Chomsky: "You have to turn people into pathological monsters who think that way"

Everywhere from high school and college campuses to bus stops and dinner tables, we hear a lot about what a "quagmire" and "costly mess" Iraq has become for the United States, now being blamed as a Republican war, for how the Bush Administration handled the occupation—that 'it should've been done this or that way'—and 'now that we're there we can't leave, it's our 'responsibility' to fix the problem we made because it'll only get worse if we leave—those people will kill each other', and so on.  What do you say to these arguments that seem to interweave with each other?  And what would you suggest in terms of what some might call an 'honorable solution'?  International measures, immediate withdrawal—both?

 

The position of the liberal doves during the Vietnam War was articulated lucidly by historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur Schlesinger, when the war was becoming too costly for the US and they began their shift from hawk to dove.  He wrote that "we all pray" that the hawks will be right in believing that the surge of the day will work, and if they are, we "may be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government" in gaining victory in a land that they have left in "wreck and ruin." But it probably won't work, so strategy should be rethought.  The principles, and the reasoning, carry over with little change to the Iraq invasion.

 

There is no "honorable solution" to a war of aggression—the "supreme international crime" that differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows, in the wording of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which condemned Nazi war criminals to death for such crimes as "pre-emptive war." We can only seek the least awful solution.  In doing so, we should bear in mind some fundamental principles, among them, that aggressors have no rights, only responsibilities. 

 

The responsibilities are to pay enormous reparations for the harm they have caused, to hold the criminals responsible accountable, and to pay close attention to the wishes of the victims.  In this case, we know their wishes quite well.  Poll after poll has yielded results similar to those reported by the military in December, after a study of focus groups around the country.  They report that Iraqis from all over the country and all walks of life have "shared beliefs," which they enumerated: The American invasion is to blame for the sectarian violence and other horrors, and the invaders should withdraw, leaving Iraq—or what's left of it—to Iraqis. 

 

It tells us a lot about our own moral and intellectual culture that the voice of Iraqis, though known, is not even considered in the thoughtful and comprehensive articles in the media reviewing the options available to Washington.  And that there is no comment on this rather striking fact, considered quite natural.

 

 

Is there anyone saying the war was fundamentally wrong?

 

In the case of Vietnam, years after Kennedy's invasion, liberal doves began to say that the war began with "blundering efforts to do good" but by 1969 it was clear that it was a mistake that was too costly to us (Anthony Lewis, at the critical extreme, in the New York Times).  In the same year, 70% of the public regarded the war as not "a mistake" but "fundamentally wrong and immoral." That gap between public and elite educated opinion persists until the most recent polls, a few years ago.

 

In the media and journals, it is very hard to find any voice that criticizes the invasion or Iraq on principled grounds, though there are some.  Arthur Schlesinger, for example, took a very different position than he did on Vietnam.  When the bombs started falling on Baghdad he quoted  President Roosevelt's condemnation of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as "a date which will live in infamy."  Now, Schlesinger wrote, it is Americans who live in infamy as their government follows the path of fascist Japan.  But that was a lone voice among elites.

 

Dissidents, of course, describe "the supreme international crime" as fundamentally wrong.  I haven't seen polls about public attitudes on this question.

 

 

What about when it is that people know to undertake more serious or severe resistance efforts after the point at which "the limits of possible protest" are reached?  In a letter to George Steiner in the NYR, in 1967, you gave the example of what this might look like, now 60 years ago during the Spanish Civil War, when people found it quite necessary to join international brigades to fight against the army of their own country; or, applied to Vietnam, the possible action one might undertake in such circumstances of travelling to Hanoi as a hostage against further bombing.  —That's pretty far-reaching, relatively speaking, to what we see in current resistance efforts today against the war.  What's your feeling about the possibilities for such methods today in relation to the Iraq war, border action, or other criminal policy in the Middle East and elsewhere?  Do situations have to get worse before people or individuals might deem this sort of action necessary? 

 

In the case of Vietnam, serious resistance began several years after Kennedy's invasion of South Vietnam.  I was one of a few people trying to organize national tax resistance in early 1965, at a time when South Vietnam, always the main target, was being crushed by intensive bombing and other crimes.  By 1966-67, refusal to serve in the invading army was beginning to become a significant phenomenon, along with support for resistance by organized groups, primarily RESIST, formed in 1967 (and still functioning).  By then the war had passed far beyond the invasion of Iraq in destructiveness and violence.  In fact, at any comparable stage, protest against the Iraq invasion considerably exceeds anything during the Indochina wars. 

 

As for living with the victims to help them or provide them some measure of protection, that is a phenomenon of the 1980s, for the first time in imperial history, to my knowledge, in reaction to Reagan's terrorist wars that devastated Central America, one of his many horrendous crimes.  The solidarity movements that took shape then have now extended worldwide, though only in limited ways to Iraq, because the catastrophe created by Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz and the rest is so extraordinary that it is almost impossible to survive in the wreckage—the main reason why reporting is so skimpy; it is simply too dangerous, unlike earlier wars of imperial aggression.

 

~ From: United States of insecurity ~