Chomsky 9-11.pdf

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9-11 Noam Chomsky

I would like to thank David Peterson and Shifra

Stern for invaluable assistance with current media

research particularly.

-NOAM CHOMSKY

C ONTENTS

Editor's Note ................................9

9-11

1. NOT SINCE THE WAR OF 1812.........................11

2. IS THE WAR ON TERRORISM WINNABLE?....23

3. THE IDEOLOGICAL CAMPAIGN.......................27

4. CRIMES OF STATE.............................................39

5. CHOICE OF ACTION..........................................59

6. CIVILIZATIONS EAST AND WEST..................71

7. CONSIDERABLE RESTRAINT?.........................93

Appendix A...................................119

DEPARTMENT OF STATE REPORT ON FOREIGN

TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS (OCTOBER 5, 2001)

Appendix B...................................125

RECOMMENDED READING

About the Author.............................127

EDITOR'S NOTE

What follows is a set of interviews conducted with Noam Chomsky by a variety of interviewers during the

first month following the attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The

interviews were conducted largely via email, many with foreign journalists who speak and write English as

a second language. Although some interviews were conducted as early as eight days after the attacks,

edits, additions, and revisions consistent with the latest news continued up until the book left for the printer

on October 15. As a result, interviews dated September may contain references to October events.

Furthermore, in the process of editing, sections were cut in which questions or answers were repeated

between interviews. However, occasionally a repeated fact or point has been intentionally left in, for

emphasis.

As Chomsky wrote me during the editing process, "These facts have been completely removed from

history. One has to practically scream them from the rooftops."

Greg Ruggiero

New York City

NOT SINCE THE WAR OF 1812

Based on an interview with I1 Manifesto (Italy),

September 19, 2001

Q: The fall of the Berlin Wall didn't claim any victims, but it did profoundly change the geopolitical

scene. Do you think that the attacks of 9-11 could have a similar effect?

CHOMSKY: The fall of the Berlin Wall was an event of great importance and did change the geopolitical

scene, but not in the ways usually assumed, in my opinion. I've tried to explain my reasons elsewhere and

won't go into it now.

The horrifying atrocities of September 11 are something quite new in world affairs, not in the their scale

and character, but in the target. For the United States, this is the first time since the War of 1812 that the

national territory has been under attack, or even threatened. Many commentators have brought up a Pearl

Harbor analogy, but that is misleading. On December 7, 1941, military bases in two U.S. colonies were

attacked- not the national territory, which was never threatened. The U.S. preferred to call Hawaii a

"territory," but it was in effect a colony. During the past several hundred years the U.S. annihilated the

indigenous population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico (in fact, the territories of indigenous

peoples but that is another matter),

intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of

thousands of Filipinos), and, in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout

much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the

other way. That is a dramatic change.

The same is true, even more dramatically, of Europe. Europe has suffered murderous destruction, but

from internal wars. Meanwhile European powers conquered much of the world with extreme brutality.

With the rarest of exceptions, they were not under attack by their foreign victims. England was not

attacked by India, nor Belgium by the Congo, nor Italy by Ethiopia, nor France by Algeria (also not

regarded by France as "a colony"). It is not surprising, therefore, that Europe should be utterly shocked by

the terrorist crimes of September 11. Again, not because of the scale, regrettably.

Exactly what this portends, no one can guess. But that it is something strikingly new is quite clear.

My impression is that these attacks won't offer us new political scenery, but that they rather confirm

the existence of a problem inside the "Empire." The problem concerns political authority and

power. What do you think?

The likely perpetrators are a category of their own, but uncontroversially, they draw support from a

reservoir of bitterness and anger over U.S. policies in the region, extending those of earlier European

masters. There certainly is an issue of "political authority and power." In the wake of the attacks, the Wall

Street Journal surveyed opinions of "moneyed Muslims" in the region: bankers, professionals,

businessmen with ties to the United States. They expressed dismay and anger about U.S. support for harsh

authoritarian states and the barries that Washington places against the independent development and

political democracy by its policies of "propping up oppressive regimes." Their primary concern, however,

was different: Washington's policies towards Iraq and towards Israel's military occupation. Among the

great mass of poor and suffering people, similar sentiments are much more bitter, and they are also hardly

pleased to see the wealth of the region flow to the West and to small Western-oriented elites and corrupt

and brutal rulers backed by Western power. So there definitely are problems of the authority and power.

The immediately announced U.S. reaction was to deal with these problems by intensifying them. That is,

of course, not inevitable. A good deal depends on the outcome of such considerations.

Is America having trouble governing the process of globalization-and I don't mean just in terms of

national security or intelligence systems?

The U.S. doesn't govern the corporate globalization project, though it of course has a primary role. These

programs have been arousing enormous opposition, primarily in the South, where mass protests could often

be suppressed or ignored. In the past few years, the protests reached the rich countries as well, and hence

became the focus of great concern to the powerful, who now feel themselves on the defensive, not without

reason. There are very substantial reasons for the worldwide opposition to the particular form of investor-

rights "globalization" that is being imposed, but this is not the place to go into that.

"Intelligent bombs" in Iraq, "humanitarian intervention" in Kosovo. The U.S.A. never used the

word "war" to describe that. Now they are talking about war against a nameless enemy. Why?

At first the U.S. used the word "crusade," but it was quickly pointed out that if they hope to enlist their

allies in the Islamic world, it would be a serious mistake, for obvious reasons. The rhetoric therefore

shifted to "war." The Gulf War of 1991 was called a "war." The bombing of Serbia was called a

"humanitarian intervention," by no means a novel usage. That was a standard description of European

imperialist ventures in the 19th century. To cite some more recent examples, the major recent scholarly

work on "humanitarian intervention" cites three examples of "humanitarian intervention" in the immediate

pre-World War II period: Japan's invasion of Manchuria, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, and Hitler's

takeover of the Sudetenland. The author of course is not suggesting that the term is apt; rather, that the

crimes were masked as "humanitarian."

Whether the Kosovo intervention indeed was "humanitarian," possibly the first such case in history, is a

matter of fact: passionate declaration does not suffice, if only because virtually every use of force is

justified in these terms. It is quite extraordinary how weak the arguments are to justify the claim of

humanitarian intent in the Kosovo case; more accurately, they scarcely exist, and the official government

reasons are quite different. But that's a separate matter, which I've written about in some detail elsewhere.

But even the pretext of "humanitarian intervention" cannot be used in the normal way in the present case.

So we are left with "war."

The proper term would be "crime"-perhaps "crime against humanity," as Robert Fisk has stressed. But

there are laws for punishing crimes: identify the perpetrators, and hold them accountable, the course that is

widely recommended in the Middle East, by the Vatican, and many others. But that requires solid

evidence, and it opens doors to dangerous questions: to mention only the most obvious one, who were the

perpetrators of the crime of international terrorism condemned by the World Court 15 years ago?

For such reasons, it is better to use a vague term, like "war." To call it a "war against terrorism,"

however, is simply more propaganda, unless the "war" really does target terrorism. But that is plainly not

contemplated because Western powers could never abide by their own official definitions of the term, as in

the U.S. Code* or Army manuals. To do so would at once reveal that the U.S. is a leading terrorist state, as

are its clients.

Perhaps I may quote political scientist Michael Stohl: "We must recognize that by convention- and it

must be emphasized only by convention-great power use and the threat of the use of force is normally

described as coercive diplomacy and not as a form of terrorism," though it commonly involves "the threat

and often the use of violence for what would be described as terrorist purposes were it not great powers

who were pursuing the very same tactic," in accord with the literal meaning of the term. Under the

(admittedly unimaginable) circumstances that Western intellectual cultures were willing to adopt the literal

meaning, the war against terrorism would take quite a different form, along lines spelled out in extensive

detail in literature that does not enter the respectable canon.

The quote I just gave is cited in a survey volume called Western State Terrorism , edited by Alex George

and published by a major publisher 10 years ago, but unmentionable in the United States. Stohl's point is

then illustrated in detail throughout the book. And there are many others, extensively documented from the

most reliable sources-for example, official government documents- but also unmentionable in the U.S.,

though the taboo is not so strict in other English-speaking countries, or elsewhere.

------------------------------

* "[An] act of terrorism, means any activity that (A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the

criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United

States or of any State; and (B) appears to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a

government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping." (United States

Code Congressional and Administrative News, 98th Congress, Second Session, 1984, Oct 19, volume 2; par 3077, 98 STAT. 2707

[West Publishing Co., 1984]).

NATO is keeping quiet until they find out whether the attack was internal or external. How do you

interpret this?

I do not think that that is the reason for NATO's hesitation. There is no serious doubt that the attack was

"external." I presume that NATO's reasons for hesitation are those that European leaders are expressing

quite publicly.

They recognize, as does everyone with close knowledge of the region, that massive assault on Muslim

population would be the answer to the prayers of bin Laden and his associates, and would lead the U.S. and

its allies into a "diabolical trap," as the French foreign minister put it.

Could you say something about connivance and the role of American secret service?

I don't quite understand the question. This attack was surely an enormous shock and surprise to the

intelligence services of the West, including those of the United States. The CIA did have a role, a major

one in fact, but that was in the 1980s, when it joined Pakistani intelligence and others (Saudi Arabia,

Britain, etc.) in recruiting, training, and arming the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists it could find to

fight a "Holy War" against the Russian invaders of Afghanistan.

The best source on this topic is the book Unholy Wars, written by longtime Middle East correspondent

and author John Cooley. There is now, predictably, an effort under way to clean up the record and pretend

that the U.S. was an innocent bystander, and a bit surprisingly, even respectable journals (not to speak of

others) are soberly quoting CIA officials to "demonstrate" that required conclusion-in gross violation of the

most elementary journalistic standards.

After that war was over, the "Afghanis" (many, like bin Laden, not Afghans), turned their attention

elsewhere: for example, to Chechnya and Bosnia, where they may have received at least tactic U.S.

support. Not surprisingly, they were welcomed by the governments; in Bosnia, many were welcomed by

the governments, in Bosnia, many Islamic volunteers were granted citizenship in gratitude for their military

services (Carlotta Gall, New York Times , October 2, 2001).

And to western China, where they are fighting for liberation from Chinese domination; these are Chinese

Muslims, some apparently sent by China to Afghanistan as early as 1978 to join a guerrilla rebellion

against the government, later joining the CIA-organized forces after the Russian invasion in 1979 in

support of the government Russia backed-and installed, much as the U.S. installed a government in South

Vietnam and then invaded to "defend" the country it was attacking, to cite a fairly close analog. And in the

southern Philippines, North Africa, and elsewhere, fighting for the same causes, as they see it. They also

turned their attention to their prime enemies Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Arab states, and by the 1990s,

also to the U.S. (which bin Laden regards as having invaded Saudi Arabia much as Russia invaded

Afghanistan).

What consequences do you foresee for the Seattle movement? Do you think it will suffer as a result,

or is it possible that it will gain momentum?

It is certainly a setback for the worldwide protests against corporate globalization, which-again-did not

begin in Seattle. Such terrorist atrocities are a gift to the harshest and most repressive elements on all

sides, and are sure to be exploited-already have been in fact- to accelerate the agenda of militarization,

regimentation, reversal of social democratic programs, transfer of wealth to narrow sections, and

undermining democracy in any meaningful form. But that will not happen without resistance, and I doubt

that it will succeed, except in the short term.

What are the consequences for the Middle East? In particular for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

The atrocities of September 11 were a devastating blow for the Palestinians, as they instantly recognized.

Israel is openly exulting in the "window of opportunity" it now has to crush Palestinians with impunity. In

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