1.
Maté:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in Washington as part of
his bid to stop a nuclear deal with Iran. Netanyahu will address the lobby
group AIPAC today, followed by a controversial speech before Congress on
Tuesday. The visit comes just as Iran and six world powers, including the U.S.,
are set to resume talks in a bid to meet a March 31st deadline. At the White
House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Netanyahu’s trip won’t threaten the
outcome.
2.
Earnest:
I think the short answer to that is: I don’t think so. And the reason is simply
that there is a real opportunity for us here. And the president is hopeful that
we are going to have an opportunity to do what is clearly in the best interests
of the United States and Israel, which is to resolve the international
community’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear program at the negotiating table.
3.
Maté:
The trip has sparked the worst public rift between the U.S. and Israel in over
two decades. Dozens of Democrats could boycott Netanyahu’s address to Congress,
which was arranged by House Speaker John Boehner without consulting the White
House. The Obama administration will send two officials, National Security
Adviser Susan Rice and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, to address the AIPAC
summit today. This comes just days after Rice called Netanyahu’s visit, quote, “destructive.”
4.
Goodman: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also
facing domestic criticism for his unconventional Washington visit, which comes
just two weeks before an election in which he seeks a third term in Israel. On
Sunday, a group representing nearly 200 of Israel’s top retired military and
intelligence officials accused Netanyahu of assaulting the U.S.-Israel
alliance. But despite talk of a U.S. and Israeli
dispute, the Obama administration has taken pains to display its staunch
support for the Israeli government. Speaking just today in Geneva, Secretary of
State John Kerry blasted the U.N. Human Rights Council for what he called an “obsession”
and “bias” against Israel. The council is expected to release a report in the
coming weeks on potential war crimes in Israel’s U.S.-backed Gaza assault last
summer. For more, we spend the hour today with world-renowned
political dissident, linguist, author, Noam Chomsky. He has written over a
hundred books, most recently On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone
Warfare. His forthcoming book, co-authored
with Ilan Pappé, is titled On Palestine and
will be out next month. Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he’s taught for more than 50
years. Noam Chomsky, it’s great to have you back here at Democracy Now!,
and particularly in our very snowy outside, but warm inside, New York studio.
5.
Chomsky:
Delighted to be here again.
6.
Goodman:
Well, Noam, let’s start with Netanyahu’s visit. He is set to make this
unprecedented joint address to Congress, unprecedented because of the kind of
rift it has demonstrated between the Republicans and the Democratic president, President
Obama. Can you talk about its significance?
7.
Chomsky:
For both president—Prime Minister Netanyahu and the
hawks in Congress, mostly Republican, the primary goal is to undermine any
potential negotiation that might settle whatever issue there is with Iran. They
have a common interest in ensuring that there is no regional force that can
serve as any kind of deterrent to Israeli and U.S. violence, the major violence
in the region. And it is—if we believe U.S. intelligence—don’t see any
reason not to—their analysis is that if Iran is developing nuclear weapons,
which they don’t know, it would be part of their deterrent strategy. Now, their
general strategic posture is one of deterrence. They have low military
expenditures. According to U.S. intelligence, their strategic doctrine is to
try to prevent an attack, up to the point where diplomacy can set in. I don’t think anyone with a grey cell functioning thinks
that they would ever conceivably use a nuclear weapon, or even try to. The
country would be obliterated in 15 seconds. But
they might provide a deterrent of sorts. And the U.S. and Israel certainly don’t
want to tolerate that. They are the forces that carry out regular violence and
aggression in the region and don’t want any impediment to that. And for the Republicans in Congress, there’s another
interest—namely, to undermine anything that Obama, you know, the entity Christ,
might try to do. So that’s a separate issue there. The Republicans stopped being an ordinary parliamentary party
some years ago. They were described, I think accurately, by Norman Ornstein,
the very respected conservative political analyst, American Enterprise
Institute; he said the party has become a radical insurgency which has
abandoned any commitment to parliamentary democracy. And their goal for the
last years has simply been to undermine anything that Obama might do, in an
effort to regain power and serve their primary constituency, which is the very
wealthy and the corporate sector. They try to conceal this with all
sorts of other means. In doing so, they’ve had to—you can’t get votes that way,
so they’ve had to mobilize sectors of the population which have always been
there but were never mobilized into an organized political force: evangelical
Christians, extreme nationalists, terrified people who have to carry guns into
Starbucks because somebody might be after them, and so on and so forth. That’s
a big force. And inspiring fear is not very difficult in the United States. It’s
a long history, back to colonial times, of—as an extremely frightened society,
which is an interesting story in itself. And mobilizing people in fear of them,
whoever “them” happens to be, is an effective technique used over and over
again. And right now, the Republicans have—their nonpolicy has succeeded in
putting them back in a position of at least congressional power. So, the attack
on—this is a personal attack on Obama, and intended that way, is simply part of
that general effort. But there is a common strategic concern underlying it, I think,
and that is pretty much what U.S. intelligence analyzes: preventing any
deterrent in the region to U.S. and Israeli actions.
8.
Maté:
You say that nobody with a grey cell thinks that Iran would launch a strike,
were it to have nuclear weapons, but yet Netanyahu repeatedly accuses Iran of
planning a new genocide against the Jewish people. He said this most recently
on Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, saying that the ayatollahs are
planning a new holocaust against us. And that’s an argument that’s taken
seriously here.
9.
Chomsky:
It’s taken seriously by people who don’t stop to think for a minute. But again, Iran is under extremely close surveillance. U.S.
satellite surveillance knows everything that’s going on in Iran. If Iran even began to load a missile—that is, to
bring a missile near a weapon—the country
would probably be wiped out. And whatever you think about the
clerics, the Guardian Council and so on, there’s no indication that they’re
suicidal.
10.
Maté:
The premise of these talks—Iran gets to enrich uranium in return for lifting of
U.S. sanctions—do you see that as a fair parameter? Does the U.S. have the
right, to begin with, to be imposing sanctions on Iran?
11.
Chomsky:
No, it doesn’t. What are the right to impose sanctions? Iran should be
imposing sanctions on us. I mean, it’s worth
remembering—when you hear the White House spokesman talk about the
international community, it wants Iran to do this and that, it’s important to
remember that the phrase “international community” in U.S. discourse refers to
the United States and anybody who may be happening to go along with it. That’s
the international community. If the international
community is the world, it’s quite a different story. So, two years ago,
the Non-Aligned—former Non-Aligned Movement—it’s a large majority of the
population of the world—had their regular conference in Iran in Tehran. And
they, once again, vigorously supported Iran’s right to develop nuclear power as
a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That’s the international community.
The United States and its allies are outliers, as is usually the case. And as far as
sanctions are concerned, it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s now 60 years
since—during the past 60 years, not a day has passed without the U.S. [fucking]
torturing the people of Iran. It began with overthrowing the
parliamentary regime and installing a tyrant, the shah, supporting the shah
through very serious human rights abuses and terror and violence. As soon as he was overthrown, almost instantly the United
States turned to supporting Iraq’s attack against Iran, which was a brutal and
violent attack. U.S. provided critical support for it, pretty much won the war
for Iraq by entering directly at the end. After the war was over, the U.S.
instantly supported the sanctions against Iran. And though this is kind of
suppressed, it’s important. This is George H.W. Bush now. He was in love with Saddam
Hussein. He authorized further aid to Saddam in
opposition to the Treasury and others. He sent a presidential delegation—a
congressional delegation to Iran. It was April 1990—1989, headed by Bob Dole,
the congressional—
12.
Goodman:
To Iraq? Sent to Iraq?
13.
Chomsky:
To Iraq. To Iraq, sorry, yeah—to offer his greetings to
Saddam, his friend, to assure him that he should disregard critical comment
that he hears in the American media: We have this free press thing here, and we
can’t shut them up. But they said they would take off from Voice of America,
take off critics of their friend Saddam. That was—he invited Iraqi nuclear
engineers to the United States for advanced training in weapons production.
This is right after the Iraq-Iran War, along with sanctions against Iran. And
then it continues without a break up to the present. There have been
repeated opportunities for a settlement of whatever the issues are. And so, for
example, in, I guess it was, 2010, an agreement was reached between Brazil,
Turkey and Iran for Iran to ship out its low-enriched uranium for storage
elsewhere—Turkey—and in return, the West would provide the isotopes that Iran
needs for its medical reactors. When that agreement was reached, it was
bitterly condemned in the United States by the president, by Congress, by the
media. Brazil was attacked for breaking ranks and so on. The Brazilian foreign
minister was sufficiently annoyed so that he released a letter from Obama to
Brazil proposing exactly that agreement, presumably on the assumption that Iran
wouldn’t accept it. When they did accept it, they had to be attacked for daring
to accept it. And 2012, 2012, you know, there was to be a meeting in Finland,
December, to take steps towards establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the
region. This is an old request, pushed initially by Egypt and the other Arab
states back in the early ‘90s. There’s so much support for it that the U.S.
formally agrees, but not in fact, and has repeatedly tried to undermine it.
This is under the U.N. auspices, and the meeting was supposed to take place in
December. Israel announced that they would not attend. The question on everyone’s
mind is: How will Iran react? They said that they would attend unconditionally.
A couple of days
later, Obama canceled the meeting, claiming the situation is not right for
it and so on. But that would be—even steps in that direction would
be an important move towards eliminating whatever issue there might be. Of
course, the stumbling block is that there is one major nuclear state: Israel.
And if there’s a Middle East nuclear weapons-free zone, there would be
inspections, and neither Israel nor the United States will tolerate that.
14.
Goodman: I want to ask you about major
revelations that have been described as the biggest leak since Edward Snowden. Last
week, Al Jazeera started publishing a series of spy cables from the world’s top
intelligence agencies. In one cable, the Israeli spy agency Mossad contradicts
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own dire warnings about Iran’s ability to produce a
nuclear bomb within a year. In a report to South African counterparts in
October 2012, the Israeli Mossad concluded Iran is “not performing the activity
necessary to produce weapons.” The assessment was sent just weeks after
Netanyahu went before the U.N. General Assembly with a far different message.
Netanyahu held up a cartoonish diagram of a bomb with a fuse to illustrate what
he called Iran’s alleged progress on a nuclear weapon.
15.
Netanyahu:
This is a bomb. This is a fuse. In the case of Iran’s nuclear plans to build a
bomb, this bomb has to be filled with enough enriched uranium. And Iran has to
go through three stages. By next spring, at most by next summer, at current
enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to
the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks,
before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb. A red line should
be drawn right here, before—before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear
enrichment necessary to make a bomb.
16.
Goodman:
That was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September 2012. The
Mossad assessment contradicting Netanyahu was sent just weeks after, but it was
likely written earlier. It said Iran, quote, “does not appear to be ready,”
unquote, to enrich uranium to the highest levels needed for a nuclear weapon. A
bomb would require 90 percent enrichment, but Mossad found Iran had only
enriched to 20 percent. That number was later reduced under an interim nuclear
deal the following year. The significance of this, Noam Chomsky, as Prime
Minister Netanyahu prepares for this joint address before Congress to undermine
a U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal?
17.
Chomsky:
Well, the striking aspect of this is the chutzpah
involved. I mean, Israel has had nuclear weapons for probably 50 years
or 40 years. They have, estimates are, maybe 100, 200 nuclear weapons. And they
are an aggressive state. Israel has invaded Lebanon five times. It’s carrying
out an illegal occupation that carries out brutal attacks like Gaza last
summer. And they have nuclear weapons. But the main story is that
if—incidentally, the Mossad analysis corresponds to U.S. intelligence analysis.
They don’t know if Iran is developing nuclear weapons. But
I think the crucial fact is that even if they were, what would it mean? It
would be just as U.S. intelligence analyzes it: It would be part of a deterrent
strategy. They couldn’t use a nuclear weapon. They couldn’t even threaten to
use it. Israel, on the other hand, can; has, in fact, threatened the use of
nuclear weapons a number of times.
18.
Goodman:
So why is Netanyahu doing this?
19.
Chomsky:
Because he doesn’t want to have a deterrent in the
region. That’s simple enough. If you’re an aggressive, violent state,
you want to be able to use force freely. You don’t want anything that might
impede it.
20.
Goodman:
Do you think this in any way has undercut the U.S. relationship with Israel,
the Netanyahu-Obama conflict that, what, Susan Rice has called destructive?
21.
Chomsky:
There is undoubtedly a personal relationship which is hostile, but that’s
happened before. Back in around 1990 under first President Bush, James Baker went
as far as—the secretary of state—telling Israel, “We’re not going to talk to
you anymore. If you want to contact me, here’s my phone number.” And, in fact,
the U.S. imposed mild sanctions on Israel, enough to compel the prime minister
to resign and be replaced by someone else. But that
didn’t change the relationship, which is based on deeper issues than personal
antagonisms.
22.
Maté:
And meanwhile, support for the occupation continues, so much so that during the
Gaza assault the U.S. rearmed Israel.
23.
Chomsky:
It was kind of interesting how the U.S. rearmed Israel. The arms—it’s true that
the Pentagon sent more arms to Israel. They were actually running out of arms
in this vicious
assault against a totally defenseless population. The arms were taken from arms that the U.S. stores in Israel;
they’re pre-positioned in Israel for eventual use by U.S. forces. That’s one
part of the U.S.-Israel strategic alliance. That’s one small part of it, is
that Israel is regarded as essentially an offshore military base. So we store,
pre-position arms there, and some of those arms were transferred to Israeli
control so that they could complete—continue the massive destruction of Gaza,
which is horrific and one of many indications of the nature of the alliance. It’s a very close alliance, and deep enough—so, for
example, one of the interesting leaks from WikiLeaks was a U.S. government
study of—a Pentagon study of sites in the world that are of such high
significance that we must protect them at all costs. One of them was right near
Haifa. It was the Rafael military industries. It’s one of the main producers of
drones and other high-tech military equipment. And the relation—and that’s one
of the highest—strategic sites of highest importance. And, in fact, the
relationship is so close that Rafael actually transferred its management
offices to Washington, where the money is and the contacts are. It’s
essentially an offshore military base, in many ways, also a major source for
U.S. investment, high-tech investment. So, Intel, for example, is setting up
its major new facility for next-generation chips in Israel. Warren Buffett just
bought a big Israeli company. There are many very close relationships, and they’re not
going to be affected by a personal conflict between Baker and Shamir or Obama
and Netanyahu.
24.
Goodman:
And the Obama administration has taken great pains, even as this division has
taken place, to show its support for Israel. On Sunday, Secretary of State John
Kerry said the U.S. has intervened on Israel’s behalf hundreds of times in the
international arena.
25.
Kerry:
Prime minister of Israel is welcome to speak in the
United States, obviously, and we have a closer relationship with Israel right
now in terms of security than at any time in history. I was reviewing the record
the other day. We have intervened on Israel’s behalf in the last two years more
than several hundred—a couple of hundred times in over 75 different fora in
order to protect Israel.
26.
Goodman:
That was U.S. secretary of state on ABC’s This Week. Noam Chomsky?
27.
Chomsky:
And it’s interesting to look at the cases. The most—one of them actually
received a fair amount of publicity, because it was so remarkable. That was, I
suppose, February 2011, roughly, at the U.N. Security Council. There was a
resolution proposed at the Security Council calling on Israel to abide by
official U.S. policy. The official U.S. policy is
objection to settlement expansion. It’s a pretty minor issue, incidentally.
That’s what’s talked about. But the issue is the settlements, not the expansion. They’re all illegal. They’re criminal activities. They
undermine any hope for any peaceful settlement. But U.S. policy is that
settlement expansion is, as they put it, not helpful to peace. The Security Council
proposed a resolution asking Israel to abide by official U.S. policy. Obama
vetoed it. You know, that’s real support for Israel.
28.
Goodman:
We’re going to break and then come back to our discussion with the
world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, institute professor
emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Noam Chomsky. Stay with us. This is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Aaron
Maté. Our guest for the hour is MIT institute professor emeritus, Noam Chomsky,
known around the world for his political writings. We’re going to turn
right now to the issue of Russia and Ukraine. Secretary of State John Kerry is
meeting with Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov in Geneva to discuss the conflict in Ukraine. The
meeting comes just days after Kerry publicly accused Russian officials of lying
to his face about their military support for separatist rebels. Russia and
Ukraine are also holding direct talks in Brussels to resolve a dispute over the
delivery of Russian gas. The U.N. said today the death toll from the nearly
year-old conflict has topped 6,000. A recent ceasefire continues to hold, over
a shaky start. Also in Russia, the murder this weekend
on Friday night of the opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov. A former deputy prime
minister turned dissident politician, Nemtsov was shot dead Friday night near
Red Square. He was going to lead a major rally that was critical of Vladimir
Putin on Sunday. It grew much larger after his death, with tens of thousands,
perhaps 50,000 people, marching past the Kremlin carrying signs reading, “I am
not afraid.” Noam Chomsky, if you can comment on what’s happening in
Russia and Ukraine?
29.
Chomsky:
What’s happening is quite ugly. And I think the criticisms are mostly accurate,
but they’re kind of beside the point. There’s a background that we have to
think about. It’s fashionable now in the United States
and Britain to condemn Putin as some sort of a distorted mind. There’s an
article in Psychology Today analyzing his brain, asking why he’s so
arrogant. He’s been accused of having Asperger’s; an irritable, rat-faced man,
as he’s described by Timothy Garton Ash and so on. This is all very reminiscent of the early 1950s, when I
was a graduate student then. At that time, the U.S. had overwhelming power, and
it was able to use the United Nations as a battering ram against its enemy, the
Soviet Union, so Russia was, of course, vetoing lots of resolutions, condemning
it. And leading anthropologists in the United States and England developed
a—began to analyze why the Russians are so negative, what makes them say no at
the United Nations all the time. And their proposal was that the Russians are
negative because they raise their children in swaddling clothes, and that makes
them negative. The three or four of us at Harvard who thought this ridiculous
used to call it diaperology. That’s being re-enacted—a takeoff on
Kremlinology. This is being re-enacted right now. But the fact is, whatever you
think about Putin—OK, irritable, rat-faced man with Asperger’s, whatever you
like—the Russians have a case. And you have to understand the case. And the case is
understood here by people who bother to think. So, for example, there
was a lead article in Foreign Affairs, the main establishment journal, by John Mearsheimer with a title like something like “The
West is Responsible for the Ukraine Crisis.” And he was talking about
the background. The background begins with the fall of the Soviet Union, 1989,
1990. There were negotiations between President Bush, James Baker and Mikhail
Gorbachev about how to deal with the issues that arose at the time. A crucial
question is: What happens to NATO? NATO had been advertised, since its
beginning, as necessary to protect western Europe from the Russian hordes. OK,
no more Russian hordes, so what happens to NATO? Well, we know what happened to
NATO. But the crucial issue was this. Gorbachev agreed to allow Germany, a
unified Germany, to join NATO, a hostile military alliance. It’s a pretty remarkable
concession, if you think about the history of the preceding century,
half-century. Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times, and
now he was agreeing to have Germany join a hostile military alliance led by the
only superpower. But there was a quid pro quo, that Germany—that NATO
would not move one inch to the east. That was the phrase that was used in the
interchanges, meaning to East Germany. And on that condition, they went
forward. NATO immediately moved to East Germany. When Gorbachev vigorously
protested, naturally, he was informed by the United States that it was only a
verbal commitment, it wasn’t on paper. The unstated
implication is, if you are naïve enough to think you can make a gentlemen’s
agreement with us, it’s your problem. [Accurate.] They didn’t say
that; I’m saying that. But
NATO moved to East Germany; under Clinton, moved right up to Russia’s borders. Just a couple
of weeks ago, U.S. military equipment was taking part in a military parade in
Estonia a couple hundred yards from the Russian border. Russia is
surrounded by U.S. offensive weapons—sometimes they’re called “defense,” but
they’re all offensive weapons. And the idea that the new government in Ukraine,
that took over after the former government was overthrown, last December, late
December, it passed a resolution, overwhelmingly—I think something like 300 to
eight or something—announcing its intention to take steps to join NATO. No
Russian leader, no matter who it is, could tolerate Ukraine, right at the
geostrategic center of Russian concerns, joining a hostile military alliance. I mean, we can imagine, for example, how the U.S. would
have reacted, say, during the Cold War if the Warsaw Pact had extended to Latin
America, and Mexico and Canada were now planning to join the Warsaw Pact. Of
course, that’s academic, because the first step would have led to violent U.S.
response, and it wouldn’t have gone any further.
30.
Goodman:
The Cuban missile crisis.
31.
Chomsky:
Yeah, and it’s very interesting to think about what actually happened at the
Cuban missile crisis, which is very striking. The issue—the crucial issue with
the missile crisis was—the peak moment was October 26th and 27th, right at the end. Khrushchev had
sent a letter to Kennedy offering to end the crisis by simultaneous, public
withdrawal of Russian missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey. These
were obsolete missiles for which a withdrawal order had already been given,
because they were being replaced by much more lethal U.S. missiles and Polaris
submarines, invulnerable submarines. So that was the offer. They would withdraw
the missiles; we would withdraw obsolete missiles, which are already being
replaced by more lethal ones. Kennedy refused. And his own subjective
assessment, whatever that means, of nuclear war was a third to a half. That’s
got to be the most horrific decision in history. Khrushchev backed down,
fortunately. The U.S. did secretly say that it would withdraw the obsolete
missiles, of course, which it didn’t need anymore. But if you take a
look at the balance of power that was assumed to be legitimate, we are—you have
to establish the principle that we have a right to surround anyone with lethal
offensive weapons that can obliterate them in a second, but they can’t do
anything anywhere near us. Same as with—take a look at
the conflict with China over the maritime conflict. Where is it taking place? I
mean, is it off the coast of California? Is it in the Caribbean? No, it’s off
the coast of China. That’s where we have to protect what we call freedom of the
seas, not in—in China’s waters. This is a part of the concept that we
basically own the world, and we have a right to do anything anywhere we like,
and nobody has a right to stand up to it. Now, in the case of the
Ukraine, again, whatever you think about Putin—think he’s the worst monster
since Hitler—they still have a case, and it’s a case that no Russian leader is
going to back down from. They cannot accept the Ukrainian move of the current
government to join NATO, even probably the European Community. There is a very
natural settlement to this issue: a strong declaration that Ukraine will be
neutralized, it won’t be part of any military alliance; that, along with some
more or less agreed-upon choices about how—about the autonomy of regions. You
can finesse it this way and that, but those are the basic terms of a peaceful
settlement. But we have to be willing to accept it; otherwise, we’re moving
towards a very dangerous situation. I mentioned before that the Doomsday Clock, famous
clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has just been
advanced to three minutes before midnight. That’s very close. Midnight means we’re
finished. That is the highest, closest it’s reached since 1983. And we might remember what happened then. What happened then
was that the Reagan administration, as soon as it came into office, began
highly provocative actions. It wanted to probe Russian defenses, so they
simulated air and naval attacks against Russia, very publicly and openly. They
wanted the Russians to know, to see how they’d respond. Well, it was a very
tense moment. Pershing II missiles were being installed in western Europe with
a five- to 10-minute flight time to Moscow. Reagan had announced the so-called
Star Wars program, which is called defense, but strategic analysts on all sides
agree that it’s a first-strike weapon, what’s called missile defense. It was an
extremely tense period. The Russians were concerned. It was known at the time
that they were concerned, but recently released archives, Russian archives,
indicate that the concern was very high. There’s a recent U.S. intelligence
report analyzing in detail what their reactions were, and it concludes—its
words are—”The war scare was real.” We came close to war. And it’s worse than
that, because right in the—1984, right at the peak of this—this is when the
Doomsday Clock was approaching midnight—right in the midst of that, Russian automated
detection systems, which are much worse than ours—we have satellite detection.
We can detect missiles from takeoff. They have only radar detection, line of
sight, so they can only detect missiles when you can kind of see them with
radar. They detected a U.S. missile attack. The protocol is for that
information to be transmitted to the high command, which then launches a
preventive strike. It went to a particular individual, Stanislav Petrov. He
just decided not to transmit it. That’s why we’re alive to talk about it.
32.
Goodman:
We’re going to have to break, then come back to Noam Chomsky, professor
emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of over a hundred
books. We’ll be back in a minute. This
is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m
Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. Noam Chomsky is our guest for the hour, the
world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author of over a hundred books,
MIT professor emeritus. Aaron?
33.
Maté:
Yes. Noam, I wanted to ask you about ISIS. The big news is that Iraq is
planning a major offensive to retake Mosul. It’s currently launching strikes to
recapture Tikrit with U.S. support. My question is about the effectiveness of
the U.S. strategy. To what extent is the U.S. constrained by its own policies
in terms of the effectiveness of defeating ISIS, constrains in terms of its
ties to Saudi Arabia and its refusal to engage with Iran and groups like
Hezbollah, which have been effective in fighting ISIS?
34.
Chomsky:
Patrick Cockburn, who has done by far the best
reporting on this, describes it as an Alice in Wonderland strategy. The U.S. wants to destroy ISIS, but it’s opposing
every force that’s fighting ISIS. So, the main state that’s opposed to
ISIS is Iran. They support the Iraqi government, the Shiite government. But
Iran is, you know, on our enemies list. Probably the main ground forces
fighting ISIS are the PKK and its allies, which are on the U.S. terrorist list.
That’s both in Iraq and in Syria. Saudi Arabia, our major ally, along with Israel,
is both traditionally, for a long time, the main funder of ISIS and similar
groups—not necessarily the government; rich Saudis, other people in the
emirates—not only the funder, but they’re the ideological source. Saudi Arabia
is committed, is dominated by an extremist fundamentalist version of Islam:
Wahhabi doctrine. And ISIS is an extremist offshoot of the Wahhabi doctrine.
Saudi Arabia is a missionary state. It establishes schools, mosques, spreading
its radical Islamic version. So, they’re our ally. Our enemies are those who
are fighting ISIS. And it’s more complex. ISIS is a
monstrosity. There’s not much doubt about that. It
didn’t come from nowhere. It’s one of the results of the U.S. hitting a very
vulnerable society—Iraq—with a sledgehammer, which elicited sectarian conflicts
that had not existed. They became very violent. The U.S. violence made it
worse. We’re all familiar with the crimes. Out of this came lots of violent,
murderous forces. ISIS is one. But the Shiite militias are not that different.
They’re carrying out—they’re the kind of the—when they say the Iraqi army is
attacking, it’s probably mostly the Shiite militias with the Iraqi army in the
background. I mean, the way the Iraqi army collapsed is an astonishing military
fact. This is an army of, I think, 350,000 people, heavily armed by the United
States and trained by the United States for 10 years. A couple of thousand
guerrillas showed up, and they all ran away. The generals ran away first. And
the soldiers didn’t know to do. They ran away after them.
35.
Goodman:
We have 20 seconds.
36.
Chomsky:
Hmm?
37.
Goodman:
We have 20 seconds.
38.
Chomsky:
Yeah. Well, now, it’s basically—the effect, it’s hard to see
how Iraq can even be held together at this point. It’s been devastated by U.S.
sanctions, the war, the atrocities that followed from it. The current policy,
whatever it is, is not very likely to even patch up, put band-aids on the
cancer.
39.
Goodman:
We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’ll continue this discussion
tomorrow on Democracy Now! Our guest, Noam Chomsky, institute professor
emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[Thenextday.]
40.
Goodman:
Today, part two of our discussion with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned
political dissident, linguist and author, institute professor emeritus at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he’s taught for more than half a
century. On Monday
on Democracy Now!, Aaron Maté and I interviewed him about Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech on Iran to Congress. Today, in part two,
we look at blowback from the U.S. drone program, the legacy of slavery in the
United States, the leaks of Edward Snowden, U.S. meddling in Venezuela and the
thawing of U.S.-Cuba relations. We began by asking Professor Chomsky how the
U.S. should respond to the self-proclaimed Islamic State.
41.
Chomsky:
It’s very hard to think of anything serious that can be done. I mean, it should
be settled diplomatically and peacefully to the extent that that’s possible. It’s
not inconceivable. I mean, there are—ISIS, it’s a horrible manifestation of
hideous actions. It’s a real danger to anyone nearby. But so are other forces. And we should be getting together with Iran, which has a huge
stake in the matter and is the main force involved, and with the Iraqi
government, which is calling for and applauding Iranian support and trying to
work out with them some arrangement which will satisfy the legitimate demands
of the Sunni population, which is what ISIS is protecting and defending and
gaining their support from. They’re not coming out of nowhere. I mean,
they are—one of the effects, the main effects, of the U.S. invasion of
Iraq—there are many horrible effects, but one of them was to incite sectarian
conflicts, that had not been there before. If you take a look at Baghdad before
the invasion, Sunni and Shia lived intermingled—same neighborhoods, they
intermarried. Sometimes they say that they didn’t even know if their neighbor
was a Sunni or a Shia. It was like knowing what Protestant sect your neighbor
belongs to. There was pretty close—it wasn’t—I’m not claiming it was—it wasn’t
utopia. There were conflicts. But there was no serious conflict, so much so
that Iraqis at the time predicted there would never be a conflict. Well, within
a couple of years, it had turned into a violent, brutal conflict. You look at Baghdad today, it’s segregated. What’s left
of the Sunni communities are isolated. The people can’t talk to their neighbors. There’s war going on all
over. The ISIS is murderous and brutal. The
same is true of the Shia militias which confront it. And this is now spread all
over the region. There’s now a major Sunni-Shia conflict rending the region
apart, tearing it to shreds. Now, this cannot be
dealt with by bombs. This is much more serious than that. It’s got to be dealt
with by steps towards recovering, remedying the massive damage that was
initiated by the sledgehammer smashing Iraq and has now spread. And that does
require diplomatic, peaceful means dealing with people who are pretty ugly—and we’re not
very pretty, either, for that matter. But
this just has to be done. Exactly what steps should be taken, it’s hard to say.
There are people whose lives are at stake, like the Assyrian Christians, the
Yazidi and so on. Apparently, the fighting that protected the—we don’t know a
lot, but it looks as though the ground fighting that protected the Yazidi,
largely, was carried out by PKK, the Turkish guerrilla group that’s fighting
for the Kurds in Turkey but based in northern Iraq. And they’re on the U.S.
terrorist list. We can’t hope to have a strategy that
deals with ISIS while opposing and attacking the group that’s fighting them,
just as it doesn’t make sense to try to have a strategy that excludes Iran, the
major state that’s supporting Iraq in its battle with ISIS.
42.
Goodman:
What about the fact that so many of those who are joining ISIS now—and a lot
has been made of the young people, young women and young men, who are going
into Syria through Turkey. I mean, Turkey is a U.S. ally. There is a border
there. They freely go back and forth.
43.
Chomsky:
That’s right. And it’s not just young people. One thing
that’s pretty striking is that it includes people with—educated people,
doctors, professionals and others. Whatever we—we may not like it, but ISIS
is—the idea of the Islamic caliphate does have an appeal to large sectors of a
brutalized global population, which is under severe attack everywhere, has been
for a long time. And something has appeared which has an appeal to them. And
that can’t be overlooked if we want to deal with the issue. We have to ask
what’s the nature of the appeal, why is it there, how can we accommodate it and
lead to some, if not at least amelioration of the murderous conflict, then
maybe some kind of settlement. You can’t ignore these factors if you want to
deal with the issue.
44.
Goodman:
I want to ask you about more information that’s come out on the British man who
is known as “Jihadi John,” who appears in the Islamic State beheading videos. Mohammed Emwazi has
been identified as that man by British security. They say he’s a 26-year-old
born in Kuwait who moved to the U.K. as a child and studied computer science at
the University of Westminster. The British group CAGE said he faced at least four years of
harassment, detention, threats and attempts to recruit him by British security
agencies, which prevented him from leading a normal life. Emwazi approached
CAGE in 2009 after he was detained and interrogated deportations by the British
intelligence agency MI5 on what he called a safari vacation in Tanzania. In
2010, after Emwazi was barred from returning to Kuwait, he wrote, quote, “I had
a job waiting for me and marriage to get started. But know [sic] I feel like a
prisoner, only not in a cage, in London.” In 2013, a week after he was barred
from Kuwait for a third time, Emwazi left home and ended up in Syria. At a news
conference, CAGE research director Asim Qureshi spoke about his recollections of Emwazi and
compared his case to another British man, Michael Adebolajo, who hacked a soldier to
death in London in 2013.
45.
Qureshi: Sorry, it’s quite hard, because,
you know, he’s such a—I’m really sorry, but he was such a beautiful young man,
really. You know, it’s hard to imagine the trajectory, but it’s not a
trajectory that’s unfamiliar with us, for us. We’ve seen Michael Adebolajo,
once again, somebody that I met, you know, who came to me for help, looking to
change his situation within the system. When are we going to finally learn that
when we treat people as if they’re outsiders, they will inevitably feel like
outsiders, and they will look for belonging elsewhere?
46.
Goodman:
That’s CAGE research
director Asim Qureshi.
Your response to this, Noam Chomsky?
47.
Chomsky:
He’s right. If you—the same if you take a look at those who perpetrated the
crimes on Charlie Hebdo. They also have a history of oppression, violence.
They come from Algerian background. The horrible
French participation in the murderous war in the ‘90s in Algeria is their
immediate background. They live under—in these harshly repressed
areas. And there’s much more than that. So, you mentioned that information is
coming out about so-called Jihadi John. You read the British press, other
information is coming out, which we don’t pay much attention to. For example, The Guardian had an article a couple
of weeks ago about a Yemeni boy, I think who was about 14 or so, who was
murdered in a drone strike. And shortly before, they had interviewed him
about his history. His parents and family went through them, were murdered in
drone strikes. He watched them burn to death. We get
upset about beheadings. They get upset about seeing their father burn to death in
a drone strike. He said they live in a situation of constant terror, not
knowing when the person 10 feet away from you is suddenly going to be blown
away. That’s their lives. People like
those who live in the slums around Paris or, in this case, a relatively
privileged man under harsh, pretty harsh repression in England, they also know
about that. We may choose not to know about it, [WoodyAllen.
MajaToudal.] but they know. When we talk about
beheadings, they know that in the U.S.-backed Israeli attack on Gaza, at the
points where the attack was most fierce, like the Shejaiya neighborhood, people
weren’t just beheaded. Their bodies were torn to shreds. People came
later trying to put the pieces of the bodies together to find out who they
were, you know. These things happen, too. And they have an impact—all of
this has an impact, along with what was just described. And if we seriously
want to deal with the question, we can’t ignore that. That’s part of the background
of people who are reacting this way.
48.
Maté:
You spoke before about how the U.S. invasion set off the Sunni-Shia conflict in
Iraq, and out of that came ISIS. I wonder if you see a parallel in Libya, where
the U.S. and NATO had a mandate to stop a potential massacre in Benghazi, but
then went much further than a no-fly zone and helped topple Gaddafi. And now,
four years later, we have ISIS in Libya, and they’re beheading Coptic
Christians, Egypt now bombing. And with the U.S. debating this expansive war
measure, Libya could be next on the U.S. target list.
49.
Chomsky:
Well, that’s a very important analogy. What happened is, as you say, there was
a claim that there might be a massacre in Benghazi, and in response to that,
there was a U.N. resolution, which had several elements. One, a call for a
ceasefire and negotiations, which apparently Gaddafi accepted. Another was a
no-fly zone, OK, to stop attacks on Benghazi. The three
traditional imperial powers—Britain, France and the United States—immediately
violated the resolution. No diplomacy, no ceasefire. They immediately
became the air force of the rebel forces. And, in fact, the war itself had
plenty of brutality—violent militias, attacks on Africans living in Libya, all
sorts of things. The end result is just to tear Libya to shreds. By now, it’s
torn between two major warring militias, many other small ones. It’s gotten to
the point where they can’t even export their main export, oil. It’s just a
disaster, total disaster. That’s what happens when you strike
vulnerable systems, as I said, with a sledgehammer. All kind of horrible things
can happen. In the case of Iraq, it’s worth recalling that there had
been an almost decade of sanctions, which were brutally destructive. We know
about—we can, if we like, know about the sanctions. People prefer not to, but
we can find out. [WoodyAllen. MajaToudal.] There was a
sort of humanitarian component of the sanctions, so-called. It was the
oil-for-peace program, instituted when the reports of the sanctions were so
horrendous—you know, hundreds of thousand of children dying and so on—that it
was necessary for the U.S. and Britain to institute some humanitarian part.
That was directed by prominent, respected international diplomats, Denis
Halliday, who resigned, and Hans von Sponeck. Both Halliday and von Sponeck
resigned because they called the humanitarian aspect genocidal. That’s
their description. And von Sponeck published a detailed, important book on it
called, I think, A Different Kind of War, or something like that, which
I’ve never seen a review of or even a mention of it in the United States, which
detailed, in great detail, exactly how these sanctions were devastating the
civilian society, supporting Saddam, because the people had to simply huddle
under the umbrella of power for survival, probably—they didn’t say this, but I’ll
add it—probably saving Saddam from the fate of other dictators who the U.S. had
supported and were overthrown by popular uprisings. And there’s a long list of
them—Somoza, Marcos, Mobutu, Duvalier—you know, even Ceaușescu, U.S. was
supporting. They were overthrown from within. Saddam wasn’t, because the civil
society that might have carried that out was devastated. He had a pretty
efficient rationing system people were living on for survival, but it severely
harmed the civilian society. Then comes the war, you know, massive war, plenty
of destruction, destruction of antiquities. There’s now, you know, properly,
denunciation of ISIS for destroying antiquities. The U.S. invasion did the same
thing. Millions of refugees, a horrible blow against the society. These things
have terrible consequences. Actually, there’s an interesting interview with Graham Fuller. He’s
one of the leading Middle East analysts, long background in CIA, U.S. intelligence.
In the interview, he says something like, “The U.S. created ISIS.” He hastens
to add that he’s not joining with the conspiracy theories that are floating
around the Middle East about how the U.S. is supporting ISIS. Of course, it’s
not. But what he says is, the U.S. created ISIS in the sense that we
established the background from which ISIS developed as a terrible offshoot.
And we can’t overlook that.
50.
Goodman:
MIT professor Noam Chomsky. When we come back from break, he talks about Cuba,
U.S. relations with Venezuela, Edward Snowden, U.S. drones, the legacy of
slavery, and a new chapter in Noam’s own life. Stay with us. As we continue our
conversation with Noam Chomsky, we turn now to Latin America. Democracy Now!’s
Aaron Maté sat down with Noam Chomsky yesterday on Democracy Now!, the
MIT professor emeritus. We asked him to talk about the thawing of U.S.-Cuba
relations and U.S. meddling in Cuba.
51.
Chomsky:
The U.S. has been at war with Cuba since late 1959. Cuba was—had been, essentially, a colony of the
United States, a virtual colony. In January 1959, the Castro guerrilla forces took over. By late
that year, around October, U.S. planes were already bombing Cuba from Florida.
In, I think it was, March
1960, there was a formal decision internally to overthrow the
government. John F. Kennedy came in shortly after, got the Bay of Pigs. After the Bay of Pigs, there was almost hysteria in
Washington about how to punish the Cubans for this. Kennedy made some
incredible speeches about how, you know, the future of the world is at stake in
dealing with Cuba and so on. The U.S. launched a major
terrorist war against Cuba. We kind of downplay it, and what you can get
reported is CIA attempts, you know, to kill Castro—bad enough—but that was a
very minor part of it. Major terrorist war is part of the background for the missile
crisis, which almost led to a terminal nuclear war. Right after the crisis, the terrorist war picked up again. Meanwhile,
the sanctions have been very harsh sanctions against Cuba, right from the
Eisenhower regime, picked up, extended by Kennedy, extended further under
Clinton, who actually outflanked Bush from the right on extending the
sanctions. The world has been totally opposed to this. The votes at the
General Assembly—you can’t do it at the Security Council because the U.S.
vetoes everything, but at the General Assembly, the votes are just
overwhelming. I think the last one was 182 to two, you know, U.S. and Israel,
and sometimes they pick up Papua or something like that. This has been going on
year after year. The U.S. is utterly isolated, not just on this issue, many
others. Finally,
notice that Obama didn’t end the sanctions. In fact, he didn’t even end the
restrictions, many of the restrictions on travel and so on. They made a mild
gesture towards moving towards normalization of relations. That’s
presented here—the way it’s presented here is, we have to test Cuba to see if
our long—as Obama put it, our efforts to improve the situation in Cuba have
failed, right? Big efforts to improve the situation—terrorism, sanctions. The sanctions are really incredible. So, if, say, Sweden
was sending medical equipment somewhere which had Cuban nickel in it, that had
to be banned, you know, things like that.
52.
Goodman:
And terrorism, you mean?
53.
Chomsky:
Terrorism just—it went on into the ‘90s. The worst part was under Kennedy, then
picked up again in the late ‘70s and so on. Major
terrorists are provided refuge in Florida. The
late Bosch is one, Orlando Bosch. Posada is another. You remember there was something called the Bush Doctrine,
Bush II: A country that harbors terrorists is the same as the terrorists
themselves. That’s for others, not for us. We harbor them and also
support their activities. But we have to test Cuba to see if they’re making successful
gestures, now that our old policy of bringing freedom and democracy didn’t
work, so we have to try a new policy. I mean, the irony of this is
almost indescribable. The fact that
these words can be said is shocking. It’s a sign of, again, a failure to
reach a minimal level of civilized awareness and behavior. But
the steps—I mean, it’s good that there are small steps being taken. It’s
interesting to see what the Cuban intellectual community—there is a dissident
intellectual community in Cuba—how they’ve been reacting to it. Actually, there’s
an interesting article about it by my daughter, Avi Chomsky, who’s a Cuba
specialist. But we don’t look at that. We don’t hear what they’re saying.
54.
Goodman:
What are they saying?
55.
Chomsky:
What they’re saying is approximately what I was just saying: You know, it’s a
good step that the U.S. is beginning to move, but they’ve got to begin to face
up to the reality of what’s been happening, which is that the U.S. has been
attacking Cuba. And the reason for—the primary reason, probably, for Obama’s
slight moves are that the U.S. was becoming completely isolated in the
hemisphere. It’s not just that the world is opposed, the hemisphere is opposed.
And that’s a remarkable development.
56.
Goodman:
Speaking of Latin America, overall, I wanted to turn to the latest that’s
happening in Venezuela and with U.S.-Venezuelan relations. Venezuela has announced the arrest of an unspecified number of
Americans on charges of espionage, at least some of whom have reportedly been
released and left the country. Speaking at a rally, the Venezuelan president,
Nicolás Maduro, said the suspects were trying to stoke anti-government
political sentiment.
57.
Maduro:
[translated] We’ve detected activity, and we have
captured some U.S. citizens in undercover activities, in hidden activities,
espionage, trying to win over people in towns along the Venezuelan coast,
trying to win over people in some neighborhoods. In Táchira, we captured a
pilot of a U.S. plane of Latin origin with all sorts of documentation.
58.
Goodman:
President Maduro also announced new restrictions on the
number of U.S. diplomats allowed in Venezuela and rule changes that will
subject Americans to the same visa requirements Venezuelans face in the United
States. President Maduro has also unveiled a list of American politicians
barred from entering Venezuela in response to U.S. sanctions against Venezuelan
officials last year. Maduro has repeatedly accused right-wing opponents of
fomenting a coup with U.S. support. Now, the White House has denied the
charges, but said last week it’s considering tools to, quote, “steer the
Venezuelan government in the direction they should be headed,” unquote. Professor
Noam Chomsky, your response? What’s happening?
59.
Chomsky:
Well, one kind of question we should immediately ask ourselves is brought up by
your observation that Venezuela is planning to impose on U.S. citizens the same
restrictions that the United States imposes on Venezuelans. Why do we impose
those restrictions? Suppose, say, that Iran was
sending people to the United States to foment opposition to the government and
call for change in the regime. How would we react to that? Unimaginable.
But we consider it our right to do that elsewhere. Incidentally, this is not a
justification of Venezuelan actions. The fact that we do it doesn’t make it
justified. If others do it, no, it’s not justified. Venezuela has severe
internal problems. There’s no doubt about that.
60.
Goodman:
What is your assessment of Maduro and how he compares to President Chávez?
61.
Chomsky:
Well, Maduro—Chávez had a charisma and popular support and appeal that Maduro
doesn’t have. But there is a—there are difficult economic circumstances to face
within Venezuela. The economy is in difficult shape.
During the Chávez years, there were progress in many areas, but there was no
success in moving Venezuela away from a strictly oil-based economy. There was
very little in the way of diversification of the economy, a development of
agriculture, development of industry and so on. And that’s a pretty weak reed
for an economy to rest on. It’s not a successful development program. And
that’s now showing up. There were inflation problems. They were never able to
deal with the problem of internal violence. It’s not the most violent country
in the hemisphere, but it’s pretty bad. And these are serious internal problems
that are undoubtedly being exacerbated, to some extent by U.S. involvement. By
rights, we should be trying to support Venezuela to overcome its internal
problems, not trying to light fires that will make them worse.
62.
Goodman:
How could the U.S. do that?
63.
Chomsky:
We could, for example, eliminate those restrictions that you’re talking about.
We could be providing economic and technical assistance that could be used to
overcome internal difficulties. These are things that could be done. Instead what we’re doing is maintaining a position of extreme
hostility. This is not—there’s plenty of problems internally, and our actions
are purposely making them worse. It’s not by accident. We want—the U.S.
government wants to make them worse, because it wants the regime overthrown.
Chávez’s own estimate—whether it’s accurate or not, I can’t judge, but what he’s—his
position is that the United States was willing to tolerate his government, up
to the point when he began to play a significant role in OPEC and convinced the
OPEC countries, the oil-producing countries, to lower production in order to
raise prices. And the U.S. was strongly opposed to that. And what he says is,
that’s when the U.S. government turned against him. In fact, the U.S. backed,
openly backed, the 2002 coup, which briefly overthrew the government, and has
continued subversive activities. That’s his judgment.
64.
Goodman:
MIT professor Noam Chomsky. Coming up, he talks about Edward Snowden, drone
warfare, the legacy of slavery in the United States and Noam’s new love. All
that and more, coming up. We’re
spending the hour with MIT professor, author and activist Noam Chomsky. We sat
down with him Monday. I asked him about the significance of the leaks by
National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden and whether he should be
allowed to return to the United States without facing any charges.
65.
Chomsky:
He should be welcomed as a person who carried out the
obligations of a citizen. He informed American citizens of what their
government is doing to them. That’s exactly what a person who has real
patriotism, not the flag-waving type, but real patriotism, would do. So he
should be honored, not just allowed back. It’s the people in the government who
should be on trial, not him.
66.
Goodman:
I was talking to a friend who was saying, you know, when you talk about Edward
Snowden, what about the issues of terrorism and having to spy on those who
might want to hurt others?
67.
Chomsky:
If they want to—first of all, it’s—we can raise this question, but it’s
academic, because they are not preventing terrorism. You’ll
recall, when the Snowden revelations came out, the immediate reaction from the
government, the highest level—Keith Alexander, others—was that these NSA
programs had stopped, I think they said, 54 or so acts of terror. Gradually,
when the press started asking questions, it was whittled down to about 12.
Finally, it came down to one. And that act of terror was a man who had sent, I
think, $8,500 to Somalia. That’s the yield of this massive program. And it is not intended to stop terrorism. It’s intended to
control the population. That’s quite different. You have to be
very cautious in accepting claims by power systems. They have no reason to tell
you the truth. And you have to look and ask, “Well, what is the truth?” And
this system is not a system for protecting terrorism. Actually,
you can say the same about the drone assassination program. That’s a global
assassination program, far and away the worst act of terror in the world. It’s
also a terror-generating program. And they know it, from high places. You
can find quotation after quotation where they know it. Take this
one case that I mentioned before, this child who was murdered in a drone strike
after having watched his family burn to death by drone strikes.
68.
Goodman:
In Yemen.
69.
Chomsky:
What’s the effect of this on people? Well, it’s to create terror. The close
analyses have shown that that’s exactly what happens. There’s a very important
book by Akbar Ahmed, who’s
an important anthropologist, who is a Pakistani,
who studies tribal systems and worked in the North-West territories and so on, and
it’s called The
Thistle and the Drone. And he goes through, in some detail, the effect on tribal
societies of simply murdering—from their point of view, just murdering
people at random. The drone attacks, remember, are aimed at people who
are suspected of maybe someday wanting to harm us. I
mean, suppose, say, that Iran was killing people in the United States and
Israel who they thought would—might someday want to harm them. They could
find plenty of people. Would we consider that legitimate? It’s again, we
have the right to carry out mass murder of suspects who we think might harm us
someday. How does the world look at this? How do the people look at this in
this village where this child was who said that they’re terrorized by constant
drone strikes all over North-West Pakistan? That’s true. Now it’s over most of
the world. The U.S. war—so-called war against terror has been a smashing
success. There was a small group up in the tribal areas of mostly Pakistan and
Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, and we have succeeded in spreading it over the whole
world. Now they’re all everywhere—you know, West Africa, Southeast Asia—simply
generating more and more terror. And I think it’s—you
know, it’s not that the U.S. is trying to generate terror. It’s simply that it
doesn’t care.
70.
Goodman:
I wanted to ask you about Syriza in Greece, a movement that started as a
grassroots movement. Now they have taken power, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.
And then you have Spain right now. We recently spoke to Pablo
Iglesias, the secretary general of the group called Podemos, that was
founded, what—an anti-austerity party that has rapidly gained popularity. A
month after establishing itself last year, they won five seats in the European
Parliament, and some polls show they could take the next election, which would
mean that Pablo Iglesias, the 36-year-old political science professor and
longtime activist, could possibly become the prime minister of Europe’s
fifth-largest economy. He came here to New York for just about 72 hours, and I
asked him to talk about what austerity measures have meant in Spain.
71.
Iglesias:
Austerity means that people is expulsed of their homes. Austerity means that
the social services don’t work anymore. Austerity means that public schools
have not the elements, the means to develop their activity. Austerity means
that the countries have not sovereignty anymore, and we became a colony of the
financial powers and a colony of Germany. Austerity probably means the end of
democracy. I think if we don’t have democratic control of economy, we don’t
have democracy. It’s impossible to separate economy and democracy, in my
opinion.
72.
Goodman:
That was Pablo Iglesias, the head of this new anti-austerity group in Spain
called Podemos, which means in English “We can.” The significance of these
movements?
73.
Chomsky:
It’s very significant. But notice the reaction. The reaction to Syriza was
extremely savage. They made a little bit of progress in their negotiations, but
not much. The Germans came down very hard on them.
74.
Goodman:
You mean in dealing with the debt.
75.
Chomsky:
In the dealing with them, and sort of forced them to back off from almost all
their proposals. What’s going on with the austerity is
really class war. As an economic program, austerity, under recession, makes no
sense. It just makes the situation worse. So the Greek debt, relative to GDP,
has actually gone up during the period of—which is—well, the policies that are
supposed to overcome the debt. In the case of Spain, the debt was not a public
debt, it was private debt. It was the actions of the banks. And that means also
the German banks. Remember, when a bank makes a dangerous, a risky borrowing, somebody
is making a risky lending. And the policies that
are designed by the troika, you know, are basically paying off the banks, the
perpetrators, much like here. The population is suffering. But one of the
things that’s happening is that the—you know, the social democratic policies,
so-called welfare state, is being eroded. That’s class war. It’s not an
economic policy that makes any sense as to end a serious recession. And there
is a reaction to it—Greece, Spain and some in Ireland, growing elsewhere,
France. But it’s a very dangerous situation, could lead to a right-wing
response, very right-wing. The alternative to Syriza might be Golden Dawn,
neo-Nazi party.
76.
Goodman:
And then you have in the United States a movement around accountability,
overall. It’s the 50th anniversary of the Selma Bloody Sunday, March 7th, when
John Lewis, now a congressman, and scores of others had their heads beaten in
by Alabama state troopers. It’s 50 years later, and you have the Black Lives
Matter movement. You have these stories repeatedly around the country of police
officers killing young people and not-so-young people of color. What do you
make of this movement? And do you see the anti-austerity movement in Europe,
the accountability movement in the United States, the movement around climate
change—do you see these coalescing in any way?
77.
Chomsky:
They should. But in actual fact, the degree of coalescence is not high. We
should remember that—take Selma. If you listen to the rhetoric on Martin Luther
King Day, it’s instructive. It typically ends with the “I Have a Dream” speech
and the voting rights. And Martin Luther King didn’t
stop there. He went on to condemning the war in Vietnam and to raising class
issues. He began to raise class issues and turn to the North. At that point, he
fell out of favor and disappeared. He was trying to—he was assassinated
when he was trying to organize a poor people’s movement, and he was supporting
a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis. There was supposed to be a march to
Washington to establish a poor people’s movement, appeal to Congress to do
something about class issues. Well, the march actually took place after his
death, led by his widow, ended up in Washington. They set up a tent city, a
resurrection city. This was the most liberal Congress in history probably,
tolerated it briefly, then sent in the police in the middle of the night and
drove them out of town. And that’s disappeared from the rhetoric on Martin
Luther King Day. So it’s OK to condemn a racist sheriff in Alabama, but not us,
please. Don’t touch our privilege and power. [e.g. AmyTaubin. WoodyAllen.] And that’s
a large part of the background. These issues are very real. There’s more issues
here. Racism is a very serious problem in the United States. Take a look at the
scholarly work on it, say, George Fredrickson’s study of
the white supremacy, comparative study. He concludes, I think plausibly,
that the white supremacy in the United States was even more extreme and savage
than in South Africa. Just think of our own history. You know, our economy, our
wealth, our privilege relies very heavily on a century of horrifying slave
labor camps. The cotton—cotton production was not just the fuel of the
Industrial Revolution, it was the basis for the financial system, the merchant
system, commerce, England, as well. These were bitter, brutal slave labor
camps. There’s a recent study by Edward Baptist which comes out with some startling information.
It’s called—actually, the title is startling, something like The Half was
Never Told [The
Half Has Never Been Told], which is more or less true, was never
told. But, for example, he shows, pretty convincingly,
that in the slave labor camps—the “plantations,” we call them, politely—the productivity increased more rapidly than in industry,
with no technological advance, just the bullwhip. Just by driving
people harder and harder to the point of survival, they were able to increase productivity and profit. And it’s
not just the—he also points out that the word “torture” is not used in discussion
of this period. He introduces it should be used. I mean, these are camps that could have impressed the Nazis. And it is a
large part of the basis for our wealth and privilege. Is there a slave museum in the United States? Actually,
the first one is just being established now by private—some private donor. I
mean, this is the core of our history, along with the extermination or
expulsion of the native population, but it’s not part of our consciousness.
78.
Goodman:
Noam, you’re headed off on a Latin America trip right now for a month. You’ll
be in Brazil. You’ll be giving talks in Argentina. When you go to Brazil, you’re
going to be meeting your new family.
79.
Chomsky:
That’s correct.
80.
Goodman:
And I was wondering if you could talk a little about that?
81.
Chomsky:
Well, we’ve been talking about a variety of things that range from unpleasant
to horrific, but we shouldn’t overlook the fact that the world has some
wonderful things in it, too. And I got an unexpected, wondrous gift from Brazil
that fell into my arms not long ago. We’re now—Valeria—we’re now about to
celebrate our first anniversary and off to Brazil to meet Valeria’s family.
82.
Goodman:
And what is that like for you? You are seen around the world, by many, as—not
only as a person who shares incredible political insight in the world, but really
as a role model. And so, can you talk personally about your own life?
83.
Chomsky:
I’m a very private person. I’ve never talked about my own life much. But, you
know, I’ve—personally, I’ve been very fortunate in my life, with—there have
been tragedies. There have been wonderful things. And Valeria’s sudden
appearance is one of those wonderful things.
84.
Maté:
You said, after your first wife, Carol, died, that life without love is
empty—something along those lines. Can you talk about that?
85.
Chomsky:
Well, I could produce some clichés, which have the merit of being true. Life
without love is a pretty empty affair.
86.
Maté:
And your own tireless schedule, keeping up with your lectures, writing
extensive articles, and still tirelessly answering the emails, from correspondence
from people around the world—when I was in college, I remember I wrote you
several times and got back these long, detailed answers on complex questions.
And there’s people across the globe who could attest to a similar experience.
Do you feel a certain obligation to respond to people? Because nobody would
fault you, at the age of 86 now, if you took more time for yourself.
87.
Chomsky:
I don’t know if it’s an obligation exactly. It’s a privilege, really. These are
the important people in the world. I remember a wonderful comment by Howard
Zinn about the countless number of unknown people who are the driving force in
history and in progress. And that’s people like—I didn’t know you, but people
like you writing from college. These are people that deserve respect,
encouragement. They’re the hope for the future. They’re an inspiration for me
personally.
88.
Goodman:
You mentioned your daughter Avi being an expert on Cuba, among others. You have
three children that you and Carol raised, now broadening your family to
Valeria, as well. Can you talk about your philosophy of child rearing in a very
politically active family? You have said in the past that you thought, because
of your opposition to the war in Vietnam, for example, you might spend years in
jail.
89.
Chomsky:
Came very close, came close enough so that by 1967, ‘68, when resistance
activities were at their height—and I was an unindicted co-conspirator in one
trial, and the prosecutor announced I’d be the leading person in the next
trial, but—
90.
Goodman:
In which trial?
91.
Chomsky:
Pardon me?
92.
Goodman:
In which trial?
93.
Chomsky:
These were the
so-called trials of the resistance. The first was called the Spock-Coffin
trial, although—a lot to say about that. The next ones were called off,
mainly because of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which convinced the American
business community that the war is going to drag on, and they—in a rather
significant power play, they compelled Johnson to start backing off. And one of
the things they did was end the trials. But it was serious enough so that my
wife Carol went back to school after 16 years to get a—finish up with her
doctoral degree, since we had three kids to take care of. But during those
years, although I was extremely active—I mean, there were times when I was giving seven talks a day
and going to demonstrations and so on, but I always managed—took care
to spend as much time as I could, quality time, with the kids when they were
growing up.
94.
Goodman:
So what gives you hope?
95.
Chomsky:
Things like what you described, also the wonderful things in the world of the
kind that I mentioned, like my wife.
96.
Goodman:
MIT professor, world-renowned linguist, dissident, author, Noam Chomsky. To
hear part one
of our interview yesterday, when he talked about Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu’s speech to Congress today, you can go to our website. This is just a
clip.
97.
Chomsky:
Basically, a joint effort by Netanyahu and mostly Republicans hawks from the
United States to undermine any possibility of a negotiated settlement with
Iran. Neither Israel nor U.S. hawks want to tolerate a deterrent in the region
to their violence.
98.
Goodman:
Noam Chomsky. To hear both of our hours of interview with him, go to
democracynow.org.
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