Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

  And there were also covert activities in this period involving the Vatican, the U.S. State Department, and British and American intelligence to save and employ many of the worst Nazi war criminals, and use them in exactly the same sorts of operations the Nazis used them for, against the popular resistance forces in the West and then in Eastern Europe. For example, the guy who invented the gas chambers, Walter Rauff, was secreted off to work on counterinsurgency in Chile. The head of Nazi intelligence on the Eastern Front, Reinhard Gehlen, joined American intelligence doing the same kind of work for us in Eastern Europe. The “Butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie, worked for the Americans spying on the French until finally they had to move him out through the Vatican-run “ratline” to Latin America, where then he finished out his career. 80 That was another part of the whole postwar effort of the United States to destroy the prospects for independent democracy—and certainly it’s something which took place.

  P.R. in Somalia

  MAN: Professor Chomsky, in light of all this I’m wondering, do you think there has ever been such a thing as a humanitarian intervention by the U.S.? Take what we were supposed to have been doing in Somalia, for example: that was framed as a humanitarian action here—do you think that was all image, or was there also some reality to it too?

  Well, states are not moral agents; they are vehicles of power, which operate in the interests of the particular internal power structures of their societies. So anybody who intervenes in another country, except maybe Luxembourg or something, is going to be intervening for their own purposes—that’s always been true in history. And the Somalia operation, to take the case you mention, certainly was not humanitarian.

  I mean, the U.S. waited very carefully until the famine there was pretty much over and the major international aid organizations, like the Red Cross and Save the Children and so on, were getting about eighty percent of their aid into the country (using Somalis to do most of the work, it turns out) before it decided to move in. 81 So if the U.S. government had had any humanitarian feelings with regard to Somalia, it had plenty of time to show it—in fact, it could have shown it from 1978 through 1990, when the U.S. was the chief supporter of Siad Barre, the Somali warlord who destroyed the country and killed maybe fifty or sixty thousand people with U.S. assistance, long before the famine. 82 But when our favorite tyrant collapsed, the U.S. pulled out, a civil war then erupted, there was mass starvation—and the U.S. did nothing. When the famine and fighting were at their peak, in the first half of 1992, the U.S. still did nothing.

  By around the time of the November 1992 Presidential election here, it was clear that Somalia could provide some good photo op’s—if we send thirty thousand Marines in when the famine is declining and the fighting is calming down, we’ll get really nice shots of Marine colonels handing out cookies to starving children; that’ll look good, it’ll be a real shot in the arm for the Pentagon budget. And in fact, it was even described that way by people like Colin Powell [then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and others—they were saying, well, you know, it’ll look good for the Pentagon. 83

  Of course, it should have been obvious to them that pretty soon it was going to turn into a nightmare: when you put a foreign military force into a country, it won’t be long before they’re fighting the local population. That’s almost automatic, even if the population had welcomed them. Take Northern Ireland, for example: the British were called in by the Catholic population [in August 1969]; a couple months later, they were murdering the Catholic population. 84 That’s what foreign armies are like, the dynamics are clear—and in the case of Somalia, it was only a question of time before the shooting started. 85

  MAN: Then you were opposed to the whole U.S. operation?

  By that point I was sort of, like, neutral. I mean, you couldn’t really tell whether it would cause more good than harm, though it was certainly not a humanitarian intervention. But the more important point is, there was always a much better alternative.

  Look: the U.S. should have given aid right away, and the U.N. should have remained there throughout the famine. But by the time you got to mid-1992, things were already beginning to improve—and they were beginning to improve partly under the leadership of a U.N. negotiator, an Algerian named Mohammed Sahnoun, who was doing extremely well by all accounts: he was starting to bring local groups together, he had a lot of respect from all sides in the conflict, he was working with traditional elders and women’s groups and so on. And they were starting to rehabilitate Somalian society, and to address some of its problems—he was just extremely effective by the testimony of all the international aid agencies, and a lot of others. But he was thrown out, because he publicly opposed the incompetence and corruption of the U.N. operation. They simply got rid of him—and that means the U.S. supported it. 86

  So you see, you really didn’t need an intervention at that time: the best thing would have been just to continue giving support to Sahnoun and others like him, who were trying to bring together the various parts of Somalian civil society. I mean, that’s the way you’ve got to do it, or else there isn’t really going to be any lasting progress—you have to help the civil society reconstruct itself, because they’re the only ones who can ultimately solve their own problems. And Sahnoun and others were doing that, so it would have been very efficient just to help them continue doing it. But of course, that was never a thought here: you don’t get any P.R. for the Pentagon that way.

  So you can ask whether in the end the Somalis benefited or were harmed by what we did, and I’m not certain what the answer is. But whatever happened, they were secondary: they were just props for photo opportunities. Maybe they were helped by it—I hope so—but if so it was purely incidental.

  The Gulf War

  MAN: Probably the major U.S. foreign policy event of recent years was the Gulf War. What would you say was the media’s contribution to that? As I remember it, the coverage in the United States was all “rah-rah” support as we bombed Iraq.

  It’s true there was a lot of that—but in my view, the much more significant period for reviewing the media on the Gulf War is not what people usually concentrate on, and what the media themselves are willing to talk about: that is, the six weeks of the actual bombing [January 16 to February 27, 1991], when the constraints on reporting were naturally pretty tight and there was the predictable patriotic jingoism. The most important period was between August 1990 and January 1991—the period when a decision had to be made about how to respond to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait [on August 2, 1990].

  The decision to use violence is always a very serious one. In a functioning democratic society—I don’t mean one with democratic forms, but I stress “functioning”—that decision would only be taken after a lot of public discussion of the issues, and consideration of the alternatives, and weighing of the consequences. Then, after appropriate public debate, maybe a decision would be made to resort to violence. Well, that never happened in the case of the Gulf War—and it was the fault of the American media that it never happened.

  Look: the fundamental question throughout the pre-war period was whether the U.S. would pursue the peaceful means that were available—and which are in fact required to be pursued by international law—for a diplomatic settlement and negotiated Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, or whether on the other hand we would undercut any possibility for a diplomatic settlement, and move straight to the arena of violence. 87 Well, we don’t know whether diplomatic means actually were available in this case, but we don’t know that for a very simple reason: Iraq put them on the table, but they were rejected, and they were rejected at once by the Bush administration starting in mid-August 1990, and running right through to the start of the bombing in mid-January. 88

  What was the media’s role in this? Well, they suppressed the story, basically. I mean, you’d have to be a real media addict to know that Iraq had made proposals in mid-August 1990 that frightened the State Department enough so that they were worried they would hav
e to try to—as the New York Times correspondent put it in a moment of carelessness—“reject the diplomatic track.” 89 And that suppression continued right up until the bombing started in January 1991: there were diplomatic offers on the table, whether serious or not we don’t know, for Iraqi withdrawal in the context of a conference on regional issues, and other things which certainly sounded negotiable—and indeed were regarded by U.S. Middle East specialists in the government as, as they put it, “serious” and “negotiable” proposals. 90 But barely anybody knew about this. In Europe, I think virtually no one knew. In the United States, you could have known it if you read the one newspaper in the country that actually followed the story, namely Newsday in Long Island. And Newsday followed it in part I suspect—although I can’t prove this—because they were being leaked material from somebody in the government who was trying to smoke out the New York Times, which had failed to publish it. See, Newsday is a very funny publication to see information being leaked to—it’s good, but it’s a small suburban newspaper. However, it does happen to be on sale at every newsstand in New York, so when their whole front page has a big headline saying “Iraq Sent Pullout Deal to U.S.,” the New York Times can’t pretend not to see it, and they’ll have to publish some sort of back-page acknowledgment and dismissal the next day—which is indeed what happened. 91

  But the point is, by refusing to allow the discussion and debate—and even the information—that would be the basis for sane decision-making about the need for war in a democratic society, the media set the stage for what turned out to be, predictably, a very destructive and murderous conflict. People don’t want a war unless you absolutely have to have one, but the media would not present the possibility that there were alternatives—so therefore we went to war very much in the manner of a totalitarian society. 92 That’s really the main point about the media and the Gulf War, in my view.

  Of course, it didn’t stop there—there were also plenty of the things that you referred to as well. So before and during the war, the Bush administration had to build up an image in people’s minds of Iraq as a monstrous military superpower, in order to mobilize enough popular hysteria so that people here would go along with their policies. And again, the media did their job 100 percent. So I don’t know how well you remember what was going on around the country back then, but people were literally quaking in their boots about the extraordinary might of Iraq—it was a superpower with artillery we’d never dreamt of, all this kind of stuff. 93 I mean, this was a defenseless Third World country that was so weak it had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran in eight years of warfare [from 1980 to ’88]—and that was with the support of the United States, the Soviet Union, all of Europe, the Arab oil countries: not an inconsiderable segment of world power. Yet with all those allies, Iraq had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran, which had killed off its own officers’ corps and barely had an army left: all of a sudden this was the superpower that was going to conquer the world? You really had to be a deeply brainwashed Western intellectual even to look at this image—a defenseless Third World country threatening the two most advanced military forces in the world, the United States and Britain—and not completely collapse in ridicule. But as you recall, that’s what all of them were saying—and people here really believed it.

  In fact, during the Gulf War I dropped my scheduled speaking engagements and accepted invitations to talk in the most reactionary parts of the country I could find—just because I was curious what I’d see. So I went to some place in Georgia which is surrounded by military bases; I went to Lehigh, Pennsylvania, a jingoist working-class town; to some conservative towns in Massachusetts, to Appalachia, places like that. And everywhere I went, people were terrified out of their wits. Sometimes it was pretty amazing.

  For instance, there’s a college in northern California called Chico State, which is where guys like Reagan and Shultz [Reagan’s Secretary of State] send their kids so they won’t be infected by “lefties” at Berkeley. The place is right in the middle of four hundred miles of cornfields, or whatever it is they grow out there, a million miles from nowhere, and when you fly in you land at an airport that’s about half the size of a house. Well, when I landed there, a student and a faculty member who were like the two local radicals at the school came out to meet me. And as we were walking to the car, I noticed we had to go a pretty long distance, because the airport was all surrounded with yellow police tape. So I asked these guys, “What’s going on, are they rebuilding the landing strip or something?” You know what they said? “No, that’s to protect the airport from Arab terrorists.” I said, “Arab terrorists in northern California?” But they thought so. And when I got into the town, everybody was walking around in army fatigues and wearing yellow ribbons, saying “If Saddam comes, we’re going to fight to the death,” and so on.

  And in a sense, people really believed it. I should say, though, that in every one of these towns I went to, the propaganda line was so thin that as soon as you started discussing the situation and you made a few jokes about what the reality was, the whole thing just totally collapsed, and by the end of the talk you’d get a huge standing ovation. Friends of mine who spoke around the country at the time found exactly the same thing, incidentally—Alexander Cockburn, for instance. But that was the image of Iraq that the media presented right on cue—and with the help of that propaganda cover, Bush was able to carry out his bombardment for six weeks, and kill a few hundred thousand people, and leave Iraq in total ruins, and put on a huge show of force and violence. 94

  And notice that contrary to the line that’s constantly presented about what the Gulf War was fought for, in reality it had nothing to do with not liking Saddam Hussein—as can very easily be demonstrated. So just take a look at what happened right after the U.S. bombardment ended. A week after the war, Saddam Hussein turned to crushing the Shiite population in the south of Iraq and the Kurdish population in the north: what did the United States do? It watched. In fact, rebelling Iraqi generals pleaded with the United States to let them use captured Iraqi equipment to try to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The U.S. refused. Saudi Arabia, our leading ally in the region, approached the United States with a plan to support the rebel generals in their attempt to overthrow Saddam after the war; the Bush administration blocked the plan, and it was immediately dropped. 95

  Furthermore, there was no secret about the American decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power after the Gulf War—and there was even a reason given for it. The reason was explained by a spokesman for the State Department at the New York Times, Thomas Friedman. What he said was, it is necessary that Saddam Hussein remain in control of Iraq for what’s called “stability.” He said: “The best of all worlds” would be “an iron-fisted Iraqi junta” that would rule Iraq the way Saddam Hussein did—much to the approval of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and of course the boss in Washington. But since they couldn’t get the “best of all worlds” right then, they were going to have to settle for second best—namely, Saddam Hussein himself, so he could rule Iraq, as Friedman put it, with an “iron fist.” 96

  Therefore the United States did nothing to prevent Saddam from massacring the Shiite rebels as U.S. troops were stationed all over the region—and that’s been going on ever since, with his attack on the marsh dwellers and others. And the only reason why any barriers were ever put up to his attack on the Kurds in the north was that a huge international outcry developed in the West, as people here watched Iraqi forces massacring people who this time happened to have blue eyes and Western features—it was just pure racism that no similar public response ever developed to his assault on the Shiites.

  But sure, Saddam Hussein stayed in power after the war—and he was supported by George Bush again, just like before the war. Meanwhile, the real victim of the bombing and the U.S.-imposed embargo has been the general population of Iraq. In fact, literally hundreds of thousands of children have died in Iraq since the end of the war, just as a result of American insistence o
n maintaining sanctions—and by now the United States and England are alone at the U.N. Security Council in insisting that the sanctions against Iraq still remain in effect, even though the formal U.N. conditions for them have by this point been satisfied. 97 But again, that’s another story you won’t see pursued very far in the U.S. press.

  Also, it’s widely agreed that Saddam Hussein’s hold on power has not been weakened by all of this—it’s actually been strengthened. For instance, there was an article not too long ago in Foreign Affairs, the main foreign policy journal, which pointed out that Saddam Hussein now can at least appeal to nationalism in the Iraqi population to tighten his rule—while the sanctions have turned what was previously a relatively wealthy country into a deeply impoverished one, with literally more than a million people dying of malnutrition and disease. 98

  And this is all being done by the United States for its own reasons. It has nothing much to do with disliking Saddam Hussein—as you can see from the fact that he was George Bush’s great friend and trading partner right up until the moment of the Kuwait invasion.” Or as you can see from the fact that the Bush White House intervened repeatedly well into 1990 to prevent the Treasury Department and others who thought Iraq wasn’t creditworthy from cutting back on U.S. loan guarantees to their dear friend Saddam Hussein. 100 Or as you can see from the fact that we supported him again immediately after the war ended, as he was decimating internal resistance to his rule with “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf [the U.S. general] sitting nearby and refusing even to lift a finger. 101

  WOMAN: So you think in the end the U.S. just wanted to regain control of the Kuwaiti oil fields that Saddam had captured—it was just a war fought for oil?