This is part of an interesting article by
Noam Chomsky that I wanted to share with as many people as possible. (Pictured to the right the war criminals behind the need for power, greed and constant war.)
Chomsky on World OwnershipMichael Shank January 23, 2008
Editor:
John FefferForeign Policy In Focus
(
Sold!) Suggested caption for photo at right, please feel free to suggest your own.
Back to the article...
Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. On January 15,
Michael Shank interviewed him on the latest developments in
U.S. policy toward
Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. In the first part of this two-part interview,
Chomsky also discussed how the
U.S. government’s belief in its ownership of the world shapes its foreign policy.
Michael Shank: Is the leading
Democrats’ policy vis-à-vis
Iraq at all different from the
Bush administration’s policy?
Noam Chomsky: It’s somewhat different. The situation is very similar to
Vietnam. The opposition to the war today in elite sectors, including every viable candidate, is pure cynicism, completely unprincipled: “If we can get away with it, it’s fine. If it costs us too much, it’s bad.” That’s the way the
Vietnam opposition was in the elite sectors.
...
It’s based on two principles. The
first principle is:
“we totally reject American ideals.” The only people who accept
American ideals are
Iraqis. The
United States totally rejects them. What
American ideals? The principles of the
Nuremburg decision. The
Nuremburg tribunal, which is basically
American, expressed high ideals, which we profess. Namely, of all the war crimes, aggression is the supreme international crime, which encompasses within it all of the evil that follows. It’s obvious that the
Iraq invasion is a pure case of aggression and therefore, according to our ideals, it encompasses all the evil that follows, like sectarian warfare,
al-Qaeda Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and everything else. The
chief U.S. Prosecutor Robert Jackson, addressed the tribunal and said, “
we should remember that we’re handing these Nazi war criminals a poisoned chalice. If we ever sip from it we must be subject to the same principles or else the whole thing is a farce.” Well, it seems that almost no one in the
American elite accepts that or can even understand it. But
Iraqis accept it.
The latest study of
Iraqi opinion, carried out by the American military, provides an illustration. There is an interesting article about it by
Karen DeYoung in the
Washington Post. She said the
American military is very excited and cheered to see the results of this latest study, which showed that Iraqis have “shared beliefs.” They’re coming together. They’re getting to political reconciliation. Well, what are the shared beliefs? The shared beliefs are that the
Americans are responsible for all the horrors that took place in
Iraq, as the
Nuremberg principles hold, and they should get out.
That’s the shared belief. So yes, they accept
American principles. But the
American government rejects them totally as does elite opinion. And the same is true in
Europe, incidentally.
That’s point number one.
The second point is that there is a shared assumption here and in
the West that we own the world. Unless you accept that assumption, the entire discussion that is taking place is unintelligible. For example, you see a headline in the newspaper, as I saw recently in the
Christian Science Monitor, something like “
New Study of Foreign Fighters in Iraq.”
Who are the foreign fighters in Iraq? Some guy who came in from
Saudi Arabia. How about the
160,000 American troops? Well, they’re not foreign fighters in
Iraq because we own the world; therefore we can’t be foreign fighters anywhere. Like, if the
United States invades
Canada, we won’t be foreign. And if anybody resists it, they’re enemy combatants, we send them to
Guantanamo.
The same goes for the entire discussion about
Iranian interference in Iraq. If you’re looking at this from some rational standpoint, you have to collapse in ridicule. Could there be Allied interference in
Vichy France? There can’t be. The country was conquered and it’s under military occupation. And of course we understand that. When the
Russians complained about
American interference in
Afghanistan, we’d laugh. But when we talk about
Iranian interference in
Iraq, going back to viable political candidates, every single one of them says that
this is outrageous – meaning, the
Iranians don’t understand that we own the world. So if anybody disrupts any action of ours, no matter what it is, the supreme international crime or anything else, they’re the criminals. And we send them to
Guantanamo and they don’t get rights and so on. And the
Supreme Court argues about it.
In fact, the same is true almost anywhere you look. Since we own the world, everything we do is necessarily right. It can be too costly and then we don’t like it. Or there could be a couple of bad apples who do the wrong thing like
Abu Ghraib. Going back to the
Nuremburg tribunal, they did not try the
SS men who threw people into the extermination chambers. The people who were tried were the people at the top, like
von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, who was accused of having supported a preemptive war.
The Germans invaded
Norway to try to preempt a
British attack against
Germany. By our standards they were totally justified. But
Powell is not being tried. He is not going to be sentenced to hanging. ...
They remember history, all over the
Third World. The history that
Iranians remember is the correct one. The
United States has been torturing
Iran, without a stop, since
1953. Overthrew the parliamentary government, installed the tyrant
Shah Reza Pahlavi, and backed him through horrible torture and everything else. The minute
the Shah was overthrown,
the United States moved at once to try and overthrow the new regime. The
United States turned for support to
Saddam Hussein and his attack against
Iran, in which hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered with chemical weapons and so on. The
United States continued to support
Saddam (including selling Saddam the chemical weapons used on the Kurds).
In 1989, the
Iran-Iraq war was all over.
George Bush I, supposedly the moderate, invited
Iraqi nuclear engineers to the
United States for advanced training in weapons production.
Iranians don’t forget that. After what they’ve just been through, they should be able to see the total cynicism of what’s happening. Immediately after the war, which the
United States basically won for
Iraq by breaking the embargo, shooting down
Iranian commercial airplanes, and so on, the
Iranians were convinced that they couldn’t fight the
United States. So they capitulated. Immediately after that the
United States imposed harsh sanctions, which continue, they got worse. Now the
United States is threatening to attack. This is a violation of the
UN charter, if anybody cares, which bars the threat of force. But outlaw states don’t care about things like that.
And it’s a credible threat. Just a couple of weeks ago there was a confrontation in the Gulf. Here the story is: “look how awful the
Iranians are.” But suppose
Iranian warships were sailing through
Massachusetts Bay or the
Gulf of Mexico. Would we think that’s fine? But since we own the world of course it’s fine when we do it off their shores. And we’re there for the benefit of the world, no matter what we do, so it’s fine. But
Iranians aren’t going to see it that way. They don’t like the threats of destruction. They don’t like the fact that it’s a very credible threat. They’re surrounded on all sides by hostile
American forces. They’ve got the American Navy sending combat units to the Gulf.
Take this recent
Annapolis meeting about
Israel-Palestine. Why did they pick
Annapolis? Is that the only meeting place in the
Washington area? Well,
Iranians presumably notice that
Annapolis is the base from which the
U.S. Navy is being sent to threaten Iran. You think they can’t see that?
American editorial writers and commentators can’t see it, but I’m sure
Iranians can.
...Although
Olmert just announced again yesterday that
Israel is leaving open the option of attacking
Iran, if
Israel decides that it is a threat.
Israel, which is a
U.S. client state, is granted a right similar to that of the
United States. The
United States owns the world and can do anything, and its client states can be regional hegemons.
Israel wants to make sure that it dominates the region and therefore can carry out whatever policies it wants to in the occupied territories, invading
Lebanon or whatever it happens to be. The one threat that they cannot overcome on their own is
Iran. ...
Chomsky: Again, there’s a little bit of history that matters to people outside centers of power. First of all, the
United States supported
Pakistani military governments ever since
Pakistan was created. The worst period was the 1980s, when the
Reagan administration strongly supported the
Zia ul Haq regime, which was a brutal harsh tyranny and also a deeply Islamic tyranny. So that’s when the madrassas were established,
Islamic fundamentalism was introduced, they no longer studied science in schools and things like that, and also when they were developing nuclear weapons.
The
Reagan administration pretended that it didn’t know about the nuclear weapons development so that it could get congressional authorization every year for more funding to the
ISI, the intelligence agencies, the fundamentalist tyranny and so on. It ended up holding a tiger by the tail. It commonly happens. The
Reagan administration also helped create what turned into
al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at the same time. It’s all interrelated. And they left Afghanistan in the hands of brutal, vicious, fundamentalist gangsters, like their favorite
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who got his kicks out of throwing acid in the face of women in
Kabul who weren’t dressed properly.
That’s who
Reagan was supporting.
Michael Shank is a contributor to
Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) and an analyst with
George Mason University’s Institute for
Conflict Analysis and Resolution.
For More Information
The second part of this interview,
Chomsky on the Rise of the South, was published on January 30, 2008.
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Published by
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Institute for Policy Studies (
IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). Copyright © 2008, Institute for Policy Studies.
Recommended citation:Michael Shank, "
Chomsky on World Ownership" (Washington, DC:
Foreign Policy In Focus, Janaury 23, 2008).
Web location:
http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/4920Production Information:Author(s):
Michael Shank, Editor(s):
John FefferProduction:
John Feffer
Lou Dobbs has lost it. For a brief spell when he was actually listing the corporations who HIRE illegally landed immigrants, I found his show had some merit. He at least seemed to be one of few seeing that all manufacturing jobs had gone overseas or to low cost labor who entered illegally over the Mexican border, but that the CAUSE was the corporations doing the hiring.
I was so excited that someone in the media was actually seeing what was happening to American jobs that I found Dobbs quite intriguing - at first.
Perhaps Mr. Dobbs could take valium from a Big Pharma sponsor and try to find reality sometime soon.
