Noam Chomsky Lectures on Modern-Day American Imperialism: Middle East and Beyond

hello everybody and welcome my name is Leanne Gillooly and I'm the president of the Boston University anti-war coalition we are a coalition formed as an alliance of students United in support of an end to Wars and a non-violent methods of social change our main purpose is to raise awareness through education and to advocate and develop a legislative agenda that promotes our established goals I would like to start off the evening by sharing some thoughts with you it is no secret that we live in an extremely complex world and everyday society spawns new issues that become increasingly difficult to solve as technology booms in our collective intelligence expands limits are replaced with innovations to the likes of which our parents could have never dreamed progress has led to an intricately run consumer based mass production society that is showing no signs of slowing down yet in our current state of affairs you do not have to look far to see our economic slowdown increasing unemployment or lackluster medical care the incarceration rate in the United States is among the highest in the world while energy prices skyrocket are skyrocketing and our ignorant of the looming climate crisis continues and of course there's the quagmire that is Iraq which everybody seems to recognize as a blunder yet nobody can seem to find a way out of information about Iraq has been staled from the beginning the mainstream media effectively blacks out gruesome pictures of war and the many actions of the anti-war movement while simultaneously misdirecting the public with lofty rhetoric and distracting them with breaking stories about Britney Spears there are over 4,000 dead American troops and estimates of anywhere from 80,000 to over 1 million deceased Iraqis the majority of them civilians with this war our government has carried out an assault on our civil liberties from legalizing and justifying torture of innocent people to openly spying on our citizens while all along the military industrial complex is turning out profit in many different arena arenas and top government officials personally profit from government contracts that serve the private companies such as the prime example of vice president Cheney's Halliburton this is all topped off with the mind-numbing redundancies of the presidential campaigns complete with media distractions personal attacks at platforms that lead half-hour since feeling disenfranchised considering that this country was founded upon the concept of for the people by the people it is dismaying that the public interest in the in u.s. policies has drastically fallen over time while the detrimental effects these policies have in the rest of the world have exponentially grown how many more transgressions well our unchecked government commits before people get mad what does it take for those not awake to the urgency of our distress to finally see it and what does it take for those who are conscious of our ills to feel obliged to fix it some argue that it takes a tragedy yet with tragedy abound to every page sort of the newspaper people are desensitized to it the lack of outrage at the war in Iraq and our burgeoning domestic issues most notably from my generation is due to viewing these issues as distant abstractions society desperately needs to be dislodged from the complacent back seat of American politics our methods of government are punctuated with rudimental grievances that our politicians attempt to mend with band-aids being anti-war means a lot more than just desiring an end to this war what we are really fighting is a system that has led to massive destruction on a global scale and will continue to without a people of our ideology on a restructuring of our political system that is why undeniable parallels between the wars and Iraq and Vietnam can be drawn and why the social movements of the 60s are used as a paradigm for today's revolution and that is why hate has been perpetuated instead of unqualified love the great enlightenment of our generation will come but it will not look like it did in the 60s we the current students of America are faced with a difficult task of having to run this place in the future some say that there's simply nothing anybody can do to fix it that the powers that be are too overwhelming to counter that public dissent is a thing of a past here I like to invoke Margaret Mead who once said don't ever tell me that a small group of thoughtful people could not change the world indeed it's the only thing that ever has we must work within the confines of the structures of society for in the end it is simply a game of power politics and social status that when wisely manipulated can be utilized to put someone of good intention into power yet this ultra concentrated power is undeniably tainting and the real challenge lies in combating the culture of greed bigotry ignorant and intolerance that permeates the United States because these plates are not identified by our increasing increasingly unbalanced media we turn to the unsung heroes who have been the voices of dissent the forefront of innovative philosophy and the words bold and brave enough to question reality I'll never forget the day I first discovered Noam Chomsky I had Inklings that there was something off about this society I've been living in for 18 years especially considering the war we had begun in Iraq feeling overwhelmed in an attempt to locate some facts I was sifting through media and I came across an article professor Chomsky wrote in December of 2002 and my mind was cracked wide open part of the article entitled modest proposal Illustrated a persistent pattern of policies that had been occurring for decades and showed no signs of changing It was as if I had been staring straight at something for years yet I was actually seeing it for the first time mr. Chomsky's work is like a precision laser whittling down the cumbersome ideologies indoctrinated into the social psyche exposing and condemning their flawed underbellies a true renegade professor Chomsky has remained one of the most celebrated and highly demanded voices of revolution since he first took a stance in the 60s although relentlessly sought after by international media sources he's often criticized at home in the u.s. most widely recognized for his groundbreaking contributions in the field of linguistics undergrads cannot take a course in evolutionary psychology computer science or international politics without encountering the works of Professor Chomsky his tall intellect is conditioned with a social consciousness that gives purpose and depth to his works his flame has been ignited minds and hearts for decades especially at his beloved school of MIT where he has taught for the past 53 years his wisdom is adorned with experience and professed with clarity above all else his in devout individuality is marked by his unique positions for he has never allowed anybody to put him in a box refusing to reside along the established plane of party politics he has added a dimension to the otherwise horizontal political spectrum he has taught to dispel preconceived notions ignore propagandistic headlines tune out sound bites fight off their self-serving tendencies and instead of sharpening differences between one another recognize the commonalities of man and the potential for justice and peace that exists with within each being he has taught to question everything about the reality to criticize and debate those in power to find a more human response to the challenges posed by globalization his ability to think in different modes has allowed for life-changing revelations and has inspired my thinking and it is my hope that you all be inspired as well the future that is at stake is our own and I believe with intelligent reasoning and original thought the answers to all these questions can be discovered so without further ado I am honored to introduce to you the brilliant author empowered lecturer multi-talented adoring father and doting husband he's received honorary degrees from over two dozen of the top universities on the planet he has been called by the New York Times arguably the most important intellectual alive and he's among the eight among the eight most cited scholars in history I could go on for hours about all the college credentials literally but ladies and gentlemen the one and only professor Noam Chomsky well I don't anticipate living up to that but I'll try I've been asked to talk about modern-day American imperialism that's a rather challenging task in fact the talk about American imperialism is a little bit like talking about triangular triangles the United States is the one country that exists as far as I know and ever has that was founded as an empire explicitly according to the founding fathers when the country was found that it was a nascent Empire that's George Washington modern day American imperialism is just a later phase of a process that has continued from the first moment without a break going in a very steady line so we're looking at one phase in a process that was initiated when the country was founded and has never changed the model for the founding fathers had borrowed from Britain of that at that time was the Roman Empire then they wanted to emulate it I'll talk about that a little even before the Revolution these notions were very much alive Benjamin Franklin 25 years before the Revolution complained to the British that they were imposing limits on the expansion of the colonies and he objected to this he borrowing from Machiavelli he admonished the British and quoting him that a prince that acquires new territories and removes the native the natives to give his people room will be remembered as the father of the nation and George Washington agreed he wanted to be the father of the nation his view was that the gradual extension of our settlement will a certainly caused the savage as the wolf to retire both being beasts of prey of a different shape I'll skip some contemporary analogues that you can think of Thomas Jefferson the most forthcoming of the founding fathers I said we shall drive them the savages we shall drive them with the beasts of the forests into the stony mountains and the country will ultimately be free of blot or mixture meaning red or black wasn't quite achieved but that was the goal furthermore Jefferson went on our new nation will be the nest from which all America north and south is to be people displacing not only the red the red men here but the Latin the spanish-speaking population to the south and anyone else who happened to be around there was a deterrent to those glorious aims mainly Britain Britain was the most powerful military force in the world at the time and it did prevent the steps that the founding fathers in tempt attempted to take in particular it blocked the invasion of Canada the first invasion of Canada attempted invasion of Canada was before the Revolution and there were several others later but it was always blocked by British force which is why Canada exists the United States did not actually recognize Canada's existence until after the first world war another goal that was blocked by British force was Cuba the again the founding fathers regarded the taking over of Cuba as essential to the survival of the nascent Empire but the British fleet was in the way and they were too powerful just like the Russians blocked john f kennedy's invasions the however the they understood that it would sooner or later would come the great grand strategist john quincy adams the sort of electoral father of manifest destiny he pointed out in the 1820s that we just have to wait I said Cuba will sooner or later fall into our hands by the laws of political gravitation just as an Apple falls from the tree what he meant is that over time the United States would become more powerful a Britain would become weaker and the deterrent would be overcome which in fact finally happened and we should not ignore these early events they are very much related to current history that's made very clear by scholarship on current affairs so the major scholarly work on the Bush Doctrine george w bush doctrine the pre-emptive war doctrine major work is by John Lewis Gaddis who's the most respected historian of the Cold War period it's on the roots of the Bush Doctrine and he traces it right back to John Quincy Adams who is his hero the great grand strategist in particular to Andrew Jackson's invasion of Florida which conquered Florida from the Spanish and that was strongly approved by then Secretary of State Adams in a famous state paper in which he advocated the principle of pre-emptive war on the basis of the thesis that expansion is the path to security so if we want to be secure after all we want to defend ourselves we have to expand at that time expand into Florida we were being threatened by what were called the runaway slaves and lawless Indians who were in the way they were threatening us by their existence by barring our expansion and as Gaddis points out there's a straight line from that to George Bush and now expansion is the path the security means we take over the world we take over space take over the galaxy there's no limit to how much you have to expand to guarantee security and that's been the principle from the beginning goddess is a good historian and he cites the right sources on the so-called seminal war Jackson's conquest of Florida but he doesn't bother telling us what the sources say and it's worth looking at what they say they describe it as a war of murder and plunder and extermination driving out the indigenous population there were pretexts made but they were so flimsy that nobody paid much attention to them it was also the first executive war in violation of the Constitution setting a precedent which has been followed ever since there was no congressional authorization that's all like Adams lied through his teeth to Congress I mean it's all very familiar so Gaddis is correct it is the model for the Bush Doctrine he approves of both of them but that's a moral judgment but his analysis correct yes what's happening now traces right back to the wars of extermination and plunder and murder and lying and deceit and so on executive Wars of that John Quincy Adams was the great spokesman for Adams incidentally later his life regretted this he after his own contributions were well in the past he condemned the Mexican War as an executive war and a terrible precedent wasn't a precedent he'd established the precedent and he also expressed remorse over what he called that hapless race of Native Americans which we are exterminating with such mercial merciless and perfidious cruelty they knew what they were doing contemporary history likes to prettify it but if you read the descriptions and the observations by the people who are involved they know exactly what they were doing he expressed regret for it but of course his own role was long past well the it's commonly argued that American imperialism began in 1898 that's when in 1890 the US did finally succeed in conquering Cuba which called in history books liberating Cuba namely intervening in order to prevent Cuba from liberating itself from Spain and turning it into a virtual colony as it remained until 1959 setting off hysteria in the United States which hasn't ended yet the also conquering taking over Hawaii which was stolen by force and guile from its population Puerto Rico another colony soon moving to the Philippines and liberating the Philippines also liberating a couple of hundred thousand souls to heaven and the process and again the reverberations of that extend right to the present with ample state terror and the one corner of Asia that hasn't undergone a high development something we're not supposed to notice but the the belief they're old that the Imperial thrust started in 1898 is an example of what historians of Empire are called the salt water fallacy the belief that you have an empire if you cross salt water in fact if the Mississippi River were as wide as the Irish Sea the Imperial thrust would have started much earlier but that's an irrelevance I mean expanding over a settled territory is no different from expanding over the waters so what happened in 1898 was just an extension of the process that began when the nascent Empire as it saw itself was formed in its first moments the and the extension to Beyond was again a lot of this starts right into England with New England merchants who wanted to know very eager to take over the Pacific trade the fabulous markets of China which were always in their minds which meant conquering the northwest so you can control the ports and so on kicking the British the others out and so on that went on from right here the goal was the William Seward Secretary of State and 1860s pointed out that the central figure in American imperialism that we have to gain command of the Empire of the Seas conquered continent we're going to settle take it over monitor doctrine was a declaration that we'll take it over everybody else keep out and the process of doing so continued through the 19th century and beyond until today but now we have to have command of the Seas and that meant when the time was ripe 30 years later when the apple started to fall from the tree given relative power proceeding overseas to the overseas empire but it's basically no different than the earlier steps the leading philosophical Imperia Imperial is bricks Adams he pointed out that his 1895 were just on the verge of moving overseas extensively that all Asia must be reduced to our economic system the Pacific must be turned into an inland sea just like the Caribbean had been and there's no reason he said why the United States should not become a greater seat of wealth and power than ever was England Rome or Constantinople well again there was a deterrent the European powers wanted a piece of the action in East Asia and Japan by then was a becoming a formidable force so it was necessary to explore more complex modes of gaining command of turning the Pacific into an inland sea and going on and that was lucidly explained by Woodrow Wilson who is one of the most brutal and vicious interventionists in American history the probable permanent destruction of Haiti is one of his many accomplishments those of you who study international relations theory or read about it know that there's a notion of Wilsonian idealism the fact that that notion can exist is a very interesting commentary on our intellectual culture and scholarly culture if you look at his actual actions fine words are easy enough but these are some of his fine words which he was smart enough not to put into print he just ripped them for himself I said since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market the flag of his nation must follow must follow him and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unset left unused that's nineteen seven there's a current version of that a crude version by Thomas Friedman who says that McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas meaning the US Air Force well that's crude version of Wilson's point they got about patted down the doors by force and threat and no corner of the world must be left unused no useful corner there was a watershed in this process at the time the Second World War the time of the Second World War the u.s. already had by far the largest economy in the world and had for a long time but it wasn't a major player in world affairs Britain was the leading player of France second the United States a lagging it controlled the hemisphere you know had made forays into the Pacific but was not the leading player however during the war the u.s. planners understood that the war was going to end with the u.s. the world dominant power however it turned out other competitors were going to destroy themselves and each other and the US would be left alone that comparable security in fact the u.s. gained enormous Lee from the war industrial production virtually quadrupled the war ended the depression New Deal measures hadn't done so the u.s. ended at the end of the war the US had literally half the world's wealth and competitors were virtually distributed either damaged or Syria or destroyed and incomparable security controlled Western Hemisphere controlled both oceans controlled the opposite side of both oceans is nothing remotely like it in history and during the war planners understood that something like that was going to turn out was obvious from the nature of the war from 1939 to 1945 there were high-level meetings regular meetings of the State Department State Department planners and the Council on Foreign Relations the sort of main external nongovernmental input into foreign policy and they laid careful plans for the world that they expected but to emerge it was a world they said in which the United States will hold unquestioned power and will ensure the limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by States that might interfere with u.s. global designs and certainly I'm not quoting neo-cons on quoting the Roosevelt administration the peak of American liberalism the they called for what they called an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States and bar any exercise of sovereignty by anyone who would interfere with it and they would do this in a region that they called the grand area well in the early part of the war in 1939 the 1943 the grand area was defined as the western hemisphere routinely the former British Empire which the US would take over and the Far East that would be the grand area they assumed at the time that there would be a German led world the rest so would be a non German world that's us in the German world as the Russians gradually a ground down the Nazi armies after 1942 it became pretty clear that there wouldn't be a German world so the grand area was expanded to be as much of the world as could be controlled the limitless that's simply pursuing the old position that expansion is the path to security for the nascent Empire of 1776 the these policies were laid down during the war but then they were implemented right after the war in fact the thought you now that we have available the declassified record the planning documents of the late late 1940s it turns out they're not very surprisingly very similar to the wartime planning the one of the leading figures was George Kennan was head of the State Department the policy planning staff he wrote one of his many important papers in 1948 PPS 23 if you want to look it up noted that the United States has half the world's wealth but only 6% of its population and our primary goal in foreign policy must be as he put it to maintain this disparity and in order to do so we must put aside all vague and idealistic slogans about democracy and human rights those are for public propaganda and colleges and so on but we must put those aside and keep to pure power concepts we had no other way to maintain the disparity and then in the same paper and elsewhere he and his staff went through the world assigned to each part of the world what would be what they called its function within this global system that in which the US would have unchallenged power unquestioned power so Latin America and the Middle East the Middle East obviously would provide the energy resources that we would control gradually pushing out Britain throwing out France immediately and pushing out Britain slowly over the years and turning it into essentially a junior partner as the British Foreign Office ruefully described their role at that time the Latin America we simply control that's our little region over here which has never bothered anyone that is a Secretary of War Stimson said while the US was violating the principles it was establishing by setting up a regional organization in violation of the UN Charter and so on so Latin America we keep at least we control Southeast Asia would be its function was to provide resources and raw materials to the former colonial powers meanwhile we would purchase them - that would send dollars there which the colonial powers would take not the population and they could use those to Britain France Netherlands could use the dollars to purchase US manufacturers it's called a triangular trading arrangement which would allow the US had the only really functioning industrial system in the world had a huge excess of manufacturing products and there was what was called a dollar gap of the countries we wanted to sell it to who didn't have dollars that's Europe basically so we had to provide them with dollars and the role of function of Southeast Asia was to play a role in that hence the support for French colonialism and recapturing it's in the Chinese colony and so on it's a there was various variations but that's the basic story the and so cannon went through the world and signed them its function each part when he got to Africa he decided that the United States really didn't have much interest in Africa that time and therefore we should hand it over to the Europeans to exploit his word to exploit for their reconstruction he said it would also give him a kind of a psychological lift after the damage of the war and while we were taking over all of their domains well you could imagine a different relationship between Europe and Africa and the light of history but that wouldn't even be considered I mean it was like too outlandish to discuss and still is so Africa was to be exploited by Europe for its reconstruction with consequences we know us has since gotten into the act well that was canon he was removed from office soon after because he was considered too soft-hearted not up to dealing with this harsh world and he was replaced with real tough guys Dean Acheson : it see and others and it's no time to go through it but if you ever won an education on hysterical jingoist fanaticism you really should read their documents if you've studied these issues you've heard of at least NSC 68 which is discussed by everyone but its rhetoric is omitted and you have to look at its rhetoric to see what's going on in these crazed heads of the great thinkers and this is true of the whole national security council culture there's a wonderful book on it that came out a couple years ago by James Peck Scientologists who called Washington's China is the first scholarly book to go through the whole national security culture and it's like reading a collection of Mad Men you know the work was very much worth studying much more worth studying than most of what people study in their courses on these issues well anyway that's what do we do that Latin America the the one we just nobody has you know our domain well Kenan was pretty explicit about that too he said in Latin America we should prefer police States the reason is and he said that harsh government measures of repression should cause no qualms as long as the results are unbalanced favorable to our interests in particular as long as we guarantee the protection of our resources the resources happen to be somewhere else but that's a historical accident there are our resources and we have to protect them and if you have to do it by the mailed fist okay that's the way you do it as I say he was moved the there is a long ugly history there's no time to go through it but the Cold War history essentially follows this pattern the Cold War was a kind of a tacit compact between the super V superpower and it's on the smaller power the United States and Russia the compact was that the United States would be free to carry out violence and terror and atrocities limitless in its own domains and the Russians would be able to run their own dungeon without too much US interference so the Cold War in effect was a war of the United States against the third world and of Russia against its much smaller domains in Eastern Europe and the events of the Cold War illustrate that each great power used the others threats as a pretext for repression and violence and destruction the United States way more than Russia if you look at the record reflecting its their relative power but that's essentially the picture you can see the in fact for the United States the war was basically a war again the Cold War was a war of a basically a war against a independent nationalism in the third world what was called radical nationalism the radical means doesn't follow orders so constant struggle against radical nationalism in particular the leading thesis all the way through is that even the smallest place if it becomes independent is a serious danger it's what Henry Kissinger called a virus that might infect others like even a tiny place you know Grenada or something if it has successful independent development others might get the idea that we can follow the rot will spread as patches and put it so you've got to stamp it out right at the source it's not a novel idea any Mafia Don will explain it to you the Godfather does not tolerate it when some small storekeeper doesn't pay protection money not that he needs the money but kind like a bad idea of theirs I get the idea and in particular small weak countries have to be we have to crush them with particular violence so that others because they are it's easy you know nobody can stop you and others get the point that's a large part of International Affairs right to the present well to learn about what the Cold War was about the obvious place to look is what happened when it ended ok so November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell Soviet Union soon collapsed so what did the United States do how did it react I mean the pretext for everything that had happened in the past was you know the Russian monster the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy attempting to take over the world as john f kennedy called it well now the monolithic and ruthless conspiracy was gone so what do we do well it turns out what we do is exactly the same thing but with different pretext and that was made clear instantly a couple of weeks after the Blin Berlin Wall fell the United States invaded Panama killing unknown numbers of people we don't count our victims according to Panamanian human rights groups maybe a couple thousand people bombing the slum melchio slum the Panamanians take it seriously in fact last December they once again declared a national day of mourning about the referring to the invasion I don't even think I made the newspapers here and when you crush ants and your path you don't pay much attention to their you know what they may have to say about it but they invaded Panama had to veto the Security Council resolutions the point of the invasion was to kidnap a kind of a minor thug Noriega who was kidnapped brought to the United States tried sentenced long sentence a sense for crimes that were real but he had committed them when he was on the CIA payroll almost without exception small footnote oh but but for that we had to invade Panama and kill however many people it was a couple of thousand probably and install a government of bankers and narco traffickers that drug trafficking shot up and so on about a successful invasion and applauded here it was kind of a footnote to history that's the kind of thing the US doesn't its domains all the time but it was a little different for one thing the pretexts were different this time it wasn't we were defending ourselves against the Russians it was we were defending ourselves against the Hispanic narco traffickers who were going to come and shoot up our kids and destroy the country and so on and in fact Noriega was a minor narco-trafficker had mostly been working for the CIA but he became unacceptable when he started dragging his feet on following orders like he didn't participate enthusiastically enough in the u.s. terrorist war against nicaragua and so on so he obviously had to go well one difference was that it had different pretext another was that the United States was much freer to act that was pointed out right away by Elliott Abrams as now after he's not back in office running Middle East affairs he pointed out right away that the invasion of Panama was different from what had preceded because we didn't have to be concerned about the Russians stirring up trouble somewhere in the world we were free to use force without impediment and correct observation counts goes on right until today many of the violent acts that the US has carried out since then it would have hesitated seriously about if there was a deterrent but now there are no deterrence anymore so you do what you like that was a change the again if you want to learn more about what the Cold War was about have a look at the documents that were produced right afterwards this is George Bush the first right after the early nineteen ninety gives you a budget request there was a new national security strategy and they described what the post-cold war world would be turns out exactly as before we still have to have a huge mass military force but we have to maintain what they call the defense industrial base that's a euphemism for high-tech industry in you know for the public and so on you talk about our belief in free trade and free enterprise and so on but anyone who knows anything about the US economy knows it's based on state extensively on the state sector high-tech industry is very largely within the state sector and under a government it's under typically under a pentagon cover as long as it's electronics based and that's called the defense industrial base so we have to maintain the huge public subsidy to high-tech industry called the defense industrial base we have to have a massive military but it has different targets the as they pointed out before this we were aimed at a weapons rich target namely Russia now we're aiming at a target rich region namely the third world and on any weapons but there are a lot of rich targets there so that's what we need the major military forces for in fact that's pretty much what it was in the past - but now it's openly conceded we have - with regard to the Middle East specifically we have to maintain intervention forces directed at the Middle East and then comes this interesting comment we need same intervention forces directed at the Middle East where the problems that we faced could not be late could not have been laid at the Kremlin's door ok so sorry folks we've been lying to you for the last 50 years claiming we're defending ourselves against the Russians but now that the Russians aren't there it turns out the problems couldn't have been laid at the Kremlin store which is correct the problems were independent nationalism and they continue to be so but now it's said open and clear because the pretext is gone we also we have to also be concerned now about what they call the technological sophistication of third world powers it's a really overwhelming threat I like Hillary Clinton there two ago saying that if you ran a tax Israel with nuclear weapons will obliterate Iran and the chance of Iran attacking Israel with nuclear weapons is somewhere below an asteroid hitting Israel but it doesn't matter it's a nice throwaway line but but that's the kind of threat we have to worry about it's not like Ronald Reagan in 1985 strapping on his cowboy boots and declaring a state of national emergency because of the threat posed to the national security of the United States by the government of Nicaragua which was only two days away from Harling in Texas so we really had to tremble and terror well that's you know that that's standard and it had to increase after the end of the Cold War with the main pretexts gone and it and it has the this is also is all consistent with a conception of a conception of aggression that has developed through the period and right up till today it's very lively today regression aggression has a meaning but that meaning doesn't apply to us the vitac by US leaders aggression means resistance so anyone who resists the united states is guilty of aggression and that makes sense if we own the world you know so any act of resistance is aggression against us so when the u.s. invaded South Vietnam in the early 1960s under Kennedy Kennedy said we're defending ourselves against what he called the assault from within and the leading liberal light died late Stevenson described it as indirect internal aggression so internal aggression by South Vietnamese against us and of course we're thereby right because we own the world the and that that continues right to the present so keep a lot of time because nothing much changed and come right up till today so the big problem middle-east now read The Washington Post a couple days ago is the growing aggressiveness of Iran that's what's causing the problems of the Middle East well you know aggression has a meaning it means sending your armed forces into the territory of some of the state where when the latest case of Iranian aggression was a couple of centuries ago unless we count Iranian aggression that was carried out under the Shah which we approved of the tyrant who we imposed conquered a couple of Arab islands but that was okay but nevertheless we have to defend ourselves against tyranny and aggression in Iraq in Lebanon and in Gaza where Iran is carrying out aggression meaning people they are doing things we don't like and Russia isn't around so we'll blame it on Iran that's aggression and there's even there's a lot of discussion about the aggression inside Iraq that carried out by the renegade cleric muqtada al-sadr if you read the press you might get the idea that moved out his first name is renegade it's hardly a phrase that reference to him that doesn't talk about the renegade el Sutter why is he a renegade well he opposes the US invasion of his country ok that makes him a renegade or a radical obviously and that's routine nobody questions that it's kind of like reflexive description Condoleezza Rice was asked a little while ago on a TV interview how could we end the war in Iraq and said it's very easy way to end the wars that it's quite obvious stop the flow of arms to foreign fighters stop the flow of foreign fighters across the border that'll end the war in Iraq well if somebody was looking at this who hadn't been adequately brainwashed by a good Western education they would collapse and ridicule I mean yes there are foreign fighters in Iraq and plenty of foreign arms they're mainly from the country the invaded arrests but they're not foreign remember they're indigenous because we are indigenous everywhere that follows from owning the world going back to the nascent empires spread so therefore we're not foreign fighters there or anywhere else we're indigenous and it's the foreign fighters who have to be stopped on and actually the concept of aggression has expanded recently a couple of back in January you may have seen there was an important statement by five former NATO commanders which was reported the big issue was that they had said we have to base our military posture on possession of nuclear weapons but it's nothing new it's always been true it was strongly advocated by the Clinton administration but much stronger terms and thing but that was what was reported how it was interesting was and the one thing that was new was their expansion expansion of the concept acts of war they said acts of war against which we must have let's defend ourselves by the use of nuclear weapons if necessary is using weapons of finance okay so the country uses weapons of finance against us that's an act of war and we have to be ready to use nuclear weapons if necessary well two months after in late March the United States Treasury Department warned the world's financial institutions against any dealing with Iran's state-owned banks now those warnings have teeth thanks to the Patriot Act little-noticed element of the Patriot Act permits the United States to bar from access to the United States financial system any country that violates its orders meaning if a German or Chinese or other bank tries to have dealings with Iran they can be barred from the US financial system which is a cost that very few are willing to bear and might and it and is in fact a declaration of war and by the judgement of the five NATO commanders an act of war against which Iran is entitled to respond any way it likes perhaps with nuclear weapons or terror or whatever according to these judgments now you'll notice that there's a serious logical fallacy and what I've just been saying it overlooks two fundamental principles which are the crucial principles of World Order the rest is footnotes the first principle is that we own the world and Iran doesn't so therefore the principle is not applied on us they only apply to others and the kind of a corollary to that is that everything we do is necessarily with the best of intentions that's a tautology you don't have to give evidence or arguments and that's a constant feature of the intellectual culture almost without exception across the spectrum so for example during the invasion of Vietnam I don't hope I don't to describe it to you but it killed several million people destroyed three countries it's just a monstrous atrocity but and it was if you if you look over there was vast discussion of it mainstream discussion but if you look closely you'll find that there was never a principled critique of the war that was not permissible the typical just to keep the kind of left critical end and the rest gets worse at the end of the war Anthony Lewis of the New York Times wrapped it up he said speaking from the left liberal extreme that the United States entered the war with blundering efforts to do good notice efforts to do good as a tautology we did it so therefore its efforts to do good so it's not saying anything blundering because it didn't work as well as they wanted at least worked pretty well but not as well as they wanted so we started with blundering efforts to do good but by 1969 it was clear that we could not establish democracy in South Vietnam at a cost acceptable to ourselves well established democracy in South Vietnam is on a par with some Soviet commissar saying that Stalin was trying to establish democracy in Eastern Europe but that doesn't matter it's us so we were doing and but the cope at the problem with it was the cost to us okay so that meant we had to sort of start pulling out well that's the critique at the very left end take one more example the leading American liberal historian maybe the most famous historian of his generation Arthur Schlesinger who was at first a super Hulk like the whole Kennedy administration was no alternative to victory and in their invasion of South Vietnam this is what it was but by the late 60s he was having second thoughts and he wrote a I will expressing them and he said that he said we all pray that the Hawks will be correct in hoping that the surge of the day big influx of troops will be successful and if they are we will be praising the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government in winning the war and he was aware of what it was he said leaving a land of wreck and ruin with its institutions destroyed and may never recover but will nevertheless be praising the wisdom and the statesmanship of the American government and we pray that they're right the Hawks but he said they probably aren't right it's probably going to be too costly for us no question about the cost of the Vietnamese and land of wreck and ruin so therefore maybe we ought to rethink it well that's the criticism at the critical end of the spectrum the dovish critical end then from there on over to the jingoist end of the spectrum you have a kind of a debate could we have one with more force or was a lost cause anyway and so on rather striking that the population is out of this so in 1969 the year that lewis pointed to seventy percent of the population i thought that the war was fundamentally wrong a tomorrow not a mistake try to find anything in the literature of educated sectors that says it was anything but a mistake that it was fundamentally wrong a tomorrow that's not unusual internally the government was aware of this one of the things that is not taught but should be read because it's very illuminating is the final part of the Pentagon Papers Pentagon Papers are not Declassified archives they are stolen archives so we know a better idea what they were thinking the Pentagon favors end in 1968 right after the Tet Offensive in January 1968 which convinced the business world this is going to cost us too much we better start separate winding it down there was a request from the government to send another couple hundred thousand troops to Vietnam but they were dubious about doing it and didn't do it finally because they were fait afraid that there would be an uprising in the United States a popular uprising of unprecedented proportions and they would need the troops for civil disorder control because of protests among underprivileged people women youth and others who just weren't going to take anymore well that tells you that they were they'd been in admit that they were listening but they were and they always do if they needed the troops for control and they sort of slowly started backing off another six years of war devastated Laos and Cambodia and much of Vietnam but at least they started winding down well that was 1969 notice that you can take the rhetoric about the Vietnam War and translate it almost verbatim at the discussion of the Iraq war there is no principled critique within the mainstream and nobody can buy principled critique I mean the kind of critique that we would carry out reflexively and do when somebody else commits aggression I say when the Russians invade Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan or Chechnya we don't ask is it too costly in fact it wasn't costly at all practically killed nobody in Czechoslovakia Chechnya after reducing the place to ruin apparently it's functioning pretty well in fact if according to Western correspondents if David Petraeus could achieve anything in Iraq like what the Putin achieved in Chechnya I'd probably be crowned king or something like that but nevertheless we condemned it rightly doesn't matter whether it worked or not or whether it was costly for them or not or when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait the killing probably a fraction of the number of people that Bush killed a couple of months earlier when he invaded Panama but we nevertheless denounced it as aggression you know that's a principled objection but when we carry out aggression it's inconceivable and that goes back to the principles that I mentioned we own the world and everything we do is by definition good and intention so the worst that it can be is what barack obama calls a strategic blunder or what hillary clinton calls getting into a civil war which we can't win in fact iraqis overwhelmingly blame zoo or on us but that's irrelevant to that's the level of critique and it's and it follows from you know from the principles that i mentioned and it governs news coverage to in fact pretty openly here's john burns is the dean of correspondents most the senior most respected correspondent in iraq after a long long career he says that the united states is the prominent economic political and military power in the world and has been the greatest force for stability in the world certainly since world war ii it would be a dark day if the outcome in iraq were to destroy the credibility of american power to destroy America's willingness to use its power in the world to achieve good to fight back against totalitarianism authoritarianism gross human rights abuses okay in other words that's the framework of reporting reporting must be cheering for the home team nothing else is conceivable because of the depths of these principles which are instilled into people in the educational system in propaganda you can't see the world in any other terms so it's neutral objective reporting to say we're cheering for the home team and it's quite open that's interesting that he said it so clearly but he says that's particularly true he says in the Middle East notice that makes not the slightest difference with the people of the world of the Middle East think that's not relevant or for that matter with the people in the United States state so the Vietnam War was benign efforts to do good which were too costly to us even when 70% of the population I said that's fundamentally wrong and immoral not a mistake population here is as irrelevant as the population and the rest of the world unless you're frightened of them and have to keep your troops here for civil disorder control what what do people think well what people think we know from international polls that are regularly taken they think that the United States is most frightening dangerous country in the world not John Burns this line what about the and there's overwhelming opposition to us force this everywhere the it's also true the Middle East and there's nothing new about it so George Eric current George Bush after 9/11 asked why do they hate us and went on they hate our freedoms and so on you remember that but the press should have reported is that he was just repeating a question that President Eisenhower asked in 1958 Eisenhower asked his staff why is there a campaign of hatred against us among the people of the Middle East and the National Security Council the highest planning agency had provided an answer is that the people in the Middle East their perception is that the United States supports brutal tyrannies and blocks democracy and development and does so because we want control of their oil and then they went on to say on perceptions more or less correct and that's why it ought to be so therefore there's a campaign of hatred against us and so it continues after 9/11 The Wall Street Journal to its credit conducted some polls in the Middle East they didn't care about the general population what's demeaning Lee called the Arab Street they pulled the what they called money Muslims bankers managers of multinational corporations you know kind of guys we like and they found pretty much the same thing as 1958 there's a camp it's not been I have any objection to neoliberalism or any of this stuff in fact they love it but they condemn the United States for supporting and a harsh tyrannical regimes which it does and opposing democracy and development which it does because we want to control their energy resources by 2001 they had other objections namely Israel's US backed vicious repression and dispossession of Palestinians which is ongoing and also the sanctions against Iraq the sanctions against Iraq didn't get much play here because we don't pay attention to our crimes that's crucial that's part of the principle that everything we do is good but they do pay attention and in fact we know a lot about them or we can if we want to there were two directors of the oil-for-food program supposedly the humanitarian part of the sanctions both of them resigned because they regarded the sanctions as genocide --all carrying out a huge massacre of population the Clinton administration would not permit them to transmit their information to the Security Council which was technically responsible and the media agree the secretary spokesman for the State Department James burns said that referred to Hunt's von sponeck the second of them as I said this man in Baghdad is paid to work not to talk and the press agrees and scholarship agrees so they're suppressed they knew more about Iraq than any other Western are they had hundreds of observers running around the country sending back reports but you can do a Google search and find out how often they were allowed to speak in the United States and the run-up to the war for that matter since a fan sponeck right and who's a very distinguished international diplomat read a book about it about two years ago called a different kind of war I don't think there's a reference to it in the United States little on a review we do not want to publicize our genocide all actions but people have at least noticed and didn't like it and that increased the campaign of hatred among the money Muslims our friends there have to think about the others but it doesn't matter what they think the same is true of the invasion of Iraq Iraqis regarded it is worse than the Mongol invasions it's the great successes it Iraq may never recovered I mean you know the great success story of Petraeus is to establish warlord armies which will probably tear the country up in the future and also to turn say Baghdad it's true the violence in Baghdad has declined that partly because there are fewer people to kill you know there's been massive as ethnic cleansing and that's been accelerated by the Petraeus strategy of building essentially walled communities so comment by near Rosen who's one of the two or three journalists who actually reports seriously from Iraq he speaks Arabic fluently and he looks Arab so he can get around easily travels all over not with the armed guards you know Abrams tanks and so on he says talking about Baghdad recently says looming on the looming over the homes and the district he's looking at our 12 foot high walls built by the Americans confine people to their own neighborhood emptied and destroyed by civil war which the u.s. fomented walled off by the surge of sections of the city feel more like a desolate post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living inhabited neighborhood they're controlled by separation walls and in fact by the increasing use of air power but will quieter so therefore the critics having no principled criticism don't talk about it much well what does the public think about all these things well we know about Iraq public wants to get out but they're irrelevant what about Iran the next major crisis looming which will make your act look like a tea party if we go through that there are opinions about this there's the opinion of American elites which you can reach they in the New York Times or watch and post their liberal journals and so on they'll tell you that Iran is defying the world by enriching uranium well exactly who is the world okay well we can find out there is a organization called g77 130 countries includes the vast majority of the people of the world they vigorously support Iran's right to all the rights guaranteed by the non-proliferation treaty including enriching uranium for nuclear power so they're not part of the world okay what about the American population an overwhelming majority of the American population agrees with g77 mainly that Iran should have the right to produce nuclear energy but not nuclear weapons so the American population is not part of the world so non-aligned countries are not part of the world American populations not part of the world obviously Iranians are not part of the world so who's left well the world consists of people who follow Washington's orders you can't say it includes the United States because the overwhelming majority of Americans are not part of the world they oppose this just as on many other issues and that goes on with comment you know correctly if we're cheerleaders for the home team and that's the framework for discussion is there a solution to the crisis with Iran which is extremely serious the u.s. goes through it its plans parent plans like I said it might look make your act look like a tea party well there are solutions potential solutions one of them is what I just said that Iran should have the rights of any signer of the non-proliferation treaty Israel Pakistan and India also what have those rights if they sign the treaty since they haven't done it they don't have those rights but of course they're doing it because we say it's okay the but that's the opinion of the large majority of Americans and the same large majorities runs around seventy five percent says that a nuclear weapons free zone should be established in the region including Iran Israel American forces deployed there and so on well that would end the crisis is that possible well it's supported by the large majority of Americans but as I mentioned they're not part of the world it's Iran's official policy but they're not part of the world the US and Britain are formally committed to it in fact more so than any other powers for a very simple reason which we would read about if we had a free press when the United States and Britain went to war with Iraq and try to find the thin legal cover for it they appealed to UN Security Council resolution 687 1991 which ordered Iraq to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction and as you remember Britain in the United States States claimed they had and lived up to it well you know you're all literate you can read resolution 687 it commits the United States and Britain to work to establish a nuclear free weapons zone in the Middle East okay so if you can appeal to it as a justification for aggression you're you're compelled to follow its its provisions but to point that out would be really to break the rules and you can again do a Google so you can find anyone named and you're the mainstream has ever bothered to point this out another way to move towards the solution would be to end the threats against Iran the threats if anyone cares or a violation of the UN Charter but for outlaw states that's irrelevant again the large majority of the American population thinks we should end the threats and move to normal diplomatic relations with Iran well if these steps were taken the crisis would essentially be over so we can ask who's defying the world if the world includes its people including the American people and the answer is very simple and straightforward those who are defying the world are the ones in power in Washington and in London and in the editorial offices and the university faculties and so on they're defying the world but not Iran not on these issues and in fact it's a serious matter because it could lead to total disaster and the same is true on other issues so the other major live issue in the Middle East is Israel Palestine well what does the world think about this there is an international consensus supported by about two-thirds of the American population supported by former non-aligned countries supported by the Arab world formally at least supported by Europe basically Latin America in fact everyone your hand supports it Hamas supports it it's for a two-state settlement two-state settlement on the international borders with being pre June 67 borders with minor or modifications who opposes that well for the last 30 years the United States has opposed it and it continues to oppose it and Israel of course opposes it though it if the US would support it Israel would necessarily go along so the problem is right in Washington this begins in 1976 when the u.s. veto the first Security Council resolution calling for a settlement in these terms as introduced by the Arab states backed by the PLO actually it even goes back earlier to 1971 when President Sadat of Egypt offered Israel a full fee streety in return for withdrawal from occupied territory sequel he carried his withdraw beltless withdrawal from the Sinai where Israel was kicking out thousands of peasants and settling Israel he didn't say anything about the Palestinians they were not an issue at the time Israel recognized as a genuine peace offer decided to reject it they made a fateful decision preferring expansion to security peace treaty with Israel would have ended security problem the Egypt would have ended security problems important question is what would happen in the United States no the Godfather well Kissinger managed there was a battle in a bureaucratic internal battle in the United States Kissinger won he and the US followed his policy which he called stalemate meaning no negotiations just force okay that set the stage for the 1973 war and on to a whole list of horrors since and up till today the United States and Israel are have been leading the rejectionist camp by now they are the rejectionist camp not the u.s. population but the government's so who's defying the world on this issue is there a possible settlement sure there is but resides here in fact on issue after issue the major problems happen to be right here which is a very optimistic conclusion because it means that we can do something about it it's here we can have an influence not elsewhere she time yeah contrary to what we say here in the introduction your times of course not say that you were the most important intellectual alive and you know that well it was merely an outsider professor at Stanford who said it in a revue which appeared in the New York Times interestingly enough you use that quote on several of your books also a fabricated quote you've also said that whenever that arises during an introduction like tonight you always say something about it and correct it and that's of course a falsehood because you didn't do it here tonight and that's happened in the past also number two I couldn't help but notice the reference to Arthur Schlesinger apparently you're still something sticking in your craw about you're about with him I guess it was around 1970 in which he exposed you for fabricating some Harry Truman quotes that was the exchange in which he dubbed you an intellectual crook so I guess that's so sticking in your craw even now and finally as to this notion of steering for the home team which obviously you don't do there's somebody else you're curing for so I'd like you to be very forthright like some leftists do who say they are cheering for our opponents in various places around the world quite clearly do you have the courage to tell us right now that you are pulling against us in Iraq and Afghanistan that you're hoping we fail that you support the terrorists or you might call them freedom fighters hoping they kill Americans or we get the point yeah can I go through these points on the first one the quote it was not by somebody interview it was by a reviewer in the New York he wasn't it you said he was interviewed say that listen uh you did but it doesn't matter what were you it was a book review right and it won't you know it's true that I didn't bother to correct it tonight but I almost always do it because it's funny it's a very funny thing what he actually said is he's the most important intellectual in the world how can you write such terrible things about u.s. foreign policy I like that quote so I invariantly neither I invariably corrected you say you see it on the backs of books if you take a look at the publishing industry you find that the author has actually no control over what appears and blurbs nothing if I had a choice I'd tell them not to use it of course and I often do but they like to use it and then I correct it when it's brought up that's because I think the actual quote is quite interesting so that's one as for Schlesinger you've got the story backwards I criticize Schlesinger on these points in the in a book that appeared in 1969 which he was furious about and in his review of that book which was a furious review he tried to find some error and he found an absolutely trivial error so small that it was corrected two months later in the second printing but it but he's been screaming about it he screamed about it ever since and people like you do too the error was that in quoting a speech by Harry Truman okay instead of quoting his actual speech I quoted a virtually verbatim paraphrase of it by a leading respected commentator James Warburg so the words were slightly different though the content was exactly the same as I say it was a trivial it was corrected two months later in the second printing it's a rare book that doesn't have some small error but yes you know the the defenders of state violence are desperate and if they can find anything that they can point to they'll run with it forever so that's the truth about the second point as for the cheering you heard what I said and it's what I've written I think we should pay attention to the population okay population of the United States population of Iraq population of the world we should pay attention to what they think of course those who are you know supporters of state violence think we shouldn't we should pay attention to the guys in power and to the sort of cheering section that among the intellectuals that supports them well I don't agree with it if I just take the case of Iran I think the opinion of American the American population has to be very sound and I support it and the same is true in Iraq I think the opinion of Iraqis is very sane last December the Pentagon released a study of focus groups in Iraq and reported it as good news they give a very upbeat report they said contrary to what people are saying in the critics there's a lot of agreement among Iraqis and therefore there's hope for reconciliation okay and then if you read now will further what was their agreement about well there was overwhelming agreement among Iraqis that the United States is responsible for the ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence and that the United States should get out okay that's what there is agreement about well yeah I think we should pay attention to our victims and I can go down the line if you like everything else you said it's just a pure fabrication and you know it if you want if you want to write me an email about it I'll be glad to give you you know you haven't got the courage to tell who you're leading pardon you haven't got the courage to tell us who your cheerleading for you've made your point let's go so decades ago the u.s. instituted a policy of undercutting foreign food markets sorry could you raise your hand whoever's talking up over there sorry yeah good decades ago the u.s. instituted a policy of undercutting Ford food markets by US subsidies recently US farm subsidies have shifted to ethanol markets much to the chagrin of almost every third world nation and furthermore much to the disinterest of almost every major media network what role if any do you think the food this food crisis will play in u.s. expansionist policies well just to clarify a little bit when the ethanol craze began it was overwhelmingly cheered by the media and commentators and so on not by everyone I mean I wrote an article criticizing it in fact it was even an article in foreign affairs criticizing it so there were critics but it didn't take much thought to realize that shifting of cropland to ethanol production to fuel was going to cause an increase in the prices of food and shortage of food I mean you know it tends to be a genius to figure that out it's particularly true when it's us ethanol it wouldn't have been so obvious and maybe wouldn't even true if it was Brazilian ethanol Brazilian ethanol is made from sugar it's much more efficient and it's much cheaper and in order to keep the ethanol industry functioning here the government has to first of all provide huge subsidies to agribusiness and also to impose a huge tariff to prevent much cheaper and more efficient Brazilian ethanol from getting into the country the technical term for that is free trade okay but if if it's a so it's a big gift to agribusiness it takes plenty of land away from crop production that means that this shortage of corn but also a lot of other things you know that if land has shifted to corn production inefficient corn production for ethanol it's not being used for soybeans and peas and so on so that gets reduced same happening in the third-world third-world countries that are say producing soybeans may shift to using a cryptic crops that will be bought up by the rich for ethanol and that's happening too so it spirals and yes it's leading to it's one of the factors leading to a very serious food crisis just how much of a factor that is it's pretty hard to estimate so the drought in Australia is also a big contributory factor but you know although that's kind of irrelevant we can't do anything about the drought in Australia the one factor we can do something about is the use of cropland for fuel and ethanol is not particularly few efficient from the point of view of pollution or energy inputs and so on and so forth so all across the board it was I think a disaster it was understood to be anyone who thought about it from the beginning and it ought to be terminated if anybody wants to use ethanol they should break down the protectionist barriers and subsidies to agribusiness and use Brazilian ethanol it's causing all of this is part of a whole system of undermining third-world farmers so one of the big effects of NAFTA is intended effects is to drive Mexican peasants off the land Mexican peasants cannot compete with highly subsidized the US agribusiness it's kind of obvious so slowly being driven off the land going to get worse now that Mexico has been forced to eliminate all tariffs and they flood into the cities they lower wages which is very good for you as manufacturers who are exporting production there and then they try to flee across the border so we build walls no I mean these things are all interconnected same with Haiti I mean when one of the things that our America you know American cheerleaders are supposed to cheer the government about is that Clinton sent the Marines to put an end to terror in Haiti in 1995 that part is true but there's a little more the elected government government the rst government first elected government in Haiti was a populist independent government led by a what we call a radical priest meaning liberation theology concerned about the poor it was overthrown a couple of months later by a military coup as anticipated the u.s. had done everything possible to try to undercut it in those few months the u.s. immediately turned supporting the military coup violating the Organization of American States embargo that was under Bush one under Clinton the violations increased Clinton actually authorized the Texaco oil company to send arms to send oil to the military Hunta and the rich elite in violation of his own presidential order in 1995 Clinton decided that the public population had been tortured enough and it was pretty miserable I was there for a while the size figure that's enough we'll let the elected government go back put on a condition the condition was that they'd accept a very harsh neoliberal regime mean drop your tariffs drop all support for local production and so on well the outcome was completely predictable I'm not saying it in retrospect I and others wrote about at the time Haitian rice farmers are pretty efficient but they cannot compete with highly subsidized US agribusiness exporters so now Haiti sort of food and you're getting food rights yeah predictably that's the consequence of following such policies again it doesn't take a genius to figure them out it's kind of like the elementary school student can figure it out and this is happening in many places so your point is very significant there is a major food crisis we're not helping hi first of all thanks I I want to thank you a lot for all the intellectual inspiration all these matters are a lot more interesting out they make sense and I've been following the news a lot lately with Iraq and it seems like there's some deal of escalation going on in Iraq and like a few weeks ago Vice President Cheney made a major trip to the Middle East and surely there after the Iraq government commenced a large-scale offensive against sadhus forces in Basra and subsequently there was more large large-scale action against ciders forces in Sadr City and Baghdad and there was an interesting phrase that was used in an article I saw their Iraqi tanks attacking Sadr City I'm sorry I didn't hear lish it was interesting that they used the phrase Iraqi tanks which are storming yeah Sattar City but um I was thinking about this and it seems like our policy on the war in Iraq has been almost remarkably restrained it seems like we've been concentrating mostly on like the Green Zone and the oil infrastructure and so given these recent escalations I was wondering if you thought perhaps we're going to attempt to ferment some kind of like increased violence in blood baths and may perhaps use that as a pretext for additional action in Iran and I was wondering what your thoughts are on this well you're right that the war in Iraq is restrained by comparative standards killed 100,000 people maybe over a million may have destroyed the country forever it's worse than the Mongol invasions and so on yet but that's restrained for example with nothing like the attack on Vietnam I'm not even close the Iraq war has never reached the scale of Vietnam in about 1965 you know at that time there was no protest but and there are a couple of reasons for that one reason is that the American population is much more strongly opposed to aggression than it was in the 1960s that's part of the civilizing effect of the night of the activism in the 60s had a big effect on the popular on all kind of things I support for civil rights for the women's rights environmental movement you know all the kinds of things I was quoting about the American Indians those were standard attitudes in the 60s not even questioned the kind of things that kids were reading in school texts say my own children and late 60s you can find in those backward crazed part of the country today it wouldn't be permissible all of this is a civilizing fact that's why the 60s are constantly condemned as the Time of Troubles you know kids going crazy and so on they committed a crime they civilized the country and one of the forms of civilization was opposition to aggression so contrary to what is commonly said protest against the Iraq war is far beyond protest against the Vietnam War at any comparable stage the at this stage the Vietnam where there was no talk about withdrawal in fact the first book on withdrawal was written by Howard Zinn you know and it was I think 1967 at the time when there was you know half a million American troops there countries have been torn to shreds extended to thee and that could barely be mentioned because it was so far out actually he asked me to write a review of it which I did in RAM parks because nobody would mention well now at a much lower stage of aggression in Iraq every can't everyone has to say something about withdrawal maybe they'll mean it but they have to say something you know that's a big change so one reason why there is why it's restrained by comparative standards is there's just way more opposition I mean after all the Iraq Wars the first war in the history of Western imperialism that was massively protested before it was officially inaugurated and that's never happened before not that I can think of so that's one factor but there's another more important factor a Vietnam didn't matter much to the United States I mean if the country was wiped off the map of the u.s. didn't care I mean Eisenhower tried to build up some support for his early stage of the war by talking about rubber and so on but I was a joke I mean Vietnam had no resources of significance to the United States the concern about Vietnam was what I mentioned the virus infection theory there was deep concern that successful independent development in Vietnam might spur others to take on the same efforts the via the rot might spread to Thailand maybe to Indonesia maybe even Japan which was called the super domino by John Dow or leading Japan historian Japan might have to accommodate to an independent Southeast Asia that would have meant the United States has lost the Pacific War which they weren't prepared to do in 1950 so there was a concern about Vietnam but had nothing to do with its resources and in fact that the concern was overcome just by wiping the place out so the u.s. basically won the war in the nineteen seventies didn't achieve its maximal objectives but it did satisfy its basic war aims you can't destroy Iraq it's far too value I mean Iraq has probably the second largest energy resources in the world they're very cheap and easily available it's not like Alberta tar sands you stick a pipe in the sand and you know the oil gushes out and it's right at the heart of the major energy producing section of the world that's a valuable asset not like Vietnam so yes there's got to be a limit on the destructiveness you can't destroy an asset that you want to maintain and the US does want to maintain it today it happens that I just took a look at the morning newspaper Christian Science Monitor has a front-page article on the opening of what's called the u.s. embassy in Baghdad I mean the embassy is not like any embassy in the world is the size of the Vatican has 21 buildings it's an entirely self-contained city inside the green you know inside the protected area of Baghdad I mean I'm not building that in order to tear it down the major air bases that are built they're being built around Iraq are huge facilities and they are not being built with the intent of tearing them down and they're supported by the Democrats they fund them and the idea it clearly is to try to figure out some way to establish a client government which will be able to function but but much like the government in Chechnya functions you know their Chechens they have their own security forces or like say the Vichy government under the Nazis with a French government French security forces you know French police French officials and so on the Germans sort of hanging around in the background actually it's pretty much the way Russia the Russians most run ran most of Eastern Europe it was Czech troops Polish troops and so on and so forth so try to set up something like that the traditional Imperial structure but making sure that it's a base for u.s. power and that the u.s. controls it and we don't really have to debate this any longer because it's public not much of a fuss was made about it in fact I don't anything was reported but in November last November there was a declaration an agreement by George Bush and what's called the Iraqi government which is a you know little Enclave inside the green zone never gets out sided which we call the Iraqi government the client government that follows our orders so an agreement was made between them which is interesting it permits the US to maintain effectively permanent military bases and operations inside Iraq all kind of pretext but that's what it amounts to and rather brazenly to my surprise it says that the Iraqi economy must be open to foreign investment privileged in us investors that's unusual to see such a brazen statement of crass imperialism you know the u.s. Iraqi economy means oil they don't nobody cares about the asparagus they grow so it must be open to foreign investment unlike other countries which have controlled their own resources and it must privilege u.s. investors I mean now that's more extreme than the most extreme war critic ever said and Bush underscored it in one of his many hundreds of signing statements a couple of months later in January in which he said that he would he sign some legislation because I'm not going to live up to it and in fact I won't live up to any legislation that interferes with the u.s. goal of maintaining sort of permanent capacity for military operations there and it controls the energy resources well that's totally different from Vietnam that didn't us didn't care once the country was destroyed and Laos was destroyed and Cambodia was destroyed the US didn't care very much what happened happy to pull out this is just a completely different situation both domestically and in terms of the geopolitics of it I think I'll see to the other people that are waiting yeah hi I really enjoyed your book manufacturing consent and I was just curious over the last couple days the mainstream media has gotten behind this irrefutable evidence that North Korea has built a nuclear reactor in Syria and that Israel was able to us successfully wipe it out I was kind of curious to hear your take on that and maybe cut through or got through the propaganda yeah that's a very interesting story actually I've written about a little if you're interested in Oh give some references but I happened to be listening to NPR on the way in here the evening news and you know they had a one of their sober intellectual reports which was a perfect example of what John Burns was describing have you have to cheer for the home team it described about half the story it said that you know this all this is very interesting evidence that North Korea isn't living up to its obligations and then they're the Hawks who say we should you know break goal a whole discussion and attack them or something and the doves who say maybe we should give them a little more time and so on well yeah it's probably true that North Korea isn't living up to all its obligations in its declaration but it's also true that the United States is not living up to its obligations in fact in the rare reporting on this that you can occasionally find the last report was that the United stand on its nuclear facilities and produce a declaration of its nuclear activities and the United States would join with the other six powers in providing Iraq with fuel with other aid and the US would enter into the normal diplomatic relations and remove them from the remove the isolation of North Korea by taking them off the list of states that support terror and so on well us none none of that you know furthermore there's a history of this the same negotiations same agreement pretty much was reached in September 2005 North Korea agreed to dismantle to end all nuclear weapons-related operations or nuclear operations and Amal verifiably and the United States in return would enter into diplomatic relations remove the threats to Korea and provide it with a light water reactor and a couple of other things and end all threats okay that would enter the crisis a couple of days later the United States carried out what the five NATO generals now call an act of war against North Korea they closed down North Korean financial operations which happened to be in a small Bank in Macao was probably a trial run for what they're now doing against Iran to see how it worked well you know that's a very serious attack on a country to isolate it from the international financial system no exports no imports and so on and so forth and it was almost certainly done in order to undercut the negotiations that had just been reached and in fact North Korea reacted as you'd expect carried out a nuclear test you know went on to develop missiles and so on and that's been the history all the way back North Korea may have the worst government in the world but they've been following a pretty pragmatic course on this when the US gets more aggressive they get more aggressive when the u.s. gets more conciliatory they get more conciliatory and it's been running steadily all the way through so that's the other part of the story and there's another part of the story that's even more significant I don't know if North Korea has been providing anything to Syria or not but there would have been an easy way to stop this a very easy way in 1993 North Korea and Israel were on the verge of an agreement by which Israel would recognize North Korea and North Korea would terminate all weapons related activities in the Middle East now that would be very important for Israel's security but the Clinton administration said no it wouldn't let him do it and when the Godfather speaks you got a listen so that agreement was never reached and if that agreement had been reached we would be having any discussion about whether North Korea is doing anything in Syria or not well that part of the story is knocked out now it's not that it's secret you know if you do some research or you read the arms control literature and so on yeah you can find it actually I've written about it too and have others but it's certainly not the headline where it ought to be it's not something that people know another small point was made by Andrew cordis men this one bleeding a Middle East security specialists in the United States who suggested that maybe this whole flap is just a warning to Iran saying you know we got our eyes on you and if you do anything or even if you don't do anything we'll pretend that you did you're in trouble you know so yes there's a lot to the story but exactly what's going on we don't know and probably won't know until the classified documents come out someday if they ever do hi I think you're I've read your books and I think you're excellent my question is most people I mean we can sit here and have a discussion on the problems that we've had in the past in Panama or Guatemala and Cuba and we can also talk about how you know how we supported the Shah and we basically affected the Iranian Revolution but the fact is that most people in America don't even know that at one point we supported Saddam Hussein so knowing this fact how can we help educate the rest of the American public on all these issues when it seems that you know the media won't do it and it's all of this information that you say is easy to find is maybe not so easy for the average person so yeah see I first of all lets thought you write about supporting Saddam Hussein but very few people know the extent of the support in 1982 yes Saddam Hussein was hanged a couple of months ago year whatever it was and if you look he was hanged for crimes that he committed in 1982 he was alleged to have ordered the killing of 150 or so people which by his standards was like you know toothpick on a mountain but that's what he was judged for but it was kind of interesting to see the commentary on it as something else happened in 1982 in 1982 the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the list of states supporting terror which is a name for the list of states we want to go after as 90 to a sporting terror so they removed it from the list in order that the US could start providing aid and support through their friend Saddam Hussein Donald Rumsfeld went shortly afterwards to you know sign the friendly agreement and through the 1980s the US was one of a number of states who supported the gave support to Saddam Hussein a lot of was agricultural support which he desperately needed and it was a big boon to us agribusiness but also weapons support you know means to develop weapons of mass destruction and so on this went on right through Saddam Hussein's worst atrocities you know the halabja massacres is a unfallen massacres you know everything the use of chemical weapons well we threw nada there was some protest Congress protested now and then but Reagan vetoed any effort to do anything about it George Bush number one came along he was a particular admirer of Saddam in 1989 at the very time of the invasion of Panama just as the invasion of Panama was going on Bush overrode the Treasury Department and authorized new aid to his friend Saddam Hussein the press cooperated by not reporting it in also in 1989 Bush invited era Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States to get advanced training and weapons production nuclear weapons production okay that's also 1989 early 1990 Bush sent a high-level senatorial delegation to Iraq led by Bob Dole Republican Senate majority leader who was then presidential candidate a couple years later and the goal the purpose of the delegation was to send George Bush's good wishes to his friend Saddam to insure him that he could disregard the kind of protests he hears now and then from the American press we have this free press thing here and we can't shut all these guys up and told him that he would they would take off from The Voice of America anybody who was criticizing him I was generally kind of loved session that was April 1990 okay a couple of months later Saddam Hussein disobeyed orders or maybe misunderstood orders just possible and invaded Kuwait okay shifted instantly from favored friend and Ally to reincarnation of Hitler no you don't disobey orders you know like I said any Mafia Don understands that's the support and incidentally shortly after that Washington returned to support the first Saddam Hussein after the war was a murderous destructive war way beyond anything that was needed to get some time out of quate but right after the war by March 1991 the US had total control military control of the region control of the air everything and there was a large Shiite uprising in the south which probably would have overthrown Saddam but the u.s. authorized Saddam to crush it they authorized him to use aircraft military helicopters and so on to crush the uprising killing probably tens of thousands of Shiites in the south general what was his name shorts cop who was a general said later that he was fooled by Saddam he didn't realize that when he authorized Saddam to use military aircraft he'd actually use him so kind of you know we were tricked but it was explained pretty open but frankly by the New York Times the chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman a chief diplomatic correspondent State Department spokesperson in New York Times just relays State Department propaganda he said he wrote a clear column he said thee he said the best of all possible worlds he supported the decision to allow Saddam to crush the uprising I said the best of all worlds for the United States would be an iron-fisted military front the ruling Iraq just the way Saddam did but with a different name because he's now kind of embarrassment and so we have to settle for second best you know Saddam himself the Middle East correspondent for the New York Times who's still there still there top Middle East correspondent Alan Cowell he said well you know it's kind of unpleasant watching all these people get massacred they said but there's a consensus among the United States and its allies namely Britain and Saudi Arabia that the best hope for stability in Iraq is saddam hussein not the people who are trying to overthrow him okay so therefore we have to let saddam crush the uprising that might have overthrown him the stability is a technical term that means following us orders okay so that's stability and Saddam's more hopeful for stability than Iraqis in fact what it have said is you know the worst possible outcome is the Iraqis might rule Iraq we're not going to allow that independent nationalism is not to be accepted that's why without all sutter's a renegade and so on and in fact through the 90s it's the same story if you look at the main effect of the sanctions Clinton sanctions I mean they were murderers and destructive but they strengthened Saddam Hussein they undermined opposition to him they compelled the population to rely on him for survival which is probably the reason he wasn't overthrown you know otherwise he probably would have had the same fate as Ceausescu and Suharto Bhutto and a whole bunch of gangsters not very different from him who the u.s. supported until the end but in fact that's exactly what was said by Dennis Halliday and Hans von sponeck the two directors of the oil-for-food program was this as know more about Iraq than certainly any West so maybe so you know it's uh but it's crucial that Iraqis not rule Iraq so yes there was support now how do we get any of this stuff to the American people well you know how you get anything else for the population was a you who quoted Margaret Mead at the beginning you know that's the way to do it everything happens exactly the way you said exactly didn't you know I'm taking the civil rights movement the women's movement the anti-vietnam anti-war movement pick anything you like you know the environmental movement starts with small groups people doing things and gradually it grows finally it gets to the point where as in the case of the entity Vietnam war movement where the government was afraid to send troops because they'd need him for civil disorder control all that happened within about two years and it just changed the world I mean a striking example is the women's movement it's not that I mean there were feminists before but until the 1960s there was nothing much was happening and within a couple of years it changed the country in the world dramatically it's probably the major impact of the 60s on the world and it happened just by consciousness-raising groups bigger groups activism where it was necessary and so on civil rights movement a couple of black kids sat at a lunch counter and freedom fries bus riders started rioting and pretty soon you had a huge mass movement which didn't solve the problems obviously but Allah made it a lot better earlier you mentioned latin america and the u.s. preference for police states and I think we see those police states crumbling preference for what I didn't read state blue state in Latin America and those states are crumbling most recently there was the election in Paraguay and while we never heard anything about the generations of rulers in Paraguay this would this weekend there was a significant election you know we find Korea and Ecuador who is saying that US military bases have no place in Ecuador Venezuela a revolution with resources a rich revolution on ever Morales in Bolivia right now as you know is being threatened and that there is a worldwide appeal to to cease the hostilities anyway my question is how do you see Latin America moving forward on its leftist path or just on its own path and define in the US this is one of the most important things happening in the world I think it's not Latin America unfortunately at South America Central America was so devastated by Reaganite terror it may never recover so they're not part of this much I mean a little bit not much but South America is undergoing a really dramatic change and it's the first time since the Spanish invasions that the countries of South America are beginning to face two fundamental problems which have turned them into a like a horror story some of the worst poverty and misery in the world in in a in a region with enormous resources and a lot of potential you know it's not like it's not like you know it's not a desert somewhere the two problems are both problems of sort of disintegration one of them internal to each society and other among all the societies each Latin Latin American societies typically have been run by a very small wealthy very wealthy largely white elite race class correlations pre-close with a mass of suffering and misery that's been an internal problem so if you compare it with East Asia's striking I mean Latin America's many advantages over East Asia should be way ahead and development but in Latin America capital is exported by the tiny rich elite the imports are luxury goods so they can live it up their second homes are in the Riviera or someplace like that the children go to school overseas there's nothing to do with their own population no responsibilities taxes nothing the disintegration among the countries is that they are all separated from one another there's very little interaction among them during the colonial period and even the period of Independence you can see that in the transportation systems and on us everything well those things are changing strikingly I think the most dramatic cases Bolivia which is really impressive what happened and you're right it's under a lot of threat now the white elite that's always run the place is infuriated that they had a democratic election for the first time and the u.s. is just as infuriated democratic elections are a real danger but they had a remarkable democratic election in which the large majority of the population mostly indigenous entered the political arena elected someone from their own ranks on crucial issues you know not did you make a mistake you should have said but on real issues control of resources issues of cultural rights of justice and so on and they want and if they were not just pushing a button on Election Day these were continuing struggles control over water in all sorts of things sometimes very bitter struggles and I had developed mass popular organizations and they had a democratic election of a kind that is unimaginable in the United States or in the West all the and yes now there's a serious effort to overturn it this strong secessionist movement we don't have documents but I'm sure it's backed by the United States to try to support the rich mostly white minority to pull out and that happens to be where most of the natural resources are and the majorities must hold the country together and you know carry forward the significant changes that are taking place and there's also and that's happening in the other countries too that you mentioned including Brazil the most important and there's a lot of integration going on in fact the whole region almost the entire region is sort of moving to the left you know well the US had means of protection stopping this - means violence and economic strangulation and both means have been severely weakened a Correa throwing out the monta airbase is a symbol of the weakening of the weapon of violence traditionally the u.s. when anything like this happened the u.s. carried out a military coup or you know instigated a military coup installed a bunch of gangsters and that was the end of it it's but they can't do that now the last time the u.s. tried a military coup was in Venezuela in 2002 where they did manage to the us-backed military coup did manage to overthrow the government but it was overturned within a couple of days and it was huge protests all over Latin America and the u.s. had to back off and I haven't been able to do it since the economic strangulation is also weakened the economic strangulation in recent years has been the instrument of it has been the IMF International Monetary Fund which is basically a branch of the US Treasury so the idea is you get the country's deeply indebted to give impossible debts that they can never pay the debts are not from the population they're from the elite population didn't borrow the money and didn't gain anything from it but the international rules are they're the ones who have to pay it okay well that's being overcome country after countries as the Argentine president put it ridding ourselves of the IMF restructuring the debts repaying the dets Argentina did it with Venezuela Brazil did in its own way and the IMF is actually in trouble it's not getting a funding by debt repayment so the and in general the method of economic strangulation is declining partly because of the integration the countries are working together the standard u.s. line now press scholarship and so on is that the there are two kinds if they have to admit that Latin America is moving left but there's a good left and a bad left the good left is Lula and Brazil the bad left is of course Chavez and Morales and maybe Korea but in order to maintain that party line you have to be quick on your feet for example you have to overlook the fact that one of the strongest supporters of Chavez is Lula that doesn't fit the party line so it doesn't get reported after Lula and Brazil after he was his second Nasser was reelected his first act practically was to fly to Caracas to support Chavez in his electoral campaign and to dedicate a joint Venezuelan Brazilian project there's no more projects development shortly after that there was a very important meeting of Latin American presidents in Cochabamba and Bolivia very important place that's where the Bolivian revolution took off that's where peasants began protesting the World Bank u.s. programs to privatize water which means water is a token you know people can't drink this can't pay the cost so they threw out they succeeded in throwing out the Bechtel corporation and blocking the effort it wasn't easy a lot of people got killed that's Cochabamba it's real symbol so that's where the Latin American presidents met it was December 2006 and they made interesting plans joint plans for an european union type integration and actually taking steps towards it and the u.s. is just that much that you can do about it you know it's lost its main weapons now the plenty of internal to overcome so it's not going to be an easy path but this is the first time they're being seriously faced and on the and with the participation of substantial mass popular movements that's the basis for democracy it's one of the reasons why we don't have a functioning democracy we don't have mass popular movements so therefore in popular opinion we mostly disregard it as it is but they're overcoming then it's a real model to look for the u.s. is by no means giving up you may have read in the paper a couple of days ago that a training of military officers is being shifted from the State Department to the Pentagon that's been going on for some time now in fact but they finally reported it that's quite significant training within the State Department is at least theoretically under congressional supervision meaning that there are human rights conditionalities and so on once it moves into the pentagon it's just a black hole and do anything they want nobody ever looks training and torture or whatever you do it's a weak control but it's something furthermore training of Latin American officers is shot way up the u.s. is trying very hard to recreate a Latin American officer corps that will be able to follow its orders I think it's now higher than it's ever been through the cold warriors and the purposes are explicit the training is designed to combat what's called radical populism well in the Latin American context radical populism means human rights activists union leaders priests organizing peasants anybody who gets in the way and that's the explicit goal of the training of officers and training of officers just doesn't mean just teaching them it means providing them with technology and weapons and connections and so on so the u.s. is certainly trying to recreate the weapon of violence and also the economic weapons but it's not as easy it was for one thing there's much more protest here which is a good thing for other things there's the whole world has become more diverse so the the exporters in Latin America can now turn to China for that markets and China's investing there were also South South relations development so Brazil South Africa and India now have relations all of this these moves are very positive I think and could lead to of the basis for some kind of authentic independence and also for overcoming the enormous internal problems so that's a Israel very hopeful signs I think you

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Published: Wed Apr 07 2010

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