Shi'ite majority. Therefore the Shi'ites will have a lot of influence in policy, probably a dominant influence. The Shi'ite population in the south, which is where most of the oil is, would much prefer warm relations to Iran over hostile relations to Iran. Furthermore they are very close relations already, the Badr brigade, which is the militia that mostly controls the south, was trained in Iran. The clerics have long-standing relations with Iran; the Ayatollah Sistani actually grew up there. Chances are pretty strong, they'll move towards a some sort of a loose Shi'ite alliance, with Iraq and Iran. Furthermore right across the border in Saudi Arabia, there's a substantial Shi'ite population, which has been bitterly oppressed by the US-backed tyranny in Saudi Arabia, the fundamentalist tyranny. Any move towards independence in Iraq is likely to increase the efforts to gain a degree of autonomy and justice. That happens to be where most of Saudi Arabia's oil is. So you can see not far in the future a loose Shi'ite alliance controlling most of the world's oil, independent of the US. Furthermore, it is beginning to turn toward the East. Iran has pretty much given up on Western Europe, it assumes that Western Europe is too cowardly to act independently of the US, well it has options. It can turn to the East. China can't be intimidated. That's why the US is so frightened of China. It cannot be intimidated. In fact, they're already establishing relations with Iran and in fact even with Saudi Arabia, both military and economic. There is an Asian energy security grid based on Asia and Russia but bringing in India, Korea and others. If Iran moves in that direction, having abandoned any hope in Europe, it can become the lynchpin of the Asian energy security grid.
Andy Clark: And you say that this may be part of an attraction for the Shi'ite groups in Iraq as well to sort of join this movement away from the Western world influence as it were?
Noam Chomsky: Yes, they have every reason to. In fact it might even happen in Saudi Arabia. From the point of view of Washington planners, that is the ultimate nightmare.
Andy Clark: And that's why you say they won't be prepared to leave...
Noam Chomsky: That is why they're fighting tooth and nail to prevent democracy and sovereignty in Iraq. The Iraqi people have resisted and it's a very impressive resistance. I'm not talking about insurgency. I'm talking about popular, non-violent resistance under bitter conditions. There's a labour movement forming, which is a very important one. The US insists on keeping Saddam's bitter anti-labour laws, but the labour movement doesn't like it. Their activists are being killed. Nobody knows by whom, maybe by insurgents, maybe by former Baathists, maybe by somebody else. But they're working. There's the basis of a popular democracy being developed there, much to the horror of the occupying forces, but it's going on and it could have very long term consequences in their national affairs, which is why Bush and Blair have so desperately been trying to prevent democracy and any form of sovereignty and have been forced to back off step by step. This is also going on with the economic arrangements. The US moved in and immediately tried to open up the economy to foreign take-over by imposing outrageous and in fact illegal laws for privatisation. You know, Iraqis don't want that, they want to take control of their own economy and resources. There's a battle going on about that.
Andy Clark: Let's hear another message from a listener. This is from Miguel C. Alvarez, who is a Spanish ex-patriot living in the UK:
Miguel's email: "Forget about the US and EU governments: they're hopeless. Where to for 'the people?' How can the insanity be stopped? Or will it have to run its course and get much worse before it can get better?"
Andy Clark: What's your take on that?
Noam Chomsky: The violence in Iraq is a serious problem for the Iraqis and I tend to agree with, apparently the majority of Iraqis, that it's the occupation forces that are stimulating the violence. The fact that an insurgency even developed in Iraq is astonishing. I mean it's an amazing fact that the US has had more trouble controlling Iraq than the Germans had in controlling occupied Europe or the Russians in controlling Eastern Europe. After all, the countries under Nazi or Russian occupation were run by domestic forces, domestic police, domestic armies, and domestic civilian forces. The Nazis and the Kremlin were in the background and if needed, they came in, but mostly it was domestically run. There were partisans in Western Europe and they were very courageous, but they would've been wiped out very quickly if it hadn't been for enormous foreign support and, of course, Germany was at war.
Well, in Iraq none of these circumstances prevailed, there was no outside support for the resistance. The little support that has arisen, and it is very slight, is mostly engendered by the invasion. But there's no outside support. The country had been devastated by sanctions. The US was coming in with enormous resources to rebuild it and they have turned it into a total catastrophe. It's one of the worst military catastrophes in history. You look at figures for something like, say malnutrition; malnutrition is way up since the US took over, that's unbelievable. It's one of the few wars that can't be reported, not because reporters are cowards, but because it's too dangerous. Reporters are mostly in the Green Zone or else they go out with a platoon of marines. There are some, like Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and a couple of others who are independent and brave it, but not many. This is an incredible catastrophe. But it's very likely, and I tend to agree with apparent opinion of most Iraqis on this, that it's the invading armies themselves that are engendering the violence. Well, they're carrying out plenty of it, but the violence of the insurgents would probably recline if they left and allowed Iraqis to be on their own.
Andy Clark: Another message, this is from Charles Harlich, from New Jersey in the US:
Charles' email: "I have a relative who is now serving as a soldier in Iraq. What advice would you give to him?"
Noam Chomsky: Look, I have plenty of correspondence with soldiers in Iraq and all you can do is offer them your sympathy. You hope that they make it safely and that their leaders will get them out of there. The same kind of advice you would've given to Russian soldiers in Afghanistan. You have to sympathize with them; it's not their fault. It's the fault of their commanders. I don't mean their military commanders, I mean the civilians in the Pentagon, in the White House and their counterparts in England.
Andy Clark: This is from Steve Brown in Mexico:
Steve's email:" No one is talking anymore about oil. Isn't that still the main reason the US invaded Iraq and are Iraq's large reserves now under control of US corporations?"
Noam Chomsky: Nobody was talking about oil all along if you look. It was considered outrageous to talk about oil. If anyone talked about oil, Tony Blair would have a tantrum about conspiracy theories.
Andy Clark: Plenty of the protestors said it was a war for oil all along...
Noam Chomsky: Protesters did, but take a look at the mainstream. It was considered a conspiracy theory, Marxist, delusional and so on to talk about oil. Although every sane person knows that that was the reason, if Iraq had been producing pickles and lettuce, would they have been invaded? I mean, let's be serious. Of course it's oil. Furthermore the Iraqis know that. Right after the president gave his dramatic speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, announcing his 'Messianic Mission' to bring democracy to Iraq, after the collapse of the 'single question,' right after that a poll was reported. Gallup, the main polling organisation in the US, took a poll in Baghdad and asked people in Baghdad why they think the US invaded, about one percent agreed, with 100 percent of educated Western opinion, to bring democracy, one percent agreed to bring democracy, five percent said to help Iraqis. Most of the rest said the obvious: to take control of Iraq's resources and to strengthen the US strategic position in the region. And incidentally, going back to the writer, it's not so much a matter of gaining access to Iraq's resources, you can get access even if you don't control a country. I mean the oil market is something of a market. What matters is control, not access. It's a very big difference. The main theme of US policy since the Second World War has been to control the resources of the Middle East, the energy resources. That would give what George Cannon, one of the early planners, called 'veto power' over their allies, they wouldn't get out of line because we'd have our hand on the spicket. Now at that time, for about 30 years, North America was the major oil exporter. The US wasn't using any Middle East oil, but it nevertheless was dedicated and it was the main theme of US policy to maintain control over it. If you look at US intelligence projections for the future, they project that the US must control Middle East oil, but that it itself will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources, Western Africa, Western Hemisphere resources. Europe and Japan will rely on the less stable Middle East resources, but the US will control them. That's the way you prevent independence from developing. That's why the Asian Energy Security Grid and the Shanghai Cooperation Council are regarded as such a threat by the US. The meetings right now, the Malaysian meetings, East Asian meetings, that's a threat, it's a coalescence of power moving independently of the US. You look back through the history of the Cold War, and it was the same with regard to Europe, a major concern throughout the Cold War was what was called European Third Force, which might find a way independent of the US in Europe, and there was every effort made to prevent that. A long story, and that makes sense if you want to run the world, you want to make sure there are not independent forces out of your control.
Andy Clark: This is a message from L. Douglas Raymond in the US:
"With the war in Iraq, it seems we are viewing the US's engagement in some bold, in your face, strategic geopolitical chess. In your opinion, what is the US's next likely international move?"
Noam Chomsky: My own guess frankly, was that the invasion of Iraq would be over in about three days and that the US would install a stable client regime. It should have been one of the easiest military victories in history. But they did turn it into a catastrophe. My guess back at that time was that the next place the US would move would be the Andes in the Western Hemisphere. This is a traditional region of US domination, but from Venezuela down to Argentina, the region is pretty much out of control and that's a very serious worry for US planners. They expect the Western Hemisphere to be obedient and placid. And if you look at modern history the US has intervened violently and brutally throughout the Western Hemisphere for a long time to ensure obedience, overthrowing democratic governments, installing murderous military dictatorships, carrying out large-scale terror and it goes on pretty much to the present. It is somewhat out of control. Venezuela is increasingly going on an independent path and Venezuela is very important, the US took it from the British in 1921, kicked the British out at the time of the beginning of the oil-based economy because it was recognized that Venezuela had enormous oil resources, also others. And it has been one of the main oil suppliers under US control ever since, but it's moving towards independence. Chavez is enormously popular in Venezuela; in fact, support for the elected government is higher in Venezuela than in any other Latin American country. Venezuela is beginning to diversify its international relations; it's starting to export oil to China and may do so even more soon. The same is true of the other raw materials exporters, Brazil and Chile, not to the extent of Venezuela, but increasing. Furthermore, the region has left of centre governments. All through the regions, a few exceptions but almost all of them, and some of them are defying the IMF. Argentina simply defied IMF orders, told them to get lost, and did very well as a result. Furthermore, there's a large Indian population in Latin America from Bolivia up to Ecuador, very large, and they're beginning to organise and become independent. They may actually win an election in Bolivia [left wing leader Evo Morales has now won that election]. They've overthrown a couple of governments in Ecuador. They're also calling for an Indian nation throughout this region. Now, they do not want their resources taken from them, they have plenty of resources, a lot of oil. They want either to control their own resources, rather than having it taken over by foreigners, or - many of them - don't even want resources to be developed, so there are plenty of indigenous people in Ecuador who don't particularly want their lifestyle disrupted so that people drive SUVs in New York City.
Andy Clark: This is an area, you think, that will be an area of concern for the US?
Noam Chomsky: It's of deep concern. There are more US military in Latin America today than at the height of the Cold War. For the first time the number of US military in Latin America exceeds the combined number of civilians in key federal agencies, aid, state departments and others. Furthermore, the training of the Latin American military, which has always been under US control, has recently shifted; the Congress shifted it from the State Department to the Pentagon. Now that's quite important. The State Department has a terrible record of atrocities and torture and crime - everyone should know about that - but under the State Department, military training was under some Congressional supervision, had some human rights conditions, some democracy conditions. Under the Pentagon, it has no conditions. Furthermore, the military is now being trained to deal with, what are called social problems, social unrest.
Andy Clark: It plays into an e-mail we received from somebody in Peru.
Gonzalo Alvarado, Peru: "Do you see any serious alternative to the Bush administration for next elections, in order to change the US foreign policy? How do you think the US will deal with the regimes in Venezuela and Bolivia? In Peru, we have a presidential candidate with the same profile, Humala. He is growing in the polls for next presidential elections. His tactic? Blaming imperialism and the free market for making us poorer."
Noam Chomsky: It certainly doesn't like them [the regimes in Bolivia and Venezuela]. Incidentally, we should stop talking about the free market, that's another ideological trick. The US does not believe in a free market. The US itself is a largely state-based economy. You use computers and the Internet and telecommunications and lasers and aeroplanes and so on, most of it comes out of the dynamic state sector. The economy is handed over to private businesses if they make some profit out of it, but mostly state-based and same is true of pharmaceuticals and biology-based industries and so on. So, we should have no illusions about this. Even the free trade agreements, so-called, are highly protectionists, the extra-ordinary intellectual property rights go way beyond anything existed in the past those are purely protectionist. They are designed to maintain monopoly rights for major corporations. If the currently rich countries had ever been faced with such rules, the US would now be exporting fish and fur. So there's no free market. But how the US is planning to deal with it, well we know. Let's take Venezuela; there was a military coup in Venezuela in 2002. The US supported the military coup, the US had to back down very quickly because there was an overwhelming uproar in Latin America, where democracy is taken much more seriously than it is in Washington and there was great protest about US support for a military coup overthrowing a democratic government, so Washington had to back down and the military coup was quickly reversed. The US then moved into the next step, which is subversion; if you can't carry out a military coup, try to subvert the government. So the US had been pouring in aid into what are called officially 'anti-Chavez, pro-democracy elements.' That's where the money is going. The implication is: you can't be a pro-Chavez, pro-democracy element; you can't because the US says so. The fact that Venezuela leads Latin America in support for democracy and support for the elected government, going up very sharply since Chavez took over in 1998, that's just irrelevant, we decide what's democracy, not the people - that's just subversion. We saw it in the last election just a couple of days ago. It was clear the US candidate was going to do very badly, so the opposition, almost surely with US initiative or support, pulled out of the election to try to de-legitimate the election, well, that's a very standard tactic, the US used the same tactic in Haiti a couple of years ago. It was clear that Aristide, who they didn't like, was going to easily win the election, so they got together with the opposition and got the opposition, which was quite small, to pull out and then they could say, well look it's not legitimate, he's a tyrant. The most striking example of this was 1984 in Nicaragua. There was an election in Nicaragua in 1984, we're not allowed to admit that, but there was one. It was very heavily observed including a Dutch government team, very hostile, rightwing Dutch government observation team. There was a big delegation of Latin American scholars and US and British parliamentary human rights group and others. Probably the most heavily monitored elections in history and they regarded it as a pretty fair election, not magnificent, but fair by Latin American standards. Well Washington didn't want that election, so it got its own candidate to pull out. He happened to be on the CIA pay roll, it turned out, to de-legitimate the election and claim that the election didn't take place. You take a look at American press and journals and the same in Western Europe, they say there was never any election, the first election was in 1990. That's the way you de-legitimate elections when you know you're going to lose them.
And that's what just happened in Venezuela. My guess was if Iraq had been successful, the US would simply have invaded. But by now they have lost the capacity to carry out military action.
Andy Clark: There's been a lot of talk recently about how far the US should go in questioning suspected terrorists. If we can talk a little bit about the War on Terror. You know persistent allegations have been made of torture, and allegations were also made that there were secret CIA prisoners in Eastern Europe. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was keen to dispel the torture allegations during her recent trip to Europe.
We've also seen the Bush Administration accepting the bill put forward by Senator John McCain within the past few days, which will ban US interrogators from using, and I quote: 'cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of detainees in the war on terror.' Earlier, Vice-President Dick Cheney had lobbied to try and have an exception for the CIA from this, but the government has now backed away from that. Professor Chomsky, what do you make of the McCain bill being accepted?
Noam Chomsky: To the extent the McCain bill is accepted, which hasn't happened, that is saying that what Condoleezza Rice just said is a lie, she claimed it wasn't happening. The discussion of the McCain bill is saying, yes it did happen, but we won't do it any more. OK, that allows us to dismiss Condoleezza Rice's statement.
Andy Clark: Are they saying that really, or are they saying "we want a safeguard against it happening in the future?"
Noam Chomsky: Yes that meant it happened in the past, they're conceding it. Of course they don't have to concede it, there's overwhelming evidence for it. Just read American legal journals, full of discussion on it. Take a look at Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, extensive evidence. Of course they've been torturing. Condoleezza Rice was very careful to say we don't send people to countries where we believe they're going to be tortured, so we send them to Egypt and Syria, but we don't believe they're going to be tortured there. How can you listen to that without laughing? What are they sending them there for? Why aren't they sending them to Holland? But why aren't they leaving them in the US? Do we have to even know what's going on in Guantanamo? I mean Guantanamo is a horror chamber - there's plenty of evidence, but did we need that evidence? Why are they even in Guantanamo? Why aren't they in a prison in New York? There's no security reason for that. The reason they're sent to Guantanamo is elementary, any child can understand it, Guantanamo they can claim, is not under US judicial jurisdiction, so therefore they can do to people whatever they want, without habeas corpus, without judges and so on. If they weren't torturing them, they would put them in New York, where they'd be under the legal system and the rendition, which is a shocking crime, is obviously to send people to places where they can be tortured. What Condoleezza Rice actually said is: 'we take the word of the countries to which we're sending them that they're not going to torture them,' meaning we know they torture everybody, but we're going to take their word they're not going to torture these people. We're just sending them there for a vacation because we want them to have a good time, you know at a ritzy resort. How can we even listen to these words?
Andy Clark: Let's hear from two listeners on torture.
Noel Smyth, Dublin, Ireland: "Can the people of this country believe anything that the US says about torture not being committed on their behalf in EU countries?"
R. Kurt, Oak Ridge, Tennessee: "Why isn't Europe more critical of the Bush administration's policy on torture and human rights?"
Andy Clark: What about that second question and Europe not being more forthright in that listener's viewpoint?
Noam Chomsky: When you talk about a country you have to differentiate. Do you mean the elite sectors, the political class?
Andy Clark: I guess he does, he's talking about the European Union, I guess.
Noam Chomsky: Well, talking about the elite sectors, the reason they don't protest is they more or less agree. The general population doesn't agree. The question: can you believe what the US says? Of course not, you don't believe what any government say, you don't believe what corporate leaders say. The role of people in power is to deceive, it's not just the US, I mean, we all know that. When you look at an ad on television, do you believe it's telling the truth? I mean, after all, systems of power are dedicated to deceit and delusion, to maintain power and to pursue their interests. That's elementary; we should learn that in elementary school. So sure, you don't believe what, you know, the benign, grandiose statements that are made by leaders. As I said before, they're predictable, they carry no information, it doesn't matter whether it's the US or anyone else. You look at the practices, when you look at the practices, it stares you in the face, even without the volumes of evidence that we have. As for why Europe accepts it, I don't think that Europe does. If you mean by Europe, the people of Europe. In fact, the US doesn't accept it, if you mean the people of the US, they don't like these policies. In fact, there's an enormous gulf in the US between public attitudes and public policy, not just on this issue, but on a host of issues. Take another one, which is right on the front pages now, the Montreal Conference, the Kyoto protocols, you read everywhere that the US refused to accept Kyoto and broke up the Montreal meetings. Well, that's true if you understand the US to exclude its population. The population of the US is overwhelmingly in favour of those agreements. In fact, so strongly that a majority of Bush voters think that he's in favour of them because it's so obviously right to be in favour of them. But when you have an enormous gulf between public policy and public opinion, we can mislead ourselves by saying Europe doesn't want, the US doesn't want and so on. No, we mean sectors that happen to concentrate power and keep the population out of their hair. What that means there's a very serious democratic deficit in western countries, the US in particular. The population plays a very little role in policy and is often very strongly opposed to it.
Andy Clark: Professor Chomsky, your outspoken comments always provoke equally outspoken criticism. And when people have been e-mailing into our web page, there was, of course, criticism, too. So let me put some of these e-mails to you. I'm sure you've heard these arguments many a time before but it's always interesting to hear your answer to them as well.
Michael Molluck, who is in Philadelphia in the US: "Noam Chomsky has a pathological hatred for the United States. Like all haters, he is blinded to everything that does not support his bigotry. It must kill him and his followers to constantly be so smart, so wrong and consistently on the wrong side of history."
Andy Clark: That is an accusation that's levelled against you that you are unpatriotic and that you have a hatred of the US What do you say to that?
Noam Chomsky: Well, since it's just a tantrum, there's nothing that you can say. If people want to have tantrums, that's fine. There is a history of that; the writer should at least know what company he's keeping. He's keeping the company of Stalinist commissars, that's exactly what they said about every dissident. So, Sakharov and the rest had a pathological hatred of Russia, they were on the wrong side of history and so on. That's the stand of the commissars. In fact, it's the stand of their counterparts in every country. It has a long history. I don't know if the writer has religious education, but maybe he's heard of something called the Bible, which is the source of this. The Bible is the source of the concept of hating your country. At that point, it meant hating Israel. King Ahab, who was the epitome of evil in the Bible, condemned the prophet Elijah as a hater of Israel. What did he mean by that? What did he mean by saying Elijah had a pathological hatred of Israel? What he meant is Elijah was condemning the acts of the evil king, not of the people of Israel, but of the evil king. And the king, like every totalitarian, identified himself with the people, the society, the country and so on. So you can love your country more than anyone else, but you have a pathological hatred of it if you criticize the acts of leadership. That's the attitude of those who totally subordinate themselves to power, like Soviet commissars and others. So yes, it's a familiar complaint, it goes through history, as in this case, it's not presented with any argument or evidence, because there isn't any, it's presented as a tantrum, like King Ahab.
Andy Clark: This is from Jude Kirkham from Vancouver in Canada:
Jude's email: "My problem with Mr Chomsky and the left in general regarding Iraq is that they oversimplify and fail to put forth realistic solutions. When I see a crowd of hippies parading around with giant paper-mace puppets of George Bush and Tony Blair, how on earth am I supposed to take them seriously? The invasion went well, insofar as it overthrew Saddam Hussein. The occupation was and is a disaster. Simply withdrawing is not going to happen because it would be political suicide. The answer is to reform the occupation, taking more a Colin Powell approach rather than Rumsfield one."
Andy Clark: What's your reaction to that?
Noam Chomsky: Well, forget about the hippies and so on and so forth. The person who proposed it has an idea, it's the very same idea that was proposed by moderate communists in Russia during the Afghanistan years. They said Russia was originally successful, the invasion, took it over, it turned into a disaster. We obviously can't leave; it would be politically impossible for the Kremlin. So there we have to reform it, it doesn't matter what the Afghans want. That's a point of view, to say, what he calls, the left doesn't have a point of view is completely wrong, they have a clear point of view, he just doesn't like it. The clear point of view is what I said before: let the people of Iraq decide. An invasion is a crime, in fact it's the supreme crime, which includes, with it supreme international crime, which contains within it, all the evil that follows, I'm quoting from the Nuremberg judgements. Yes, it's a supreme crime. I'm not saying we should hang the criminals who carried out the crimes, as it was done at Nuremberg, rather we should get rid of them. But once the crime has been committed, a very clear policy, whether the writer likes it or not, is to recognise that the invaders have no rights. They have responsibilities. There is the prime responsibility, one responsibility is to pay huge reparations to the people invaded for all the destruction they caused and that would include the sanctions, which were monstrous. The second one, as much as you can, is to keep to their will. If the large majority of the population, let's say the British Defence Ministry poll is more or less accurate, if 80 percent of the population wants the invaders to leave, good, they should be preparing to leave. That's a plan. When the writer said it's politically impossible, meaning in Washington and in London, well if so, that's a problem in Washington and London. That's a problem in the US and Canada and England, we should deal with that problem because it's our problem. Our problem is we can't control our leaders. Iraqis don't have to suffer for that. But the solution, the proposals that are coming from what he calls the left, are very clear, precise, belief in democracy, belief in freedom. He just doesn't happen to like them. That doesn't mean the proposals aren't there.
Andy Clark: Another criticism that is sometimes levelled against you goes back to Cambodia and some of your writings there. This is from Noah Cooperman from Florida in the US
Noah's email: "Does the Professor harbour any feelings of guilt for acting as an apologist for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge during the period of the genocide in Cambodia. Or is mass murder by leftwing extremists still acceptable?"
Noam Chomsky: I would ask the listener whether he harbours any guilt for having supported Hitler and the Holocaust and insisting the Jews be sent to extermination camps. It has the same answer. Since it never happened, I obviously can't have any guilt for it. He's just repeating propaganda he heard. If you ask him, you'll discover that he never read one word I wrote. Try it. What I wrote was, and I don't have any apologies for it because it was accurate, I took the position that Pol Pot was a brutal monster, from the beginning was carrying out hideous atrocities, but the West, for propaganda purposes, was creating and inventing immense fabrications for its own political goals and not out of interest for the people of Cambodia. And my colleague and I with whom I wrote all this stuff simply ran through the list of fanatic lies that were being told and we took the most credible sources, which happened to be US intelligence, who knew more than anyone else. And we said US intelligence is probably accurate. In retrospect, that turns out to be correct, US intelligence was probably accurate. I think we were the only ones who quoted it. The fabrications were fabrications and should be eliminated. In fact, we also discussed, and I noticed nobody ever talks about this, we discussed fabrications against the US. For example a standard claim in the major works was that the US bombings had killed 600,000 people in 1973. We looked at the data and decided it was probably 200,000. So we said let's tell the truth about it. It's a crime, but it's not like anything you said. It's interesting that nobody ever objects to that. When we criticize fabrications about US crimes, that's fine, when we criticize and in fact expose much worse fabrications about some official enemy, that's horrible, it becomes apologetics. We should learn something about ourselves. If you're interested in the truth, which you ought to be, tell the truth about yourself and tell the truth about others. These fabrications had an obvious political purpose. Incidentally, we continually criticize the Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese invasion. After the Vietnamese invasion, which finally threw them out thankfully, the US and Britain immediately turned to support Pol Pot. Well, we criticized that, too, we said, no, you shouldn't be supporting this monster. So yes, our position was consistent throughout. There's been a huge literature trying to show that there was something wrong in what we said. To my knowledge, nobody's even found a comma that's misplaced. And therefore what you have is immense gossip. My guess is that the person who just wrote this in has never seen anything we wrote, but has heard a lot of gossip about it.
Andy Clark: This is from Jeremy Raskin in Los Angeles:
"What then do you make of the trend currently underway in the Middle East to move towards more democratic national institutions - for example, the growing strength of the anti-Syrian opposition in Lebanon and the recent elections in Egypt and Iraq? Can we succeed in remaking the states of the Middle East by encouraging this trend? Or does America give up 'spreading the gospel' of democratic institutions?"
Noam Chomsky: US policy in these countries has always been and remains to deter democracy. There are a lot of popular democratic forces, all over the Middle East, they've been there for a long time and they're not just starting now. We should stop preventing them. Take; say Egypt, the Kafiya movement is significant. The US is opposed to it. The Kafiya movement began with ... its immediate roots were outrage over the US backed Israeli atrocities in the West Bank in 2000, which were extreme. That's the origins of the Kafiya movement. Of course it has deeper origins and Egyptian democratic tendencies, which go far back. That was the origins of Kafiya and then it gained even more strength from the enormous opposition to the US invasion of Iraq. Now, it's trying to break through to give some opening to the US backed Mubarak dictatorship. And yes, I think that instead of opposing Democracy in Egypt, as we've always been doing and still are, we should be supporting it. In Lebanon, there's a long history. The issue right now is the Syrian involvement in Lebanon. Syria entered Lebanon in 1976 with the approval of the US and Israel, open approval because their task at the time was to murder Palestinians. They stayed there. In 1990, George Bush no 1, gave them further authorisation to stay in Lebanon because he wanted them as allies in the war against Iraq. By the early part of this millennium, they were becoming the one state in the region, which was not obeying US orders, so the US turned against them and wanted them out. Well how did they get out? I think they should've been out all along. Congress passed legislation to condemn Syria and impose sanctions and so on and in that resolution, if you look at it, here you see the ultimate cynicism. They appeal to a UN resolution, correctly, which said every country should allow Lebanon to run its own affairs and that all foreign forces should get out. That was the resolution they appealed to. Take a look at that resolution, it was directed against Israel in 1980. It said Israel should get out of Lebanon. Instead, Israel invaded Lebanon again and extended its role in Lebanon and stayed there until the year 2000. So here we use a resolution that was directed against Israel for its occupation of Lebanon for 22 years, parts of Lebanon. And we say that resolution says Syria should get out. Not a word in the Congressional discussion, not a word in the debate. I mean the cynicism is just mind-boggling. Yes, Syria should get out; of course, they should have been out in 1976, when we helped bring them in. The immediate impetus for getting Syria out was a car bombing of Rafik Hariri. Unless the CIA was involved in that bombing, the US has nothing to do with getting Syria out of Lebanon. There was a very important development in Lebanon of democratic forces, complex. One of the strongest forces in Lebanon is Hezbollah, which has a strong Shi'ite support. The US, of course, is opposed to it. But yes, we should permit for the first time, we should permit democracy to function in Lebanon, meaning getting our dirty hands out of their affairs. You could say the same about Iraq. Iraq has a long democratic tradition, goes back a century. It was crushed by the British invasion, but it continued to function in many different ways. There was some hope for it with the 1958 revolution, which was a kind of populist revolution which threw out the British and began to introduce social measures and so on and so forth. It introduced the constitution, which is far more liberal than the current one. Well the US and Britain couldn't stand that, so they backed and maybe initiated a coup, a military coup to put the Baath party in. That crushed Iraqi democracy for years. We should let Iraqi democratic forces, which go way back, to flourish and develop internally. We can say the same thing right throughout the region.
Andy Clark: One final email, we're almost out of time, this is from Jasmin:
"Politicians are rarely great minds or intellectuals, they are 'scoundrels' as Samuel Johnson said. So my question to Mr Chomsky is, what effect do intellectuals or great minds have in the politics of today, and has he ever been able to influence any major decision of the political leaders in the past few decades?
Noam Chomsky: First of all, we should have no illusions. History is written by intellectuals, almost by definition. So if you look at history intellectuals look pretty good. On the other hand, if you look at the actual history, the role of intellectuals has typically been awful. I mention the Bible as an example, but it's a good example that pattern replicates. There were people in the biblical period who we would call dissident intellectuals, they're called Prophets. It's a bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word. But if you look at what the Prophets were saying, it's what we would call dissident intellectuals. Geopolitical critique, a call for justice and freedom and so on. Yes, that's dissident intellectuals. How were they treated? Well? No, they were denounced as haters of Israel. They were driven into the desert, they were imprisoned, reviled. Now, there were intellectuals at that time who were very highly respected, namely the flatterers at the court. Hundreds of years later they were called false prophets. That's the way it works. It's the flatterers at the court who are typically the mainstream of the intellectuals. It runs all the way through history, very few exceptions. So, you don't look to intellectuals to influence policy. Dissident intellectuals often have many things to say, but they're usually pretty badly treated, varying in different societies. What makes things better is popular movements. That is what effects policy, that's how we've gained the freedoms that we have and we have a lot of freedom, but it didn't come from above and it didn't come from intellectuals. It came from organised popular movements, which demanded more freedom, like the non-violent resistance in Iraq, which forced the US and Britain to permit elections. That's how we got the right to vote here. That's how we got women's rights, that's how we got freedom of speech and so on. Constant struggle, that's why there are such efforts to break up popular movements and to atomise people and separate them from one another and to create enormous gulfs between public opinion and public policy. It's a constant battle and, yes, that's the way to make things better as in the past, plenty of concrete ways to do it. We're much more able to than in the past because of the freedoms that have been won. We have a legacy of freedom, which has been won. We can use it, improve it, carry it forward or we can abandon it. But you're not going to look to intellectuals to save you.
Andy Clark: Professor Chomsky, as ever, a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much for joining us.
Noam Chomsky: Good to be with you.
On War and Activism - Noam Chomsky interviewed by Charngchi Way
First of all, happy birthday.
Thank you.
December 7th is also the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It's also the anniversary of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, authorized by Henry Kissinger, which probably wiped out a third of the population. So, a lot of anniversaries.
WWII is where I want to start. Howard Zinn wrote that "Perhaps the worst consequence of WWII is that it kept alive the idea that war could be just." You've talked about that you are not a pacifist, and you believe that WWII was a necessary thing to beat back the spread of fascism.
Well, that's a little…. I mean I think WWII could have been prevented. But once it wasn't prevented, the failure to prevent it, lead to a situation where you either have to allow the triumph of fascism or resist it. So after the failure to prevent it, yes, I thought it was a necessary war. On the other hand, Germany could have been stopped in 1938. They were not ready for war. Hitler wasn't stopped, mainly because Britain and the United States weren't that much opposed to him. In fact, they were rather, more or less supported him in many ways.
As far as Japanese fascism is concerned, there is a complicated background. I mean Japan was monstrous aggressors right through the Thirties, but the US was not opposing it, all they wanted was that Japan grant US privileged access to China, and that went on just about two weeks before Pearl Harbor. Japan's position, which is, from their point of view not irrational, is that they were doing just what the US and Britain has done. I mean, US for 130 years have had the Monroe Doctrine, they are going to take control of the Western Hemisphere, and hadn't been able to implement it yet, completely, but have done it to a large extent, in (our own case) it depends, to carve out a new order of nations. In fact the US support for that, I mean the US did support it, because its going to be out of US control, but after the Second World War, the US reconstructed it, and openly.
Could that have been prevented, yeah it could have. But once the war took place, my own feeling, I don't know if my friend Howard Zinn would agree, is that it was a necessary war, once the war started.
A lot of undesirable results happened.
Of course it's going to happen from war. But what would the alternative have been? Nazi conquest of Eurasia? Not very pretty.
Back to the present, you've mentioned as a starting point, that the use of force is only legitimate under two conditions: under the threat of imminent attack, or UN security council authorization.
That's not my position, that's international law, that's everyone's formal position.
To me, it seems that there is only one condition, which is self-defense.
Not necessarily. The question is whether the security council of the United Nations does have the right to authorize force. Well, that's a complicated question. There might be conditions…. First of all, it has almost never happened. Try to find an example. But you can imagine conditions under which in might be legitimate, at least I can.
What kind of conditions would they be?
For example, suppose something like Nazi Germany arose in a major power center. Or, take say, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. I mean, that's a case where they didn't actually call for, but they came pretty close to authorizing it. Again, I think it could have been reversed without aggression, so I don't approve of the war, because there was a way to reverse it. But if there hadn't been a way to reverse it, then it would have been appropriate for the UN to take action. And there are other cases.
Now take the US invasion of South Vietnam. It would certainly have been appropriate for the security council to act to prevent it. Of course they can't. It is a major power and you can't do anything about it. Or take, say, the US terrorist war against Nicaragua. The UN tried to intervene, security council, the world court ordered the US to terminate it, US told them to get lost. Nicaragua took it to the Security council, and the Security council passed two resolutions affirming the court's judgments, the US vetoed them. Okay, that's the end of that story. The UN could never have authorized force against the United States, because it's just too powerful. But, those are imaginable cases. If something had happened I would regard it as legitimate.
The international organizations have been in place since WWII to resolve conflicts and prevent the use of force, but they have no enforcement power.
It's not that they have no enforcement power. They have enforcement power when the US authorizes it. So they have enforcement power against the weak, and against US enemies, otherwise, no. That's a little over exaggeration, but it's pretty much the story. I mean the UN has problems, and the problems are right here. Same is true of all this ludicrous talk about UN reform. Yeah, UN could use some reform, but you know, so could Washington, so could most US corporations. But the main problem that's required for the UN reform is for the US to stop disrupting UN operations. That's the main problem.
Actually we are seeing it right this minute in Montreal, doesn't happen to be the UN at this moment, but the international conference on global warming. The US is simply not permitting it to proceed, unilaterally. That's the problem of international organizations. If the most powerful state blocks their operations, yeah, it's a problem.
Are there deeper causes for war, or has it always been an interplay of power interests?
Well, you can't generalize it, you know. Sometimes, there's a crazy king or somebody. Or take the Crusades, I mean, that was just religious fanaticism. So yes, there are all kinds of reasons, but by and large, aggressive wars have to do with strategic and economic reasons. It's not a hundred percent.
Orwell said "Wars are mostly internal." Do you agree with that and can you elaborate on it?
Well, there is a sense in which it's true. Often there is a major factor internal to the aggressive society. So [the elites] may have to control the population, something like that. That's often true. In fact, in wars, the outcome is usually the weak and poor suffer in all societies and the powerful make out fine in all societies.
So take say, the Second World War. I mean, there were Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals which tried some people, but the US and Britain pretty much restored the traditional order. In Japan, there was a brief period of democratization, from 1945 to 1947, but the Washington liberals were appalled, instituted was called the "reverse course" in which they essentially ordered the occupation authorities to undermine the democratic institutions in Japan, and to pretty much restore the traditional fascist order. Which is what happened, I mean with a parliamentary system and so on, but it's the same people, same institutional structures. Same in Germany. Major war criminals were reconstituted, and much of the traditional fascist order was restored. So they didn't lose, but the people lost massively both in Japan and Germany and many other countries.
You wrote that "Concentrated power pursuits war relentlessly, and very self-consciously." Now that we have the ability to destroy ourselves many times over, can you ever picture certain power centers curbing their relentlessness in pursuing war?
There have been some efforts. For example, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world very close to disaster, the Kennedy administration did agree to test ban treaties, and steps to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Prior to that they had been rejecting offers from the Russians. Russians had offered to sharply reduce military capacity if the US would do likewise. And the Russians in fact implemented it in the '50s and the early '60s, and the US refused. Kennedy responded by increasing US military power. Then came the missile crisis and a change in policy, and then there were moves to reduce the threat of war, and they were reasonably successful. The Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was signed in 1970 has had effects. It's reduced the number of nuclear states, they anticipated many more. It's bad enough, but [they] reduce it.
On the other hand, the NPT is not working. There is a five year review, and the last one in May was a disaster, and the main reason is the US has simply announced it's not going to satisfy its NPT obligations. The government and the media tried to blame the whole thing on Iran, which has whatever problems it has, but the major problem is the refusal of the nuclear powers, primarily the United States, to live up to their obligations. And the US has now formally stated that it's not going to do it. So, there goes the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But it was an effort to do exactly what you are saying, to reduce the likelihood of a terminal war. There have been other efforts.
The UN Charter was an effort. In fact, read it, it opens by saying that the human entity has suffered the scourge of devastating war twice in the past generation, we have to put an end to it, and they did try. That's why Article II bars the use of force in international affairs, for the first time in a major international agreement. And then come the sole exceptions which you mentioned. Well, that's an effort, a serious effort, on the part of the international society, initiated by the US at that time, to limit the threat of war, maybe eliminate it. It didn't work, and it didn't work because the major powers didn't accept it, primarily and overwhelmingly the United States.
People seem to think that the elites act in an irrational way, but…
Depends on what you mean by irrational.
Right, it's rational by their structural…
By their structural reasons it's rational. In fact, take say, the Bush administration. For them, it's perfectly rational to increase the threat of terror, to increase the threat of nuclear war, to destroy the environment so your own grandchildren won't survive. All of that is totally rational, because it's a much lower priority than stuffing the pockets of your rich friends with dollars, and increasing your power. So yeah, it's rational.
But, does it ever reach a point where the elites have to worry about their own survival?
Yeah. For example, within, say, the business world, there's some recognition that, you know, you might as well pay attention to whether your grandchildren are going to have a world to live in. So, yes, you have some pressures, the ones I mentioned also had elite support. In fact, after the missile crisis, it was realized in elite circles if we continue with this we are going to blow ourselves up.
Or take say Europe. [In] political science, there's major thesis, huge discussion about what is called "democratic peace." Democracies don't go to war with each other. And the main proof, the main evidence is, well, in democratic Europe, they haven't had a war since 1945. Was that because of the democracies? I don't think so. I mean, for centuries, Europe was the most savage place in the world. They had monstrous wars constantly, trying to impose the nation-state system which didn't make any sense. They stopped in 1945, that's true. That's because European elites understood, that the next time they play the game they are all going to be dead. Okay, they decided, okay, games over. We played it for 500 years, can't do it anymore. So, yes, the elites recognized they better not have anymore wars between Germany and France and England, because the next time is the last.
Can you talk a little bit about imposing the nation-state system with violence and war?
Murderous savagery. I mean, the European history is an example. Take a look at the populations of Europe, very diverse. There are a lot of concerns now about what are called endangered languages, indigenous languages disappearing. And it's serious. But probably the greatest loss of languages in the last century is right inside Europe. I mean, what we call Italian, most Italians didn't speak, had to learn a second language if you learned the real one. Same with Germany, same with France, a little bit further back. And that's a reflection of the diversity of cultures and so on, which you find almost everywhere in the world. I mean, you don't find it in the United States, but there's a simple reason for that. The English colonist just wiped everybody out. Okay, you don't get diversity. You have what amounts to genocide, okay: no diversity. But in societies where you didn't have mass extermination, there are complex regional, local identities and associations which you just can't draw lines around it. So to impose that nation-state system did lead to centuries of murderous violence.
In fact, it was that murderous violence that gave Europe it's comparative advantage. Europe had developed a culture of savagery which was unknown in the rest of the world. When the Europeans then started expanding, they weren't really winning wars on the base of their military superiority, but on the base of savagery, which others didn't know how to face. In fact, if you look at military historians, they point out, British ones, main ones, they said well, for the rest of the world war was a sport, for Europe it was a science. And yes, they conquered much of the world, and attempted to impose a nation-state system on it. And you take a look at most of the horrible wars today, they are the results of the drawing of colonial boundaries in an effort to impose the nation-state system. It has almost nothing to do with people's interests and associations and commitments.
Actually Europe itself is beginning to recognize this, and it's moving towards a kind of devolution. So in Spain, for example, Catalonia, a vast country, and pretty soon others are going to have a fair degree of autonomy, with their own languages and some degree of local control. In Wales and Scotland there's a degree of devolution in the languages. Not in Scotland, but in Wales the language is pretty much recovered. It's a very unnatural system.
In fact the natural system, though nobody likes to hear, is the Ottoman Empire. I mean, the Ottoman Empire was corrupt and brutal, and nobody wants to restore that, but they more or less left people alone. So if you are in the Greek part of the city the Greeks run it, and if you are in the Armenian part the Armenians run it. You don't have to travel pass two border posts when you go from Istanbul to Cairo to Baghdad. It was just a loose, complex, regional system with a rather high level of local control, and for most of the world that's exactly what makes sense. To impose a nation-state system on that, it's going to cause plenty of violence and savagery, and did.
There is a huge amount of historical evidence for it. In fact, the United States itself is an example. There was a nation-state system imposed, a pretty homogenous one, but it was imposed by eliminating an enormous diversity of rather highly developed societies. I mean, it was pretended they were hunter-gatherers wondering around the woods, but we know that that wasn't true. And [by] conquering half of Mexico, and settling it with the European colonists. Yeah, that way you can impose a nation-state, but we don't call it violence because we did it, you know. But take a look at the victims, they have a different picture.
Since a military system is totalitarian, how would an anarchist society, a society based on cooperation and free association deal with external threats?
You can't give a general answer. It depends on the nature of the external threats. So take say, the one example of a more or less anarchist society that did manage to exist for a while, namely revolutionary Spain in 1936. There was an external threat, several, in fact. The immediate external threat was the Franco invasion from North Africa, with mostly North African troops in fact. There was an invasion, and there was complex interaction. Within about a year, the anarchist society had been destroyed, but not by Franco. It was destroyed by the Russians and the West, who didn't like each other, but they had a common aim: destroy revolutionary Spain. And they cooperated on that together with Franco nationalists, and after about a year, they succeeded, and then it turned into a conventional civil war.
But, did the anarchist society have a way of surviving that? Well, it's possible. I mean in fact there were proposals which the government wouldn't accept, but there were serious proposals. The main one was by one of the leading anarchist activists, thinker in Spain, he was actually Italian, Camillo Berneri, who proposed right away, he said look, conventional war is not going to work, the forces massed against us are far to strong for that. So he suggested a combination of guerilla war and political war. Guerrilla war makes sense. Spain is where it was invented, in fact, in the Napoleonic invasions, and we know now that you can do a lot with it, we've seen that. So guerrilla war is local resistance against the occupying armies. And crucially, political war. The base of Franco's army was North African, and Berneri suggested that the Spanish Anarchists should support the revolutionary movements in Morocco in French and Spanish territories, and support the ones that are trying to overthrow the colonial governments, support land reform. And they existed. There was a nationalist revolutionary movement in Northern Africa which the colonial powers were trying to repress. And it was calling for land reform, getting rid of the imperial powers, things that would have a lot of popular support. Well, Berneri's proposal is, okay, that's what we support. Undercut the base of the invading army by giving its own soldiers a reason not to fight, because if they go back home, they don't have to live under the jackboot of the conquerors, they can run their own lives. It could very well have worked.
Of course that would completely have infuriated the West. I mean, England and France and the United States would have gone berserk, but doesn't mean it would have failed. They might not have been able to repress an anti-colonial movement in North Africa, which would have indeed undermined the Franco army. Well, okay, that's a strategy, political warfare and if needed, guerrilla warfare. It's not a formula for every circumstance, you know, every circumstance you need your own formula. But there are ways to proceed.
I mean nonviolence resistance is often a way to proceed, depends on who you are confronting. If you are confronting people that are going to blow your head off, well, it's not going to do anything. But to appeal to the humanity of the enemy is sometimes effective. There are lots of ways to proceed.
I read in Politics by Aristotle "Facts, as well as arguments, prove that the legislator should direct all his military and other measures to the provision of leisure and the establishment of peace. For most of these military states are safe only while they are at war, but fall when they have acquired their empire." Do you think that his statement applies to the modern era, especially in the case of the United States?
There is something to that, I mean, you have to keep the population quiet. We have many examples.
Take, say, the Vietnam War. The US was unable to call a national mobilization. It became a big war, much bigger than expected. If the United States had called a national mobilization, as they did the Second World War, the US would have just walked over Vietnam, wouldn't have any problem, and the economy here would have improved, under quasi-command economies you can get enormous economic growth. During the Second World War, which was a semi-command economy in a mobilized public, it was the greatest period of economic growth in American history.
That could have happened in the Sixties too, but they couldn't do it. There was too much popular opposition to the war, so they could not carry out a national mobilization. As a result, they had to fight what's called a "guns and butter" war. You know, okay, produce guns, but we would also have to have butter for the population. Well, that turns out to be not good for the economy, it lead to stagflation, economic problems, loss of power to economic rivals. Finally the business elites said you got to call it off, which is why after the Tet offensive, Johnson was compelled, in fact, almost ordered by Wall Street, the business interest, to just draw it down. So, yes, it's an example of where the military leaders have to provide enough to the population to keep them more or less mobilized.
Actually the same thing happened in Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany never became as totalitarian as England and the United States did. In England and the United States it was a kind of voluntary totalitarianism. People were really committed to the war, so they were willing to give up the normal freedoms. You know, you had wage and price controls and so on, and they could carry out very effective mobilization. In Germany, they couldn't do it, because they didn't trust the population. They haven't got that same degree of commitment. So as a result, Nazi Germany had to fight a kind of "Guns and butter" War.
If you read the memoirs of Albert Speer, the economic czar for Hitler, he argues in his memoirs with some credibility that that may have been why Germany lost the war. They were technologically far more advanced. When there was a near equal military battle, Germany always won, the West always lost. On the Russian front, where almost the entire war was fought, the only reason Germany lost was because it was crushed by the massive people in arms, Germany was way more advanced. He argues that they might have won if they didn't have to carry out this internal policy, similar to Johnson's in the 1960s. So that's an illustration of Aristotle's maxim. Even military leaders, the most extreme, say, Nazi Germany, are going to have to ensure the population are sort of, at least passive, and maybe committed if possible. And that means offering them something.
So do you see the beginning of a fall for the United States?
Well, it really began in the 1960s. The activism of the 1960s was very long, laden coming, but it did come, and it changed the country enormously. For example, not just these issues, but take, say, women's rights. All kinds of things change quite radically, as a result of the 1960s' activism.
One of the things that changed was attitudes towards war. So the population just doesn't support an aggressive war to the extend it did in the 1960s. You can see that in the case of Iraq. Iraq, after all, and they won't tell you this in the newspapers, it was the first time in history, hundreds of years of European imperialism, counting US as European, that a war was massively protested before it was officially launched. And now there are 2000 or so American casualties, it's causing an uproar. Didn't happen in Vietnam, didn't happen in Korea, and it certainly didn't happen in the Second World War. I mean the population just won't accept it anymore. And in the case of Iraq, they just have to lie massively about what's going on to keep people quiet. So, about a year ago the major study came out of Iraqi casualties, the best estimate was about 100,000, and that's over a year ago. Well, it was barely mentioned in the United States. In fact, when mentioned, it was just ridiculed. If people knew about it, and knew what lay behind it, they would be much more opposed to the war, but that's kept quiet.
Take, say, [the] polls in Iraq, and for a long time they published the results, but recently they stopped publishing the results, at least results that had attitudes toward the occupation, but they are being taken, and sometimes they leak. So the British Ministry of Defense did carry about a poll on the countries attitudes toward the occupation, well finally it leaked in England, and to the right wing press, Daily Telegraph, and some of the other press picked it up, but it wasn't even mentioned in the US. What they found was that over 80 percent of the population wants the occupying force out of the country, 1 percent think that they increase security, and almost half of the population thinks that attack against them are justified. Well, you know if people here knew that, the support for the occupation would go way down, that's why they don't report it.
And same with other things, you've got to keep the population ignorant because if they know what's going on, they are not going to tolerate it. I've done a lot of work on internal secret declassified documents, the US happens to be a very free society in this respect then most of the world so, have a lot of records. Take a look at declassified documents, secret documents. Why is it kept secret? [It's] almost never for security reasons, not from the enemy, they mostly know it anyway. It's mostly a weapon against the domestic population. You don't want the domestic population to know what you are doing in their name. It's the main reason for secrecy and obvious the main reason for propaganda. These are attacks on the domestic population. I mean, the elites quite rightly are terrified of democracy. It's lethal [for them], how could [they] tolerate it? So they do many things they can to undermine it. And one of the things you do is lie, deceive, have secrecy and so on.
But take a look at the American population in the last 40 years, yeah it's changed a lot, and they know it. There have been a few leaked documents in which they say that we cannot carry out a large scale war, when we fight. Now I am quoting "If we confront a much weaker enemy," which is the only kind we are ever going to confront, "we must win rapidly and decisively, or else public support will erode." And in fact, you can see that in Iraq. They thought they would win rapidly and decisively, and when they didn't, public support erodes exactly as they knew. It wasn't that way in Vietnam, it went on for years, and public support didn't erode. Yeah, it's changed, it's understood in high places, and indicates that things could change.
In fact, global attitudes are the same, take the Iraq war. Barely mentioned here, but there was overwhelming popular opposition. I mean, Spain, which was considered the great hope for the future because Asnar the prime minister, joined Bush and Blair for the summit declaring war, you know, everybody loving Spain. He came with the support of 2 percent of the population. In fact, in the international polls taken about the war, right before the war, I think the only country that went above 10 percent support was maybe Israel, for their own reasons.
Since I was a teenager I've been working for a grassroots Taoist/Confucian movement, and a tendency I've experienced is that people who are more privileged tend to be less involved, less willing to accept alternative views, and less generous with their time, energy and resources.
That's natural. I can tell you about that from personal experience. When I give a talk in Cambridge and when I give a talk in Jamaica Plains, it's totally different.
I was there, actually (in Jamaica Plains).
Were you there the other night? Try to find that in Cambridge, in Harvard Square.
Why do you think that the privileged people miss the obvious truths?
Well, several reasons. For one thing, the more educated you are, the more indoctrinated you are. After all, propaganda is largely directed towards the privileged. For the mass of the population, there is propaganda, but it's mostly to try to get them out of our hair, you know, it is distraction. Get them involved in professional sports, or sex scandals, or anything. Just keep them away from us. That's why the political system in the United States has now degenerated to the point where the only issues that are talked about are what are called "the culture wars." You know, are we going to give gay rights, this sort of thing. Alright, CEOs don't care about that, so let's get the people involved in that, and you have red states and blue states and culture wars and so on. So for the population is mostly distract them.
But for elites, they have to believe. They are the ones who are the managers and the directors, whether it's political or economic, or doctrinal managers in universities and media and so on. They got to believe. Otherwise they can't do the job. So they have to be profoundly indoctrinated. Furthermore, it is in their interest to be indoctrinated, they are the ones who gain from these activities.
So there are many factors that lead to a very natural outcome of what you described. Nothing to do about it, and nothing surprising about it. I mean, if we had an educational system, we would teach that in eighth grade.
I was watching Manufacturing Consent, I suppose you still haven't seen it?
No.
Toward the end you talked about part of what you are doing is giving people a course in intellectual self-defense. Can you kind of describe what…
Well, you know, there are very serious illusions that there are major efforts to instill. And I don't think they are very hard to dismantle. Almost anything we understand about international affairs is on the level that my 10-year old grandson can figure out, if given a chance. So just give people a chance to figure it out for themselves. Everything we are talking about, for example, is completely obvious. You would see it unless you are deeply indoctrinated not to see it. Okay, just get people to question sensibly, be reasonable, and think through the obvious and so on.
Take, say, the invasion of Iraq. Outside of the West, everybody, including Iraq, everybody just assumes the obvious, the invasion of Iraq was undertaken because Iraq is right at the center of a major oil producing, energy producing region of the world and the US wants to extend control over it. It's like a truism.
The polls in Baghdad as they had, just takes it for granted. In the West if anybody says that, they are immediately denounced as a conspiracy theorist, or anti-American, or some lunatic tirade. What you are supposed to believe is that the US would have, as they called, "liberated" Iraq, if it was an island in the Indian Ocean producing lettuce. That's what you are supposed to believe. How much does it take to peel that away? Well, you know, you have to be willing to do it. And people don't think of it. Once somebody mention it to them it's kind of obvious. But when you are inundated with massive propaganda on the contrary, it's not easy to think of it.
For example, take a look at the US media, have you seen anybody say that? I mean, it's so obvious that a child could see it, have you ever seen it said? Well, you know, if nothing ever said, people don't think of it. You were there in Jamaica Plains? You remember I started by talking about the polls, well, you know, there's a reason why those polls are never published, literally. People are not supposed to know that their own attitudes are right in the mainstream. I mean, if you are an individual, you may have your own attitudes, but everything that you are hearing and seeing says you are a nut. So you think, okay, I am a nut. If you knew that's what the large majority are thinking, people would get together and do something about it.
So, intellectual self-defense is not easy, but it's not hard either. The instant you get the idea of it, everything falls apart pretty quickly. Unless there are real barriers, and the more educated you are, the more barriers. After all, it is what education is about. Large part of it is about indoctrination.
Do you know who Richard Feynman is? The American physicist?
Yeah.
His writings have had some effect on me personally. He wrote about some of his regrets with his involvement in the Manhattan Project as a graduate student. Kind of what he went in for was that he bought into the propaganda, but also he thought it was a great puzzle to solve, you know, he was a scientist.
It's a very interesting phenomenon. I've looked into that a bit.
I think he is as far away from the mainstream intellectual as you can get.
Well, see, first of all, the sciences are different. What I've been describing up till now does not hold for the sciences. In the sciences, when you study physics, you are not taught to copy down what the teacher said and repeat it on the next exam, you are expected to challenge, to think about it, to innovate, stand up and say, "I think you are wrong," you know, "Do it this way, I have a good idea everybody will like it." That's what the education is in the advance sciences.
That's why, for example, if you take a look at their political attitudes, MIT is much more conservative than Harvard. On the other hand, MIT has been the center of peaceful antiwar activity for 50 years. It is because it is science based. You are allowed, in fact encouraged to think independently. So yes, Feynman is out of the mainstream, but so are most of the natural sciences, because you just have to deal with things differently. If you try to carry out in the sciences the kind of indoctrination that goes on in the soft fields, they would die. They live on challenging, questioning, participation, young people having ideas and so on, that's what make them survive.
On the other hand if you take a look back at the Manhattan Project, the whole thing, it's very interesting what happened. There were two phases, a Chicago phase and a Los Alamos phase. The Chicago phase is producing the materials [and] was done first. So they were done and the Los Alamos phase was producing the gun. Take a look at the protest. The beginning of protest, they started in Chicago. There were rumblings in Chicago pretty much after that phase was over. Then you started thinking of, you know, what are we doing? [At] Los Alamos there was nothing. I mean, they had the smartest people in the world living there in a closed environment, most of them politically pretty radical, they came out of the European left and things like that, sitting there, no protest. In fact, no questions.
I was teaching an undergraduate course here on these issues and you know Phil Morrison? Phil Morrison was a physicist here, actually he's still alive but retired, he was the guy who put the bomb together on Tinian Island, he was in the Los Alamos phase, and I think he was probably communist, certainly on the far left. He described for the class what it was like in Los Alamos. And it was just what Feynman said, you know, he said we were all interested in the technical problem. We didn't even ask what we were doing. And there was no Chicago phase because they were kept at it till the end. They didn't know it was going to go off, when it went off. So they were all excited, what Oppenheimer called, you know, a beautiful technical problem or something. So that's what they were engaged in. And yeah, in that respect, Feynman is correct. A number of people did become pretty active but [there] weren't many.
Do you see that as a danger? You have a class of technical people who…
Take a look at what happened. We are lucky that the German physicists didn't get there, they would have done the same thing, would it have been any different?
Thank you.
December 7th is also the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It's also the anniversary of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, authorized by Henry Kissinger, which probably wiped out a third of the population. So, a lot of anniversaries.
WWII is where I want to start. Howard Zinn wrote that "Perhaps the worst consequence of WWII is that it kept alive the idea that war could be just." You've talked about that you are not a pacifist, and you believe that WWII was a necessary thing to beat back the spread of fascism.
Well, that's a little…. I mean I think WWII could have been prevented. But once it wasn't prevented, the failure to prevent it, lead to a situation where you either have to allow the triumph of fascism or resist it. So after the failure to prevent it, yes, I thought it was a necessary war. On the other hand, Germany could have been stopped in 1938. They were not ready for war. Hitler wasn't stopped, mainly because Britain and the United States weren't that much opposed to him. In fact, they were rather, more or less supported him in many ways.
As far as Japanese fascism is concerned, there is a complicated background. I mean Japan was monstrous aggressors right through the Thirties, but the US was not opposing it, all they wanted was that Japan grant US privileged access to China, and that went on just about two weeks before Pearl Harbor. Japan's position, which is, from their point of view not irrational, is that they were doing just what the US and Britain has done. I mean, US for 130 years have had the Monroe Doctrine, they are going to take control of the Western Hemisphere, and hadn't been able to implement it yet, completely, but have done it to a large extent, in (our own case) it depends, to carve out a new order of nations. In fact the US support for that, I mean the US did support it, because its going to be out of US control, but after the Second World War, the US reconstructed it, and openly.
Could that have been prevented, yeah it could have. But once the war took place, my own feeling, I don't know if my friend Howard Zinn would agree, is that it was a necessary war, once the war started.
A lot of undesirable results happened.
Of course it's going to happen from war. But what would the alternative have been? Nazi conquest of Eurasia? Not very pretty.
Back to the present, you've mentioned as a starting point, that the use of force is only legitimate under two conditions: under the threat of imminent attack, or UN security council authorization.
That's not my position, that's international law, that's everyone's formal position.
To me, it seems that there is only one condition, which is self-defense.
Not necessarily. The question is whether the security council of the United Nations does have the right to authorize force. Well, that's a complicated question. There might be conditions…. First of all, it has almost never happened. Try to find an example. But you can imagine conditions under which in might be legitimate, at least I can.
What kind of conditions would they be?
For example, suppose something like Nazi Germany arose in a major power center. Or, take say, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. I mean, that's a case where they didn't actually call for, but they came pretty close to authorizing it. Again, I think it could have been reversed without aggression, so I don't approve of the war, because there was a way to reverse it. But if there hadn't been a way to reverse it, then it would have been appropriate for the UN to take action. And there are other cases.
Now take the US invasion of South Vietnam. It would certainly have been appropriate for the security council to act to prevent it. Of course they can't. It is a major power and you can't do anything about it. Or take, say, the US terrorist war against Nicaragua. The UN tried to intervene, security council, the world court ordered the US to terminate it, US told them to get lost. Nicaragua took it to the Security council, and the Security council passed two resolutions affirming the court's judgments, the US vetoed them. Okay, that's the end of that story. The UN could never have authorized force against the United States, because it's just too powerful. But, those are imaginable cases. If something had happened I would regard it as legitimate.
The international organizations have been in place since WWII to resolve conflicts and prevent the use of force, but they have no enforcement power.
It's not that they have no enforcement power. They have enforcement power when the US authorizes it. So they have enforcement power against the weak, and against US enemies, otherwise, no. That's a little over exaggeration, but it's pretty much the story. I mean the UN has problems, and the problems are right here. Same is true of all this ludicrous talk about UN reform. Yeah, UN could use some reform, but you know, so could Washington, so could most US corporations. But the main problem that's required for the UN reform is for the US to stop disrupting UN operations. That's the main problem.
Actually we are seeing it right this minute in Montreal, doesn't happen to be the UN at this moment, but the international conference on global warming. The US is simply not permitting it to proceed, unilaterally. That's the problem of international organizations. If the most powerful state blocks their operations, yeah, it's a problem.
Are there deeper causes for war, or has it always been an interplay of power interests?
Well, you can't generalize it, you know. Sometimes, there's a crazy king or somebody. Or take the Crusades, I mean, that was just religious fanaticism. So yes, there are all kinds of reasons, but by and large, aggressive wars have to do with strategic and economic reasons. It's not a hundred percent.
Orwell said "Wars are mostly internal." Do you agree with that and can you elaborate on it?
Well, there is a sense in which it's true. Often there is a major factor internal to the aggressive society. So [the elites] may have to control the population, something like that. That's often true. In fact, in wars, the outcome is usually the weak and poor suffer in all societies and the powerful make out fine in all societies.
So take say, the Second World War. I mean, there were Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals which tried some people, but the US and Britain pretty much restored the traditional order. In Japan, there was a brief period of democratization, from 1945 to 1947, but the Washington liberals were appalled, instituted was called the "reverse course" in which they essentially ordered the occupation authorities to undermine the democratic institutions in Japan, and to pretty much restore the traditional fascist order. Which is what happened, I mean with a parliamentary system and so on, but it's the same people, same institutional structures. Same in Germany. Major war criminals were reconstituted, and much of the traditional fascist order was restored. So they didn't lose, but the people lost massively both in Japan and Germany and many other countries.
You wrote that "Concentrated power pursuits war relentlessly, and very self-consciously." Now that we have the ability to destroy ourselves many times over, can you ever picture certain power centers curbing their relentlessness in pursuing war?
There have been some efforts. For example, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world very close to disaster, the Kennedy administration did agree to test ban treaties, and steps to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Prior to that they had been rejecting offers from the Russians. Russians had offered to sharply reduce military capacity if the US would do likewise. And the Russians in fact implemented it in the '50s and the early '60s, and the US refused. Kennedy responded by increasing US military power. Then came the missile crisis and a change in policy, and then there were moves to reduce the threat of war, and they were reasonably successful. The Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was signed in 1970 has had effects. It's reduced the number of nuclear states, they anticipated many more. It's bad enough, but [they] reduce it.
On the other hand, the NPT is not working. There is a five year review, and the last one in May was a disaster, and the main reason is the US has simply announced it's not going to satisfy its NPT obligations. The government and the media tried to blame the whole thing on Iran, which has whatever problems it has, but the major problem is the refusal of the nuclear powers, primarily the United States, to live up to their obligations. And the US has now formally stated that it's not going to do it. So, there goes the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But it was an effort to do exactly what you are saying, to reduce the likelihood of a terminal war. There have been other efforts.
The UN Charter was an effort. In fact, read it, it opens by saying that the human entity has suffered the scourge of devastating war twice in the past generation, we have to put an end to it, and they did try. That's why Article II bars the use of force in international affairs, for the first time in a major international agreement. And then come the sole exceptions which you mentioned. Well, that's an effort, a serious effort, on the part of the international society, initiated by the US at that time, to limit the threat of war, maybe eliminate it. It didn't work, and it didn't work because the major powers didn't accept it, primarily and overwhelmingly the United States.
People seem to think that the elites act in an irrational way, but…
Depends on what you mean by irrational.
Right, it's rational by their structural…
By their structural reasons it's rational. In fact, take say, the Bush administration. For them, it's perfectly rational to increase the threat of terror, to increase the threat of nuclear war, to destroy the environment so your own grandchildren won't survive. All of that is totally rational, because it's a much lower priority than stuffing the pockets of your rich friends with dollars, and increasing your power. So yeah, it's rational.
But, does it ever reach a point where the elites have to worry about their own survival?
Yeah. For example, within, say, the business world, there's some recognition that, you know, you might as well pay attention to whether your grandchildren are going to have a world to live in. So, yes, you have some pressures, the ones I mentioned also had elite support. In fact, after the missile crisis, it was realized in elite circles if we continue with this we are going to blow ourselves up.
Or take say Europe. [In] political science, there's major thesis, huge discussion about what is called "democratic peace." Democracies don't go to war with each other. And the main proof, the main evidence is, well, in democratic Europe, they haven't had a war since 1945. Was that because of the democracies? I don't think so. I mean, for centuries, Europe was the most savage place in the world. They had monstrous wars constantly, trying to impose the nation-state system which didn't make any sense. They stopped in 1945, that's true. That's because European elites understood, that the next time they play the game they are all going to be dead. Okay, they decided, okay, games over. We played it for 500 years, can't do it anymore. So, yes, the elites recognized they better not have anymore wars between Germany and France and England, because the next time is the last.
Can you talk a little bit about imposing the nation-state system with violence and war?
Murderous savagery. I mean, the European history is an example. Take a look at the populations of Europe, very diverse. There are a lot of concerns now about what are called endangered languages, indigenous languages disappearing. And it's serious. But probably the greatest loss of languages in the last century is right inside Europe. I mean, what we call Italian, most Italians didn't speak, had to learn a second language if you learned the real one. Same with Germany, same with France, a little bit further back. And that's a reflection of the diversity of cultures and so on, which you find almost everywhere in the world. I mean, you don't find it in the United States, but there's a simple reason for that. The English colonist just wiped everybody out. Okay, you don't get diversity. You have what amounts to genocide, okay: no diversity. But in societies where you didn't have mass extermination, there are complex regional, local identities and associations which you just can't draw lines around it. So to impose that nation-state system did lead to centuries of murderous violence.
In fact, it was that murderous violence that gave Europe it's comparative advantage. Europe had developed a culture of savagery which was unknown in the rest of the world. When the Europeans then started expanding, they weren't really winning wars on the base of their military superiority, but on the base of savagery, which others didn't know how to face. In fact, if you look at military historians, they point out, British ones, main ones, they said well, for the rest of the world war was a sport, for Europe it was a science. And yes, they conquered much of the world, and attempted to impose a nation-state system on it. And you take a look at most of the horrible wars today, they are the results of the drawing of colonial boundaries in an effort to impose the nation-state system. It has almost nothing to do with people's interests and associations and commitments.
Actually Europe itself is beginning to recognize this, and it's moving towards a kind of devolution. So in Spain, for example, Catalonia, a vast country, and pretty soon others are going to have a fair degree of autonomy, with their own languages and some degree of local control. In Wales and Scotland there's a degree of devolution in the languages. Not in Scotland, but in Wales the language is pretty much recovered. It's a very unnatural system.
In fact the natural system, though nobody likes to hear, is the Ottoman Empire. I mean, the Ottoman Empire was corrupt and brutal, and nobody wants to restore that, but they more or less left people alone. So if you are in the Greek part of the city the Greeks run it, and if you are in the Armenian part the Armenians run it. You don't have to travel pass two border posts when you go from Istanbul to Cairo to Baghdad. It was just a loose, complex, regional system with a rather high level of local control, and for most of the world that's exactly what makes sense. To impose a nation-state system on that, it's going to cause plenty of violence and savagery, and did.
There is a huge amount of historical evidence for it. In fact, the United States itself is an example. There was a nation-state system imposed, a pretty homogenous one, but it was imposed by eliminating an enormous diversity of rather highly developed societies. I mean, it was pretended they were hunter-gatherers wondering around the woods, but we know that that wasn't true. And [by] conquering half of Mexico, and settling it with the European colonists. Yeah, that way you can impose a nation-state, but we don't call it violence because we did it, you know. But take a look at the victims, they have a different picture.
Since a military system is totalitarian, how would an anarchist society, a society based on cooperation and free association deal with external threats?
You can't give a general answer. It depends on the nature of the external threats. So take say, the one example of a more or less anarchist society that did manage to exist for a while, namely revolutionary Spain in 1936. There was an external threat, several, in fact. The immediate external threat was the Franco invasion from North Africa, with mostly North African troops in fact. There was an invasion, and there was complex interaction. Within about a year, the anarchist society had been destroyed, but not by Franco. It was destroyed by the Russians and the West, who didn't like each other, but they had a common aim: destroy revolutionary Spain. And they cooperated on that together with Franco nationalists, and after about a year, they succeeded, and then it turned into a conventional civil war.
But, did the anarchist society have a way of surviving that? Well, it's possible. I mean in fact there were proposals which the government wouldn't accept, but there were serious proposals. The main one was by one of the leading anarchist activists, thinker in Spain, he was actually Italian, Camillo Berneri, who proposed right away, he said look, conventional war is not going to work, the forces massed against us are far to strong for that. So he suggested a combination of guerilla war and political war. Guerrilla war makes sense. Spain is where it was invented, in fact, in the Napoleonic invasions, and we know now that you can do a lot with it, we've seen that. So guerrilla war is local resistance against the occupying armies. And crucially, political war. The base of Franco's army was North African, and Berneri suggested that the Spanish Anarchists should support the revolutionary movements in Morocco in French and Spanish territories, and support the ones that are trying to overthrow the colonial governments, support land reform. And they existed. There was a nationalist revolutionary movement in Northern Africa which the colonial powers were trying to repress. And it was calling for land reform, getting rid of the imperial powers, things that would have a lot of popular support. Well, Berneri's proposal is, okay, that's what we support. Undercut the base of the invading army by giving its own soldiers a reason not to fight, because if they go back home, they don't have to live under the jackboot of the conquerors, they can run their own lives. It could very well have worked.
Of course that would completely have infuriated the West. I mean, England and France and the United States would have gone berserk, but doesn't mean it would have failed. They might not have been able to repress an anti-colonial movement in North Africa, which would have indeed undermined the Franco army. Well, okay, that's a strategy, political warfare and if needed, guerrilla warfare. It's not a formula for every circumstance, you know, every circumstance you need your own formula. But there are ways to proceed.
I mean nonviolence resistance is often a way to proceed, depends on who you are confronting. If you are confronting people that are going to blow your head off, well, it's not going to do anything. But to appeal to the humanity of the enemy is sometimes effective. There are lots of ways to proceed.
I read in Politics by Aristotle "Facts, as well as arguments, prove that the legislator should direct all his military and other measures to the provision of leisure and the establishment of peace. For most of these military states are safe only while they are at war, but fall when they have acquired their empire." Do you think that his statement applies to the modern era, especially in the case of the United States?
There is something to that, I mean, you have to keep the population quiet. We have many examples.
Take, say, the Vietnam War. The US was unable to call a national mobilization. It became a big war, much bigger than expected. If the United States had called a national mobilization, as they did the Second World War, the US would have just walked over Vietnam, wouldn't have any problem, and the economy here would have improved, under quasi-command economies you can get enormous economic growth. During the Second World War, which was a semi-command economy in a mobilized public, it was the greatest period of economic growth in American history.
That could have happened in the Sixties too, but they couldn't do it. There was too much popular opposition to the war, so they could not carry out a national mobilization. As a result, they had to fight what's called a "guns and butter" war. You know, okay, produce guns, but we would also have to have butter for the population. Well, that turns out to be not good for the economy, it lead to stagflation, economic problems, loss of power to economic rivals. Finally the business elites said you got to call it off, which is why after the Tet offensive, Johnson was compelled, in fact, almost ordered by Wall Street, the business interest, to just draw it down. So, yes, it's an example of where the military leaders have to provide enough to the population to keep them more or less mobilized.
Actually the same thing happened in Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany never became as totalitarian as England and the United States did. In England and the United States it was a kind of voluntary totalitarianism. People were really committed to the war, so they were willing to give up the normal freedoms. You know, you had wage and price controls and so on, and they could carry out very effective mobilization. In Germany, they couldn't do it, because they didn't trust the population. They haven't got that same degree of commitment. So as a result, Nazi Germany had to fight a kind of "Guns and butter" War.
If you read the memoirs of Albert Speer, the economic czar for Hitler, he argues in his memoirs with some credibility that that may have been why Germany lost the war. They were technologically far more advanced. When there was a near equal military battle, Germany always won, the West always lost. On the Russian front, where almost the entire war was fought, the only reason Germany lost was because it was crushed by the massive people in arms, Germany was way more advanced. He argues that they might have won if they didn't have to carry out this internal policy, similar to Johnson's in the 1960s. So that's an illustration of Aristotle's maxim. Even military leaders, the most extreme, say, Nazi Germany, are going to have to ensure the population are sort of, at least passive, and maybe committed if possible. And that means offering them something.
So do you see the beginning of a fall for the United States?
Well, it really began in the 1960s. The activism of the 1960s was very long, laden coming, but it did come, and it changed the country enormously. For example, not just these issues, but take, say, women's rights. All kinds of things change quite radically, as a result of the 1960s' activism.
One of the things that changed was attitudes towards war. So the population just doesn't support an aggressive war to the extend it did in the 1960s. You can see that in the case of Iraq. Iraq, after all, and they won't tell you this in the newspapers, it was the first time in history, hundreds of years of European imperialism, counting US as European, that a war was massively protested before it was officially launched. And now there are 2000 or so American casualties, it's causing an uproar. Didn't happen in Vietnam, didn't happen in Korea, and it certainly didn't happen in the Second World War. I mean the population just won't accept it anymore. And in the case of Iraq, they just have to lie massively about what's going on to keep people quiet. So, about a year ago the major study came out of Iraqi casualties, the best estimate was about 100,000, and that's over a year ago. Well, it was barely mentioned in the United States. In fact, when mentioned, it was just ridiculed. If people knew about it, and knew what lay behind it, they would be much more opposed to the war, but that's kept quiet.
Take, say, [the] polls in Iraq, and for a long time they published the results, but recently they stopped publishing the results, at least results that had attitudes toward the occupation, but they are being taken, and sometimes they leak. So the British Ministry of Defense did carry about a poll on the countries attitudes toward the occupation, well finally it leaked in England, and to the right wing press, Daily Telegraph, and some of the other press picked it up, but it wasn't even mentioned in the US. What they found was that over 80 percent of the population wants the occupying force out of the country, 1 percent think that they increase security, and almost half of the population thinks that attack against them are justified. Well, you know if people here knew that, the support for the occupation would go way down, that's why they don't report it.
And same with other things, you've got to keep the population ignorant because if they know what's going on, they are not going to tolerate it. I've done a lot of work on internal secret declassified documents, the US happens to be a very free society in this respect then most of the world so, have a lot of records. Take a look at declassified documents, secret documents. Why is it kept secret? [It's] almost never for security reasons, not from the enemy, they mostly know it anyway. It's mostly a weapon against the domestic population. You don't want the domestic population to know what you are doing in their name. It's the main reason for secrecy and obvious the main reason for propaganda. These are attacks on the domestic population. I mean, the elites quite rightly are terrified of democracy. It's lethal [for them], how could [they] tolerate it? So they do many things they can to undermine it. And one of the things you do is lie, deceive, have secrecy and so on.
But take a look at the American population in the last 40 years, yeah it's changed a lot, and they know it. There have been a few leaked documents in which they say that we cannot carry out a large scale war, when we fight. Now I am quoting "If we confront a much weaker enemy," which is the only kind we are ever going to confront, "we must win rapidly and decisively, or else public support will erode." And in fact, you can see that in Iraq. They thought they would win rapidly and decisively, and when they didn't, public support erodes exactly as they knew. It wasn't that way in Vietnam, it went on for years, and public support didn't erode. Yeah, it's changed, it's understood in high places, and indicates that things could change.
In fact, global attitudes are the same, take the Iraq war. Barely mentioned here, but there was overwhelming popular opposition. I mean, Spain, which was considered the great hope for the future because Asnar the prime minister, joined Bush and Blair for the summit declaring war, you know, everybody loving Spain. He came with the support of 2 percent of the population. In fact, in the international polls taken about the war, right before the war, I think the only country that went above 10 percent support was maybe Israel, for their own reasons.
Since I was a teenager I've been working for a grassroots Taoist/Confucian movement, and a tendency I've experienced is that people who are more privileged tend to be less involved, less willing to accept alternative views, and less generous with their time, energy and resources.
That's natural. I can tell you about that from personal experience. When I give a talk in Cambridge and when I give a talk in Jamaica Plains, it's totally different.
I was there, actually (in Jamaica Plains).
Were you there the other night? Try to find that in Cambridge, in Harvard Square.
Why do you think that the privileged people miss the obvious truths?
Well, several reasons. For one thing, the more educated you are, the more indoctrinated you are. After all, propaganda is largely directed towards the privileged. For the mass of the population, there is propaganda, but it's mostly to try to get them out of our hair, you know, it is distraction. Get them involved in professional sports, or sex scandals, or anything. Just keep them away from us. That's why the political system in the United States has now degenerated to the point where the only issues that are talked about are what are called "the culture wars." You know, are we going to give gay rights, this sort of thing. Alright, CEOs don't care about that, so let's get the people involved in that, and you have red states and blue states and culture wars and so on. So for the population is mostly distract them.
But for elites, they have to believe. They are the ones who are the managers and the directors, whether it's political or economic, or doctrinal managers in universities and media and so on. They got to believe. Otherwise they can't do the job. So they have to be profoundly indoctrinated. Furthermore, it is in their interest to be indoctrinated, they are the ones who gain from these activities.
So there are many factors that lead to a very natural outcome of what you described. Nothing to do about it, and nothing surprising about it. I mean, if we had an educational system, we would teach that in eighth grade.
I was watching Manufacturing Consent, I suppose you still haven't seen it?
No.
Toward the end you talked about part of what you are doing is giving people a course in intellectual self-defense. Can you kind of describe what…
Well, you know, there are very serious illusions that there are major efforts to instill. And I don't think they are very hard to dismantle. Almost anything we understand about international affairs is on the level that my 10-year old grandson can figure out, if given a chance. So just give people a chance to figure it out for themselves. Everything we are talking about, for example, is completely obvious. You would see it unless you are deeply indoctrinated not to see it. Okay, just get people to question sensibly, be reasonable, and think through the obvious and so on.
Take, say, the invasion of Iraq. Outside of the West, everybody, including Iraq, everybody just assumes the obvious, the invasion of Iraq was undertaken because Iraq is right at the center of a major oil producing, energy producing region of the world and the US wants to extend control over it. It's like a truism.
The polls in Baghdad as they had, just takes it for granted. In the West if anybody says that, they are immediately denounced as a conspiracy theorist, or anti-American, or some lunatic tirade. What you are supposed to believe is that the US would have, as they called, "liberated" Iraq, if it was an island in the Indian Ocean producing lettuce. That's what you are supposed to believe. How much does it take to peel that away? Well, you know, you have to be willing to do it. And people don't think of it. Once somebody mention it to them it's kind of obvious. But when you are inundated with massive propaganda on the contrary, it's not easy to think of it.
For example, take a look at the US media, have you seen anybody say that? I mean, it's so obvious that a child could see it, have you ever seen it said? Well, you know, if nothing ever said, people don't think of it. You were there in Jamaica Plains? You remember I started by talking about the polls, well, you know, there's a reason why those polls are never published, literally. People are not supposed to know that their own attitudes are right in the mainstream. I mean, if you are an individual, you may have your own attitudes, but everything that you are hearing and seeing says you are a nut. So you think, okay, I am a nut. If you knew that's what the large majority are thinking, people would get together and do something about it.
So, intellectual self-defense is not easy, but it's not hard either. The instant you get the idea of it, everything falls apart pretty quickly. Unless there are real barriers, and the more educated you are, the more barriers. After all, it is what education is about. Large part of it is about indoctrination.
Do you know who Richard Feynman is? The American physicist?
Yeah.
His writings have had some effect on me personally. He wrote about some of his regrets with his involvement in the Manhattan Project as a graduate student. Kind of what he went in for was that he bought into the propaganda, but also he thought it was a great puzzle to solve, you know, he was a scientist.
It's a very interesting phenomenon. I've looked into that a bit.
I think he is as far away from the mainstream intellectual as you can get.
Well, see, first of all, the sciences are different. What I've been describing up till now does not hold for the sciences. In the sciences, when you study physics, you are not taught to copy down what the teacher said and repeat it on the next exam, you are expected to challenge, to think about it, to innovate, stand up and say, "I think you are wrong," you know, "Do it this way, I have a good idea everybody will like it." That's what the education is in the advance sciences.
That's why, for example, if you take a look at their political attitudes, MIT is much more conservative than Harvard. On the other hand, MIT has been the center of peaceful antiwar activity for 50 years. It is because it is science based. You are allowed, in fact encouraged to think independently. So yes, Feynman is out of the mainstream, but so are most of the natural sciences, because you just have to deal with things differently. If you try to carry out in the sciences the kind of indoctrination that goes on in the soft fields, they would die. They live on challenging, questioning, participation, young people having ideas and so on, that's what make them survive.
On the other hand if you take a look back at the Manhattan Project, the whole thing, it's very interesting what happened. There were two phases, a Chicago phase and a Los Alamos phase. The Chicago phase is producing the materials [and] was done first. So they were done and the Los Alamos phase was producing the gun. Take a look at the protest. The beginning of protest, they started in Chicago. There were rumblings in Chicago pretty much after that phase was over. Then you started thinking of, you know, what are we doing? [At] Los Alamos there was nothing. I mean, they had the smartest people in the world living there in a closed environment, most of them politically pretty radical, they came out of the European left and things like that, sitting there, no protest. In fact, no questions.
I was teaching an undergraduate course here on these issues and you know Phil Morrison? Phil Morrison was a physicist here, actually he's still alive but retired, he was the guy who put the bomb together on Tinian Island, he was in the Los Alamos phase, and I think he was probably communist, certainly on the far left. He described for the class what it was like in Los Alamos. And it was just what Feynman said, you know, he said we were all interested in the technical problem. We didn't even ask what we were doing. And there was no Chicago phase because they were kept at it till the end. They didn't know it was going to go off, when it went off. So they were all excited, what Oppenheimer called, you know, a beautiful technical problem or something. So that's what they were engaged in. And yeah, in that respect, Feynman is correct. A number of people did become pretty active but [there] weren't many.
Do you see that as a danger? You have a class of technical people who…
Take a look at what happened. We are lucky that the German physicists didn't get there, they would have done the same thing, would it have been any different?
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