[MUSIC PLAYING] PRESENTER: Welcome
everyone to 10250. We also have people
in 4270 and 4370. Hello, if you can see me. We'd like to welcome everyone. This is a really
important occasion. We're on the eve of war. So thank you for being here. This is MIT's second evening of
events sponsored by the MIT's Initiative of Peace. And yesterday's event
was a tremendous success, with over 3,000 people attending
Reverend Jesse Jackson's speech in which he urged us to join
our community fellow members and study war no more. [APPLAUSE] This was then followed by the
inauguration of the MIT student center to be the Martin Luther
King, Jr. Peace Center, where we will be having many different
various activities organized. For example, we
have discussions, open discussions, workshops. There'll be newspapers,
political art, political theater, many,
many different things. And we urge all
of you to join us after this talk to continue
the activities that will be going on in the
peace center this evening. With no further
ado, here's Noam. [CHEERING] CHOMSKY: I guess it's not
considered good form to start by admonishing your audience. But I don't think it's
a time for cheering. In fact, it's not easy to
talk about this topic at all when we're just short
of a decision that's going to mean the
slaughter of tens if not hundreds of
thousands of people and that may set a large
part of the world in flames. And that's exactly what
is soon going to happen. I suppose there are
still possibilities that it may be averted. But right now, they
look pretty slim. Well, as I say, it's not
easy to talk about it calmly. But since I really can't
think of much else to do, that's what I will proceed
to do, for what it's worth. At least we can try to
understand what's going on and use such
understanding as we can get as a basis of making some
reasonable decision about how to respond to this and many
other things like it that are going to follow. When Saddam Hussein
invaded Kuwait on August 2, there were two responses. And they were both very strong
and pretty much unprecedented. One response, which went
through the United Nations, was sanctions and embargo. And those sanctions were
of unprecedented severity. I mean, there's been nothing
remotely like them even in cases much worse than
this latest crime of Saddam Hussein's. The other response
was preparation for war, quick preparation
for war, within a day or two. That preparation
for war had nothing to do with the
annexation of Kuwait. In fact, it took place
well before the annexation. So it had to do
with the invasion. And at the time
that it took place, there was essentially nothing
to distinguish Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait
from, for example, George Bush's invasion of
Panama a couple of months earlier, which was probably
more bloody and destructive. Now, these two responses
separate world opinion quite substantially. The first response had pretty
broad support, at least in the industrial world-- the sanctions. And sanctions, of course,
means negotiations. Sanctions means that
you put pressure on through some economic
means leading to a negotiated settlement of some kind. And diplomacy-- there's
another word for diplomacy. It's called linkage. That word is a new one that
was kind of invented here. And we're supposed
to be against it. But it's just another
word for diplomacy. Diplomacy means you
consider relevant issues, and you try to reach
some solution to them. But since we're supposed
to be against it, a new word was necessary, and
that's linkage, which is bad. And therefore, everybody's
against linkage. So the first response is
sanctions and diplomacy equals linkage. And that had pretty
broad support. And what was surprising
about it is not that it took place,
because there's often broad opposition to
aggression, but that it could get implemented, that
sanctions could be implemented, which is rare, and also
that they were so severe, which is also very rare. The second response, preparation
for war, that was very limited. In fact, it was limited to
the United States and England, with very weak
support from others. Also, the family dictatorships
that run the Gulf states. They're in favor of it. And Israel's in favor of it. But it's basically a two-member
partnership, US and England. And if you look at the
military structure, you'll notice that two military
forces are under a command structure to fight. And the others are
kind of hanging around the periphery to the
extent that they're at all. The other major
countries in the world didn't want anything
to do with it. The European community
and Japan, the other two major power centers-- European community
outside of England-- made it pretty clear
at once that this was none of their business. They were not going to
support it even financially. In the third world,
it's very split. Much of it is, in fact,
against any of the responses. In the Arab world,
there's a sharp division. It's been noted, and it's
worth paying attention to, that the division
in the Arab world pretty much has to do with the
extent to which a country has some degree of responsiveness
and openness to public opinion. By and large, the more a country
has some form of pluralism and elements of
democracy, it tends to be opposed to the US
presence in the Gulf. The countries that are
more in support of it are the ones that are
more repressive, narrower, have no openings. That's pretty much the case. And it's been noticed. The New York Times specialist on
the Middle East, Judith Miller, pointed out that
the countries that have what she called "nascent
democratic movements" are opposed to the US presence. And administration
spokesmen have also noticed it and have
spoken about it and have pointed out that
their conclusion from that is that we have to strike fast
because especially if you let things run into the
Islamic religious periods around March, the Ramadan
and the pilgrimage, the Hajj, then even
the totalitarian states have a tough time keeping
a lid on public opinion. And therefore, the whole
thing might collapse. So the conclusion
is strike fast. And incidentally,
the same conclusions are drawn about the home front. Unless you strike fast,
there will be an expression of public opinion. Well, you can draw
your own conclusions from that, both the lessons
that it teaches about statecraft and the prospects for action. Anyhow, there were
those divisions. George Bush likes
to talk about how it's the world against Saddam
Hussein, which is something of an exaggeration. It certainly is the
industrial world and parts of the rest
against Saddam Hussein. But it's also, in this respect,
the world against George Bush or, to be more precise,
against George Bush and-- whoever happens to be sitting in
10 Downing Street at the moment varies. But it's the
US-British coalition that's pretty much breaking
with world opinion on that and has been from the beginning. Now, that raises a
number of questions. We want to understand why the
United Nations was able to act, which is very unusual;
why the actions were so unprecedented in
severity as they were-- I can't think of
another case where there was an embargo on
food, for example, even in much worse cases than this. And, of course, the
crucial question is why the United States
and England are alone-- aside from the family
dictatorships in the Gulf, pretty much alone. Well, let's hold those questions
in the back of our minds for a second and be clear about
what in fact happened next. What happened next is that
within days of the invasion, well before the annexation,
the United States moved decisively to undercut
the possibility that sanctions might be effective. That was done instantly. The immediate response
from Washington was to announce the sending
of a huge expeditionary force. Now, a deterrent force,
largely offshore, that could be kept in
place for a long time, long enough for
sanctions to take effect. And these sanctions are
very likely to take effect. It's two major reasons for that. One is their
unprecedented severity. And the other is that the
usual sanctions busters-- namely the United States and
England and their allies-- happen to be onboard this
time, and vigorously onboard. So it's not like South Africa. So this time, it's very
likely that these sanctions would work. But of course, it takes
time for sanctions to work. And a huge expeditionary
force can't be kept there more than a
couple of weeks, or maybe months at the outside. Furthermore,
there's this problem that I mentioned before-- you
can't keep the troops too long or the Arab world blows up
because nobody likes it. So you've got to do it fast. That wouldn't be a problem
with a deterrent force. So the purpose--
certainly the effect, and the predictable effect,
so I assume the purpose-- of announcing right
off that there would be a huge expeditionary
force, that must have been-- the effect obviously
was and the purpose must have been-- to undercut
sanctions, to make sure that they can't work. And within the first
couple of days, it was clear that sanctions
were not an option. Well, what about
diplomacy, the other aspect of the peaceful means prescribed
by international law, sanctions and diplomacy? Diplomatic opportunities
began to crop up very quickly, within a week or two. By the end of August,
there were several that looked pretty significant,
including Iraqi offers that were regarded by
high US officials as serious and negotiable. The offers at that
time basically had to do with, as you've
all heard plenty of times by now, two uninhabited
islands in the Gulf and with this particular oil
field, the Rumaila oil field. This oil field's
about 98% inside Iraq. It crosses a disputed border. And Iraq wanted control
of the whole thing. The uninhabited
islands, they have to do with access to the Gulf. The imperial settlement
imposed by England was set up in such a way that
Iraq is basically landlocked. And access to the Gulf
would involve control over those two islands. There could be lots of
ways of working this out-- leasing or whatever. Much harder problems
than that have been settled through negotiations. And a settlement along
those lines looked feasible. Was it feasible? Well, we don't know because
the United States rejected it flat out, out of hand. The only way you can find
out if a proposal is serious is to pursue it, obviously. And rejecting it out of hand
was a way of ensuring that there wouldn't be serious-- in fact, it was probably
an expression of fear that it might be serious. The New York Times had a
pretty remarkable story. Thomas Friedman, the
diplomatic correspondent, which means, essentially,
the State Department spokesman at the Times. That's the nature
of that office. He had quite a perceptive
article, I thought-- I think it was
around August 22-- in which he said that
the administration wants to prevent the diplomatic track
from being pursued because of fear that pursuit
of the diplomatic track might defuse the crisis-- that was his words-- by offering a few token
gains for Saddam Hussein, namely-- and then
he mentioned them-- a couple of uninhabited islands
and some border rectification. And you don't want to
defuse the crisis when you can have a neat war with a
couple hundred thousand people killed, apparently. So the Times actually had
this offer leaked to it and suppressed it. And it was only released,
and then marginally, when it was then leaked to
a suburban newspaper in New York, Newsday, which
published it very prominently on the front page. It was all over the
newsstands in New York, and you had to at least have
dismissive mention of it in the back pages the next day. Well, since that time, there
have been repeated offers. The most recent one
that's been made public, at least, was disclosed on
January 2, again in Newsday. The reporter-- it's
a good reporter at Newsday, Newt Royce,
Washington bureau, who's been following
this topic very closely. On January 2, he reported
that US officials had disclosed that there
had been an Iraqi offer a couple of days earlier. And that offer was to withdraw
completely from Kuwait in return for a pledge not to
attack the withdrawing forces and to reach arrangements
or settlement-- or something kind of vague, to
do something about two issues, two major regional issues-- one of them the issue of
the Arab-Israeli conflict, particularly the state
of the Palestinians. And the second issue was
weapons of mass destruction in the region. So in return for some kind of
Security Council commitment to deal with those
two issues, there could be complete withdrawal. Well, was that offer serious? We don't know because the United
States dismissed it instantly. Again, high State
Department officials described it as a serious
pre-negotiating position as an indication that Iraq
wants to withdraw from Kuwait and noted specifically
that it didn't say anything about the border issues. It dropped them. Well, that one didn't
get much publicity. The New York Times, however,
which didn't report, did report the same day a
meeting between Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein
in which Arafat said that they had agreed that-- Saddam Hussein had made a
proposal back on August 12 to withdraw, or
at least to link-- all these are kind of vague--
to link Iraqi withdrawal to withdrawal from other
occupied Arab territories. That means Syria and Israel
from Lebanon and Syria and Israel from the Syrian
Golan Heights and the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And according to the January 2
report, January 3 in the Times, this was now weakened
to just a commitment to deal with those issues,
so withdrawal in response to a commitment to
deal with those issues. Well, that was also rejected. Anyhow, two weeks
before the deadline, things looked like this. The contours of a
possible settlement were Iraqi withdrawal from
Kuwait in return for a pledge not to attack the withdrawing
forces and a commitment to settle regional issues. No settlement of them, just
a commitment to settle them. That was rejected. So we don't know if
that was serious. And all of that is indicative
of a strong opposition to diplomacy, very strong
opposition to diplomacy. These are certainly
well within the range of negotiable positions. But the United States
didn't want to hear of them. And they were flat out rejected. And therefore, we haven't any
idea, and we'll never know, whether that offered a way of
avoiding a major catastrophe. That has continued up until
just a couple of hours ago. Last night, France
made a proposal at the Security
Council for Iraq, calling for a complete
and rapid Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait in return for-- and then comes
wording, vague wording, about calling an
international conference at an appropriate moment. Not even saying when, but some
time or other, a commitment to call an
international conference at an appropriate moment to
consider the Palestinian issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict. That was the proposal. That was flat out rejected by
the United States, instantly. The United States and
Britain rejected it outright. Also the Soviet Union, but at
this point Soviet leadership would stand on their heads
and sing Yankee Doodle if they thought they could
get American support. So that's irrelevant. But England and the United
States instantaneously rejected it on the
usual grounds-- linkage, meaning diplomacy, and
you can't reward aggressors, and all this posturing. Now, actually, what
the UN ambassador, the American UN ambassador
said, Thomas Pickering, he said, you can't accept this because
it doesn't keep to the UN resolutions on Iraq and Kuwait. And he's technically
correct about that. The wording is not drawn
from those resolutions. It's drawn from a different
UN Security Council decision. Namely, it's drawn from a
Security Council decision on December 20 of last year,
which had absolutely nothing to do with Iraq. It had to do with protection
of the rights of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. It was a resolution-- I think 681-- which called on
Israel to observe the Geneva Conventions and to
stop deporting people and to protect the rights of
Palestinians under occupation. Now, that resolution
was passed unanimously. The United States had
voted for it, too. And then came something
kind of unusual. Attached to that
resolution was a codicil, a statement attached to it-- not in the resolution, but
attached to it-- which said, members of the Security Council
agree that in the interest of peace, they will proceed
at an appropriate moment-- that's the crucial wording. They will proceed at
an appropriate moment to call for an
international conference to deal with the issue
in order to reach peace. Now, why wasn't that
in the resolution? Well, because if that phrase
had been in the resolution, the United States would
have vetoed it, right? Remember that this had
nothing to do with Iraq. The word Iraq or
Kuwait never got mentioned in this resolution. It just had to do
with the Palestinians. But the United States
was going to veto it if it said that at
some appropriate moment in the future, there would be-- unspecified when, some
moment in the future, when it's appropriate,
whatever that means-- there might be an international
conference on the Palestinians. If that was the case, the United
States was going to veto it. Nothing there about linkage. And the French offer
simply drew that wording and tried to work it into
a resolution on Iraq. So Pickering, the
ambassador, was right in saying
the wording wasn't drawn from Iraq resolutions. But it was drawn from
another resolution, or an addition to a resolution,
just a couple of weeks earlier. Well, that indicates the depth
of the commitment of the United States not to allow
diplomacy to work. You can't allow it to work,
even in any fashion whatsoever. Even the weakest gesture toward
diplomacy has to be blocked. The US from the start insisted
that diplomatic contacts be limited to delivery
of an ultimatum. You're allowed to deliver
them an ultimatum saying, capitulate or die. That's diplomacy. And that's what
George Bush calls going the extra mile for peace. And most of the press,
including even people who ought to know better, like
Fred Kaplan of the Globe, who's a good reporter,
have described this as a tremendous,
forthcoming effort to explore every
possible diplomatic path and so on and so forth. Fact is, it was flat
rejection of diplomacy from the first instant. Now, looking back, we have
the following situation-- there were
unprecedented sanctions. There were diplomatic options. The United States moved at
once to undercut the sanctions and moved at once to
undercut the diplomacy and has kept to that
position ever since. Well, what are the
reasons for this? You've heard them 10,000 times. We can't reward aggressors. You can't have linkage. And so on. It just offends our
moral sensibilities to allow our aggressor
to get anything. So therefore, we got to
smash them in the face. Now, it really doesn't-- we don't have to waste
any time discussing this. The only reason for even
spending three seconds on it is that this has been
accepted at face value virtually across the spectrum. So, for example, if you listen
to the congressional debate, you'll notice that-- I mean, I didn't
hear the whole thing. But just about everybody, maybe
everybody-- every word I heard, at least-- accepted
the legitimacy of this. And most of the
press has accepted the legitimacy of this. There's been very
little questioning of the rhetorical stance. There's debate, but the
debate is over tactics. Is it good for us
or is it bad for us to pursue this just course? Now, because the rhetorical
stance was never challenged, the debate was pretty much
restricted to a tactical frame. Is it good for us or is
it bad for us to proceed? And in that frame,
the administration's going to win, obviously. I mean, it's debatable. And so you go along with power. Of course, if the
rhetorical stance had ever been
challenged, it would have collapsed instantaneously. And that would have been
the end of the debate. Because it's
impossible to uphold even one fragment of this
position for three seconds. And the reason for
that is very simple. In fact, the reason is
one of logic, basically. The point of logic is that
you can't uphold principles selectively. If you uphold some
doctrine selectively, it's not a principle. That's transparent. We don't ever doubt that. So, for example, when
Saddam Hussein tells us that he's agonizing over the human
rights abuses of the Israelis in the occupied territories
and he clutches to his breast the Amnesty International
report on Israeli atrocities-- which is pretty
awful, incidentally-- or when he tells us he's
against annexation-- namely, he's against annexation
of the Golan Heights-- we don't say he's
a man of principle. You laugh. And exactly the same
reasoning holds true when George Bush tells us
that he clutches to his breast the Amnesty International report
on Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait, but not a long
list of others you might think of and that his-- [APPLAUSE] --cant tolerate,
can't go to sleep at night because of this
thought that an aggressor's not being punished and
so on and so forth. I mean, these are jokes. Incidentally, in the third
world, my impression-- we don't get much information
from the third world. But my impression is that
they were regarded as jokes. It's kind of striking that
until the last couple of days, even, people in the
third world didn't seem to think that this
was going to happen. I was down at a conference
in Mexico last weekend. And nobody took it-- from
people around Latin America, nobody thought
this was for real. They all thought, this
is never gonna happen. People from the Middle East
have had the same reaction, from right in the region. And I think the reason
for that is pretty simple. When we hear Saddam Hussein's
posturing, we laugh. When they hear George Bush's
posturing, they laugh. What they don't realize is
that in the United States and England, people don't laugh. They take it seriously. They don't understand the
deep totalitarian streak in Western culture,
which means that you can get by with this
kind of posturing and everybody takes it very
seriously and somberly. And that's the kind of mistake
that people in the third world have been making for a long
time, in fact for 500 years, ever since the European
conquest of the world began. And they've paid
quite a cost for it, and they're continuing
to pay a price. Well, now it's clear
that it's for real. It's instantaneous-- I'm not
gonna waste your time on it. But the United States is
one of the leading violators of all the principles that
are grandly proclaimed. That's obvious. Anybody who's opened
their eyes in the last 50 years or 100 years knows that. In the last year, in fact. And therefore, we don't
have to argue any further about the stance. What about the matter
of linkage or sanctions? Well, supposedly, we
can't be for sanctions because it'll take too long. Why will it take too long? Well, there's the argument
given by the administration and by people in
Congress is that-- one argument is, well, if you
wait for sanctions to hold, the coalition will fall apart. Yeah, that's interesting. That's possibly
true, incidentally. But that tells you something
about the kind of support that there is behind
the US position. The second argument
is that sanctions will reward the aggressor. It just hurts our
moral sensibilities to sit by while we
watch the aggressor benefit from what he's done. We've got to move fast to stop
our sensitive souls for being seared by this sight. Again, that's not one you can
take very seriously, either. There are other cases where
there have been sanctions-- very porous sanctions because,
as I say, the United States and England and France and
others regularly violate them. But take, say, South Africa. The occupation of
Namibia was declared illegal by the United
Nations and the World Court back around late '60s. For years, the United
States carried out what it called quiet diplomacy
and constructive engagement-- 20 years, in fact. Meanwhile, South Africa robbed
the place, terrorized it, used it as a base for
attacking its neighbors at a terrific cost. The UN Economic
Commission on Africa estimated the cost to
the neighbors alone-- forget South Africa
and Namibia-- in the last decade,
in the '80s, they estimated it at over $60 billion
and a million and a half lives. Well, meanwhile, our sensitive
souls weren't seared. We went along with-- nobody
proposed bombing South Africa. Nobody proposed
withholding food. The sanctions, they were
violated all over the place. We went on with diplomacy. There was finally a settlement
with plenty of reward for the aggressor,
plenty of linkage, linkage all the way up to Cuba. And everybody thought
that was great, a great achievement
of diplomacy. And the same is true in
case after case after case. When George Shultz tried to
broker Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon after a completely
unprovoked attack in which maybe 20,000
civilians were killed, that was a partial
withdrawal from Lebanon. Plenty of reward for
the aggressor and plenty of linkage. So Syria was ordered to get out. No negotiations with Syria,
just give 'em orders. That's linkage with a vengeance. Same was true after Israel's
invasion of Sinai back in 1956, which the United States
didn't like that time. So it kicked them
out, but, again, with plenty of rewards
for the aggressor. That's just standard. So this just can't
be taken seriously. I mean, serious people can't
waste a moment on this. So let's not. There's a conclusion
that follows from this, incidentally. The conclusion that follows
is that no reason has been offered for going to war. And I mean no reason. I mean none. [APPLAUSE] None whatsoever. There's been simply no argument. The reason is that
every single argument is transparently fraudulent. Not complicated
fraud, trivial fraud. And that means
whatever's going on has nothing to do
with the reasons that are being presented. Some other thing. Well, let's come back to
the original questions. Why were the
sanctions implemented? Well, one reason-- the answer to
that is also trivially simple. The sanctions were
implemented because the United States, for once, permitted it. Usually, the United
States doesn't permit the UN to carry
out its peacekeeping role. That's why it
doesn't carry it out. For the last 20 years,
the United States is far in the lead in vetoing
Security Council resolutions. In second place is the
other one of the righteous avengers in the
Gulf, Britain, mainly because of their protection
of the racist states of southern Africa. Between them, the United
States and England, which are now standing
on high principle, account for about 4/5 of
the Security Council vetoes during these last 20 years. In third place, well
behind, is France. And in fourth is
the Soviet Union. Well, we're now told
over and over again that one of the really
important things is this great new world order,
which will finally have peace, and the UN will be able to
function because the Soviet Union has lost the Cold War. And therefore, they're not
going to block the UN anymore. Well, it takes three
minutes to figure out who's been blocking the UN. I should say the same is
true in the General Assembly. And there's not the
slightest reason to suppose that with the
Soviet Union out of the game, the United States and Britain
will suddenly call off their campaign against
international law and against the United Nations. It doesn't make any sense. Why should they? If fact, they'll carry
it out more vigorously. There's less in the way. There's no prospects for a new
world order or a great new era. In fact, quite the contrary. I should say, incidentally,
that in this case, too, I think if you take
a careful look, you'll notice that
the United States also undercut the peacekeeping
function of the United Nations, but in a more complex way. Usually, it just does it
by vetoes, straight vetoes so nothing can happen. In this case, the United Nations
did move toward sanctions, and the United States, as I
said, undercut that instantly, undercut the sanctions option
and undercut the diplomacy option. That's undercutting the
peacekeeping mission of the UN. There were lots of threats
and pressure and cajolery. And finally, what
in effect happened is that the UN washed
its hands of the matter. This famous UN resolution
that was passed basically says nothing. It says, use any
necessary means. Doesn't tell you what
necessary means are. They can be diplomacy
or sanctions. Or, for those guys who want
to kill a lot of people, they can be kill
a lot of people. But that's a decision for the
individual states to take. There's no UN
resolution that uses any phrase like
"minimal use of force" or anything of that kind. The UN has mechanisms,
Security Council has mechanisms to call
for military force. It specifically didn't use them. And the United
States, incidentally, didn't want it to use them
because those UN resolutions were intended as nothing more
than a weapon against Congress so that you could turn
to people in Congress and say, you guys aren't
as patriotic as Malaysia or something. And that's it. Now, this whole record is one of
simply undercutting the United Nations in slightly different
fashion than the usual one. Why were the sanctions of
such unprecedented severity? Well, that's easy
to answer, too. It's because of
tremendous US pressure. US is a scary place. And people don't
stand up against it. It's dangerous and frightening. And if the US is putting a
lot of-- it's also powerful. And if the US is
putting pressure on, people tend to go along. Not gonna stand up against-- you don't stand up
against a violent, lawless terrorist state. And what happened is the
sanctions were imposed. Again, it's not explicit. There's nothing
explicit in the UN. In fact, the UN
resolutions don't even call for enforcing sanctions, if
you actually read the wording. But it was interpreted
the US way. Block everything,
including force. So that answers the
first set of questions. Very simple. The UN could act because
the United States for once permitted it to, instead of
blocking it, as is usual. The reaction was
particularly harsh because the United States
twisted a lot of arms and scared a lot of people. And that's about all
there is to it, as far as the first questions
are concerned. What about the more
interesting ones-- why are the United States and
England isolated on this issue? Well, that's
important to look at. Here, you have to
look a little more carefully at what's going on. So let's start with this
latest Iraqi offer, disclosed by US officials, remember,
to withdraw from Kuwait in return for agreements on two
major issues, regional issues-- the Arab-Israeli conflict and
weapons of mass destruction. Why won't the US permit that? Well, I've already mentioned
that the US is opposed to an international conference
quite independently of anything having to do with Iraq. And in fact, we know
that because the US has been opposed to an
international conference long before Iraq invaded Kuwait. So the argument that we're
now opposed to it because of linkage, that can't be true. We were opposed to it before,
quite apart from the fact that we standardly
reward aggressors, even much worse cases than this. So that's not the answer. What is the answer? Well, the answer to that
is also painfully simple. The United States is opposed
to a diplomatic settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It's been opposed to
it for a long time. And it's isolated on that. The last vote at the
United Nations, last year, was 151 to 3. The three were the United
States, Israel, and Dominica. Now, that's the
kind of unanimity you never get at the
United-- all the NATO allies voted against us. Everybody did. I mean, maybe one
or two countries were sleeping or something. But it was basically the
world against George Bush. And again, by a large, much
larger majority than the world against Saddam Hussein. Well, that's the way
it's been for 20 years. The United States and Israel
have been essentially alone in blocking a
political settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict,
which has been supported by the whole world. Well, that tells you
why they're against an international conference. What's gonna happen at an
international conference? No matter how you
pick the people-- you pick them as you like--
there's no way to-- unless you pick just Dominica. At an international conference,
there's going to be pressure-- and that'll probably
change the day after the vote, when
they paid them off. At any international
conference, there's going to be pressure for
a diplomatic settlement. And the United States doesn't
want a diplomatic settlement. Therefore, there can't be
an international conference. Period. Nothing to do with linkage. Nothing to do with Iraq. Nothing to do with anything. That's why it's the way
it's been for years. The United States has been
vetoing Security Council resolutions, voting virtually
alone against General Assembly resolutions, undercutting
every possible initiative. This has been going
on since 1970-'71. Nothing new about it. Our blocking of the
diplomatic process on this even has a technical name
in the United States. It's called the peace process. We're pursuing
the peace process, meaning blocking every
conceivable possibility to get peace. And in fact, occasionally,
you'll get an article. It will say somewhere,
well, the Russians are-- I remember an article in
the New York Times saying, the Russians are
trying to come aboard. They're trying to get to
join the peace process, meaning maybe they're
going to accept the US position in isolation from
the rest of the world. If they do that, they'll be
on the team, team being us, by definition. Everyone else is off the team. Well, that's the way it's
been for a long time. So therefore, there can't be
an international conference. And therefore, we go to war. What about the second
issue, the issue of weapons of mass destruction? Well, refusal of
linkage on this one is particularly remarkable
because this is a disarmament issue. And disarmament
issues are always settled in a regional
or global context. I mean, that's not
even in dispute, right? Of course disarmament issues are
settled in a broader context, regional or maybe global. Everyone is. But we reject it in this case. And once again, that
rejection, though it's claimed to be based
on linkage, has nothing to do with Iraq's
conquest of Kuwait. And it's easy to prove that. We can prove it very easily by
simply noticing that the United States also opposed the
diplomatic settlement of that problem before the
Iraq invasion of Kuwait. In fact, last April, when
Saddam Hussein was still George Bush's great
friend and favored trading partner, at that
last April, Iraq made an offer to destroy
its nonconventional weapons, to destroy its biological
and chemical weapons. And that was turned down
by the United States. The United States responded
and turned it down because Saddam Hussein
insisted that this be done in a regional context-- that is, that Israel
destroy its nuclear weapons and its biological
and chemical weapons. Well, that's not entirely
unreasonable, one might think. But the United
States rejected it. And the terms of the rejection
are worth listening to. The official State
Department rejection said, they welcomed Saddam
Hussein's offer to destroy his own weapons. But that can't be
linked, United States rejects any link to
other weapons issues. Now, the other weapons
issues were left unspecified. But, of course, everybody
knows what that means. That means Israel's
nuclear weapons, which they've had for at least
20 years, probably a couple hundred of them. Now, you can't mention that. If you look at the
US diplomatic record, you'll notice that no
spokesperson for the government ever refers to Israeli
nuclear weapons. I mean, everyone knows
they've got them. That's not even a question. But you can't refer to them. Why can't you refer to them? Well, there's a reason
for that in American law. According to amendments to the
foreign aid legislation back in the '70s, it's illegal
under American law to give any aid at all,
including economic aid, to any country that's engaged
in clandestine nuclear weapons development. So therefore, if you
concede that Israel has nuclear weapons,
all aid to Israel has been illegal for years. And you can't concede that. So therefore, you don't mention
Israeli nuclear weapons. But in order to
preserve Israel's right to continue nuclear
weapons development-- without mentioning
it, of course-- we reject the possibility
of treating Saddam Hussein's military arsenals through
diplomatic means, which is the right way to do it. And we go to war. That's the other element. Notice there are three
issues here that are linked. One is Iraqi
withdrawal from Kuwait. Another, settlement of
the Arab-Israeli conflict and other regional
security problems. And a third, the problem
of Saddam Hussein's threatening military arsenals. There appears to be
a diplomatic approach to every one of
those three issues. The United States is opposed
to a diplomatic settlement of each of those issues. And therefore, it's
opposed to linking them. Very simple. That's the answer to why
we're opposed to linkage, meaning diplomacy,
and why we go to war. Well, that gives you
more understanding of what's going on. Britain is with us on this
alone, virtually alone. Except on the
Arab-Israeli conflict, even Britain's not with us. In fact, nobody
is except Israel. Well, that leaves, basically,
really, the serious question-- why are the United
States and Britain alone on this issue? Why is it the world versus
the United States and England, which it pretty much is? That's a serious
question because it's going to blow up a
large part of the world very shortly, maybe
getting started right now. So it's worth trying
to understand it. Well, the other questions
are really trivial. I mean, every question
I've mentioned so far shouldn't strain the
intelligence of a 10-year-old. If it's not in the front
pages of the newspaper, it's because they're trying
hard not to understand it. There's nothing
subtle about this. And you don't have to have any
complicated knowledge of world affairs or be able to think
through hard arguments or anything. You don't have to know anything. Everything that I've just
said is basically elementary. And there shouldn't be any
much confusion about it. However, this
other question, why the United States and England
are alone, that's harder. There you really
have to speculate. You have to try to figure out
what's behind policy decisions and so on. And it is speculation. So you could argue. But speculation doesn't have
to be totally uninformed. There's evidence. There's evidence from
history, and there's evidence from the
current world situation. How am I doing on time? AUDIENCE: Quarter after 8:00. CHOMSKY: Should I go
three more minutes? OK. Tell me if I'm-- so let's take a look at those
two questions, those two issues. We know something about those. On the matter of
history, there's some very, again,
pretty obvious points. There was an imperial
settlement in that region. And that imperial settlement
was imposed by the United States and England. It was, in fact,
imposed in such a way that they would be the
beneficiaries of it. Given that fact, it's
not too surprising to see that those are the two
countries that are girding up for war in the Gulf while
everybody else keeps their distance. Now, the history
of this goes back to the early part
of the century. Originally, it was
England and France. They sort of ran the region. By the First World
War, the United States was becoming a big actor
in international affairs, and it wanted to get in, too. So there was a British,
French, US division around by the '20s and '30s. After the Second World
War, the United States essentially took over. The relations of power were such
that the United States was just overwhelmingly powerful. France was kicked in
the pants immediately. They were kicked out of the
arrangement on the grounds that France was an enemy state,
and therefore the agreements with it, the treaties and
so on, didn't mean anything. It was an enemy
state because it had been under German occupation. So that got rid of France and
left England and the United States. The British tried to hang on. And the United States was
not allowing them very much. There was a lot of
conflict between Britain and the United States in the
late '40s and the early '50s. It was pretty much resolved by
the mid-'50s under the dictates of the stronger partner. I mean, the United States wanted
to keep Britain in the game. The reason for that
was stated uncautiously in a secret discussion by
a high Kennedy official, which later got declassified. He described England
as "our lieutenant." And then he said, the
fashionable word is "partner." Now, you don't tell
the British about this. They're supposed to have
delusions of partnership. But in secret, they're
our lieutenants. So we want to keep them viable. That's called the
special relationship. And by the '50s, it was a
Anglo-American condominium with the US calling most
of the shots, of course. Now, there's an earlier
history, needless to say. And even if nobody
remembers it here, they probably
remember it elsewhere. So just in the
case of that, right after the First World
War, the British were having some problems
holding together the empire. Britain was weakened
by the First World War. And that meant it was kind of
hard to keep the lid on things. And they had to get pretty
violent, in fact, to do it. That's when the Amritsar
massacre took place in India in 1919, with about 400
unarmed protesters massacred. There were similar
problems in Iraq. And England didn't have the
manpower to put it down. They didn't have the
troops at that point. So they decided to
innovate and turn to terror bombing of villages
for the first time, which is cheaper. You don't need a lot
of force for that. Also, terror bombing of
villages was used even to collect taxes from tribesmen
and that sort of thing. And it was pretty effective,
but it wasn't quite enough. The RAF, Royal Air Force,
Middle East command in 1919 requested authorization for the
use of chemical weapons as-- I'm quoting-- "against
recalcitrant Arabs as experiment." Now, chemical weapons,
that means poison gas. At the time, that was regarded
with the ultimate horror. This was right after
the First World War. It was ultimate revulsion. It was poison gas. So they requested
authorization to do that. The India office didn't think
it was a very bright idea. They thought it would have
negative consequences. But they were overruled
by the Secretary of State at the war office,
who dismissed what he called this squeamishness
over the use of gas. And he declared
himself to be strongly in favor of the use of poison
gas against uncivilized tribes. That was Winston
Churchill, incidentally, one of the great moral
heroes of the West. And it kind of
went on from there. So there is an earlier history. But let's put that aside and
turn to the post Second World War period. The US and Britain pretty
much had it under control. But there was a break. There was a break in
1953, when Iran tried to take control of its own oil. That was taken care of
with a CIA-backed coup. The big break, the
serious one, was in 1958, when Iraq had
a nationalist officers coup, which overthrew
a dependent regime and took Iraq
partially, at least, out of the Anglo-American
condominium. Well, that caused a furor
in Washington and London. One response was a marine
landing in Lebanon the next day to prop up the regime there. A second response was
apparent authorization by Eisenhower of the use
of nuclear weapons in case any unfriendly forces
went into Kuwait. Third response was a set
of decisions by Britain and the United States about
how to handle the situation. And Kuwait at that time
was more or less a colony, although they called
it independent. And the British decided
that it would be a wise idea to give Kuwait at least
nominal independence to try to undercut
the possibility that a nationalist revolt
might spread there, but, however, reserving the
right to intervene by force, or, as they put it, ruthlessly
to intervene if anything goes wrong, no matter
who's responsible. And the United States
reserved the same right for the rest of the region. In fact, they jointly
agreed that the oil fields of Kuwait,
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the other
emirates, that they be kept in US-British hands. They were very clear
about the reasons. The reasons were-- and they're
important because they're still operative and, in fact,
more operative than ever. The reasons were
first, Britain, which had an ailing economy then-- worse now, but an
ailing economy-- needed privileged access
to the oil of Kuwait and, crucially, to
investments from Kuwait in order to prop up
its economy, which had to prop up sterling,
which was extremely weak. So that was a major condition. Now, by the early 1970s,
those very same considerations were applying to
the United States. The United States was
losing its world dominance-- in fact, seriously losing it
from an economic point of view. And it began to need
not the oil, so much, but the profits from oil. Oil creates huge profits. And control over those profits
gives you plenty of power. And the United States
started needing 'em. Also, of course,
control over oil gives you a good
deal of influence over people who need oil. It's a lever of world
control, a significant lever. So you've got several reasons. One, access to the oil
on preferential terms. Two, a lever of world control. But three, just
the profits alone. They're necessary. And by the early '70s, that
was beginning to be serious. Going back to 1958 for a moment,
the National Security Council, the highest planning body
in decisions that have now been partially declassified-- it isn't too much
declassification of US records, incidentally, because the
Reagan administration, which had a kind of a
fascist element to it, imposed very heavy restrictions
on declassification. They didn't want the public to
be able to see what's going on. So things get declassified now
with very heavy restrictions, so much so that the State
Department historians all quit a few months ago. But anyhow, enough
went through so you can see what was going on. The National Security
Council decided in '58, after the Iraqi
coup, that the US should be prepared to use
force if needed in order to secure British and American
interests in the region, in Kuwait and other
parts of the region. That tells us a lot about
what's going on now. As I say, by the
early '70s, the US needed the investments
and beginning to need the access to the oil
as much as the British did at that time. We're a little
behind them in this. In fact, this is one of the-- there's been a very substantial
capital flow from the Gulf oil producers to England
and the United States. Other places, too, but primarily
England and the United States. And that's propped up their
financial institutions, their corporations, and
their general economies. Just purchase of Treasury
securities by Saudi Arabia props up the American economy. In fact, when the oil price
goes up, what in fact happens is dollars shift from one
bank to another in New York, and pounds shift from one
bank to another in London, to a large extent. Prices go up, a lot
of petrodollars. But they get spent,
and they get spent on exports and
construction firms and so on, primarily in
England and the United States. And a lot of it goes straight
to-- they purchase up parts of ailing banks and
Treasury securities and so on. That's been a big shot in the
arm for the US and British economies, British
for a long time and the United States
for the last 20 years. That's a good reason for keeping
control over this system. These are all good reasons. That's one of the reasons why
the United States and England have not been
particularly opposed to rises in the oil price. In fact, sometimes
they've favored it. After the big
near-quadrupling of oil prices in the early
'70s, that actually improved the British
and American economies, helped them. The balance of trade between
the United States and the oil producers improved
in the US favor after the oil price
went up, quadrupled, for exactly the
reasons I mentioned. Also, the rise in oil
prices helps countries that produce high-cost oil. There are two such
countries, primarily-- the United States and England. The oil corporations knew about
Alaska oil a long time ago. But it wasn't profitable enough. After the price quadrupled
in the early '70s, it became very profitable,
so they started producing it. Same with North Sea oil. All of that is good. And also, quite apart from
that, the energy corporations are all US-- I mean, with some
minor exceptions, they're basically US-British. And their profits go up
as the oil price goes up. So these are all parts of
the system, important parts. Well, without going on, you
put all these things together, you see some pretty good reasons
why two countries are getting ready to go to war,
just as they said they were going to do
back in the late '50s, and probably since, but we
don't have documents since. We do have documents up to
then, and we know what they say, and they make a lot of sense. And you can look
at the record since and see it follows
the same lines. Well, there's one final
point to make about this. And here, we really
do speculate. That has to do with the
current world system. And take a look at what the
current world system is like. There's a lot of talk about
this fabled new world order. And there's something to it. There are changes in the world. In fact, there have been changes
in the world for the last 20 years, and important ones. About 20 years ago, it
was becoming quite clear that economic power was
diffusing in US domains. It was diffusing into
three major power centers-- German-led Europe,
Japan and its region, and the United States
and its region. United States is still the
biggest, but not very much anymore. And in fact, the Reaganite
policies severely harmed the American
economy, and those costs have not yet come due. But they're serious. The Vietnam War harmed
the American economy. It was very costly
to the United States, very beneficial to the
industrial rivals of the United States. And all of that stuff
changed the structure of the world economy. That's a major part of the
new world order-- three major powers, the US,
especially after Reagan, now deeply in debt
and much weakened. That's part of the
new world order. What about the Russian-- five minutes, yeah. I'm just about done. What about the disappearance
of the Soviet Union? Well, by the mid-'70s, it was
pretty clear that the Russians were in bad trouble. In fact, their
military expenditures started leveling off,
exactly the opposite of what we were told at the time. But the CIA has now conceded it. And by a couple of years
later, it's pretty clear that they're finished. And the effect of
that is-- there's several effects to that. One effect is rhetorical. Since 1917, every
American intervention anywhere has been in defense
against the Russians. Like when the US began to
support fascist Italy back in 1922, as they did,
that was in defense against the Russians. And everything up until
then has been in defense against the Russians. By about 1988, that
becomes impossible. I mean, even the most fertile
imagination can't say, we're defending ourselves
against the Russians. So you need other excuses. That's one change-- new
rhetorical framework. The invasion of Panama was
historic in this respect. I mean, it was just
like everything that's been going on for a
couple of hundred years in most respects, but it was
different in that you couldn't say we were defending
ourselves against the Russians. So one change is
rhetorical, and that's happening again in the Gulf. A second change is
more significant. The Soviet Union and its
empire are now opened up freely to Western exploitation. That is, they're reverting to
what they were before 1917-- quasi-colonial dependencies
of the industrial West. And that's a big change. But of course, the
United States and Britain are not ahead in that game. Germany's ahead. And Japan, when it decides to
get into it, will be ahead. But Britain and
the United States are not capital-rich countries. They can't do that. So that's a second development,
not good for the United States and Britain. Third major development is
that although the world is tripolar economically, it's
got one military power. And furthermore,
that military power is now a lot more free to
use military force than ever before because there's
no deterrent any longer. Soviet deterrent is gone. 10, 15 years ago,
the United States could not have sent
massive conventional armies to the Middle East. Now it can do anything
it feels like. That gives the US a lot
more freedom to use force. Well, you put these
things together, and you get a certain picture. Everything I say about
the United States is also true of England,
but at a much lower scale, so I'll put them behind,
keep the lieutenant out of the story. We have three major
economic powers, one major military power. That military power doesn't any
longer have the economic base to carry off intervention. Well, some consequences
follow, and they're drawn. So, for example, when Deputy
Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger was
testifying to Congress a couple of weeks ago
about the new world order, he said the new
world order will be based on what he called
a kind of new invention in the art of diplomacy. Namely, we carry
out intervention, other people pay for it. Well, who's going to pay for it? The Germans and the
Japanese are not that happy about paying for it. They're quite happy to see the
United States and England go down the tubes, so they
win the Second World War. They're not gonna pay for it. And there's only one other big
source of capital in the world. That's the Gulf oil producers. In fact, that's the way
you make the Germans and the Japanese pay for it-- via the oil price
coming back here. OK? So that's the way
you pay for it. However, notice that
there is a shared interest with Germany and Japan
and the whole industrial world. Namely, somebody has to keep
the third world under control. This war against
the world that's been going on for the last 500
years, it still has to go on. And somebody's got to be
there to make sure it works. You try with the
IMF all that stuff. That's cost effective. But sooner or later,
you need the Marines or the B-52s or something. And the United States is the
only country that can do it-- Britain secondarily, but
primarily the United States. So somebody has to
play the enforcer role. And that's got to be us. And that is now being
openly discussed in the international
business press, for example, where
it's pointed out that the US must play even
more than before what's called the mercenary role. The United States has to be
the Hessians, the guys who keep the third
world under control, and other people pay for it. If there's a
diplomatic settlement, it's of no particular
advantage to the United States. If there's a
capitulation to force, it's of considerable advantage
to the United States. It shows that our comparative
advantage is important. Our comparative advantage
is in the use of force, certainly not in diplomacy. We've always been against
diplomacy, but not even anymore economically. However, force, we rank supreme. If you can show that force
is the crucial device for controlling the
world, you're better off. And I think that's
another reason why you've got two powers
sitting there in the Gulf. Incidentally, the oil
producers recognize this from their own point of view. A couple of weeks ago-- or days ago, in fact-- there was
an article in the Wall Street Journal which quoted a high
Gulf official as saying that he didn't see
any reason for his son to die in Kuwait because we have
our white slaves to do that. He hadn't looked very
carefully at the skin color of the mercenaries there. And he'd also
forgotten for a moment that the guys with the guns
are gonna call the shots. And if he gets out of line,
he'll learn that very fast. But apart from that,
it's sort of true. Last comment-- there are
domestic developments in the United States that are
tending in the same direction. It's not a big secret that
the so-called infrastructure is collapsing. The educational
system's collapsing. The health system's collapsing. The inner cities
are being destroyed. You may have seen
the statistics that were published a
couple of days ago on prison population
in the United States. The United States is way
ahead of anybody else in per capita prison
population, way ahead of South Africa
and Russia, which used to be up ahead of us. For a black male,
the probability of being in prison
in the United States is four times as high as in
South Africa under apartheid. That tells you something. All of this reflects an
internal third world. Businesses is worried. I mean, they're not worried
because too many people are in jail. They're worried because half the
jobs in the next decade or so have to be filled by
blacks and Hispanics. And if you keep them in jail and
in concentration camps called cities and so on,
they're not going to be able to do any of the
work that you need done. So they're expecting a big
shortage of skilled labor. And that means that
transnational corporations are going to shift
those operations that involve skilled labor
overseas to where there is skilled labor,
educated populations and so on. That means everything from
research and management and so on to product
development and guys to push buttons on computers
and so on and so forth. What happens to
the United States? Well, maybe these guys
can't do research, but they can truck
around the desert. So they can be Hessians. That's another factor that's
pressing in the same direction. Now, that's pretty
much what the future's going to look like if it
goes on the way it does. It's not for the usual victims. It's like always. For the citizens of
the mercenary states, it's also not
particularly attractive if they let it happen. And it might happen. That's the way
things are moving. That's another thing that's
going on in the Gulf. Well, what about policy choices? Your policy choices depend
on what your goals are. If the goal had been to
get Iraq out of Kuwait and to settle, to
reduce regional tensions and to move make a move towards
a slightly more decent world, you would use
sanctions and diplomacy and the peaceful means
required by international law. If the goal, however, is to firm
up the mercenary enforcer role and to establish the rule
of force in the world-- if that's the goal,
then the policy choices that the Bush
administration has picked have a certain
chilling logic to them. Thanks. [APPLAUSE] PRESENTER: Thank
you very much, Noam. Just for your information,
I'd like everybody in 10250 to realize there are
actually more people that are outside of 10250
who are watching this event this evening. And for those who are outside
and are still concerned about whether they can be able to
make the necessary questions or comments, we will allow
these to be written down. And these can be
passed to the usher, and then will be brought
here and randomly selected for anyone who's outside 10250. The second announcement I'd
like to make before getting on with our second
speaker is that we have the specific
list of events that will be taking place in the
peace center this evening. And Rich Cohen will
read those out. COHEN: Thanks. This is a continuation in
some cases of the workshops that took place yesterday. There will be a table on the
third floor of the student center when the group moves
over to the student center after the beginning of the
question and answer session. The question and
answer session will continue in the student center. And sometime toward
the beginning to the middle of that
question and answer session, people will break up into these
working groups, organizing groups. There will be three
small group discussions, one led by Geetha from MIT,
one led by David from MIT, one led by Marcy from
Brandeis, probably in the private dining
rooms in the third floor. The gender gap working
group by real men of Boston and ecological
transportation group will not be meeting tonight. But there will be
a sign-up sheet for those activities,
a sign-up sheet so that you can get connected
with the next meeting of those groups. The ecological group
is meeting Friday. The newspaper creation workshop
of a daily anti-war organizing newspaper, that will take
place with Steve Penn from MIT. Political art and painting,
Marianne Donnelly from MIT. Political organizing,
that will be me. And that will be combined
with some other people who are working on the
direct action group. The letter writing and computer
communications task force, Erica from Brandeis
and John from Harvard. The direct action meeting will
be announced a little bit later when we get over there. And then there's going
to be an MIT caucus. Not all the people who
are here are from MIT. But those of you who are, Penlow
will have a meeting over there. We're still here in
this room, everybody. We're not going over there yet. We still have one more
speaker before we go over to the student center. And I'll introduce
Michael Albert. And here, [INAUDIBLE]. PRESENTER: Our second
speaker for the evening is perhaps probably the
most notorious student organizer from MIT. He was actually at one point the
MIT Undergraduate Association president. He cofounded the South End
Press and the Z Magazine. And here he is, Michael Albert. [APPLAUSE] ALBERT: When I came
here 25 years ago, it was to be a physicist. I loved it. I was pretty good at it. I was comfortable with it. This was probably the best place
in the country, or at least one of the best places
in the country, to become educated
as a physicist. When I left here, I had been
educated to be something else. I was a person instead
of a physicist. I was just a feeling,
thinking person. I wound up a revolutionary. That's what I left here as. That's what I was taught to be. I was taught by Noam and by the
social movements of the time. A revolutionary
meaning a person who felt that the reason why we
had the atrocity of Vietnam, the reason why we had the
atrocity that the civil rights movement confronted and that
the women's movement confronted and that the other movements
of that time confronted, was because of the
basic underlying institutions of our society and
that they had to be changed. The reason I was
notorious while I was here is because of my
response to things that went on in this
institution at that time. And there are undoubtedly
parallel things that go on today. One of those
things, for example, was a project to
stabilize helicopters. It was ostensibly to
stabilize helicopters so that they could
fly over Detroit and evaluate traffic patterns. When we broke onto the airport
where those helicopters were and photographed them and came
back with the photographs, we were able to prove what
we said all along, which was that the helicopters
were gunships and that the
stabilization process was to be able to shoot the peasants
in the fields in Vietnam more accurately. Jesse said studying more,
know more last night. And we tried to do that. Another project that was going
on here at MIT at the time was to develop a radar
system, a radar system that could guide bombs so that
the bombs would literally be smart and find
their target better. We didn't know about that. We found out about it later. And those smart
bombs were a part of the worst bombing run in the
Vietnam War at its conclusion. Other projects included
ideological projects associated with justifying the war. One of the faculty people
here, Ithiel de Sola Pool, would regularly interrogate
Vietnamese prisoners. My response to all
of this and much more was a great deal of anger,
anger which you can probably already perceive here tonight. And at that time, I
allowed that anger to show. I expressed it. I screamed it when need be. And I demonstrated with it. And I was considered
moderately insane, and it made me notorious. And in the 25 years since then,
I've kept that anger down. You know how when you
walk down the street over on Boylston Street, and you
see somebody grabbing food out of a garbage can, or somebody
asks you for a quarter and they're in pretty
decrepit shape, and you try and keep going,
and you try and get by it, and you close yourself
off to it a little bit. Well, for the 25 years
between then and now, I've been a revolutionary. I've been an activist. I've been involved all
the time with addressing the same questions. But I've also
closed off a little to the emotions and the
anger and the energy that you feel because
of those phenomena. And the reason for that is
because of the relative absence of large social movements
which were present when I was here at MIT
and which gave an outlet. And the reason I'm in
quite a bit of turmoil tonight is because
some of those shields are starting to come down. And that's because, for
example, today there were 50,000 people on
the streets of Seattle protesting what's going on. [CHEERING] It's because, if the reports
I'm hearing are correct, there were 3,000 or
4,000 people occupying the main postal center
in the city of Chicago. [APPLAUSE] What I want to do tonight is to
try and talk about the broader context and the
causes and what we can do about it
with the intention that in Boston in
the coming days, we'll have the militants
of those 3,000 people who are in the post
office in Chicago and the numbers of the
50,000 or 75,000 people who are in the streets
of Seattle marching. And we will be able to
have an impact on this city and on the nation
in that manner. For me, what's
happening right now, as bad as it is, as
unbelievably surreal as it is with this
deadline, is really just one part of a phenomenon
that exists all the time. And it's the war of
the developed West, basically the United States
on the whole third world. And that's the thing that
I turned off my sensitivity to a little bit
in those 25 years, and which roused me so
much then and is again. I'm going to have little trouble
reading this, but I will. It is an attempt to
try and encapsulate the scale and the
magnitude of the crimes that Noam has been documenting
for the last 25 years. I, over the course of that
time, have been Noam's publisher and have not only
read his words, but have often typeset
them and laid them out. And the process often
leaves me throwing rocks at the sides of buildings-- my own building. Regrettably, there's no social
movement powerful enough during that period of time to
channel that kind of energy. Recently, I wrote something
to try and encapsulate the scale of the crimes that
I feel go on in the world and that I feel we
have to address. Suppose a hypothetical
god got tired of what we humans do to one another and
decided that from January 1, 1999 onward, all corpses
created by violence or neglect anywhere in the free world
would cease to decompose. Anyone dying for want of
food or medicine, anyone hung or garroted to death,
shot or beaten to death, raped or bombed to death, anyone
dying unjustly and inhumanely in countries of the free
world would as a corpse persist without decomposing. And the permanent corpse
would then automatically enter a glass-walled
cattle car attached to an ethereal train traveling
across the United States, state by state, never stopping. One by one, the corpses would
be loaded on the killing train. And after every 1,000
corpses piled in, a new car would hitch up
and begin filling also. Mile after mile, the killing
train would roll along, each corpse viewed through
walls of transparent glass, 200 new corpses a minute, one
new car every five minutes, day and night, without pause. By the end of 1991,
on its first birthday, the killing train would
measure over 2,000 miles long. Traveling at 20
miles an hour, it would take about five days to
pass through an intersection. By the year 2000, assuming
no dramatic change in institutions and
behavior, the train would stretch from coast
to coast seven times. It would take about six weeks
from the time its engine passed the Statue of Liberty to
when its caboose would go by, full of corpses,
preventable deaths, every death in there preventable. Think how young
children sometimes point to a picture in
a book or a magazine and ask for an explanation. Tell me about a tree, a car,
a boat, a train, a big train, killing train. Try and answer that. Think about the pain that
radiates from the Vietnam War monument with its 50,000 names. Imagine a lost
opportunity and lost love and the network of
negative influences that radiate from the
unnecessary deaths engraved on that monument. Now think about
the killing train, stretching from coast to
coast and back and forth and back and forth
and back and forth. Consider its impact, not
only on those on board, but on every person that
any of those corpses ever loved or would have
loved, fed or would have fed, taught or would have taught. Who rides the killing train? Citizens of the third world,
selling their organs for food, selling their babies
to save their families, suffering disappearances,
diseases, starvation, mass murder. They live in Brazil, the
Philippines, El Salvador, South Africa, and New York City. They are headed for the
killing train every day, millions of them. When 10 million
children die yearly for lack of basic medical
care that the US could provide at almost no cost in
countries whose economies Exxon and the Bank of
America have looted, what can you call it
other than mass murder? Bloated, diseased
bodies are victims of murder just as surely as
bullet-riddled bodies tossed into rivers by death squads. Denying medicine
is no less criminal than supplying torture rocks
and stealing resources. That's the background of
international relations, at least as I see it, that
made me revolutionary. Why does Bush want war? It seems to me that Bush
wants war, partly, minimally-- I suppose I should
say it's obvious that he doesn't
want war because we oppose violation of
national sovereignty, as Noam made clear. If we oppose violation
of national sovereignty, we wouldn't support the
Israelis in their violation of Lebanon's sovereignty. We wouldn't support Syria
in their violation of it. We wouldn't support Turkey. We wouldn't support
the United States in its violation of
Panama's sovereignty, of Grenada's sovereignty, of
South Africa, of many countries throughout the world. That's not the issue. Price of oil isn't the issue. The control of the price
of oil is a serious issue. Insofar as the United
States is no longer a viable and a serious
economic force in the world as it once was,
the control of oil is one economic card
that we can hold, and we want to keep holding it. That's a powerful reason. But it's not sufficient to
explain the drive toward war. It's only sufficient
to explain the desire to get Hussein out of Kuwait. I think the drive toward war
is explained by something else, which Noam also brought up. And that's the desire,
as he described, to have a new world order
in which American might is a function no longer of
in part economic power and in part military power,
but basically entirely military power. For those who are old
enough, Paladin, Have Gun-- Will Travel. The difference is that
the people who pay will pay because we
have the gun also. We will force them to pay. That's the future
Bush has in mind. What do people do about this? Now, I know that you all
know that what you do is you protest. What you do is you demonstrate. What you do is you
march, you rally, you do civil disobedience, you
educate, you hold teach-ins, you talk to people. I'd like to provide what I hope
will be some useful lessons. They're very simple. They're almost transparently
obvious, I think. But they're hard
to keep in mind. And they can inform our
activity and give us the strength that can help
us in the period ahead. The first lesson, the
most trivial and obvious, and in many ways
the most important and the hardest to keep in
mind, is that organizing works. It really does work. [APPLAUSE] When I came here in 1965, there
were anti-war demonstrations in Boston. They were small. They were held at the Common. They were minuscule compared
to what's happening right now. And MIT actually participated,
to a small extent. A small number of MIT students
would go over and throw rocks at the demonstrators. No lie. That was about the extent
of MIT student participation in anti-war demonstrations
in the year 1964 and 1965. In 1969, as mentioned, I was
elected the Undergraduate Association President at MIT. The platform included no more
war research, no more grades at MIT, no more
requirements, open admissions for working-class
people and people of color, $100,000
indemnity payment to the Black Panther Party. There were about 10
more similar planks on the platform on which I was
elected in an election which I suspect until this time
is still the one that involved more students
than any other, probably, in MIT's history. It certainly involved
the administration in a significant
way, campaigning for the other candidates. The difference
between 1965 and 1969 was that in the interim,
students on this campus, like the ones who set up the
Peace and Justice Center-- in fact, identical to them-- had gone into the dorms and
talked one-to-one with people. They had held meetings
with people in which people were entreated and helped
to express what they really felt about what was going on. We'll come a bit later to what,
in fact, they really did feel and what our response was. We did all sorts
of demonstrations. We painted the walls
of MIT at other schools that might not be so relevant. But at MIT, I'll tell you one
more-- every once in a while, I'll do a little
anecdote about MIT. MIT produces technocrats. Harvard produces ruling class
elite who make decisions. BU produces people who
feel middle-level strata. I didn't know that at first. But when I was here
early on, I went over, and I sat in on a
few classes at BU. And I was astounded. I was astounded by
their magnitude, by the absolute lack
of participation of anybody in anything having to
do with education, any student, by the utter dissociation of
the faculty from the students, by a lot of characteristics. Then I went up to Harvard. There, I was blown away. I was blown away by the fact
that they had plush rugs in the classrooms, that they
lived in suites that were small-scale, miniature
models of boardrooms, that they were literally-- [LAUGHTER] --that everything
about the school was structured in such
a way as to produce a certain kind of product. Not a person, mind you, but
an elite CEO, politician, et cetera. Then I came back to MIT. Before this, I had no notion
that MIT was anything other than a school, good school. I came back to MIT,
and I looked around. And it was quite a contrast. I saw gray walls as
far as you could see. I saw faculty who would
come in and write textbooks on the wall. I saw an utter lack, a
complete absence of emotion, such an absence of emotion that
probably the most important thing I did as an organizer
was exhibit emotion. That's how bad it was. No lie. And then I began
to understand why. And what I understood was
it's because this place means to produce a certain product. And the product is a very, very
well-trained, a very capable, a very brilliant, in
many cases, scientist or engineer who will solve
any problem, any problem, so long as it's of some
interest and so long as somebody will pay. If somebody would pay MIT
graduates to create weapons to shoot down B-52s, and it
was an interesting problem, they'd rush to it. But nobody will pay that. And so instead, they create
stabilization programs for helicopters and smart bombs
and MIRVs, and all the rest. And they do it without so much
as a wrinkle of moral question because for them, it's
not a moral issue. It's simply a technical,
scientific issue. That's what this place produces. So the kind of organizing that
we did was relevant to that. We did things like
painting the walls. We took all the couches,
what few of them there were, and put
them in public places so people could sit in them
and talk to each other. [LAUGHTER] We went into classes and we
confronted people loudly, exhibiting anger and emotion. And we marched, and we held
teach-ins, and we had rallies, and we had explanations
and information, and then we had occupations. And then we had even more
militant demonstrations. And in 1969, most of this campus
moved over to the Boston Common not to throw rocks at the
demonstration, but to join it. So the first lesson
is that organizing can move people,
even people who are subject to the kind
of socialization that this place can generate. The second lesson
is that people can be moved for the long- or
only for the short-term. It's a hard lesson to get to,
although it's, on the face of it, very simple. Some of you who were there
will remember a May Day demonstration held back then. This was a
demonstration in which people were supposed to go
to Washington to shut down the city and end the war. The idea was to disrupt
traffic and disrupt the functioning of the city. The problem was that
the organizing-- not the conception. The conception of going to
Washington and disrupting, that was fine. The problem was the way
the organizing was done. It was an example of
what I like to call the apocalyptic organizing. People like Rennie Davis,
Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin-- as a sidebar, Rennie Davis
wound up an insurance salesman. Tom Hayden wound up-- well, Tom Hayden
at one time thought liberals were the lowest
form of human life, if he would deign
to call them human. And he wound up
barely a liberal. And Jerry Rubin is some
kind of a neo-capitalist on Wall Street. These three folks,
among some others, organized for this
May Day demonstration. And what they would do is they
would come to places like this. And they would speak
to large audiences. And they were very
good speakers. In fact, Rennie Davis was
perhaps the best speaker I've ever heard. And they would motivate
powerfully, but often with hyperbole, and often
without information, and often with a promise that
bore no semblance of reality. Come to Washington. We'll shut down the city,
and we'll end the war. People went to Washington,
disrupted the city, but the war went on. And when they went home,
having been organized without any real fundamental
understanding of the tenacity of the war and of the basic
institutions that caused it, many of them would become
disgruntled and dismayed and lose their commitment. Other people, among
them Noam, Leslie Kagan, who's currently the chief
organizer, 25 years later, of the event on January
26, Dave Dellinger, who undoubtedly will
be a speaker there and is still doing that,
and many, many others-- notice all of them
still involved, still committed
in the same way-- would organize in
a different way. They would try to motivate
and to arouse and to confront. But they would also provide
information and analysis and an honest perception
of what was possible and what it meant
to build a movement, that success was building a
larger movement, that success was raising consciousness,
that you didn't have to come home, turn on the
TV, and see an end of a war to feel success, to feel
that what you were doing was part of a process that was
building something worthwhile. You can organize for the
short-term and get a big bang, or you can organize
for the long-term and generally get just as large
an immediate demonstration and way more commitment. The third lesson is that you can
organize people around symbols or around reality. At MIT, one of the
things we did is we organized around
the instrumentation labs, where much of that
research was going on. At Princeton, they organized
around a math building-- I forget the name of it-- where research was going on. At MIT, the culmination of our
work around the instrumentation labs, which included a citywide
coalition that came here for a demonstration to block
those labs, which were actually partly a military installation,
and so there were troops here. There were literally people on
top of the buildings with guns and all of the
other paraphernalia that you'd expect. The resolution to this was
that they redefined the I-labs to be not on the campus. They just called
them something else, and they named them after-- I forget the name of the guy. But anyway, they moved
them off the campus. And some of the people
who had been organized were lost because of that,
because the organizing focused so strongly-- not that
it shouldn't have been concerned with the I-labs--
but so strongly with the I-labs and not enough
with the underlying issues and the
underlying structure that they could be lost. At Princeton, the building's
in the middle of the campus. They redefined the
borders of the campus so that that plot of ground was
no longer a part of Princeton. The thing still sat there. It was still functioning
in the exact same way. AUDIENCE: What does I stand for? ALBERT: Instrumentation. Sorry. That's where the helicopter
stuff and the smart bombs were done. So you can organize around
that, or you can organize around the basic institutions. People can be moved
narrowly or broadly. We could go out, and
we can organize now-- and there's a tremendous desire
to do it, and I feel it, too-- about war and peace, and
not bother with justice. We could skip the
links to racism. We could skip the
links to sexism. We could skip the
links to poverty. We could skip the
links to homophobia. We could skip all that
because hey, in two hours, we may have bombs
raining from the sky. It would be a mistake. It is not the way to
organize a movement. It is not the way to make the
most powerful statement that can be made. And it is not the way to
create a movement that can sustain itself. We're gonna come in a bit to
why I think that's the case. Last lesson is that moving
people really does matter. If you look back at the history
of the opposition among elites to the war-- after
all, if we do get out, if we do decide not to start
the war in Iraq, or if we go in and then we stop the
war, it will be elites, after all, who make
that decision, who put their name on that decision. So you have to look at
how do they respond? What do they respond
to in making decisions about war and peace
or, for that matter, about any other social issue? If you look at the record of
the speeches of the senators and the Congresspeople from
the period of the Vietnam War and of the CEOs and
lawyers and doctors and so on who were
public enough figures to go public, when they became
doves, as it was called-- when they decided they
were against the war-- you find over and over
again that they give one variant or another
of the same speech. That speech doesn't
talk about the lives of the Vietnamese people. It doesn't talk about the
lives of American GIs. It does not talk about resources
taken away from the United States, which cannot go to
bettering situation here. It doesn't mention those things. The Congresspeople,
the senators, they didn't mention any of that. When they changed
sides, when they said that they were no
longer against the war, they said, our streets
are in turmoil. We're losing the
next generation. There's the possibility
that all these people who are demonstrating are
going to soon challenge the basic institutions
in addition to the war. What they said was, for me,
the social cost of pursuing a policy I want to
pursue-- the war-- is too high. These movements
are raising costs that are so high that I can
no longer pursue what I really want to pursue. George Bush does not give a
shit about dead American GIs. He does not care. And it's important to
understand that if we're going to understand
what we have to do to get him and the powers
behind him to react. He does not care-- he doesn't even conceive-- that there's any
issue to care about of dead Iraqis or dead
Jordanians or dead Palestinians. That isn't even a
concept for him. He does not care about
huge sums of money going into the military and
not into dealing with racism or crumbling school systems
or crumbling infrastructure or a lack of housing
in the United States. Not only doesn't
he care about that, I think that's a significant
part of the purpose. He does care about the
possibility of social movements challenging capital,
challenging his rule, challenging the
two-party system, challenging the basic
institutions of patriarchy. He cares about no
business as usual. He cares about disruption. He cares about dissent. If he cares about
a dead GI, it's because it might
provoke dissent. That's all. If he cares about
any of these issues, it's because it might
provoke dissent. That tells us that not
only does organizing work, but that the product
of organizing, dissent and demonstrations,
also can work. They can win. They can make change. They can change policies. That can change basic trends. They can change the
consciousness of a nation. If you look at this
country now and you look at this country at the
start of the Vietnam War, you'll see that the
movements in the interim have had an unbelievably
powerful effect on the psyche of America. What we learn from
what they respond to is that it's necessary
to have movements that have more than one tactic. A demonstration in Washington
is a powerful thing. It displays large numbers of
people who are dissenting. A demonstration in
Washington which is accompanied by a civil
disobedience demonstration is a more powerful thing. It says, not only are
people demonstrating, but they are then moving on to
disrupt, to civilly disobey. And everybody knows that the
commitment and the involvement and the consciousness
change that's associated with that leak
means a lasting commitment. And so the threat to the
interests that they hold dear is that much greater. We have to make our dissent
visible and militant. We have to have a
movement which has a place for people just
moving, just beginning, and a place for people whose
anger and whose consciousness and whose awareness has gotten
to the point where they are ready to do civil disobedience. What is it about the
United States that makes it so hard to organize? I'll pick up the pace, but I
do want to address this a bit. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] ALBERT: It's part of it. We live in a country that has
an economy that's capitalist. It's profit-oriented. And has private ownership. It has competitive markets. It has 30 billionaires and
31 million poor people. We live in a country
that has a culture that's racist, ethnocentric,
violent, exclusionary. We live in a country that
has kinship arrangements that are sexist, patriarchal,
homophobic, political arrangements that call
themselves democratic but are actually money-driven
and media-dominated. And I thought
democratic in the sense that elites had a
degree of democracy. But I'm even beginning
to wonder about that now, given Bush's power
and his capability to override elite dissent,
of which there is plenty. These institutions create
hierarchies among us-- class hierarchies, gender
hierarchies, race hierarchies. And they create
consciousnesses that make it hard for us to act-- passivity, cynicism, a
belief that nothing better is possible. They also create
an intelligentsia that's bought off, that's more
interested in its well-being, financial well-being,
than in the truth. A bought media,
powerful police-- these things make
organizing difficult. These sets of institutions breed
the international relations, the international
outcomes, I described. They also breed
domestic problems. We're the richest country
in the world, far and away. We have 31 million poor people. There are 3 million people
in the United States homeless who eat garbage-can dinners
and sleep in alleys. The richest country
in the world. 40% of all Latino children
and 50% of all black children grow up poor. Half of all black
children grow up poor. One person in 20 in
the United States suffers some form of
burglary, assault, rape, or murder each year. There are 250 reported rapes
daily, one every six minutes, probably 10 times that
number of unreported rapes. There's a brutal beating of
a woman every 19 seconds, probably more. There's one successful suicide
in the United States every 20 minutes and 10 times that
number that fail, in the richest country in the world. That's the product of
institutional structures that are based on class
division, gender division, race division, and political elitism. The reason I became
a revolutionary is because I believed that those
problems were not accidents. They weren't bad policies. They were a natural outgrowth
of those underlying structures. One half of 1% of
all US citizens hold one third of all US wealth. The average CEO, chairman
of a corporation, earns as much as 93 factory
workers or 72 teachers. And they earn that not counting
the interest that they earn. Those 30 billionaires, those
folks are earning $2 million a week in interest. When I came here, I was
rushed to a fraternity. MIT has a fraternity system. I want to explain
something about why it's hard to organize people myself. And the fraternities were sort
of plus, at least at that time. Those of us who
went into them, we thought they were more
social, better place to live. It's arguably not
true, but we felt that. And we were rushed. And I went to rush week. And from my perspective, what
I saw during rush week was I was ushered into the building. And I got good food,
and people were wonderful and nice and friendly. And I was catered to. And they attempted
to try and get me to join their
various fraternities. This would last for
a period of time. And it's a very active time,
and there's a tremendous effort. I joined a fraternity. And then we went
through what's called-- what do you call it when
you get into a fraternity? AUDIENCE: Pledging. ALBERT: Pledging. And that went on for
four months or so. MIT's too sophisticated for
the normal kind of hazing. Sophisticated--
remember, this is the place building smart bombs. MIT's too sophisticated for
the normal kind of hazing. So instead, what
they did is they had the freshmen clean the
place every Friday night, from about 8 o'clock until
about 3 o'clock in the morning. Now, at MIT, you don't have
that much time to yourself. So it's not a small thing
to work from 8 o'clock to 3 o'clock in the morning
cleaning the floors, and then cleaning them again,
and then cleaning them again for four months. At the end of that
four months, we were inducted as full-fledged
members of the fraternity. And we went to a meeting. And they told us something
very interesting. They told us that
during rush week, they had tapped the telephones
in the fraternity where we stayed over. And they had bugged the rooms. Tapped the telephones
and bugged the rooms. And we asked why. And they said, well, you had to
make a difficult decision very quickly-- where to live. And we researched you folks. And we were calmer and
older and more mature. And we were in a better position
to make that decision than you. So what we did is we tapped the
phones and we bugged the rooms so that we would hear
what you would say when you called your parents or-- and at that time,
I don't know what-- at that time, it
was your girlfriend. And it was all men-- or any other friend. And you described what
you were interested in. So if I called
somebody and said, this place is really
nice, but nobody plays tennis, 7 o'clock the next
morning, tennis game for me. No lie. If I said, I thought that
I'd have more intellectual stimulation here. I thought there'd be more people
who would be into physics, and they wanted me-- oh, I forgot to mention,
this was for the people who they wanted. The process was a two-tiered
one in the fraternity when I went into. They had a little chain
because you could go any to any living group
that you wanted to try and become a part of. And they literally researched
all incoming freshmen, and they knew who they wanted. Everybody who they
didn't want, they just funneled through the
building, out the door, and into the back alley. The ones they wanted
went upstairs. And they tried to
get you to stay over so they could tap your
phone and bug your room. Now, the reason I
bring this story up is because if they had told
us the day after rush week-- if they had told me
the day after rush week that they tapped my phone,
I would have gone berserk. Berserk. But when they told
me after five months of hazing that they
tapped my phone-- in other words, after
I had invested only 20 Friday nights, but
still, 20 Friday nights, and after I had become
friends and become involved and gotten some
status associated with this fraternity, when
they told me and the 20 other incoming freshmen,
we all took it. We didn't do shit. We didn't get upset. We were part of the gang. We abided by it. Well, for some reason
that I don't know, something happened in me, and
I had a little trouble with it. But I didn't quit. I just sort of thought about it. And I stay in the fraternity
for the next six months. And actually, I was pretty
verbal and outgoing. And I was sort of the
fair-haired up-and-comer of the fraternity. And they even chart your life. They charted that I was going to
be their candidate for UAP four years later, irony of ironies. It's the truth. It's the honest truth. Well, at the end of the year,
I went home for the summer. And I started writing to
some of the freshmen with me. And I decided that
I had been a fool. And I decided to leave. And I came back. And the first political
thing I did was I sat on the fender of
a car outside API. Alpha Epsilon Pi
was the fraternity. And I told the freshmen
who were coming in rush week what was going on. [CHEERING] Well, what happened
was very amusing. There was a brawl. Half of the fraternity
wanted to get me. The other half didn't
want the embarrassment of their having gotten me. And they fought with each other. This is amusing. But what's really the
point of this story is that in subsequent weeks,
the rest of my class-- or all but five or six of
them-- left that fraternity. And that group of
people became the core of what was called
Rosa Luxembourg SDS. And that group of
people is the group of people who did what was done
here at MIT, along with others. And there was nothing,
absolutely nothing, to distinguish me or any of
the others of those people from everybody else
in the freshman class, except the trauma and
the mindset change that was associated in this case not
with understanding imperialism, but with understanding a
form of local feudalism in this fraternity and
the opening of ourselves that it led to
understanding something about the world and the
radicalization that ensued. Notice that it only
took 20 Friday nights to hold us off for six
months, plus the socialization of the gray walls
and the promise of being a big physicist
and all the rest of that. Everybody in the United
States has some forces working on them that make it
very hard to move to the left. There's the socialization. There's ignorance among many. There's literal ignorance,
literal belief in the lies. There's the pressures of
maintaining your family or of trying to get
yourself in there. And there's the awareness
that I think really exists deep down in most
people that opposition has an implication, that
going to the demonstrations once leads to going twice
and that going twice leads to going five times. And everybody knows that the
first step is the big step. The first time
you go [INAUDIBLE] is the big time because you
might just get sucked in. It might become your life. Instead of being the physicist,
you might-- well, whatever. And to build a movement
that's going to attract people over that hurdle means
building a movement that is not so abrasive, but it's
less fun and less pleasant and less empowering to be
in than a classroom at MIT. It means building a movement
that's not so sexist that women literally can't stand it. It means building a
movement that is not so dominated by white culture that
black people and Latino people find it just as abhorrent
as the society outside. It means building
a movement that's not so hierarchical that
it replicates the Congress. [APPLAUSE] And it means--
and this, I think, although it's the least
talked about thing, is probably the hardest thing. It means building a movement in
which a few intellectuals don't dominate everybody else, in
which we don't replicate class structure, not just race
and gender and sexual and the other
structures outside, but also class structure. It means creating a movement
that will welcome people and that will empower
people of all backgrounds and that will respect the
fact that by and large, they know a whole lot more about
what's wrong with the country and about what should
be done to the country than the people who have
the training to be eloquent and to dominate decision-making
and to dominate discussions. And we have to be
attuned to that. [APPLAUSE] I think we should stop, but
I do want to make one plea. I heard this evening-- I don't have the details. But I heard this
evening that tomorrow, there will be civil disobedience
at the Federal Building. [APPLAUSE] There will also be some actions
that will be hard for people to move into, that will
be by smaller groups, I guess, in other places. And I can't identify
them because I don't know the details. But there will be
civil disobedience at the Federal Building. I'm quite sure there will
also be marches and rallies. And I suspect there'll
also be teach-ins. Do whatever it is that's
comfortable for you to do, but do something because
the people who are for the war have an excuse not
to do something. But I bet everybody
here is against the war. And I'll bet everybody
here is against all of the implications of the war. To be against the war,
and to be against all of the implications of the war,
and to do nothing is hypocrisy. And you have to
think about that. And it's very important for
people to act in the way that you want to, in the
manner that you want to, with others who you
choose, but to do it. And if we do, I think we
can have a serious impact. Let's do the
questions and answers? [CHEERING] MAN: What do you think
about holding questions to about 30 minutes, and then
going over and completing them? PRESENTER: Yeah, [INAUDIBLE]. MAN: OK, great. Let's do it. Can I try and hand these out
while we're doing questions? PRESENTER: Yeah, that's fine. OK, just two announcements. More information about
the civil disobedience that Michael Albert
spoke about-- it says, put the brakes on war. Let's not go to war
for our gasoline. And the plan is to block traffic
during rush hour on Boston's major arteries, sending a
clear message to Washington and the world that we
will not allow business to proceed as usual while people
are dying for our gasoline. And they plan to block
the JFK Federal Building. And it's gathering at
the SEIU local 285, which is the seventh floor,
145 Tremont Street, across from the Common
at 7:00 PM for those who are interested. AUDIENCE: What time? PRESENTER: At 7:00
PM at the JFK-- AUDIENCE: That was tonight. ALBERT: That was tonight. PRESENTER: Oh, OK. ALBERT: The thing in the
morning is very early. PRESENTER: Sorry about that. AUDIENCE: 8:30. AUDIENCE: 7:00 AM. AUDIENCE: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM tomorrow morning. PRESENTER: 7:00 AM. OK. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
tonight's meeting gathered at the JFK Federal Building
at Government Center tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM. PRESENTER: OK. Sorry about that. Somebody gave me-- MAN: Can I ask if anyone
hasn't gotten this? PRESENTER: Well, we're
gonna ask the Q&A. MAN: What? PRESENTER: OK, fine. MAN: Yeah. While we're doing
the Q&A, if you haven't gotten a schedule
of the week's activities for the Peace Center
and you want one, indicate it to me while
we're doing this Q&A. PRESENTER: OK. And there's just one correction
that needs to be made on that. And that's that the
march for the day after either the
shooting or the bombing begins that's supposed
to take place at Tufts does not begin at 1:45 PM,
as indicated on the sheet, but rather at 12:30 PM. OK, and now we can begin
with question and answers. AUDIENCE: Over here? PRESENTER: Would
people like to raise-- OK. AUDIENCE: Yeah, my question
is I keep wondering, and I'm troubled
by my own inability to come up with a convincing
alternative to what Bush is apparently bringing us to
the brink of and trying to do. And I feel that it's important
to have-- at least for myself-- a sense of a viable alternative
approach to this situation. There are people who say
that, well, the United States shouldn't be
involved in this all. That's not my feeling. In spite of agreeing with
a lot of what Noam said, I tend to feel that
the invasion of Kuwait was something that
should be opposed. CHOMSKY: Of course. AUDIENCE: And I would like
to hear either of you, or anyone else,
perhaps, speak to what would be a viable position,
a credible position, an intelligent, sane, position,
for a United States government to take in response
to this situation. CHOMSKY: Well, I think a
credible, sane position is the one that most of
the world is taking-- namely, rely on sanctions and
pursue the diplomatic track. I don't think that sanctions
should involve things like food. [APPLAUSE] I definitely-- there's
nothing specially-- I mean, that's the position
of the National Council of Churches, for example. We're not out in left field. And it's the position
of most of the world. Sanctions in this case will cut
off Iraqi oil exports, which is their total export trade. And sooner or later-- and probably sooner-- it will
have the effect of opening up a diplomatic track. In fact, it may have had
that effect last August. And we know what the contours
of a diplomatic settlement are. I mentioned a
couple of examples. They're perfectly reasonable. They've even been
proposed by Iraq, according to US officials. So there's a viable course. I don't understand what
the big problem is. A viable course is to
say, OK, let's consider the proposal of January 2. And let's see if
it's going to work. That's a reasonable proposal. It's perfectly reasonable to
have a diplomatic settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The United States has been
blocking it for 20 years, and we should oppose that. We should have
such a settlement. It's perfectly reasonable to
have a diplomatic settlement of the very serious problem
of weapons of mass destruction in the region. Fine. Let's stop opposing that. Apparently, if we stop
opposing those two things, we can arrange for Iraqi
withdrawal from Kuwait. So I don't understand
what the problem is. The problem-- in fact, I do
understand what the problem is. The problem is the United States
won't accept those outcomes. But from our point of view,
having a credible answer, I don't think that's very hard. In fact, most of the
world has that answer. AUDIENCE: I'm wonder what's
to be made of reports and information about the
green light that was given to Hussein to invade Kuwait? And there were reports about
meetings, diplomatic meetings, immediately preceding
the invasion. And what's to be made of these? Why isn't there more about
this event [INAUDIBLE]?? CHOMSKY: Well, the
facts are pretty clear. Iraq released
transcripts of meetings. And they were
basically agreed to be authentic by the United States. These were meetings
right on the eve of the invasion between
April Glaspie, who was the US ambassador, and is,
in fact, one of the big State Department experts on Iraq. She was the US
ambassador to Iraq. She had meetings
with Saddam Hussein. I think it was-- forget-- a day or two
before the invasion. And there was also testimony
from the State Department here, public testimony, all of
which-- the basic tenor of it was that the United States
recognized that Iraq had claims against Kuwait. And it had no particular
position on the border issues. Now, there's basically the two
border issues that I mentioned. One has to do with
access to the Gulf. And that involves these two
islands, uninhabited islands. The other has to do with
this one contested oil field. And the US position was, we have
no position on those things. Now, it's very
hard to figure out what's going on in
Saddam Hussein's head. But a fair speculation
is he assumed that that was a green light. That's possible. However, there's a
further speculation here, which is not totally without
credibility, I must say. But I don't believe it. And that is that
the United States tried to draw him
in, which does have some advantages for the US. There's no doubt about it. I mean, from the point of view
of this mad strategic logic that I was talking
about, there's some point to having at least
maybe a war, or at least the threat of war. It gives the US
basis in the region. It establishes the
efficacy of force, gives a shot to the
domestic Pentagon system, which was in some
trouble, and so on. So yeah. However, I just think
it's extremely unlikely that the attempt
was to draw him in. It's much too dangerous. I mean, unless people
are really crazy, they wouldn't have done that. It's not saying it's impossible. And the argument
for it is not zero. But I don't believe it myself. I think what happened is Saddam
Hussein probably interpreted it as authorization,
as saying, well, the United States doesn't
care, so I'll move in. And then when the US perceived
that this guy is not just a loyal puppet, but rather an
independent nationalist, then all of a sudden he's got to go. Notice that the
invasion of Kuwait didn't really add very much to
his crimes, didn't add a lot. And it didn't bring
him up to the level of plenty of people we
support, like General Suharto in Indonesia, for example. But it did show that he was
an independent nationalist. And that's the ultimate crime. If you're an
independent nationalist, you can be a conservative
parliamentary democrat. You can be a right-wing
military figure. You can be a
left-wing organizer. Doesn't matter what you are. You've got to be knocked
off because that's the one thing the US will not tolerate. ALBERT: Hussein's like Noriega. Noriega we ostensibly
removed because we were concerned about his
interaction or his involvement in international drugs. Then we proceeded
to install bankers, money launderers
for the drug cartel as the government
of Panama, putting the lie to the motivation. The real motivation was,
again, admittedly a thug, admittedly an authoritarian
person, but a nationalist. But I want to relay--
although I agree with Noam, I want to relay a conversation
that I had in October. I had a conversation
with a fellow named John Stockwell, who some
of you may know who he is. He's an ex-CIA agent
who is now on our side and who's done a great deal of
work for peace and for justice. And I asked him what he thought
about what was going on. And it was much before now. It was back in early November. And he took me by surprise. He said, in the absence of
sufficient domestic dissent, there will be war. And the reason
there will be war, he said, I have to
explain that to you. I have to tell you how we
think about it in the CIA. And I don't think this is the
best way to think about it, but he did tell me how
they teach you to think about these things in the CIA. And they said, you can't really
look at the immediate context for your full understanding
because it's too volatile and it's too fraught
with possible confusion. You have to look at the
history of the country and ask, does it periodically
go to war or not? In this case, both sides, yes. If it does
periodically go to war, what are the indices
which tend to be exhibited in the country
when it goes to war? And you look at those
indices, he told me. And he said, if you look at the
indices for the United States, you find war. You find the economy decaying. You find the allegiance
of the public to the policies of
the government being undermined, the peace dividend. And you find the possibility
of a large-scale war being a way to
alleviate that problem as well as to pursue the
course of becoming the world's mercenary state. And he felt-- and I relay
it for what it's worth. I don't know what to make of it. He felt-- after all,
he was in there-- that if we weren't in
this position with Hussein right now, we would be in
this position with Cuba. That literally,
Hussein was a gift. Not an arrangement,
not a trap, but a gift, that Hussein's
activities provided exactly what they wanted. And it does sort of go
a long ways to explain our absolute unwillingness to
get out of this in anything short of what we're facing. PRESENTER: I'm gonna
just say, we'll just take a couple
more questions, and then we will have a question
and answer that will take place at the student center where Noam
and Michael Albert have both promised to spend a few
more minutes at this Peace Center, answering questions. So gentleman over there. AUDIENCE: What effort are you
aware of that our government would take to quiet the dissent
movement against this war, domestically? [INAUDIBLE] AUDIENCE: The press
doesn't report it. CHOMSKY: Well, we have
experience on that. Back in the '60s-- ALBERT: A lot of experience. CHOMSKY: Yeah,
plenty of experience. Every time there
has been dissent, there has been repression. Some of it got exposed. Like, for example,
during the 1960s, I don't know how many of you
know about the COINTELPRO program. That was a big
FBI program, which went through whole-- actually,
it started in the '30s. But it really picked
up under Kennedy. And it targeted first
the Communist Party, then the Puerto Rican
nationalist movement, then the black movements,
all of them, the civil rights movement,
all the peace movements, the entire new left, the
American Indian Movement, everybody. And that reached to the level of
actual political assassination. The worst case was the
Gestapo-style assassination of a Black Panther
organizer, probably drugged in bed by the Chicago
police with an FBI cover. It also did things-- it instigated race riots
and violence in the ghettos and took credit for killings. I mean, a lot of
this documentation came out on court cases
and things like that. It also did things
that were like a joke. So I mean, I was one of
the targets of it at MIT. I mean, this is just a joke. But just to give you
the kinds of things they do, to give you some
insight into the FBI. They were forced under court
order to release documents. And here's what's
going to go on at MIT. They were forced
under court order to release documents
for people who were targeted under COINTELPRO. And two of the people
who were targeted were teaching
assistants in a course that Louis Kampf and
I taught that Mike was in a couple times, and
other people, back in the '60s. The two people who were
teaching assistants were guys in the
draft resistance movement and other things. We sort of brought people
in who could do good things and could use the job
and that sort of thing. And the sequence
of FBI documents got released under court order. It starts like this. First one, from the Boston
office to J. Edgar Hoover, says, we have discovered
that these two guys are teaching assistants at MIT. It says, our source within MIT-- and then something's
blacked out. And we haven't been able
to figure out who it was. Our source within MIT tells
us that these two guys are teaching assistants. This would be a good target
for a disinformation operation to get them kicked out. Can we have
authorization for it? And then the a thing comes back
from J. Edgar Hoover saying, yeah, it sounds
like a good idea. Go ahead. And then it goes up
and back for a while. And finally, at the end,
the last one from the Boston office, says, our
source within MIT tells us that all
this stuff has worked and these two guys are not
going to be hired next year. So we've succeeded. The only problem with that
story is it was a total fake. These two guys were going off
to their next piece of work. They never had the slightest
intention of coming back to spend another term at MIT. And the whole thing had been
cooked up in an FBI office. Incidentally, that's one
of the kinds of things that goes on in FBI offices. An agent has a caseload. And it's a lot easier not to
go after guys in the mafia because, like, they shoot back. But if you fiddle around
with people like us, we're not gonna shoot
back, even if they did it. And that kind of
stuff will go on. So everything from probably
faked and invented harassment to really serious
things like organizing political assassinations
and ghetto riots. That's the kind of
thing that will go on. That's been going on all
through American history. We've got a very rough history
of repression of dissidents. AUDIENCE: And it
already is going on, if you read the papers. The FBI is going around to our
Americans in systematic ways and telling them,
among other things, if you receive any threats,
come to us for protection. And if you read the front
page of the New York Times, there've been a
number of articles just in this past week. They've already contacted
over 200 Arab Americans. ALBERT: Repression is
certainly a real phenomenon. But it's not as effective
as it's often led on to be unless we let it be. There's two things that
I'd like to suggest that are critical to having
the kind of activities that they engage in be
infinitely less effective than they otherwise might be. The first is you
have to have support. If you have substantial
support, really massive support, it's very hard to repress. An instance of that
here at MIT was MIT thought it was very clever. They got an injunction in which
they listed about 10 of us that we weren't
allowed on the campus, and we were to be
arrested on sight on the day of a demonstration. So the 10 of us and many
thousands of other people came to MIT. And we stood on the
steps and ripped it up. And with many
thousands of people there, and with
many more thousands who would have
supported us, it was very difficult to do
anything about it. That's one answer to repression. The second side of repression
is infiltration and the kind of thing that was
done to the Panthers and to many other groups. And while that
activity is effective and that activity
is deadly, and it's impossible to stop
it entirely, it is possible to do
better than we did then. What we did then,
often, was to construct a movement in which
a policeman was at home, in which a policeman
was not immediately obvious. If you have a movement
which is really humane and which is really democratic
and in which macho behavior stands out like a sore
thumb, police agents have a very hard
time infiltrating. We have never found
one, we have never encountered one who can
operate in that kind of context in an effective fashion. And that's not a small thing. That can save lives in
addition to building a movement that it's worth being a part of. Oh. Oh, wait a minute. This-- yeah. PRESENTER: [INAUDIBLE] AUDIENCE: Can you tell me what's
the logic behind the United States supporting Israel
[INAUDIBLE] strategically [INAUDIBLE] CHOMSKY: Three. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] CHOMSKY: There is
logic behind it. You could argue about whether-- just purely cynical, forgetting
anything about morality. We even know some of
the background for it. In 1948-- AUDIENCE: What was the question? CHOMSKY: Oh. The question was, what's
the logic behind US support of Israel? And notice it's
pretty strong support. We're supporting
them to the extent of rejecting a
political settlement, blocking a political
settlement, using it as a basis to go
to war, and so on, refusing to arrange
for a reduction of-- we claim to be concerned
about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but
not at the cost of getting Israel to eliminate its
nuclear weapons, not that cost. And the official support is
around $3 billion a year. Actually, it comes
to more than that. All of that is expensive,
and then there's all these Arab countries
around with oil, like the Gulf oil
principalities. So what's the logic? Well, there's a real logic. And let me just run
through it quickly. Starting in 1948, when
Israel was founded, right after Israel
began, at that point, they weren't clear what to do. But Israel won some pretty big
military victories very fast. In fact, even before the
state was established, it already expanded quite
considerably in the civil war. And the Joint Chiefs of
Staff concluded right then that Israeli power would be a
good base for the United States in the region. They said, after Turkey, Israel
is the major military power in the region. And it can be an
outpost of US strength, especially with
Britain in trouble. Our lieutenant was in
trouble in the region. And this would be a
basis for using force. Ultimately, you have to use
force to control people. That continued. So in 1958, the National
Security Council had a memorandum in which they
concluded that opposition-- they said a logical
corollary to our opposition to radical Arab nationalism--
that means independence. A logical corollary
to our opposition to independent nationalism
would be support for Israel as the one reliable pro-Western
state in the region. And it goes on like that. In the 1960s, the Defense
Intelligence Agency, we know-- in fact, the whole
intelligence system-- regarded Israel as a barrier
against Nasser's pressure on the Gulf oil producers. And in fact, by that
time, an alliance was being set up which was kind
of formalized under the Nixon Doctrine around 1970, an
alliance between Israel, Iran under the shah, and
Saudi Arabia, in which Iran and Israel were the tough guys
who kept anybody under control and made sure that the
ruling family of Saudi Arabia would stay rich and powerful
and not be threatened and work for us. Now, the smart guys and the
more intelligent analysts in the United States were
entirely aware of this. So for example, Senator Henry
Jackson, who at that time was the Senate's leading
specialist in energy in the Middle East
and so on, was a big hawk and very pro-Israel,
he spilled the whole story publicly. And quite correctly, he said
just what I said, more or less. I mean, he put it in a
little different words. But basically, he said that
Israel and Iran under the shah are reliable, powerful states
which can protect the Gulf oil producers from disruption
by radical elements. Now, Saudi Arabia
is not a country that has documents
that you can find. So we'll never have
a documentary record from Saudi Arabia. But when the US records
come out for that period, unless they're
destroyed or censored, I predict what
we're going to find. What we're going to find
is an actual alliance between Saudi Arabia,
Israel, and the shah. From the Saudi Arabian elite
point of view, Israel's fine. Now, they may yell about
it and this and that. But they're happy. They want to have
what's called a cop, but you have to be pretty
cynical about the police to use this phrase rent-a-cop. They want a thug around,
a rent-a-thug around who's going to suppress
radical tendencies, who will be a base for power. And that goes right
on to the present. Meanwhile, by the
1970s, Israel had begun to take on other roles. It was becoming a
mercenary state. It was used by the US in the
'60s under a big CIA subsidy to penetrate black Africa. It was used in Asia. It was used in Latin America. And it's useful. For a big terrorist country
like the United States, it's useful to have a
mercenary state around. See, other countries hire
individual terrorists. But we don't. We use mercenary states,
terrorist states. We're big shots. And a little bit
of this came out in the Iran-Contra hearings. And if you'll notice, there
was an alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia. In fact, what
actually happened-- this is part of the story
suppressed in the Iran-Contra hearings, but it's all
in the public record. I was writing about
in the early '80s. Immediately after the fall
of the shah-- immediately. No hostages, nothing
about hostages. Years before there
were hostages. Immediately after
the fall of the shah, the United States
started sending arms to Iran via Israel paid
for by Saudi Arabia. And the high Israeli officials
who were involved in it were completely open and public. Same guys who showed up later
in Iran-Contra hearings. They said exactly
what was going on. What was going on
was the United States was doing the standard
thing that you do when you're
trying to overthrow a government--
support its military. You want to overthrow
a government, you send arms to its military. That's the way you
get-- you make contacts with elements in the
military who will overthrow the government for you. That's the way we overthrew
the government of Indonesia, of Chile, case after case. And they were just
running the same game. And even in the
highly-suppressed story of the damage-control
operation that was called the Iran-Contra
hearings, you look, you can still see it. There was an Iran, Israel,
Saudi Arabia connection. And that's that old connection. Now, those are reasons. There's also intelligence
interactions. Israel can do things
for the United States. Israel tests advanced weapons
in live battlefield conditions against defenseless targets. That's useful. It's part of what went on in
things like the Lebanon War. There's common
weapons development. There's all kinds of things. So from some points
of view-- you know, the Israeli lobby, the
Jewish lobby, the pro-Israeli lobby here, they claim that
Israel's really a bargain. And they've got an argument. If these are the things you
want done in the world, yeah, it's an argument. In fact, I'll just
finally conclude. At the same time, 1948,
when the Joint Chiefs were noticing that Israel's
the dominant military, one of the dominant military
forces in the region, the Israeli state
archives, which have since been public partially
released, they also commented on what was going on. And they describe
the Palestinians as-- what they said-- human
dust and human waste who will just become part of
the debris of the Arab world as they scatter. And that was the
position of the US, too. Now, if you've got a choice
between two groups, one of them a tough, militarized,
advanced Western state, and the other
people who can just become more of the human does
that floats around the world, you know which one people in
power are going to support. And that's still their view. That's been their view
from 1948 to today, and that explains why
they're doing what they do. PRESENTER: I know there
are a lot of questions. And what we've
promised to do is have an extended
question-and-answer session that will now take place
in the student center. And we also invite everyone
else to participate in other activities that
will be going on there. [APPLAUSE]
