Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  But the U.S. makes its own rules—we don’t care what happens at the U.N., or what international law requires. As our U.N. ambassador, Madeleine Albright, put it in a debate: “if possible we will act multilaterally, if necessary we will act unilaterally”—violently, she meant. 33 And that’s the way it goes when you’re the chief Mafia Don: if you can get support from others, fine, otherwise you just do it yourself—because you don’t follow any rules. Well, that’s us, and the Cuba case illustrates it about as well as you could.

  The enhanced embargo has been quite effective: about 90 percent of the aid and trade it’s cut off has been food and medicine—and that’s had the predictable consequences. In fact, there have been several articles in leading medical journals recently which describe some of the effects: the health system, which was extremely good, is collapsing; there’s a tremendous shortage of medicines; malnutrition is increasing; rare diseases that haven’t been seen since Japanese prison camps in the Second World War are reappearing; infant mortality is going up; general health conditions are going down. 34 In other words, it’s working fine—we’re “enhancing democracy.” Maybe we’ll ultimately make them as well off as Haiti or Nicaragua, or one of these other countries we’ve been taking care of all these years.

  I mean, putting sanctions on a country in general is a very questionable operation—particularly when those sanctions are not being supported by the population that’s supposedly being helped. But this embargo is a particularly brutal one, a really major crime in my opinion. And there’s a lot that can be done to stop it, if enough people in the United States actually get together and start doing something about it. In fact, by now even sectors of the U.S. business community are beginning to have second thoughts about the embargo—they’re getting a little concerned that they might be cut out of potentially lucrative business operations if the other rich countries of the world stop obeying our rules and just begin violating it. 35 So there’s a lot of room for change on this issue—it’s certainly something that ought to be pressed very strongly right now.

  Panama and Popular Invasions

  WOMAN: Noam, I’m wondering bow you explain the very high popular approval ratings in the United States for the government’s attacks on Grenada, Libya, Panama and so on. You often talk about the population becoming more dissident—but in the polls after the Panama invasion, about 80 percent of the American people said that they supported it. My Congressman told us the results of a poll he sent out—81 percent of 23,000 respondents to the question “Do you support the Panama invasion?” said yes, they did support it.

  Well, I think there’s been approval mostly because the interventions you mentioned were all quick and successful. I mean, if you can do something where you have an overwhelming advantage, the other side can’t fight back, you can’t lose, you’ll win in a couple days and then people can just forget about it, sure, you’ll get a high approval rating. That’s just standard jingoism—but I do not think that kind of support can be sustained for very long the way it could a couple decades ago.

  The approval ratings are also high because people don’t get any information about what really happens in these operations. For instance, I don’t think anybody here actually knows what happened in Panama. After the first couple days of the invasion, the news coverage in the U.S. just stopped. So there were big round-ups of union leaders, the political opposition was all rounded up and jailed, and so on and so forth—but none of that stuff was even reported in the United States. 36 Or for example, when Quayle [American Vice-President] went down to Panama in December 1989, if you watched the news coverage on television all you saw was everybody cheering—but if you looked carefully, you’d have noticed that everybody in the crowd was white. In fact, the New York Times claimed that Quayle had not even gone to the black neighborhood in Panama City, El Chorrillo, at all on his trip—but that was a flat-out lie. 37 He did go, the motorcade went through there, and there was an accurate Associated Press report about it by a good journalist, Rita Beamish. She said that in the church Quayle went to where all the television crews were, everybody was cheering, but they were all rich white folk. She said that as the motorcade went by in the black neighborhood, people were silent, stolid, looking out the windows of what was left of their homes, no clapping, no nothing. 38 Okay, so that story didn’t appear in the New York Times, what appeared was “We’re heroes in Panama.”

  Or another thing nobody here knows is that every year since the U.S. invasion—as the Panamanians themselves call it—Panama commemorates it with a national day of mourning. Nobody here knows that, obviously, because the press doesn’t report it. 39 I mean, the government George Bush installed in Panama itself described the country as “a country under military occupation.” 40 There’s a group of eight Latin American democracies called the “Group of Eight,” and Panama was expelled from it in March 1990, because, as they pointed out, a country under military occupation cannot possibly be considered “democratic.” 41 Well, none of this has appeared in the American press either.

  And if you just look at how the U.S. media presented the reasons for the invasion at the time, it becomes even more obvious why people in the United States generally supported it. What were supposed to be the reasons for invading Panama and getting rid of Noriega?

  MAN: Drug trafficking.

  Drug trafficking? Noriega was much more of a drug trafficker in 1985 than in 1989—why didn’t we have to go and invade Panama and get rid of him in 1985? I mean, if we actually had newspapers in the United States, which we don’t, the first thing they would have asked is, “Why did we have to get rid of Noriega in 1989, but not in 1985?” Well, take a look: what was the difference between 1989 and 1985?

  MAN: He was on the C.I.A. payroll in ’85.

  Yeah, he was on the payroll—he was our thug in 1985, so therefore we didn’t have to get rid of him. But in the intervening years he was getting too independent, too big for his britches: he wasn’t following orders, he was supporting the Contadora treaty [a plan for peace in Central America], and other bad stuff like that. 42 Well, the United States doesn’t want anything like that in its domains, so at that point we had to get rid of him. But again, none of this was presented in the U.S. media at the time of these polls—what was presented was: he’s the narco-trafficker that’s destroying the United States, he’s getting your kid hooked on cocaine. Alright, with that kind of media presentation, it’s not surprising that 80 percent of the population would want us to invade Panama and throw him in jail. So frankly, I would interpret the poll results you mention quite differently.

  In fact, there are still other things which go into explaining them, I think. For example, take George McGovern [1972 Presidential candidate who campaigned on an anti-war platform]. George McGovern did not support the invasion of Panama—in fact, about two months afterwards he wrote an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post saying he had opposed it from the very moment Bush did it. But he also said that he had refrained from saying so at the time. 43 So if he’d been asked about it in a poll, he probably would have answered that he did support the invasion. And the reason is, if you’re a red-blooded patriotic American, then when the government is conducting a violent act you’re supposed to rally around the flag. That’s part of our brainwashing, you know—to have that concept of patriotism drilled into our heads. And people really do feel it, even people like George McGovern, somebody who surely would have been in the 20 percent, but if he’d been polled about it would have voted with the 80 percent. We don’t want to be “anti-American,” to use the standard term—which in itself is a pretty startling propaganda triumph, actually. Like, go to Italy and try using the word “anti-Italianism,” call somebody there “anti-Italian” and just see what happens—they’d crack up in ridicule. But here those totalitarian values really do mean something to people, because there have been very extensive and systematic efforts to control the population in ways like that, and they have been highly successful. I mean, there’s a huge public relati
ons industry in the United States, and it doesn’t spend billions of dollars a year for nothing, you know. 44 So you really have to be a little bit more careful and nuanced when you interpret these kinds of poll results, in my view.

  And the fact is, in the 1980s and Nineties, U.S. interventions in the Third World have been of quite a different character than ever before in the past. Direct U.S. military interventions in the last twenty years have been guided by a very simple principle, which was not true before in our history: never attack anybody who can fight back—and that’s not accidental. So take a look at who we attacked directly in the 1980s. Grenada: a hundred thousand people, the nutmeg capital of the world, defended by 43 Cuban paramilitaries and a couple Grenadan militiamen. Libya: it’s totally defenseless, you can bomb them, you can knock their ships out of the water, you can do anything you want to them, because there’s no way for them to react. Or look at Panama: Panama was already under U.S. military occupation at the time of the invasion—literally. I mean, American forces were able to try dry runs on their targets a couple days before the “invasion” to make sure everything would go smoothly, and the whole thing was over and done with in a day or two. 45 Well, as long as you can carry out an attack against a completely defenseless target like that, sure, then you can get up and strut around with manly poses and talk about how brave you are. But you don’t ever attack anybody who can fight back anymore—if there’s anybody who can fight back, you’ve got to resort to other methods: subversion, mercenary states, things like that.

  Okay, that’s just a major shift in U.S. policy. It’s not a constraint that Kennedy and Johnson labored under—when they wanted to attack some country, they just attacked it, didn’t give it a second thought, Johnson sent 23,000 U.S. Marines to invade and wreck the Dominican Republic in 1965—where people did fight back, incidentally. And the two of them sent a huge expeditionary force of over half a million men to invade Vietnam, which went on for years and years without any popular response here. Well, that’s the sign of a big change—and I think the change is that the American population simply won’t tolerate the traditional kind of intervention any longer, they’ll only accept the kind of invasion we carried out in Panama. 46 That’s my understanding of the political scene, at least.

  Muslims and U.S. Foreign Policy

  MAN: Dr. Chomsky, I have a question. Would you agree that in this attack on the less powerful people of the world generally, there is also a secret, vicious war being waged on the Muslim people? And what do you think is in store for Muslims in general in the world?

  Well, it does happen to be the case that plenty of Muslims have been getting it in the neck from the United States—but that’s not because they’re Muslims, it’s because they’re not sufficiently under control. There are plenty of white Christian people who are also getting it in the neck. In the 1980s, the United States fought a vicious war in Central America primarily against the Catholic Church—and that means European priests, not just priests from indigenous origins—because the Church had started working for what they called “the preferential option for the poor,” therefore they had to go. 47 In fact, when Americas Watch [a human rights organization focused on North and South America] did their wrap-up study on the 1980s, they pointed out that it was a decade framed by the murder of the Archbishop in 1980 and the murder of six Jesuit intellectuals in 1989, both in El Salvador—yeah, that wasn’t accidental. 48

  See, the Catholic Church became the main target of the U.S. attacks in Central America because there was a radical and very conscious change in critically important sectors of the Church (including dominant elements among the Latin American bishops) who recognized that for hundreds of years it had been a Church of the rich and the oppressors, which was telling the poor, “This is your fate, accept it,” And so they decided to finally become a Church in part devoted to the liberation of the poor—and they immediately fell under attack.

  So you’re right, it is true that the U.S. is attacking a substantial part of the world that happens to be Muslim, but we’re not attacking it because they’re Muslim—we don’t care if they’re Martians. The question is, are they obedient?

  This is very easy to prove, actually. For instance, there’s a lot of talk in the U.S. about “Islamic fundamentalism,” as if that’s some bad thing we’re trying to fight. But the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state in the world is Saudi Arabia: are we going after the leaders of Saudi Arabia? No, they’re great guys—they torture and murder and kill and all that stuff, but they also send the oil profits from their country to the West and not to the people of the region, so they’re just fine. 49 Or take non-state agents: I suppose the most extreme fanatic Islamic fundamentalist in the world is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, who got over a billion dollars of aid from the United States and Saudi Arabia and is now tearing what’s left of Afghanistan to pieces. Yeah, he’s a good guy, he’s been fighting on our side—narco-trafficker, terrorist, all those things, but doing what we wanted. 50

  On the other hand, if Islamic fundamentalists are organizing clinics in the slums of Cairo, they’re going to have to go, just as the liberation theologians in Latin America who happened to be Basques—you know, blue eyes, blond hair and so on—had to go. I mean, there is a racist element to U.S. policy, of course, but the basic motivation is not that, I think. The real goal is just maintaining obedience—as in Cuba, as in Panama, and so on.

  Haiti: Disturbance at an Export Platform

  MAN: Mr. Chomsky, Haiti and Jean-Bertrand Aristide [populist Haitian priest elected president in 1990] have been all over the news in recent years, and it seems to me our present policies towards Haiti don’t quite fit the overall picture you describe. In that country at least, it does seem that the United States is trying to institute democracy of some sort—after all, we ousted the coup leaders [who deposed Aristide in 1991] and restored the popularly-elected leader to power in 1994. It appears to me your thesis might be breaking down a little on this one, and I’m interested if you have an analysis of that: what’s been happening in Haiti?

  Well, I’ll start with the context, and we can see how different things are. The United States has been supporting the Haitian military and dictators for two hundred years—it’s not a new policy. And for the last twenty or thirty years, the U.S. has basically been trying to turn Haiti into kind of an export platform with super-cheap labor and lucrative returns for U.S. investors. And for a long time it seemed to be working: there was a lot of repression, the population was under control, American investors were making big profits, and so on. Then in 1990, something happened which really surprised the hell out of everyone. There was this free election in Haiti, which everyone here assumed would be won by the former World Bank official we were backing [Marc Bazin], who had all the resources, and foreign support, and so on—but meanwhile something had been going on in the slums and peasant communities of Haiti that nobody here was paying any attention to: a lively and vibrant civil society was forming, with big grassroots organizations, and people getting involved in all kinds of activities. There was in fact a huge amount of popular organizing and activism—but who here was paying any attention? The C.I.A. doesn’t look at stuff like that, certainly American journalists don’t. So nobody here knew. Well, all of a sudden, in December 1990, these grassroots organizations came out of the woodwork and won the election. Catastrophe.

  At that point, the only question for people who know anything about American history should have been, “how are they going to get rid of this guy?”—because something like the Aristide victory simply is not tolerable in our sphere: a populist movement based on grassroots support, and a priest infected with liberation theology? That won’t last. And of course, the U.S. instantly started to undermine the Aristide government: investment and aid were cut off, except to the Haitian business community so it could start forming counter-Aristide forces; the National Endowment for Democracy went in to try to set up counter-institutions to subvert the new government, which by an odd
accident are exactly the institutions that survived intact after the 1991 coup, though nobody here happened to notice that little coincidence; and so on. 51

  But nevertheless, despite all this, within a couple months of the election the Aristide regime was in fact proving itself to be very successful—which of course made it even more dangerous from the perspective of U.S. power. It was getting support from international lending institutions, because it was cutting down on bureaucracy; it was finally starting to put the country in order after decades of corruption and abuses by the U.S.-backed Duvalier family dictatorship; drug trafficking was being cut back; atrocities were reduced far below the normal level; the flow of refugees to the U.S. virtually stopped. 52

  Okay, September, there’s a military coup, and Aristide is overthrown, Theoretically the United States announced an embargo and sanctions on the new junta—but that was pure fraud: the Bush administration made it very clear, instantly, that it was not going to pay any attention to the sanctions (meaning nobody else in the world had to pay any attention to them either). Bush established what they called an “exemption” to the embargo—in other words, about eight hundred U.S.-owned firms were made “exempt” from it. The New York Times really had to do a little work on that one. They described this as “fine-tuning” the embargo—you know, to direct it more exactly against the coup leaders, since we don’t want the Haitian people to suffer, as we’ve demonstrated so clearly over the years. 53 Meanwhile, total U.S. trade with Haiti stayed not very much below the norm during the course of this “embargo,” and in fact, in 1993 under Bill Clinton it went up by 50 percent. 54 Somehow the free press seemed to miss this completely. Nobody thought enough to do what I did: give a call to the Commerce Department and ask for the trade figures; it takes approximately two minutes, and you discover exactly what happened. But I guess that’s beyond the resources of the press here, because they never managed to find it out.