Your browser may have trouble rendering this page. See supported browsers for more information.

This page shows the source for this entry, with WebCore formatting language tags and attributes highlighted.

Title

The Second War on Terrorism

Description

<a href="http://www.zmag.org">ZNet</a> published <a href="http://www.zmag.org/content/ForeignPolicy/chomsky_march26.cfm">Chomsky's Dýyarbikar Speech</a> on March 25th. He discusses several interesting topics, mostly giving a fascinating history and framework on which to hang U.S. and British behavior in the last century (and into this one). In all cases, he goes out of his way to mention that the U.S. is simply behaving like any other empire would and the repression and conquering outside its borders should be lamented, but not come as a surprise. The history runs from British terrorism in the early century under Churchill (<iq>who was a really savage monster</iq>), to brief discussions of U.S. actions in Latin America against the Catholic Church, and action in Indonesia, against the Muslim population there. The violence is inflicted evenly, at least. The U.S. was actually <iq>condemned in the World Court for international terrorism</iq>; the condemnation was ignored and the Security Council resolution to stop terroristm was vetoed by the U.S. The recent lamentation about U.S. students failing to learn history is doubly sad, because they learn neither the history taught them nor the actually history that has been erased from Western thought. <bq>All of this is gone from history. It is history, but it is not the history that we hear. Since the same war was re-declared on September 11 --- by many of the same people, with the same rhetoric - there have been endless reams of paper devoted to the new "war on terrorism," but you will have to search very hard to find any reference to what happened during the first "war on terrorism" that the same people carried out. That’s gone, and it’s gone for very simple reasons: Terrorism is restricted to what they do to us. What we do to them, even it is a thousand times more horrible, doesn’t count and it disappears. That’s the law of history as long as history is written by the powerful and transmitted by educated classes who choose to be servants of power.</bq> Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of U.S. hegemony is the smug self-righteousness with which it is carried out. The holier-than-thou vow to protect people from threats that are defined as such simply because they run contrary to U.S. interests is offensive to the intellect. Most of the threats singled out by the U.S. likely would provide benefit to the affected country, like land reform or national education and health care, but these smack too much of that intolerable evil, socialism. As long as that socialism is democratically elected and supported, the U.S. <i>should</i> have no ideological problem with it, right? The U.S. should encourage <i>all</i> forms of democracy. In particular, he discusses the world order as broken into the world leader, the U.S.; the attack dog, Britain; client states, Saudi Arabia, et. al.; and police dogs, Turkey, Israel, etc. Any nation that does what is in the best interests of the U.S. will garner U.S. support, armaments and financing regardless of the violence that they unleash on their own people. This is all done to ensure stability of regions in which the U.S. has interest. Which, at this point, is pretty much the entire planet. He mentions that any empire in power will use wild rhetoric in order to keep their people in check, and to get away with more than would be allowed were it not necessary to combat <span class="reference">X</span>, where <span class="reference">X</span> is "drugs", "crime", "communism", or once again recently, "terrorism". <bq>Now we hear every day that there is a "war on terrorism" that has been declared by the most powerful states. In fact that war is re-declared. It was declared in 1981, twenty years ago. When Reagan administration came into office, it [was] declared that the focus of US foreign policy would be state-sponsored international terrorism, the plague of the modern age; they declared that they would drive the evil out of the world. The war has been re-declared with the same rhetoric, and mostly by the same people. Among the leaders of the first "war against terror" twenty years ago are the ones who are directing the current "war against terror," with the same rhetoric and very likely with the same consequences.</bq> The interesting thing here is that it's the same people. The exact same group that "fought" the last war on terror, which worked so well at quelling terror, right? Well, no, but it worked extremely well at expanding U.S. hegemony and at increasing the worth of the U.S. military-industrial complex and their shareholders. These people see no reason why the exact same reasoning won't work again, which speaks volumes on how little U.S. awareness has grown in the last two decades. What does this fight on terrorism really do? It provides an easily believable pretense for doing things that U.S. citizens would ordinarily not approve of, but these are extreme times, and these people hate us for our freedoms and what can you do? But really, the fight on terrorism allows the U.S. to continue to install, prop up and maintain dictatorships that are terrible for other nation's citizens, but that do wonders for "stability". When the U.S. is the sole reason these dictators are in power, even monsters such as these will pay obeisance. <bq>The idea is to have non-Arab states that are militarily powerful, and can protect the Arab façade from indigenous forces that have strange ideas: for example, the idea that the wealth and resources of the region should go to them, instead of going to rich people in the West and their local associates. Such ideas are called "radical nationalism" and they have to be suppressed ...</bq> Client states of the U.S. empire are free to do as they please at home, so long as they maintain an iron discipline, give in to every U.S. demand and continue the transfer of wealth and resources from their countries into Western coffers, where it rightfully belongs, of course. Turkey's treatment of the Kurds, Suharto's treatment of Indonesia, Hussein's gas attacks...all go ignored, so long as they toed the line. Once Hussein got imperialistic ambitions of his own by invading Kuwait, he was brought to heel. If the U.S. or a pliant client state annexes land from another nation, it is allowed. If another nation does so, it is an international crime, violating the Geneva Convention. This is not surprising, but is also not how most U.S. citizens would like to think of their nation in more honest moments. <bq>They are acceptable no matter how many atrocities they carry out as long as they continue to fulfil their functions within the world system: to ensure that the rich and powerful receive what they deserve, namely the wealth of the region and its resources and markets, and so on.</bq> Therein lies the true shame, because the citizens of the U.S. are, for the most part, completely unaware that the U.S. is a proponent of what most citizens would find horrible and evil. U.S. citizens are hated for reasons completely unknown to them because they accept the manufactured version of history made available in the States. <bq>The US government, for example, certainly does not represent the US population. The population in US strongly opposes some of the most important and basic policies pursued by the government, which therefore have to be pursued in secret.</bq> A recent article on <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/">Common Dreams</a>, <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0513-07.htm">US Mideast Power Plays</a>, by Robert Jensen and Rahul Mahajan, emphasizes that the control is not simply because the U.S. needs oil. It's because <i>everyone</i> needs oil. <bq>It is not simply a question of who owns the oil, but who controls the flow of oil and oil profits. Even if the United States were energy self-sufficient, U.S. elites would seek to dominate the Middle East for the leverage it brings in world affairs, especially over the economies of our primary competitors (Europe and Japan), which are more heavily dependent on Middle Eastern oil.</bq> The greater shame is that the U.S., with its phenomenal model of freedom within its borders (I am allowed to write what I want here on this website without any real fear of retribution), sees no reason to export that model or break the repetetive cycle of human behavior that has been in control since the dawn of civilization. Perhaps, it's because those who seek power are not those who believe in the freedom of the people. This patten continues regardless of who is in power, Democrat or Republican; they are truly the same. In response to questions of a probable attack on Iraq, Chomsky points out that to attack as a subterfuge to draw attention away from domestic issues, like Enron, would be neither unprecedented nor unexpected. This can't be the only reason, though, as Iraq does have the second-largest supply of oil on the planet, which is at risk of falling into the hands of Russian and French interests if the embargo were to be lifted. This will of course not be allowed to happen. The sad thing is that most Americans I've spoken with would agree that the course of action is plain, the U.S. needs the oil, so what option is there but to take it? The rights of the people living there to their own resources never even enters into it. The basic wrongness of the U.S. attacking a country for oil is not acknowledged. A reversal of parties involved (would the U.S. like to be attacked for oil?) is scoffed at as needlessly argumentative and probably leftist and certainly unpatriotic. <bq>one plan, and this plan has been discussed in Turkey as you know, is for the US to use Turkey as a mercenary military force to conquer Northern Iraq with ground troops while the US bombs from 20,000 feet, The compensation for Turkey could be that it will get control of the oil resources of Musul and Kerkuk, which it has always regarded as part of Turkey.</bq> It is here that Chomsky is skeptical about this plan actually being put into effect, not because its sheer brutality on the people of the region would be acknowledged as too high a price to levy by the administration, but because the negative repercussions of such actions would be too much. That too is sad; that the only hope that a terrible thing won't happen is because those with the power and desire to perpetrate it see it as too risky, not because they see it as too evil.