Imperial Ambitions: Conversations with Noam Chomsky on the Post-9/11 World
Interviews with David Barsamian

MARCH 22, 2003
The world in general correctly perceives the US invasion of Iraq as a test case, an effort to establish a new norm
for the use of military force.  This new norm was articulated in general terms by the White House in September
2002 when it announced the new National Security Strategy of the United States of America.  The new doctrine
was not one of preemptive war, which arguably falls within some stretched interpretation of the UN Charter, but
rather a doctrine that doesn’t even begin to have any grounds in international law, namely, preventive war.  That
is, the United States will rule the world by force, and if there is any challenge to its domination- whether it is
perceived in the distance, invented, imagined, or whatever- then the United States will have the right to destroy
that challenge before it becomes a threat.

To establish a new norm, you have to do something.  The easiest way to establish the right to preventive war is to
select a completely defenseless target, which will be easily overwhelmed by the most massive military force in
human history.  However, in order to do that credibly, at least in the eyes of your own population, you have to
frighten people.  So the defenseless threat has to be characterized as an awesome threat to survival.  In a really
spectacular propaganda achievement, which will no doubt go down in history, Washington undertook a massive
effort to convince Americans, alone in the world, that Saddam Hussein was not only a monster but also a threat to
our existence.  And it substantially succeeded.  Half the US population believes that Saddam Hussein was
‘personally involved’ in the September 11, 2001, attacks.

In reality, the war is a textbook example of aggression, with the purpose of extending the scope for further
aggression.  Much of the world is overwhelmingly opposed to the war because they see that this is not just about
an attack on Iraq.  Many people correctly perceive it exactly the way it’s intended, as a firm statement of the
United States’ authority.  That’s why the US is now regarded as the greatest threat to peace in the world by a
large number of people, probably the vast majority of the population in the world.  It is important that resistance
movements to war, both in the US and internationally, recognize that the Iraq war is just part of a larger picture.  It
is psychologically easier to organize to oppose a military attack than it is to oppose a long-standing program of
imperial ambition, with other attacks to come.  That takes more thought, more dedication, and more long-term
engagement.  These are choices that people have to make.  The same was true for people in the civil rights
movement, the women’s movement, and every other movement.  

Oil is undoubtedly central to US strategy.  The Gulf region has been the main energy producing region of the
world since WW2 and is expected to be so for at least another generation.  The Persian Gulf is a huge source of
strategic power and material wealth.  And Iraq is absolutely central to it.  Iraq has the second largest oil reserves
in the world, and Iraqi oil is very easily accessible and cheap.  If you control Iraq, you are in a very strong position
to determine the price and production levels to undermine OPEC, and to throw your weight around throughout the
world.  This has nothing in particular to do with access to the oil for import into the US.  It’s about control of the
oil.  According to intelligence projections, Washington intends to rely on what they regard as more stable Atlantic
Basin resources, which means West Africa and the Western Hemisphere, areas that are more fully under US
control than is the Middle East, a difficult region.

If the Iraq war turns out to be an easy victory, with not too much fighting, and Washington can install a new regime
that it will call ‘democratic’, they will be emboldened to undertake the next intervention.  One possibility is the
Andean region.  The US military has bases and soldiers all around the Andes right now.  Colombia and Venezuela
are both substantial oil producers, and there is also oil in Ecuador and Brazil.  Another possibility is Iran.  For
years Israel has been pressing the US to take on Iran.  Iran is too big for Israel to attack, so they want the big
boys to come in and do it.  It is quite likely that this war is already underway.  A year ago, more than 10 percent of
the Israeli air force was reported to be permanently based in eastern Turkey- at the huge base there- and flying
reconnaissance missions over the Iranian border.  In addition, there are credible reports that the United States,
Turkey, and Israel are attempting to stir up Azeri nationalist forces in northern Iran.  This could put a wedge
through Iran and make it vulnerable to attack, but unless Iran is in a position where they cannot fight back, the US
will not attack.

The current administration’s imperial ambitions will leave the US economy in a very serious state, with huge
deficits, pretty much the same way they did in the 1980s.  And then it will be someone else’s problem.  Meanwhile,
they will have undermined social programs and diminished democracy by transferring decisions even further from
the public arena and into private hands.  Internally, the legacy they leave will be painful and hard, but only for the
majority of the population.  The people they are concerned about will be making out like bandits, very much like
during the Reagan years.  Many of the same people are in power now, after all.  And internationally, they hope
they will have institutionalized the doctrines of imperial domination through force and preventative wars of choice.

     Undermining Europe

The reasoning behind the Marshall Plan was that the United States wanted Europe to be unified, so it could serve
as a more efficient market for US corporations, offering great advantages of scale; but it was always concerned
about the threat that Europe might move off in another direction.  Many of the issues about accession of the
eastern countries to the European Union are related to this.  The United States is strongly in favor of this
accession process, because it is hoping that these countries will be more susceptible to US influence and will be
able to undermine the core of Europe, which is France and Germany, big industrial countries that could move in a
somewhat more independent direction.  

Also in the background is a long-standing US hatred of the European social system, which provides decent
wages, working conditions, and benefits.  The United States doesn’t want that model to exist, because it’s a
dangerous one.  People may get funny ideas.  And it’s understood that the accession of Eastern European
countries, with economies based on low wages and repression of labor, may help undermine the social standards
in Western Europe.  That would be a big benefit for the United States.


APRIL 5, 2003
Language is the way we interact and communicate so, naturally, people use it to try to shape attitudes and
opinions and to induce conformity and subordination.  This has been true forever, but propaganda became an
organized and very self-conscious industry only in the last century.  If you can control people by force, it’s not so
important to control what they think and feel.  But if you lose the capacity to control people by force, as in modern
democracies, it becomes more necessary to control attitudes and opinions.  Early in the twentieth century,
government leaders were beginning to fully embrace that you can control the ‘public mind’ and ‘manufacture
consent’.  They realized that you could have not only what is called ‘on-job control’ but also ‘off-job control’.  This
means turning people into robots in every part of their lives by inducing a ‘philosophy of futility’, focusing people
on the superficial aspects of life, like fashionable consumption.  Let the people who are supposed to run the show
do so without any interference from the mass of the population, who have no business in the political arena.  In
today’s world, it’s not so much government that exercises control, but corporations.  Now private tyrannies-
corporate systems- play the role of controlling opinions and attitudes.  These corporations are, of course, closely
tied to the government though.

Propaganda is essential for manufacturing consent for war.  Karl Rove, the president’s manager, is not directly
involved in the war planning, and neither is George Bush.  That’s in the hands of other people.  But Rove’s goal,
he says, is “to shape perceptions of Mr. Bush as a wartime leader and to prepare for the re-election campaign
that will start as soon as the war ends,” so that Republicans can push their domestic agenda.  That means tax
cuts- they say for the economy, but they mean for the rich- and other programs that are designed to benefit an
extremely small sector of ultra-wealthy and privileged, and that will have the effect of harming the mass of the
population.  There is, and has been, a long-term effort to destroy the institutional basis for social support
systems, to eliminate programs such as Social Security that are based on the conception that people have to
have some concern for one another.  The idea that we should feel sympathy and solidarity has to be driven from
our minds.  That’s a large part of the domestic agenda, quite apart from just shifting wealth and power toward
even narrower sectors.

The way to successfully destroy social programs- since people aren’t going to accept it otherwise- is to make
people afraid.  If people are frightened that their security is threatened, they will gravitate toward the strong
leaders.  They will trust the Republicans to protect them from enemies and therefore suppress their own concerns
and interests.  And then the Republicans will be able to drive through their domestic agenda, maybe even
institutionalize it, making it very hard to reverse.  So first they frighten people and then they present the president
as a powerful wartime leader who is succeeding in overcoming this awesome force- an enemy chosen precisely
because it can be crushed in no time.

The drumbeat of wartime propaganda began in September 2002, which also happened to be the opening of the
midterm congressional campaign.  There were a couple of constant themes.  One was that Iraq was an imminent
threat to the security of the United States.  We’ve got to stop them today or they will destroy us tomorrow.  The
second was that Iraq was behind September 11.  Nobody said that straight out; instead, they all insinuated that
Iraq was responsible.  Then they said that Iraq was planning new atrocities.  Right after September 11 the
percentage of the US population that thought Iraq was involved was around 3 percent.  By now, half the
population, maybe more, believes that Iraq was responsible for September 11.  Since September 2002, roughly
60 percent of the US population believes that Iraq is a threat to our security.  These attitudes are closely
correlated to support for war.

No one else in the world believes any of this.  No other country regards Iraq as a threat to its security.  Kuwait and
Iran, which have both been invaded by Iraq, don’t regard Iraq as a threat to their security.  It’s ridiculous.  As a
result of the sanctions, which have killed hundreds of thousands of people, the country has the weakest economy
and the weakest military force in the region.  Iraq’s military expenditures are less than half those of Kuwait, which
has 10 percent of Iraq’s population, and well below others in the Middle East.  And, of course, everybody knows
who the real superpower in the region is- in effect, an offshore US military base- that has hundreds of nuclear
weapons and massive armed forces: Israel.

Only in the United States do people fear Iraq.  This is a real achievement of propaganda.  It is interesting that the
US is so susceptible to this.  But, for whatever reasons, the United States happens to be a very frightened country
by comparative standards.  Levels of fear here on virtually every issue- crime, immigration, you pick it- are just off
the spectrum.  Right through the 1980s, the tourist industry in Europe collapsed every few years because
Americans were so frightened as a result of some spike in media coverage of terrorism that they thought, if we go
to Europe there will be some Arab there who is going to try to kill us.  Europeans don’t know what to make of this.  
How can a country be so frightened of something completely nonexistent that they’re afraid to travel to Europe?

Forty years ago, during the Cold War, kids were literally being taught to hide under desks to protect themselves
from atomic bombs.  At the time, President Kennedy was trying to organize the hemisphere to support his terrorist
acts against Cuba, which were very severe.  Generally, other countries in the Western Hemisphere just have to
do what they’re told by the United States, or they’re in bad trouble.  But Mexico refused to go along with the
campaign against Cuba.  The Mexican ambassador was quoted as saying: “If we publicly declare that Cuba is a
threat to our security, forty million Mexicans will die laughing.”   

The Bush administration’s current claims are so outlandish that it’s very hard to expect people to stick with them
unless they keep repeating them and pounding them in.  If you’re trying to turn people into mindless consumers
so they don’t interfere with you while you’re reordering the world, you have to keep at them from infancy.  
Unfortunately, there aren’t any techniques for recognizing propaganda, just ordinary common sense.  You have to
be willing to develop an attitude for critical examination toward whatever is presented to you.  Of course, the whole
educational system and the whole media system have the opposite goal.  You’re taught to be a passive, obedient
follower.  Unless you can break those habits, you’re likely to be a victim of propaganda.  You need to be able to
read the American propaganda the same way you would read Iraqi propaganda.  Look at yourself the same way.  
If you’re willing to apply to yourself the same standards you apply to others, you’ve won.  From then on it’s easy.

     Embedded Journalists

The issue of ‘embedded reporters’ came up dramatically in the Peter Arnett case.  Peter Arnett is an experienced,
respected journalist with a lot of achievements to his credit.  But he’s hated now because he gave an interview on
Iraqi television.  Is anybody condemned for giving an interview on US television?  No, that’s wonderful.  From the
standpoint of an independent journalist, giving an interview on US television should be exactly the same as giving
an interview on Iraqi television.  In fact, it’s worse; it’s not a symmetrical situation.  The United States is invading
Iraq.  It’s as open an act of aggression as there has been in modern history, a major war crime.  An independent
journalist giving an interview over the television of the invading forces or giving an interview over the television of
the invaded country shouldn’t be any different, but here in the US it’s described as treachery.  Arnett abandoned
his journalistic integrity and so on.  What this demonstrates about US journalism is telling.  One of the best
American journalists, who is therefore one of the least used, Charles Glass, a Middle East correspondent with
tremendous experience, pointed out in the London Review of Books that the US must be the only country in the
world where someone can be called a terrorist for defending his own country from attack.

     International Law

After WW2, a relatively new framework of international law was established, including the Geneva Conventions.  
This framework doesn’t include any such concept of ‘unlawful combatant’ in the way it is now being used by the
US.  This category predates WW2, when you were allowed to do just about anything during wartime.  But under
the Geneva Conventions, which were established to criminalize formally the atrocities of the Nazis, the situation
changed.  Prisoners of war are supposed to have special status.  The Bush administration, with the cooperation
of the media and the courts, is reverting back to the period before there was any serious international framework
dealing with crimes against humanity or crimes of war.  Washington has claimed the right not only to carry out
specific acts of aggression, but to classify the people it bombs and captures as ‘unlawful combatants’ who have
no legal protection.

In fact, they have gone well beyond that.  The administration has now claimed the right to round up people here,
including American citizens, place them in confinement indefinitely without access to families or lawyers, and to
hold them without charges until the president decides that ‘the war on terror’, or whatever he wants to call it, is
over.  It’s astonishing.  The government is claiming the right to strip people of their fundamental right of citizenship
if the attorney general merely infers- he doesn’t have to have any evidence- that the person is involved somehow
in actions that might be harmful to the United States.  You have to go back to totalitarian states to find anything
like this.    

     British

During WW2, Britain recognized- we have plenty of internal documents about it- the obvious: Britain had been the
world-dominant power, but the United States was going to become the dominant power after the war.  Britain had
to make a choice.  Was it going to become just another country, or was it going to be a ‘junior partner’ of the
United States?  It accepted the role of junior partner.  And that’s what it has been since then.  Britain has been
kicked in the face over and over again in the most disgraceful way, but they continue to accept their role in hopes
that in return they will be granted some privileges.  And that’s Britain’s role.  It’s disgraceful.

     What Should I Do?

Only Americans ask this question.  In the third world, they don’t ask what they should do.  They tell you what they
are doing.  These are poor, oppressed people, living under horrendous conditions, and they would never dream
of asking you what they should do.  It’s only in the highly privileged cultures like ours that people ask this
question.  We have every option open to us, and have none of the problems faced by the intellectuals in Turkey
or campesinos in Brazil.  We can do anything.  But people here are trained to believe that there are easy
answers, and it doesn’t work that way.  If you want to do something, you have to be dedicated and committed to it
day after day.  Educational programs, organizing, activism- That’s the way things change.  You want a magic key,
so you can go back to watching television tomorrow?  It doesn’t exist.

It is interesting that people today believe that there was such great student activism a half century ago.  It’s true
that by 1970 students were antiwar protesters.  But that only happened after eight years of US war against South
Vietnam, which by then had been extended to all of Indochina and had practically wiped the place out.  In 1962, it
was announced that US planes were bombing South Vietnam- there was no protest.  The United States used
chemical warfare to destroy food crops and drive millions of people into ‘strategic hamlets’, essentially
concentration camps.  All of this was public, but there was no protest; it was impossible to get anyone to talk about
it.  Even in a liberal city like Boston, you couldn’t have public meetings against the war because they would be
broken up by students, with the support of the media.  The protests came only after years and years of war.  By
then, hundreds of thousands of people had been killed and much of Vietnam had been destroyed.  But all of that
is erased from history, because it tells too much of the truth, which is that it took years and years of hard work by
plenty of people, mostly young, to build a protest movement.  We are simply taught that there was a huge antiwar
movement and now it’s gone.  The actual history can’t be acknowledged.  You aren’t supposed to learn that
dedicated, committed effort can bring about significant changes of consciousness and understanding.  That’s a
very dangerous idea, and therefore it’s been wiped out of history.  


SEPTEMBER 11, 2003
The idea of imperialism is to have independent states, but with weak governments that must rely on the imperial
power for their survival.  They can rip off the population if they like.  That’s fine.  But they have to provide a
façade behind which the real power can rule.  That’s standard imperialism.

Racism is inherent in imperial rule- it’s almost invariable.  The psychology is simple.  When you have your boot on
someone’s neck, you can’t just say, “I’m doing this because I’m a brute.”  You have to say, “I’m doing it because
they deserve it.  It’s for their own good.  That’s why I’ve got to do it.”  They’re ‘naughty children’ who have to be
disciplined.  Filipinos were described in this way.  And it’s exactly what’s been going on in the Palestinian
Occupied Territories for years.  One of the worst aspects of the Israeli occupation has been the humiliation and
degradation of Palestinians at every moment.  That’s inherent in the relation of domination.

     Failure in Iraq

Amazingly, the Iraqi occupation is not succeeding.  It takes real talent to fail in this.  For one thing, military
occupations almost always work.  Furthermore, Iraq is an unusually easy case.  Here’s a country that has been
decimated by a decade of murderous sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of people and left the whole
place in tatters, devastated by wars, and run by a brutal tyrant.  The idea that you can’t get a military occupation
to run under these conditions, and with no help from outside for the resistance, is almost inconceivable.  The
occupation of Iraq has been an astonishing failure.  The administration’s original planning looks as if it isn’t going
to work.  This is why you now hear all this backtracking about trying to get the United Nations to come in and pick
up some of the costs.

     North Korea

North Korea has a deterrent.  The deterrent is not nuclear weapons, but instead is the massive artillery at the
Demilitarized Zone, aimed at Seoul, the capital of South Korea, and at maybe tens of thousands of American
troops at the border.  Unless the Pentagon can figure out some way of taking out that artillery with precision-
guided weapons, North Korea has a deterrent, as opposed to Iraq, which has nothing.

Still, Korea is a major concern for the United States, in large part because of its position within Northeast Asia.  
The Northeast Asian region is the most dynamic economic region in the world.  It includes two major industrial
societies, Japan and South Korea, and China is increasingly becoming an industrial society.  It has enormous
resources.  Siberia has all kinds of resources, including oil.  Together, the countries in Northeast Asia have close
to a third of the world’s GDP, way more than the United States, and about half of global foreign exchange.  The
region has enormous financial resources.  And it’s growing very fast, much faster than any other region in the
world.  Its trade is increasing internally and it’s connecting to the Southeast Asian countries, sometimes called
ASEAN Plus Three: the countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus China, Japan, and South
Korea.  Some of the pipelines being built from the resource centers to the industrial centers would naturally go to
South Korea, which means right through North Korea.  If the Trans-Siberian railway is extended, as is surely
planned, it will probably follow the same route through North Korea to South Korea.  So North Korea is a fairly
strategic position with regard to this area.

The world now has three major economic centers: North America, Northeast Asia, and Europe.  In one dimension,
the military dimension, the United States is in a class by itself- but not in the others.  The United States is not
particularly happy about Northeast Asian economic integration, in much the same way it has always been
ambivalent about European integration.  In international relations theory, this is called ‘realism’.  You attempt to
prevent other powers from grouping together to oppose the hegemonic power.

     Money

Empires are costly.  Running Iraq is not cheap.  Somebody’s paying.  Somebody’s paying the corporations that
destroyed Iraq and the corporations who are rebuilding it.  In both cases, they’re getting paid by the US taxpayer.  
Those are the gifts of the US taxpayer to the US corporations.  Who pays Halliburton and Bechtel?  The US
taxpayer.  The same taxpayers fund the military-corporate system of weapons manufacturers and technology
companies that bombed Iraq.  So first you destroy Iraq, and then you rebuild it.  It’s a transfer of wealth from the
general population to narrow sectors of the population.  Even if you look at the famous Marshall Plan, that’s pretty
much what it was.  It’s talked about now as an act of unimaginable benevolence.  Of the $13 billion of Marshall
Plan aid, about $2 billion went directly to the US oil companies.  That was part of the effort to shift Europe from a
coal-based to an oil-based economy, and to make European countries more dependent on the United States.  
Europe had plenty of coal.  It didn’t have oil.  If you look at the rest of the aid, very little of the money ever actually
left the United States.  It just moved from one pocket to another.  The Marshall Plan aid to France just about
covered the costs of the French effort to reconquer Indochina.  So the US taxpayer wasn’t rebuilding France.  
They were paying the French to buy American weapons to crush the Indo-Chinese.  And they were paying
Holland to crush the independence movement in Indonesia.  Internal class war with major transfers of money from
the general population to the major corporations is a very significant element of the empire.

     Benevolence

In war, you can’t measure moral degradation, but it’s very real and very significant.  And that’s part of the reason
that an imperial system, or any system of domination, always has a cover of benevolence.  You must present
things in a way that it appears that you are doing it for the benefit of the people you are crushing.  It’s hard to find
an imperial system in which the intellectual class didn’t laud its own benevolence.  When Hitler was dismembering
Czechoslovakia, it was accompanied by wonderful rhetoric about bringing peace to ethnic groups who were in
conflict, making sure they could all live happily together under benign German supervision.  When Japanese
fascists were conquering China and carrying out huge atrocities like the Nanking Massacre, they spoke of
creating an ‘earthly paradise’ in which the peoples of Asia would work together.  Japan would protect them from
Communist ‘bandits’ and would sacrifice itself for their benefit so they would all have peace and prosperity.  You
really have to labor to find an exception to this type of rhetoric.

We like to think of other countries that oppose what we do as simply being unable to understand our pure
motives.  They heap ‘obloquy’ upon us, and seek to discover crass motives behind our benevolent actions.  But
everything we do is for the benefit of the natives, the barbarians.  We want to bring them free markets and honest
rule and freedom and all kinds of wonderful things.  Unfortunately, our perception doesn’t stack up against
reality.  If we define ‘rogue state’ in terms of any principle, such as violation of international law, or aggression, or
atrocities, or human rights violations, the United States certainly qualifies, as you would expect of the most
powerful state in the world.  Just as Britain did.  Just as France did.

Notice, by the way, that one of the great benefits of being a respectable intellectual in the United States is that
you never need any evidence for anything you say.  In order to make it to the peak of respectability, you have to
understand that it’s fairly absurd even to ask for evidence for praise of those with power.  It’s just automatic.  Of
course they’re magnificent.  Maybe they made some mistakes in the past, but now they’re magnificent.  And to
look for evidence of that is like looking for evidence for the truths of arithmetic.


FEBRUARY 12, 2004
In a new documentary, The Fog of War, Robert McNamara makes a rather interesting admission.  He quotes
General Curtis LeMay, with whom he served in the period of firebombing of Japanese cities in WW2, as saying, “If
we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”  Then McNamara says, “I think he’s right…But
what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”  McNamara served in a planning role, figuring out
how to maximize Japanese civilian deaths at minimal cost.  Apparently, Tokyo was selected as a target because it
was very densely populated and made mostly of wood, so you could start a firestorm that would kill some one
hundred thousand people with no difficulty.  Japan had no air defenses at this point.

The Nuremberg war crimes tribunal had to decide what would be considered a war crime, and they made the
operational definition of a war crime anything the enemy did that the Allies didn’t do.  This was explicit- and
explains why, for example, the devastating Allied bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, and other urban civilian centers
were not considered war crimes.  The US and British air forces did much more bombing of urban civilian centers
than did the Germans.  They aimed mainly at working-class and poor civilian areas.  But since the Allies did much
more than the Axis, bombing urban centers was removed from the category of war crimes.  A German admiral-
Karl Doenitz, the submarine commander- brought as a defense witness and American submarine commander,
Nimitz, who testified that Americans had done the things that Doenitz was charged with.  He was exonerated.  The
message was clear: Crimes are something others do, not something we do.

The same attitude can be found in the Bush doctrine.  Many established figures criticized the concept of
‘preventative war’ not so much because they disagreed with it but because they thought the brazenness of its
declaration and implementation was ultimately a threat to the US.  Even Madeline Albright, the Clinton secretary of
state, pointed out, quite accurately, that while every president has had such a doctrine, you don’t advertise it.  
“Anticipatory self-defense,” she wrote in Foreign Affairs, is “a tool every president has quietly held in reserve.”  
You keep it in your back pocket, and you use it when you want to.  Henry Kissinger approved the doctrine, though
he added one proviso: we have to understand that this can’t be a universal principle available to every nation.  
This doctrine is for us, not for anyone else.  We will use force whenever we like against anyone we regard as a
potential threat, and maybe we will delegate that right to client states, but it’s not for others.

The Bush doctrine also stated that, just as we have the right to attack and destroy terrorists, we also have the
right to attack and destroy states that harbor terrorists.  Virtually every country harbors terrorists, including the
United States.  Right now there is an extremely important case coming to appeals court in Miami that bears on this
question very directly, the case of the Cuban Five.  The US launched a terrorist war against Cuba in 1959, which
picked up rapidly under Kennedy with Operation Mongoose, and actually came close to triggering a nuclear war.  
The peak of the atrocities was in the late 1970s, but by then the US was no longer directly carrying out terrorist
acts, but instead was harboring terrorists who were carrying out attacks on Cuba- quite serious ones- in violation
of US and international law.  The terrorist acts continued until at least the late 1990s.  When it became clear that
the US was doing nothing to stop terrorists harbored here from carrying out attacks, Cuba decided to infiltrate the
terrorist organizations in Florida with agents of its own to collect information.  In 1998, Cuba provided high-level
FBI officials with thousands of pages of documents and videotapes about the planning of terrorist actions in
Florida.  And the FBI responded, namely, by arresting the infiltrators.  That’s the case of the Cuban Five: the
infiltrators who gave the FBI the information about terrorists in the United States were arrested.  The prosecutor
conceded that there was basically no case against the Cubans, but they were convicted anyway.  The case is
being appealed, but three of them have life sentences, the others long sentences, and their families have been
denied the right to visit them.  This is a perfect example of a state harboring terrorists- and should be a major
scandal.

Take Orlando Bosch, for example, whom the FBI accuses of numerous serious terrorist acts, some of them on US
soil, and whom the Justice Department described as a threat to US security that should be deported.  Bosch’s
activities include participation in the destruction of a Cuban airliner, in which seventy-three people were killed, in
1976.  George Bush Sr. granted Bosch a presidential pardon and he is now sitting happily in Miami.  Or take
Emmanuel Constant.  He is responsible for killing maybe four or five thousand Haitians.  He is living happily in
Queens, New York, because the United States refuses even to respond for requests for extradition.  So who is
harboring terrorists?  We conclude exactly what Kissinger was kind enough to say: such doctrines are unilateral.  
They are not intended as norms of international law; they are doctrines that grant the United States the right to
use force and violence and to harbor terrorists, but not anyone else.  For the powerful, crimes are those that
others commit.

Under the United Nations Charter, the planning and waging of aggressive war is regarded as a major war crime.  
The invasion of Iraq clearly falls into this category of illegal aggression, but it is not unprecedented.  The 1962
invasion of South Vietnam, for example, when Kennedy sent the air force to attack South Vietnam and began a
campaign of chemical warfare, with devastating consequences, driving the population into concentration camps,
was clearly aggression.  Then there’s the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon,
which were both carried out thanks to decisive US diplomatic, military, and economic support.  Both were
obviously aggression.

The 1989 invasion of Panama is another example.  In the course of the invasion, the US military killed, according
to Panamanian sources, three thousand civilians.  We can’t confirm the number because we don’t investigate our
own crimes, but the invasion was on par with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.  The US vetoed Security Council
resolutions and General Assembly resolutions condemning the invasion.  Noriega was seized from the Vatican
embassy and brought back to Florida- all hopelessly illegal- and then, in a ridiculous trial, he was convicted of
crimes that he had indeed committed, almost all of them when he was on CIA payroll.  If Saddam Hussein ever
comes to trial, it will be the same: he will be convicted of crimes that the US supported, but that fundamental detail
won’t be mentioned.

     Liberation

If you want to know whether a county was liberated, ask the population.  They should be the ones to decide, not
the intellectuals and politicians of the invading country.  And at about five-to-one, in Western-run polls, Iraqis say
the country is under occupation.  Iraqis were asked to name the foreign head of state they most respected.  The
leading answer was Jacques Chirac, the president of France, who was the symbol of opposition to the invasion of
Iraq.  And a substantial majority of Iraqis say US forces should leave, which is remarkable given how bad the
security situation is there.

Actually, if you look at the poll results, Iraqis show a much more sophisticated understanding of the West than we
do of ourselves.  When asked why they thought the US entered Iraq, 1 percent said that the goal of the invasion
was to establish democracy.  70 percent said that the goal was to take the overwhelmingly dominant position.  
Approximately 50 percent said that the US wants to establish democracy in Iraq but would not permit the Iraqi
government to carry out its own policies without US influence.  In other words, they understand that the US wants
democracy if the US can control it.  And that’s correct.  A democracy is a system in which you are free to do
whatever you like as long as you do what we tell you.  That ought to be taught in elementary schools here.  The
evidence is so overwhelming that it’s boring to repeat it, but somehow American commentators can’t comprehend
it.

Iraqis don’t have to read the Washington Post to discover that the United States is constructing its largest
embassy in the world in Baghdad or that Washington is insisting on a status-of-forces agreement in which the
sovereign Iraqi government will grant the United States the right to keep as many military troops and bases in Iraq
as it wants and for as long as it wants.  They don’t have to read the business press in the United States to
discover that the occupying authorities have imposed an economic regime that no sovereign state would accept
for a moment, which completely opens up Iraq to takeover from foreign corporations.  They can see that the
economic system being imposed on them is a Bush administration dream.  The only sector excluded from
complete foreign ownership is oil, because that would have been too blatant.  But if you read between the lines,
you see Halliburton executives explaining that the work they’re doing now, with nice taxpayer subsidies, will put
them in good position to manage and control Iraq’s oil resources in the future.

Though we do see some criticism now, it does not question the basic assumptions behind the invasion.  The
criticism is that the United States is trying to do the right thing but Bush is doing it badly.  The critics of war point
out that Bush didn’t tell us the truth about weapons of mass destruction.  But suppose he had told us the truth.  
Would that change anything?  If you want to find WMDs, you can find them all over the place.  Take, say, Israel.

     Weapons Proliferation

There is great concern right now about proliferation of nuclear weapons, as there should be.  Weapons
proliferation is increasing, which is an extremely dangerous threat to the world.  There are many reasons why this
is happening, but one reason is that Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons, as well as chemical and biological
weapons, which is not only a threat to itself but encourages others to proliferate in response and in self-defense.  
The United States itself is increasing proliferation by rejecting treaties, by barring any effort to stop militarization of
space, by developing what they call ‘mini-nukes’, which are actually massively destructive nuclear weapons.

Around 1950, the United States had a position of security.  There wasn’t a threat within shouting distance- except
for one potential threat: intercontinental ballistic missiles with thermonuclear warheads.  They weren’t yet
available, but they were beginning to be developed.  And they would be a threat to the US heartland, could
destroy it, in fact.  Surely, at the very least, we could have explored treaties that would have blocked the
development of these weapons.  But we didn’t.  In fact, it’s not unlikely that the Russians would have agreed to
such treaties.  They were so far behind technologically, and legitimately frightened and threatened, that they
might well have agreed not to develop these weapons.  As we know from newly opened Russian archives, they
also understood that the US was trying to spend them into economic destruction by compelling them to enter an
arms race that they couldn’t survive- remember, their economy was much smaller than ours.  So it’s possible, in
fact likely, that they would have accepted such a treaty.  But a treaty wasn’t what the people in charge of the US
wanted, because they had higher aims, like maximizing short-term power and privilege.  Today, militarization of
space is an extremely serious problem.  UN disarmament commissions have been immobilized for years.  This
goes back to the Clinton administration’s refusal to permit measures that would ban militarization of space.  In
September 2002, the Air Force Space Command, which is in charge of advanced space-age nuclear and other
weaponry, released its projection for the next several years, in which it said that the United States is going to
move from ‘control’ of space to ‘ownership’ of space.  This means putting platforms in space for highly destructive
weapons, including nuclear and laser weapons, which can be launched instantaneously, without warning,
anywhere in the world.  It means hypersonic drones that will keep the whole world under photo surveillance, with
high-resolution devices that can tell you if a car is driving across the street in Ankara or whatever else you
happen to be interested in.

Russia and China have already reacted to US weapons proliferation with an increase in military spending for
offensive military weapons.  Russia has shifted its missile system to launch on warning, meaning automated
response.  Russia’s nuclear weapons program was always extremely dangerous, but now with deteriorating
command and control systems, it’s even more dangerous.  Meanwhile, the United States has assumed a far more
aggressive posture.  More money is going into so-called military defense.  Everyone interprets the missile shield
as an offensive weapon that is supposed to provide protection against retaliation to a US first strike.  And
everyone knows how other countries will respond, namely, by increasing their offensive military capacities.  The
other mode of response that they are left with is terror.  These are the weapons available to the potential targets
of US attack.  So we’re asking for an increase in terror, an increase in proliferation, and an increase in threats to
people in the United States.  That’s the consequence of these programs.  The worst part about it is that its
purpose is the short-term gain of a few at the risk of long-term disaster for many.

     Global Warming

The concern over global warming has now reached a stage that even the Pentagon is producing studies about
the severe threat of global warming within the next twenty to thirty years.  One serious prediction is that there
could be a fairly sudden shift in the Gulf Stream, which would turn northern Europe into Labrador and Greenland,
and might turn large parts of the United States into dessert.  Rising sea levels could wipe out Bangladesh and kill
who knows how many people.  The most arable lands in Pakistan may become like the Sahara.  The effects of all
of this are indescribable.  Are we doing anything about it?  No.  We don’t care.  Planners don’t care.  It’s not part
of their framework.  That’s somebody else’s department.  You can’t blame individuals for this response because it
is simply built into the institutional structure.

     Change

There’s a lot we can do.  We have enormous privilege and tremendous freedom.  That means endless
opportunities.  But somehow the fact of enormous privilege and freedom carries with it a sense of impotence,
which is a strange but striking phenomenon.  The fact is, we can do just about anything.  There is no difficulty in
finding and joining groups that are working hard on issues that concern you.  But all too often, people are looking
for the quick, easy answer.  If you want to make changes in the world, you’re going to have to be there day after
day doing the boring, straightforward work of getting a few people interested in an issue, building a slightly bigger
organization, carrying out the next move, experiencing frustration, and finally getting somewhere.  That’s how the
world changes.  Every gain you can point to in any movement came from that kind of effort- not from people going
to one demonstration and dropping out when nothing happens, or voting once every four years and then going
home.  It’s fine to get a better, or maybe less worse, candidate in, but that’s the beginning, not the end.  If you end
there, you might as well not vote.  Unless you develop an ongoing, living, democratic culture that can compel the
candidates, they’re not going to do the things you voted for.


JUNE 11, 2004
The idea that Reagan struck a chord among the American people is simply not true.  He was not a popular
president.  Poll ratings through his years in office were roughly average, below every one of his successors,
except for Bush II.  By 1992, Reagan had become the most unpopular living former president apart from Richard
Nixon.  Then came a massive propaganda campaign, which has been going on for about ten years now, to turn
him into a semi-divinity, which has had some success.  The reverence for the imperial leader increased as the
propaganda campaign mounted.  In reality, Reagan’s regime was one of murder, brutality, and violence, which
devastated a number of countries and probably left two hundred thousand people dead in Latin America, with
hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows.  But since we did it, it never happened.  The person responsible
for one component of this terror, the Contra war in Nicaragua, was the person known as the ‘proconsul’ of
Honduras, John Negroponte.  Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras, which served as the base for the
terrorist army attacking Nicaragua.  He had two tasks as proconsul.  First, to lie to Congress about atrocities
carried out by the Honduran security services so that military aid could continue to flow to Honduras.  And second,
to supervise the camps in which the mercenary army was being trained, armed, and organized to carry out the
atrocities, atrocities for which it was condemned by the World Court.  Now Negroponte is the proconsul of Iraq.  In
Honduras, he was in charge of the biggest CIA station in the world.  He’s now in charge of the biggest embassy in
the world.  But again, because we did it is sufficient reason for effacing it from history.

During the Reagan years, the administration had a policy toward South Africa of ‘constructive engagement’.  
There was strong opposition to apartheid rule at the time, and Congress had passed legislation banning aid for
South Africa.  The Reaganites had to find ways to get around congressional legislation in order to in fact increase
their trade with South Africa.  So they said that South Africa was defending itself against one of the ‘more
notorious terrorist groups’ in the world, namely, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress.  This was a period
of massacres, devastation, and destruction, all of which is effaced.

In 1983, the US invaded Grenada.  The claim was that Grenada was a Soviet-Cuban beachhead because some
Cuban contractors, under British planning and authorization mind you, were building an airfield.  Anyone who
could believe that an air base in Grenada could be used to attack the United States does not even reach the level
of laughingstock.  Of course, the real reason for invasion was not obscure.  Just a couple of days before, there
had been a bombing in Lebanon in which 240 American marines were killed.  And they had to cover this up with a
grand gesture defending us from destruction by Grenada.  After the invasion, Reagan stood up and said, “Our
days of weakness are over.  Our military forces are back on their feet and standing tall.”

The same thing happened in Nicaragua.  Reagan declared a national emergency because the government of
Nicaragua posed “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United
States.”  He then explained that Nicaragua was “a privileged sanctuary for terrorists and subversives just two
days’ driving time from Harlington, Texas.  Anyone looking at this wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

And this trend started well before Reagan.  In 1944, Guatemala finally had an authentic democratic government,
with enormous popular support because of its progressive social policies.  For the first time, the government
mobilized peasants to participate in the political system.  A real democracy was developing, which could have
influenced other countries in Latin America to do the same.  The United States considered this to be an incredible
crime.  They worried that Guatemala might be supporting strikes in nearby Honduras or aiding Jose Figueres, the
leading figure of Central American democracy, who was trying to overthrow a dictatorship in Costa Rica.  When
the US threatened the country with attack, Guatemala sought military assistance from Europe, which the US
blocked.  Finally, Guatemala, trying to defend itself from an attack by the hemispheric superpower, made the
tactical mistake of accepting military aid from the only country that would help out, Czechoslovakia.  The US then
triumphantly discovered that Czech arms were going to Guatemala, and this fact was trumpeted as a threat to the
US.  How can the US survive if Guatemala has some rifles from Czechoslovakia?  This was used as the pretext for
invasion.

It was well understood, long before George Orwell, that memory must be repressed.  Not only memory but
consciousness of what’s happening right in front of you must be repressed, because if the public comes to
understand what’s being done in its name, it probably won’t permit it.  That’s the main reason for propaganda.  
Propaganda campaigns can either be explicit or silent.  When you’re silent about your own crimes, that’s
propaganda too.  And the reason for propaganda, both kinds, is that people do care, and if they find out what’s
really happening, they’re not going to let it continue.  Power systems never tell the truth, if they can get away with
it, because they simply don’t trust the public.  It is the same thing with classified documents.  A very small
proportion of these internal documents have anything to do with security, no matter how broadly you interpret it.  
They primarily have to do with ensuring that the major enemy- the domestic population- is kept in the dark about
the actions of the powerful.  And that’s because the people in power, whether it’s business power or government
power or doctrinal power, are afraid that people do care, and therefore the powerful have to consciously
manipulate the public’s attitudes and beliefs.

The CIA is another wonderful tool for those in power.  It acts as an agency of the White House to carry out actions
with what’s called ‘plausible deniability’.  The CIA is assigned the responsibility of committing the crimes and
atrocities, and then if anything goes wrong, you can blame it on ‘rogue’ elements at the agency.  But that’s a
joke.  It’s very hard to find a case in which the CIA acted outside presidential authority.    

The Reagan administration was instrumental in supporting the mujahideen, elements of which later morphed into
the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  In fact, they went beyond supporting them.  They organized them.  They collected
radical Islamists from around the world- the most violent, crazed elements they could find- and tried to forge them
into a military force in Afghanistan.  The mujahideen were armed, trained, and directed by Pakistani intelligence
mainly, but under CIA supervision and control, with the support of Britain and other powers.  You could argue that
this would have been legitimate if it had been for the purpose of defending Afghanistan, but it wasn’t.  In fact, it
probably prolonged the war in Afghanistan.  The Soviet archives suggest Moscow was ready to pull out of
Afghanistan in the early 1980s.  But that wasn’t the point.  The point was not to defend the Afghans but to harm
the Russians.  The mujahideen carried out terrorist activities right inside Russia.  And these same forces morphed
into what became Al Qaeda.  Incidentally, those terrorist activities stopped after the Russians pulled out of
Afghanistan, because the mujahideen were trying to do exactly what they said they were trying to do: to protect
Muslim lands from ‘the infidels’.

Al Qaeda was barely mentioned in US intelligence reports until 1998.  Clinton’s bombing of Sudan and
Afghanistan in 1998 effectively created the organization, both as a known entity in the intelligence world and also
in the Muslim world.  In fact, the bombings created Osama bin Laden as a major symbol, led to a very sharp
increase in recruitment and financing for Al Qaeda-style networks, and tightened relations between bin Laden and
the Taliban, which had previously been quite hostile to him.  The bombing of Sudan, in particular, infuriated
people throughout the Arab world.  The United States knew perfectly well that it was targeting a major producer of
pharmaceuticals and veterinary supplies for a poor African country.  Of course that’s going to have devastating
effects.  It has been estimated that several tens of thousands of deaths were caused as a consequence of the
bombing.  Here that’s not an issue.  But if Al Qaeda blew up half the pharmaceutical supplies in some country that
mattered, we wouldn’t say, “Oh, well, it’s no big deal.”  But when we did it, it didn’t happen, and the consequences
didn’t occur.  You’re not even allowed to mention the fact that the United States just thoughtlessly carries out
major crimes.

Osama bin Laden himself only became anti-American around 1991, for several reasons.  The United States and
Saudi Arabia refused to allow him to carry out a jihad against Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War.  But the
main reason was that the United States had bases in Saudi Arabia near two of the holiest cities in Islam.  It needs
to be recognized that the United States has sowed in the Middle East and South Asia very poisonous seeds.  
These seeds are growing now.  Some have ripened and others are ripening.  An examination of why they were
sown, what has grown, and what can now be done is needed.  And missiles won’t be able to solve this problem.  It
has been rightly pointed out that every use of force is another small victory for bin Laden, helping him mobilize his
constituency with a common view that the West is on a crusade to try to destroy the Muslim world.  The war in Iraq
has had exactly the same effect.

     Kerry vs. Bush

Kerry and Bush have different constituencies, and have different groups of people around them.  On international
affairs there probably wouldn’t be any major policy changes if Kerry gets elected.  It would probably be more like
the Clinton years, when you had more or less the same policies but in a more modulated form that was not so
brazen, aggressive and violent.  But on domestic issues there could be some fairly significant differences in
outcomes.  The people around Bush are real fanatics.  They’re not hiding it.  They want to destroy the whole
array of progressive achievements of the past century.  They’ve already more or less gotten rid of the
progressive income tax.  They’re trying to destroy the limited medical care system.  They’re going after Social
Security.  They’ll probably go after schools.  They want a huge, massively intrusive government, but one that
works for them.  The Kerry people will do something not so fantastically different, but they have a different
constituency to appeal to, and are much more likely to protect some limited form of benefits for the general
population.

There are other differences.  A large part of the popular constituency of the Bush people is the extremist
fundamentalist religious sector in the country, which is huge.  There is nothing like it in any other industrial
country.  And Bush has to keep throwing these people red meat to keep them in line.  While they’re getting
shafted by Bush’s economic and social policies, he’s got to make them think he’s doing something for them.  But
throwing red meat to that constituency is not only very dangerous for the world, because it means violence and
aggression, but also for the country, because it means seriously harming civil liberties.  Of course, the Kerry
people don’t really have that constituency.  They would like to have it, but they’re never going to appeal to it
much.  They have to appeal somehow to working people, women, minorities, and others.


NOVEMBER 30, 2004   
The ‘doctrine of good intentions’ says that occasionally US policy is marred by the proverbial ‘bad apple’ or ‘tragic
mistake’, but basically the record of our goodness continues unimpeded.  The standard story in scholarship and
in media is that there are two conflicting tendencies in US foreign policy.  One is what’s called Wilsonian idealism,
which is based on noble intentions.  The other is sober realism, which says that we have to realize the limitations
of our good intentions.  Sometimes our noble intentions cannot be fulfilled in the real world.  These are the only
two options.  Today, for example, there can no longer be any doubt that George Bush and Tony Blair are
motivated by their vision and faith in democracy and rights.  We know this because they’ve said so, and that
proves it.  But we have to be more realistic and acknowledge that Iraqis and others in the Middle East may not be
able to rise to the heights that we have planned for them.

Or how the United States entered Vietnam “through an excess of righteousness and disinterested benevolence.”  
It was a “dangerous mistake which marred our blundering efforts to do good.”  But looking at reality, a major
concern in the late 1940s right through to when Kennedy launched the full-scale war was that an independent
Vietnam could be a successful example to its neighbors, Thailand and Indonesia, which had major resources,
unlike Vietnam.  By the mid-1960s, South Vietnam, which was the main target of US intervention, had been
virtually destroyed, and the chances that Vietnam would ever be a model for anything had essentially
disappeared.  Nobody discusses that because the story has to be that we are benevolent, we made a mistake,
and we lost because we didn’t achieve our maximal goals.  Anything outside of that framework is just unintelligible.

     War Criminals

One of the first acts in the conquest of Falluja was to take over the general hospital, which was a major war
crime.  And they gave a reason.  The reason was the hospital was a “center of propaganda against the allied
forces” because it was producing “inflated civilian casualty figures.”  First of all, how do we know they were
inflated?  Because our dear leader said so.  Secondly, the idea that you take over a hospital because it’s
producing casualty figures is obscene.  The Geneva Conventions could not be clearer.  The wording says
explicitly and clearly that “Medical and religious personnel shall be respected and protected and shall be granted
all available help for the performance of their duties… Medical units and transports shall be respected and
protected at all times and shall not be the object of attack.”  In the attack on Falluja General Hospital, patients
were kicked out of their beds and doctors and patients were forced to lie on the floor, handcuffed.  This is a grave
breach of the Geneva Conventions.  In fact, the entire political leadership is eligible for the death penalty under
US law, according to the War Crimes Act passed by the 1996 Republican Congress.

The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, did a careful study, which estimated conservatively that the most
probable number of ‘excess deaths’ due to the Iraq war is about one hundred thousand.  Their cluster sample
excluded Falluja, where the number of violent deaths was much higher and would have greatly inflated the total;
and it included the Kurdish regions, where there was almost no fighting, and which therefore lowered the national
average.  So their estimate is probably on the low side.  The report was mentioned in the US media but was
mostly dismissed, even though it followed standard techniques of epidemiological studies.  In Britain, Tony Blair’s
spokesperson said that the study isn’t worth anything because “the findings were based on extrapolation”- not
unlike every other epidemiological study.  And besides, the Iraqi ministry of health- that is, the ministry of the US-
British-imposed client government- gives a much lower figure.  In England at least they had to discuss it.  In the
US, it didn’t even matter.

In the case of Vietnam, we literally do not know within millions the real number of civilian casualties.  The official
estimates are around two million, but the real number is more likely close to double that.  There’s been only one
public-opinion study in the United States that asked people to estimate the number of Vietnamese casualties from
war.  The mean answer was a hundred thousand, about 5 percent of the official figure.  It’s as if in Germany you
asked people how many Jews were killed in WW2 and they said three hundred thousand.  We would think there
was a big problem in Germany if that’s what Germans were thinking.  

How many victims of chemical warfare were there after 1962, when Kennedy started to destroy food crops and
ground cover so that there wouldn’t be any indigenous support for guerrillas, using dioxin, one of the most
carcinogenic elements on earth?  There has been an intensive study of the effect of Agent Orange on American
troops.  At first the Pentagon denied there was any harmful impact from Agent Orange on US troops, but now they
accept the findings.  But what about the Vietnamese people, who were being dosed with it?  Exposure to dioxin is
correlated closely with cancers and with other horrors, including children being born without arms and brains.  
Nobody really knows the numbers, but the rough estimates are that maybe half a million or a million Vietnamese
died just from chemical warfare.  

In Iraq, there are reports of civilians trying to flee Falluja who were turned back by US forces, and of Red Crescent
vehicles attempting to get in to deliver medical supplies to besieged and wounded Iraqis that were also turned
back.  Women and children were allowed to leave; men were stopped, if they were found, and sent back.  They
were supposed to be killed.  When similar actions happened in Serbia in the mid-1990s, it was universally called
genocide.  When we do it, it’s liberation.  Again the Geneva Conventions were ignored.  The laws of war require
military forces to protect civilians as refugees and forbid returning them to a combat zone.  But those rules don’t
apply to us.

It’s interesting that one of the only war crimes that the media are talking about is the case of the marine that kind
of lost it in the middle of combat and killed a wounded Iraqi.  Yes, what he did is a crime, but it’s a miniscule
footnote.  We blow it up as a way of suppressing the real crimes, just as people did with My Lai.  My Lai was a
minor footnote to the war in Vietnam.  It was part of a major military operation, Operation Wheeler- which was
directed by the suits sitting in air-conditioned offices and targeting B-52 raids on villages.  This was one of many
operations that killed who knows how many people.  But in one particular spot, some uneducated, poor GIs in the
field, who were scared out of their wits, lost it and killed a couple hundred people.  You get poor, uneducated
people who are in the midst of conflict and they have every reason to be scared.  If they commit a crime, that’s
horrible.  If nice, educated folk, sitting in comfort and protection, commit massive crimes- in particular, ordering
these crimes- that doesn’t matter.  By contrast, Nuremberg worked the opposite way.  The prosecution didn’t go
after the soldiers in the field; it went after the civilian commanders.  The planners in Washington are the real war
criminals, not the soldiers in the field.  The chain of command stars with the civilians sitting in Washington.

     Draft

Chomsky believes that the draft system is a good one.  He thinks our army should be a citizens’ army, not a
mercenary army.  The volunteer army system that we have is in effect a mercenary army of the disadvantaged.  
The privileged, except for the occasional maniacs, don’t volunteer for it.  The soldiers of this mercenary army
come from a background where the army is their only real opportunity.  This type of army is much more
dangerous than a citizens’ army.  A citizens’ army naturally reflects the culture and opinion of the entire country.  It
is integrated into society instead of simply an appendage, and this makes it much more difficult for illegitimate
wars to be undertaken.  The population will be much more inclined towards doing what it takes to avoid war unless
it is necessary, which is how it should be according to the UN charter.

     US Opinion

Major polls came out from the most prestigious polling organizations in the country right before the November
2004 election, and the results were so astonishing that the press couldn’t even report them.  The polls showed
that a large majority of the population is in favor of signing the Kyoto protocol, accepting the International Criminal
Court, and relying on the UN to take the lead in international crises.  A majority is even in favor of forgoing the
Security Council veto when it comes to what’s called preemptive war, which is now interpreted as the right to
aggression.  In other words, the population is very strongly opposed to the bipartisan consensus on preemptive
war.  Both parties are in favor of it.

About 75 percent of the US population says the United States should not have attacked Iraq if it did not have
WMDs or ties to Al Qaeda.  Yet roughly 50 percent say that we should have attacked Iraq.  And that’s after the
Iraq Survey Group showed that there were no WMDs or programs to develop them and that there were no ties to
Al Qaeda.  This indicates that, essentially, people believe the propaganda even after it is disproved.  There has
been enough of a barrage of government-media propaganda that about half the population still believes that Iraq
had WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda and 9/11.  So yes, they support the war, even though they’re generally opposed
to war unless we’re under imminent threat of attack.

Incidentally, on the domestic front, an overwhelming majority of the population, around 80 percent, is in favor of
increased health care; around 70 percent want increased aid to education and Social Security.  Both parties are
opposed.  Kerry has said that he has been unable to mention any government program that might improve health
care because there is so little political support for it.  Only about three-fourths of the population.  But that’s the
standard reaction.  If national health care is ever mentioned, it’s called ‘politically impossible’.  That tells you what
is going on.  ‘Political support’ means support of the insurance industry, Wall Street, HMOs, the pharmaceutical
industry.  That’s political support.  What all of the polls basically show is that the whole population is so far to the
left of both parties that you can understand why the polls aren’t published.


DECEMBER 3, 2004     
The occupation could end this instant.  It’s a question of what the Iraqi people want.  It should have nothing to do
with what Britain and the United States want, any more than the occupation of France should have had anything
to do with what the Germans wanted.  Within the general US population, the view, by a substantial majority, is that
the United States should leave Iraq if Iraqis want them to leave.  A large majority of the population also thinks that
the United Nations, not the United States, should be taking the lead in international crises in general and should
be leading the reconstruction of Iraq.

There is no possible way that the United States and Britain would permit a sovereign, democratic Iraq.  The State
would have a Shiite majority, so it would probably shore up relations with Iran, which also has a Shiite majority.  
There is also a very substantial Shiite population in Saudi Arabia in the regions where the oil fields are located.  
This could very well mean that the core of the world’s energy resources will be under the control or influence of an
independent Shiite government.  Is the US going to allow that?  It’s unimaginable.

In reality, the United States should be paying huge reparations to Iraq.  So should Britain, so should Germany, so
should France, so should Russia, and all the other states that supported Saddam Hussein.  Those countries have
tortured Iraq for a long time, in fact back to the time when Iraq was created by the British in the early 1920s.  John
F. Kennedy sponsored the military coup in 1963 that put Saddam Hussein’s Baathist party in power.  Since then,
the US record with regard to Iraq has been horrendous.  The State Department keeps a list of states that sponsor
terrorism.  Only one country has ever been taken off the list- Iraq in 1982- because the Reagan administration,
basically the same guys in office again under Bush II, wanted to be able to supply Saddam Hussein with weapons
and aid without Congressional scrutiny.  So Iraq was suddenly a state that didn’t sponsor terrorism, and the
United States could provide aid for agribusiness exports, for developing weapons, and all sorts of wonderful
things.  

After Hussein’s atrocities against the Kurds, against Iran, against Iraqis- which we now denounce- the United
States continued to support Saddam Hussein.  After the 1991 Gulf War, when a Shiite rebellion broke out, Bush I
allowed Saddam to crush it.  And then came more than ten years of sanctions, which killed more people than
Saddam Hussein ever did, and devastated the society.  And then came the invasion, which has lead to the deaths
of maybe a hundred thousand people.  Put it all together and we owe Iraq huge reparations.  All the while the US
public’s logic is reversed.  People here feel that they’re the ones who are oppressed.  The feeling is that we’re the
ones under attack; they’re the ones who are attacking us.

This type of inversion goes on all the time.  In one of his main speeches to US troops in Vietnam, President
Johnson said plaintively, “There are three billion people in the world and we have only two hundred million of
them.  We are outnumbered fifteen-to-one.  If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and
take what we have.  We have what they want.”  That is a constant refrain of imperialism.  You have your jackboot
on someone’s neck and they’re about to destroy you.  The same is true with any form of oppression.  And it’s
psychologically understandable.  If you’re crushing and destroying someone, you have to have a reason for it,
and it can’t be, I’m a murderous monster.  It has to be self-defense.  I’m protecting myself against them.  
Oppression gets psychologically inverted: the oppressor is the victim who is defending himself.

     Social Security

Social Security was created in response to pressure from popular, organized social movements- the labor
movement and others- that were based on the idea of solidarity and mutual aid.  If you go back to Adam Smith,
whom we’re supposed to revere but not read, he assumed that sympathy was the core human value, and society
should therefore be constructed so that this natural human dedication to sympathy and mutual support will be
satisfied.  At one time, the principle of solidarity was taken for granted.  It was a fundamental feature of popular
movements.  You’re working for each other.  That’s why ‘Solidarity Forever’ is a working-class slogan.  And ever
since the 1930s, the privileged and wealthy have been dedicated to trying to eliminate this principle.  You have to
destroy unions, you have to destroy interaction among people, and you have to atomize people so they don’t care
about one another.  And that’s what really lies behind the attack on Social Security.

Gregory Mankiw, the chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, is a very distinguished and competent
technical economist, a highly regarded professor at Harvard in the economics department and the author of one
of the main textbooks in the field.  He has warned that Social Security benefits will have to be reduced because
the US government won’t have the money to pay for them.  This is reported religiously, with the statement that the
Social Security system is headed toward fiscal collapse by 2042 “if no changes are made to the current law.”  We
have to make radical changes, preferably privatize it.  While privatization is pounded into the public’s head, there
are some easy solutions that rarely get discussed.  For example, the Social Security payroll tax is highly
regressive.  Any income you make over roughly $90,000 is not taxed, which means that the rich and privileged
are getting a free ride.  Is there some law of nature that says a small percentage of the population should get a
free ride?  If you simply eliminate the cap, there wouldn’t be a Social Security financing problem for years to come.

The people screaming about the Social Security ‘crisis’ also point out that the proportion of working people to
retired people is declining, which means today’s working people are going to have to support a growing number of
retired people.  That happens to be true, but it’s irrelevant.  The real number that should be looked at is what’s
called the total dependency ratio, the proportion of working people to the total number of people, not just
retirees.  So take, say, the famous baby boomers.  How are we going to pay for them?  Well, who paid for them
when they were newborns until they were twenty?  If you look back at the 1960s, when this generation was coming
of age, there was a huge increase in funding for schools and other programs for children, at a time when the
government had less income than it does today.  If you could take care of the baby boomers when they were
children, why can’t you take care of them when they are over sixty?  It’s not a bigger problem.  The problem is
manufactured.  It’s just a question of financial priorities.  Because the US is now a much richer country than it was
in the 1960s, that should make the problem all the easier to deal with.

So Gregory Mankiw is simply giving a radically ideological interpretation to the Social Security dilemma that may
express his personal biases or some other pressures, but doesn’t have much to do with the issue.  It’s quite
transparent.  The leading ‘solution’ to the Social Security ‘crisis’ is private investment accounts.  Instead of a
highly efficient government system, with very low administrative costs, we’re moving toward a system with very
substantial administrative costs, but costs that will be transferred to the right pockets, namely, Wall Street firms
and big money managers.

     Press

The United States is unique in its guarantees of freedom of the press.  The government in the US has fewer
options and less ability to control the press than in any other country.  But the fact that the government doesn’t
have much direct power to control the press doesn’t mean that the press is free in practice.  The press faces
powerful pressures that induce it, and often almost compel it, to be anything but free.  After all, mainstream media
are part of the corporate sector that dominates the economy and social life.  And they rely on corporate
advertising for their income.  This isn’t the same as state control but is nevertheless a system of corporate control
very closely linked to the state.

But the major media do report information; they must, for a number of reasons.  One is that their primary
constituency requires it.  This consists of economic managers, political managers, and doctrinal managers- the
educated class, the political class, those who run the economic system.  These people need a realistic picture of
the world.  They own it, they control it, they dominate it, and they have to make decisions in it, so they’d better
understand something about it.  That’s why the business press tends to have better reporting than the other
national press.  There is a doctrinal slant to what’s reported to make sure readers see the facts in the right way,
but the basic facts are there.  Furthermore, journalists generally have professional integrity.  Typically they are
honest, serious professionals who want to do their job properly.  But none of that changes the fact that most of
them reflexively perceive the world through a particular prism that happens to be supportive of concentrated
power.

Citizens of democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves from
manipulation and control.  This means training yourself to ask the obvious questions.  Sometimes the answers will
be immediately apparent; sometimes it will take a little work to find them.  One must remember that “force is always
on the side of the governed; the governors have nothing to support them but opinion.  It is, therefore, on opinion
only that government is founded”; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as
well as to the most free and most popular.  The rulers rely on consent.  They have to make sure that the people
they are ruling do not understand that they actually have power.  That is the fundamental principle of
government.  Governments have all sorts of means to control the governed.  In the United States, we don’t use
the stake, club, or torture chamber; we have other means.  It doesn’t take special skills to figure out what they are,
and that’s all part of intellectual self-defense.

Intellectual self-defense is the first step towards change, but it takes more than that.  Change doesn’t occur
through some benevolent ruler passing laws granting more rights to people.  It takes real persistence and
dedication.  At some point, people recognize what the structure of power and domination is and commit to doing
something about it.  That’s the way every change in history has taken place.  How that happens is difficult to say,
but we all have the power to do it.  Serious movements sometimes come from people who really are oppressed
and other times it comes from sectors of privilege.  Take the resistance movement.  The kids involved with that
were privileged college students, almost all of them from elite schools.  But within those sectors of privilege, a
spark was lit and these kids played a big role in changing the country.  They infuriated the rich and the powerful.  
Take a look at SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was at the leading edge of the civil
rights movement- the people who were really on the line, not the ones who showed up for the occasional
demonstration but the ones out there every day, sitting at lunch counters, traveling on freedom buses, getting
beaten up or in some cases killed.  For the most part, the students in SNCC came from the elite colleges.  
Obviously not all of the students in the movement came from privileged backgrounds, but they were certainly a
leading part of the struggle.

And the same is true if you look at other movements.  It’s a mixture of privileged and oppressed coming together
in consciousness.  Take the women’s movement.  A lot of it began with consciousness raising groups, women
talking to each other and saying, “Look, life doesn’t have to be like this.”  That was an early part of it, and it’s a
necessary part of any social movement.  On the part of the oppressed, it’s necessary to recognize that
oppression is not just unpleasant but also wrong.  And that’s not so simple.  Established practices and
conventions are usually taken for granted, not questioned.  To recognize that there is nothing necessarily
legitimate about power is a big step no matter what side of the equation you’re on.  Realizing that the power you
possess as a result of your station in life is not necessarily legitimate can be very enlightening.


FEBRUARY 7, 2005
A good student should have independence of mind, enthusiasm, dedication to the field, and a willingness to
challenge and question and to explore new directions.  There are plenty of people like that, but schools tend to
discourage those characteristics.  Commitment to ideology denies and tries to avoid evidence.  The hard sciences
teach the opposite; empirical evidence is paramount.  There is no reason not to study history, society, and
economics by using essentially the same methods as the sciences.  Empirical evidence is critically important.  You’
re flooded with it.  You have to select what is significant.  You inevitably approach evidence with certain beliefs
and principles, which you should keep open to question.  The problems are different in history and in physics, but
the method of approaching them ought to be the same.  One should generally have a good deal of respect for
Enlightenment ideals- rationality, critical analysis, freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry- and should try to
amplify, modify, and adopt them to modern society.

No other country has anything like the degree of extremist religious beliefs and irrational commitments that you
commonly find in the United States.  The idea that you have to avoid teaching evolution or pretend you’re not
teaching it is unique in the industrial world.  And the statistics are mind-boggling.  Roughly half the population
thinks the world was created a few thousand years ago.  A huge percentage, maybe a quarter or so, say they’ve
had a born-again experience.  A substantial number of people believe in what is called ‘the rapture’.  Large
majorities are convinced of miracles, the existence of the devil, and so on.

These strains go pretty far back in American history, but in recent years they have come to affect social and
political life to an unprecedented extent.  For example, before Jimmy Carter, no US president had to pretend to be
a religious fanatic, but since then every one of them has.  This has contributed to a genuine undermining of
democracy since the 1970s.  Up to that point, religious beliefs were people’s personal concerns.  There has been
a conscious takeover of the electoral system by the public relations industry, which now sells candidates the way
they sell commodities.  And the image of a God-fearing, believing person of deep faith who is going to protect us
from the threats of the modern world is one you can sell.  You can mobilize a huge constituency by presenting
yourself, honest or not, as a Bible-fearing, evangelical Christian.

This has contributed to allowing a big assault on freedom of speech everywhere- in radio, in universities.  More
than a dozen state legislatures are now considering legislation to control what teachers and professors say in
classrooms and to make sure teachers don’t ‘indoctrinate’ students.  The universities are pretty right wing, but
they are not wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate sector, and that’s unacceptable.  Academic freedom is
constantly under assault.  And now it’s increasing as part of the effort to ensure ultra-right domination.  Anything
that’s out of control has to be suppressed and disciplined.


FEBRUARY 8, 2005
Typically, there is an inverse correlation between extremist religious beliefs and industrialization: the greater the
modernization, the less commitment there is to religious extremism.  But in the United States, that correlation
completely breaks down.  It’s like an underdeveloped society in this respect.  As for the changes in recent years,
they don’t have so much to do with the level of religious commitment as with the way religion has been brought
into the political system and public life.  One possible cause is that this has always been a very frightened
country.  There is an unusually strong sense of insecurity here, which might be related to the degree of religious
fundamentalism.  The United States is by far the most powerful and secure country in the world, but still there
exists this fear that isn’t nearly as present in other countries.

Another aspect of religion in the US showed up in the 1980s.  Central America was a very striking case, because
the United States was basically at war with the Catholic Church.  The Catholic Church in the 1960s and 1970s had
really shifted its traditional vocation.  It had adopted aspects of liberation theology, and had recognized what is
called ‘the preferential option for the poor’.  Priests, nuns, and lay workers were organizing peasants into
communities, where they would read the Gospels and draw lessons about organization that they could use to try
to take control of their own lives.  And, of course, that immediately made them bitter enemies of the United States,
and Washington launched a war to destroy them.

This led to the Central American solidarity movement in the United States in the 1980s, which was something
totally new.  Tens of thousands of Americans went down in the 1980s and protected people under assault from
the United States.  The center of this movement was not in the elite universities but in the churches, including
churches in the Midwest and rural areas.  The strange thing is that here’s this supposedly very religious country,
the United States, going to war against organized religion.  And the reason was that the church was working for
the poor.  As long as religion is working for the rich, it’s fine; but not for the poor.

     National Debt

The US dollar is weak now, government deficits are up, individual consumer debt is up, credit-card interest rates
are rising, personal savings rates are at all time lows, and foreign investors are financing the US debt by buying
Treasury securities.  This seems all very bad, but the debt situation is complicated.  Household debt is out of
sight, but corporate debt is very low.  In fact, corporations are making huge profits.  That’s part of the shift in the
way economic planning is carried out, to benefit the superrich and the corporations and to harm the general
population.  In fact, the ratio of taxed income to GDP is close to an all-time low, and it’s skewed toward the general
public, much more so than before.  Corporations barely pay taxes.  The corporate tax rate is already very low, but
corporations have worked out an array of complicated techniques so they don’t have to pay taxes at all.

In the mid-1990s there was a lot of excitement about so-called emerging markets in Latin America.  Foreign direct
investment did surge at that time, but the composition of it was quite interesting.  Consistently about 25 percent of
FDI was going to Bermuda, around 15 percent was going to the British Cayman Islands, and about 10 percent to
Panama.  That’s roughly 50 percent of what they’re calling foreign direct investment, and it certainly was not going
to build steel plants.  This was just money flowing into various tax havens.  Most of the rest was going for mergers
and acquisitions and so on.  These are huge sums.  The scale of sheer robbery by corporate power is enormous.

But the general population has gone through thirty years of either stagnation or decline in real wages, with people
working longer hours with fewer benefits.  The United States is still a very rich country.  It’s got enormous
advantages of scale, resources, and anything else you can think of.  But it’s being subject to domestic policies
that are frightening.  The Bush administration has purposefully driven the country into incredible debt.  The idea
is to transfer costs to future generations.  That’s basically their plan.  Their values are to serve the rich and the
powerful.  When you talk about ‘moral values’, that’s what they are.

     Health Care

The US has a highly inefficient health care system, the worst in the industrial world, with huge expenses, much
higher that in any other country, and with relatively poor outcomes.  The costs are rising even further, partly
because of the tremendous power of the pharmaceutical corporations, and partly because of all the administrative
costs of a privatized health care system.  This is a real crisis, unlike the Social Security crisis, which is merely a
matter of prioritization.  Why are they going after Social Security and not the medical system?  It’s quite
straightforward.  The rich receive Social Security when they retire, but it doesn’t amount to that much of their
income.  They get good medical care, because they can afford it and medical care is rationed by wealth.  If you’re
rich, the system is working just right.  The insurance companies, the health maintenance organization, and the
pharmaceutical corporations are doing just great.  Wealthy people are doing fine.  If most of the population can’t
get decent health care, that’s not their problem.  If health care costs are astronomical, too bad.  The Bush
administration recently announced that they’re going to cut back federal funding for Medicaid.  But that only
harms poor people, so that’s fine.  Social Security, on the other hand, that’s a real problem because it does
nothing for the rich.  It’s a useless system.

A recent study by the Harvard Medical School and Public Citizen compared the US and Canadian health care
systems.  The study found that the United States is spending several hundred billion dollars a year in excess
administrative costs.  One of the things they did was to compare one of the main hospitals in Boston with a
leading hospital in Toronto.  When the research team visited the Toronto hospital, they wanted to examine the
billing department.  Nobody knew where it was.  Finally, they found a little office down in the basement somewhere
that had a billing department for US citizens who were coming to Canada.  In Boston, the billing office takes up a
whole floor full of accountants, computers, and paperwork.  All of that adds up.

There is universal health care in the United States.  Most states have laws stipulating that if you go to an
emergency room, they have to take care of you, even if you don’t have insurance.  Sometimes the emergency
rooms are overflowing and you can’t get in.  Or if you do get in, you may have to wait a very long time before any
doctor can help you.  The emergency healthcare system is not giving people the kind of care they need.  It wastes
enormous amounts of time.  It’s not preventive care, figuring out how to avoid getting sick in the first place.  It’s the
most expensive, most inefficient kind of universal health care system you can imagine.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to organize popular support for this issue even though whenever the question of health
care comes up in the polls, people rank it as a very high concern.  There are forty-five million Americans who
have no coverage whatsoever, but it is still difficult to issue a fight.  You organize a demonstration and people
come out.  Then most of them go back home and continue with their lives.  Health care is a different type of
issue.  You can’t get it with one demonstration.  You have to have a functioning democratic society, with popular
associations, unions, and political groups working on it all the time.  That’s the way you organize people to get
health care.  But that’s what’s lacking.  

The United States is basically what’s called a ‘failed state’.  It has formal democratic institutions, but they barely
function.  So it doesn’t matter that three-fourths of the population thinks we ought to have some form of
government-funded health care system.  It doesn’t even matter that a large majority regards health care as a
moral value.  When commentators rave about moral values, they’re talking about banning gay marriage, not the
idea that everyone should have decent health care.  And the reason is that it’s not in their interest.  They get fine
health care.  What do they care?  When Medicaid is destroyed, as it probably will be, that’s going to really harm
people.  But those people are unorganized.  They’re not in unions, they’re not in political associations, and they
don’t participate in political parties.  The genius of American politics has been to marginalize and isolate people.  
In fact, one of the main reasons behind the passionate effort to destroy unions is that they are one of the few
mechanisms by which ordinary people can get together and compensate for the concentration of capital and
power.  That’s why the United States has a very violent labor history, with repeated efforts to destroy unions
anytime they make any progress.

Part of the Bush administration’s Department of Homeland Security scam has been to strip a hundred and eighty
thousand government workers of union rights.  You have to eliminate the threat that people might get together
and try to achieve things like decent health care, decent wages, or anything that benefits the population and
doesn’t benefit the rich.  You can almost predict what’s next by that simple principle: Does it help rich people or
does it help the general population?  And from that you can virtually deduce what’s going to happen next.    

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