ISR Issue 48, July–August 2006

David Barsamian interviews Noam Chomsky

Empire and Resistance

Linguist, philosopher, and critic NOAM CHOMSKY is the author of numerous books, including most recently, Imperial Ambitions, with David Barsamian, and Failed States. Journalist David Barsamian is the founder of Alternative Radio (www.alternativeradio.org), which this year celebrates its twentieth anniversary. His interview books include The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, with Arundhati Roy, Confronting Empire, with Eqbal Ahmad, and the forthcoming Original Zinn, with Howard Zinn. This is the second part of a two-part interview that took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 10, 2006. The first part ran in ISR 47.

A REPORT in late January in the Los Angeles Times entitled "57 percent Back a Hit on Iran If Defiance Persists," shows that support for military action against Iran has increased over the last year, even though public sentiment is running against the war in Iraq. Is that a paradox?

NO, IT'S not a paradox. In fact, there are figures and polls that look like paradoxes. So, for example, take Iraq. I've forgotten the exact numbers, but a fairly large percentage, maybe two-thirds of the population, thinks it would have been wrong to invade Iraq if it had no weapons of mass destruction; and, even if it had an intention to develop them, it would have been wrong to invade. On the other hand, about half thought it was right to invade Iraq even though the fact that they had no weapons of mass destruction had been officially conceded long before and the public knows it. That looks like a direct contradiction. But the director of the institute that runs the polls, the Program on International Policy Attitudes, Steven Kull, pointed out that it's not really a contradiction. People still believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, even though it's been officially conceded that they don't.

What does that mean? He didn't go into it, but what it presumably means is that the government-media propaganda campaign was extremely effective in instilling fear. People think they're defending themselves. Even if it's already been conceded that the threat was not there, and maybe was concocted, the fear still remains. And it's the same with Iran. If you read enough of those articles you cited, you will think we're in mortal danger if Iran gets a nuclear weapon. What danger are we in, even if Iran does get a nuclear weapon? They're not going to use it except as a deterrent. If there were even an indication that they were planning to use it, the country would be vaporized. So it's there for a deterrent. But people can be frightened by massive propaganda. It's not a surprise.

Take a classic example, Germany. It was the most civilized country in the world, the leader in the sciences, the arts-the Weimar Republic. Within two or three years it had been turned into a country of raving maniacs by extensive propaganda, which, incidentally, was explicitly borrowed from Anglo-American commercial propaganda. And it worked. It frightened Germans. They thought they were defending themselves against the Jews, against the Bolsheviks. And you know what happened next. It can be done. And it was done to an extent in the U.S. as well, by very effective propaganda.

You're seeing it again today. So, for example, just do a media search and find out how often it has even been mentioned that when Iran began enriching uranium again, it was after the Europeans had rejected their side of the bargain, namely, to provide firm guarantees on security issues. Which is no trivial matter. That means guarantees that Iran will not be attacked. Of course, when one side backs down, you expect the other side to back down. Ask if that has been mentioned once in the media in the U.S. anywhere. It's not that the press doesn't know it. Of course they know it. At least, if they read the international business press, they know it. For example, in mid-January there was a very good article about it by Selig Harrison in the Financial Times, the leading business paper of the world. You think they didn't read it at the New York Times news desk or editorial board? Sure they read it. But that's not the kind of thing you report. I don't have the facilities to do a search, but I'd be willing to bet that that's not even been mentioned in the United States.

OR THAT Iran is virtually surrounded by U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf.

IF THAT were mentioned, which it may be, it's because we're defending ourselves, just like Hitler was defending himself against the Jews.

HAS ANYONE ever done research on the real cost of oil to the U.S. when you factor in Pentagon spending, the ground troops, the naval and air bases in the Middle East, the stockpiles of WMDs and conventional weapons?

I KNOW of only one attempt to do it. It was by Alfred Cavallo, an energy consultant. He did a study-I don't want to quote the figures from memory, but it was something like-if you count in the military, it accounts for 30 percent of the price of oil. But it's not the whole story. Military spending and bases may be costly to the American taxpayer, but policy is not designed for the benefit of the population, it's designed for the benefit of power sectors. And for them it's useful to dominate the world, by force if necessary. And also don't forget that Pentagon spending, though it's a cost to the taxpayer, is profit for the corporations. It depends what you think the country is. If you think the country is its population, yes, it's a big cost. If you think the country is the people who own the country, no, it's a gain.

I should say, the same is true of other things, like a lot of concern about the enormous U.S. trade deficit. How are we going to deal with it? Economists tear their hair out. It's a catastrophe. If you assume that the U.S. consists of its people, yes, there is a trade deficit. On the other hand, if you assume that the U.S. consists of the people who own the country, which is more reasonable, the trade deficit goes way down. Then, for example, if Dell is exporting computers from China to the U.S., it would be considered U.S. exports, not U.S. imports. And it is, from the point of view of the Dell management. If you count imports and exports that way, it's pretty rational. Then the trade deficit shoots way down. You can read about that in the Wall Street Journal. It's not a big secret. The business world understands it. They don't say it, of course, but they act and the New York Times acts and the government acts as if the country is the people who own it. And that's not surprising. They're part of the people who own it, so why shouldn't they look at it that way? And simply ask yourself, how many pages are there in the press devoted to business affairs and how many are devoted to labor? Most of the people in the country are labor, not owners of stock. The ownership of stock is very highly concentrated: the top 1 percent owns maybe half of it and most people own essentially nothing. But the stock market and business affairs are a huge issue. Labor affairs, you don't even have a reporter covering it. That expresses the same comprehension of what the country is.

TARIQ ALI suggests that unchallenged U.S. military power could lead to more aggression and war in order to mask its economic weakness.

IT'S POSSIBLE. A dangerous predator, say, some lion in the wild, can be dangerous, but a wounded beast is much more dangerous. Then it may act in ways that are unpredictable. Everyone knows that. The same is true in international affairs. The Bush administration has turned the U.S. into a monstrous attack instrument, but a wounded one. And that's a very threatening state of affairs. In fact, the Bush administration is quite consciously increasing the threat of nuclear terror against the United States. It's increasing the threat of general terrorism in many, many ways. And it's conscious. Not because they want it, but because it just doesn't matter that much, it's a low priority.

Take the invasion of Iraq. It's perfectly well understood, and they learned from their own intelligence agencies and others, that the attack was likely to increase proliferation of weapons of mass destruction for deterrence and to increase terror. And so it did. In fact, it did so in unanticipated ways. It was expected that it would probably increase terror, as in fact it did, but what about weapons of mass destruction? You read that it was discovered by the official U.S. investigations, the Duelfer and Kay reports, that Iraq didn't have the means to develop weapons of mass destruction. That's not exactly correct. It did. They were there: the ones that were provided to Saddam Hussein by Britain, the U.S., and others, as long as he was obeying orders. They were being dismantled but they were still there, under guard by UN inspectors.

The UN inspectors were kicked out. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the rest didn't think it was important to tell their troops to guard the sites, so they were systematically looted. The inspectors continued their work by satellite, and they reported that over a hundred sites had been systematically looted, meaning not just somebody goes in and steals something, but carefully looted. And they described the equipment that was in them. It was high-precision machine tools and other equipment that could be used to develop missiles and nuclear weapons, lethal biotoxins that could be used for biological weapons, and so on. All that went somewhere. That's expanding the threat of weapons of mass destruction. We all hate to guess where it went, but you can make a guess. That's well beyond the threat to the U.S. that was anticipated from the invasion of Iraq.

I met a Jordanian journalist who informed me that he was at the Jordanian-Iraqi border through this period. He said the border guards were reporting that one out of every eight trucks that was coming from Iraq into Jordan under the U.S. occupation was testing positive for radioactive materials. Rumsfeld had a nice phrase for it: "Stuff happens." Stuff happens. It's not that they're trying to increase the threat to the U.S. It's just that it doesn't matter.

THAT CAN bewilder some people, because these are intelligent, smart people, educated at the best universities. Why would they pursue a policy that seems to threaten their interests?

IT'S NOT clear that it does. It might benefit their interests. They have two fundamental interests. You have to be willfully blind not to see it. It's very simple administration policy. Policy one is stuff the pockets of your rich friends with as many dollars as possible. That's policy one. Policy two is get into a position where you can shake your fist at the world and they will do what you want them to do-intimidate the world by force. The invasion of Iraq achieved those aims. Nobody at Halliburton is complaining that they're going broke. In fact, the same companies that provided Iraq with the weapons are now being paid to what they call "reconstruct" Iraq, which means to rob the U.S. taxpayer blind. The amount of corruption and robbery under the occupation has just been colossal. So they're making out fine.

I think everyone assumed that the invasion would be a walkover. Iraq was completely defenseless. They knew it. They had already been bombing it for a year. We know that in detail.

"SPIKES OF activity."

WHICH THEY kept secret, because Blair and Bush and the guys around them hate democracy so much that you must not allow the population to know what you're doing. But they were doing it. And we now know about it, some of it at least. So Iraq was defenseless. They should have been able to walk in. It should have been one of the easiest military occupations in history. They managed to turn it into a catastrophe. But it looked as though they would easily be able to control Iraq, which means gaining control of the second largest hydrocarbon reserves in the world and significantly increasing their domination of Middle East oil production. That would, as Zbigniew Brzezinski put it, provide the U.S. with "critical leverage" over its major rivals, Europe and the Asian industrial systems.

Those are policies that go back to right after the Second World War. As George Kennan said, controlling Middle East oil gives the U.S. "veto power" over others. If you have your hand on the spigot, you can determine what they will do. We just saw an illustration of this when Russia turned off the spigot to the Ukraine and Europe was facing an energy crisis. Nobody expects the U.S. to do that, but just the poised fist is a very good instrument of control. So it's a rational policy.

If it happens to be threatening to the American population, it's not a priority. That's not who they're working for. When they cut taxes for the rich, is that for the benefit of the population? Read this morning's headlines. If they concealed the fact that the levees had broken in New Orleans for two days, is that in order to help the population? It's just not a priority.

THE NEW Bush budget includes big increases in spending on the military and domestic security and cuts in social programs.

IT JUST follows from the two simple principles: enrich your rich friends as much as possible, increase your power over the world. And somebody else will take care of the rest. If you have to cut Medicaid for the poor, well, who cares about them? There are almost forty million people going hungry, [who] don't have money to buy food. Does that matter? They're not influential, so who cares what happens to them?

THE OWNERS of the economy and the managers of the state have children, grandchildren. Certainly in the areas you're describing of increasing military threats, they're putting their own lives and the lives of their families in peril. Again, it doesn't seem logical.

HERE YOU have to distinguish between people in their human existence and their institutional role. A corporate executive may be the nicest guy in the world-takes care of his children, plays with them, cares about them. But in an institutional role, he may act in such a way as to endanger their lives. After all, they have legal obligations. Their legal obligation is to maximize profit and market share. They're not allowed to do anything else, except in special circumstances (say, improving the company's image). It would, in fact, be a violation of corporate law. That's their legal obligation, part of the institutional role. And that goes across the board.

Just go back to this case I mentioned to you right here at MIT in the late 1970s about providing Iran with the means to develop nuclear energy. [See part one of this interview in ISR 47]. The students were overwhelmingly opposed. There was a referendum. My recollection is that it was about 80 percent opposed. The faculty approved it by an overwhelming margin. The faculty are just the students of a couple of years ago. So what happened in between? Did they get smarter or something? No. They shifted their institutional role. When you're a student, you're relatively free. That's the freest time of your life. You're out of parental control, more or less, you don't have to worry about providing for a family. You're free to think and act. When you're a faculty member, you're part of the institution. You support institutional priorities. And the same people who were students a couple years before took exactly the opposite position from the students after they had shifted their institutional role. That's very common. It doesn't mean that their personalities have changed. It has nothing to do with that.

That's why you find euphoria in business circles over the election of a president whose policies grossly oppose their own values. CEOs have what are called liberal values: they don't have any objection to gay rights, they want abortion rights, and so on and so forth. On the so-called cultural issues, they're kind of like college faculty. On the other hand, if you read the business press the day after the election, there was euphoria in boardrooms. Why? Because this government is going to give a free run to business. And if it turns out that that destroys the lives of our grandchildren, well, it's not our institutional role to worry about that. As a person I may, but not when my task is to maximize power and profit.

WITH THE deaths of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King and the birthday of Martin Luther King in January, there were lots of retrospectives on the civil rights movement. Bob Herbert, in a column in the New York Times, says, "We've honored Dr. King, but we've never listened to him." King himself in his April 4, 1967, Riverside Church speech, said, "Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war."

YOU SEE that anywhere you look. It's obviously true in the U.S. Was the U.S. at war at that time, in 1967? He was assuming it was. And in a sense it was. It was a war in the same sense that Iraq was at war when it invaded Kuwait. The U.S. was at war when it invaded South Vietnam, which is much worse. But it's an odd sense of being at war. The U.S. was attacking another country. In fact, it was attacking all of Indochina. The U.S. was not being attacked by anybody. So what's the war? It's just plain, outright aggression. However, the American people were frightened.

Take, say, Lyndon Johnson, who was a man of the people pretty much. He expressed concerns that undoubtedly were pretty widely held. You remember the way he described it, undoubtedly straight from his heart. He said something like, "there are 150 million of us and three billion of them. If might makes right, they'll sweep over us and take what we have." So we have to stop them in Vietnam. I'm sure he meant it, just like he meant years earlier his comment that "without superior air power," we'll be "prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife." That's expressing attitudes that are deeply held and go way back in American history.

There is a very interesting study of popular culture in the United States by Bruce Franklin. He's a literary theorist at Rutgers. He wrote a very good book about it called War Stars. He traces strains in popular literature going back to the colonial period. And there is a strain in the kind of literature he points out, say, that Harry Truman was reading when he was growing up, a strain in popular magazines and so on-you now see it in television and movies-which runs that the U.S. is under terrific threat by some horrendous enemy and at the last moment it's miraculously saved by a superhero or a superweapon, and somehow we survive. That's the theme.

He also points out that the enemy that's attacking us is typically one that we are destroying. So the enemy that's attacking us is Native Americans or Blacks or Chinese. "You think those are laundries, but that's part of their insidious effort to take over the country." This goes right across the board. Jack London, one of the leading progressive writers, wrote around 1910 about how we should wipe out the Chinese by bacteriological warfare because otherwise they're going to destroy us. That's a strain that goes way back. It's psychologically understandable. When you're crushing everybody in sight, there is reason to be afraid that maybe something will happen to you. So, yes, there is a streak of fear that runs through the culture, and Lyndon Johnson was expressing it. In that sense we were at war, a war of defense. It was presented as a war of defense and so interpreted by much of the population.

IN EARLY February, the thirty-five-nation Board of Governors of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency voted to refer Iran to the UN Security Council over its nuclear program. There is a possibility of sanctions being imposed on Iran.

THE U.S. has had sanctions on Iran ever since they disobeyed orders.

RIGHT, BUT in terms of UN-imposed sanctions à la Iraq.

THEY'RE CALLED UN sanctions on Iraq, but that's just propaganda. They were U.S. sanctions administered through the UN because the UN is afraid to stand up to the United States. But everybody who has paid attention knows there is virtually no support for those sanctions outside of the U.S. and Britain. They're called UN sanctions because then it sounds as if somebody else is doing it. They were U.S. sanctions, which were devastating the society. And if the UN, under the U.S. fist, passes some kind of sanctions against Iran, which right now looks questionable, they will be U.S. sanctions again. Do you know anybody else in the world aside from the U.S. and Britain-possibly France-who are in favor of the sanctions? The Europeans aren't. They want to invest in Iran. They had to pull out-more accurately, they didn't have to, but they did pull out of Iran-many of their corporations pulled out of investments in Iran. And they explained why. You can read it in the Wall Street Journal. They said, "We just don't want to offend the United States. It's too dangerous." International affairs are very much like the Mafia. You don't offend the don. It's dangerous. Especially if the don is wounded. You never know what he's going to do.

BUT IRAN has a weapon to fight back with in terms of putting the choke on its oil supply, and that would have a potentially deleterious effect on the global economy. It's the fourth largest producer of oil in the world.

I'M NOT sitting in meetings of Bush administration planners, but I think they might like that, because that would give them an excuse to bomb Iran. It might even give them an excuse to invade. If you look at the geography, Iranian oil is concentrated in the Gulf area, which happens to be substantially Arab Shiite. I'm no military expert, but I presume it's within the military capacity of the U.S. to occupy that area and to open up the Gulf. And if Iran tried to close it, and they might very well do that, who knows what it would lead to? Maybe it would lead to global war. But that may not be a major part of the calculation. Any more than they care that they are compelling Russia and China to sharply increase their offensive military forces aimed at the U.S., to put their missiles on hair-trigger alert, which strategic analysts just call an accident waiting to happen. Not leftists, incidentally. Former Senator Sam Nunn, a serious and respected conservative, who has been in the lead in efforts to cut back on the threat of nuclear war, warned recently that we may be developing "an Armageddon of our own making." Maybe. But if you're a Bush planner, that doesn't matter much. So, yes, if Iran did try to choke off the Gulf of Hormuz, the civilian planners might take that as an excuse to prove that we not only have to bomb Iran and kill its people and so on but also occupy its oil-producing areas.

We have already done it during the Iran-Iraq war. U.S. support for Iraq was so strong that the U.S. essentially patrolled the Gulf. And just in order to make Iran understand it, a U.S. destroyer shot down an Iranian airliner in Iranian commercial air space, killing 290 people. George Bush I was then president and thought that was quite all right. Iranians might not have liked it.

HOWARD ZINN in his essay "The Problem Is Civil Obedience," says, "Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience," of people behaving and taking orders and not questioning. Talk about that and resistance.

WE DON'T have to undertake armed resistance. He's quite right. In fact, the "media echo chamber" that you referred to in the past is a perfect example of it. That's obedience to power and authority. The suppression of the critical facts about the potential confrontation with Iran is just obedience to authority. And we can run through a long list. It's obedience and subordination to power that's the major problem, not just here but everywhere. It's much more important here because the state is so powerful, so it matters more here than in Luxembourg. But, yes, it's the same problem.

How do you confront it? We have models as to how to confront it. First of all, we have plenty of them in our own history. We have them also in the hemisphere. For example, Bolivia and Haiti had democratic elections of a kind that we can't even conceive of. Take, say, Bolivia. Were the candidates both rich guys who went to Yale and joined Skull and Bones and can run with the same programs because they're supported by pretty much the same corporations? No. They elected someone from their own ranks. That's democracy. It half happened in Haiti. If Aristide had not been expelled from the Caribbean by the U.S., it's very likely that he would have won the election. They act in ways that enable them to participate in the democratic system. Here, we don't. That's real obedience. The kind of, if you like, disobedience that's needed is to recreate a functioning democracy. It's not a very radical idea.

EVO MORALES'S victory in Bolivia in December 2005 marks the first time an indigenous person has been elected to lead a country in Latin America.

IT'S PARTICULARLY striking in Bolivia because there is an indigenous majority. And that's another thing you can be sure that's deeply concerning the Pentagon and civilian planners, that not only is Latin America falling out of control, but for the first time the indigenous populations are entering the political arena, and they're substantial. In Bolivia it happens to be a majority, but they're substantial in Peru and Ecuador, also big energy producers. They're even calling for an Indian nation. And they want control of their own resources. In fact, some of them don't even want those resources developed. They'd rather have their own lives, not have their society and culture destroyed so that people can sit in traffic jams in New York. All of this is a big threat to the United States. And it's democracy. It's democracy functioning in ways that by now we have agreed not to let happen here.

But that's an agreement. We don't have to accept that. There have been plenty of times in the past when popular forces in the U.S. have caused great change. Take Martin Luther King. It wasn't him alone. He would have been the first to tell you. It was a big popular movement, which did make substantial achievements. It's kind of interesting to look at King's legacy. He's greatly honored for having opposed racist sheriffs in Alabama and you heard all about that on Martin Luther King Day and the glorious rhetoric. What happened when he turned his attention to the problem of poverty and war? Then he was condemned. He kind of lost his marbles, doesn't know what he's doing. The last couple years of his life he was mostly condemned. What was he doing when he was assassinated? He was supporting a strike of sanitation workers in Memphis and he was planning a poor people's march on Washington. He wasn't praised for that. Any more than he was praised for his rather tepid, delayed opposition to the Vietnam War. In fact, he was bitterly criticized for it: he's losing his direction. He doesn't know what he's doing anymore. That, as usual, fits the single standard. The editors at the New York Times have nothing against denouncing racist sheriffs in Alabama. They think that's fine. What about letting the sanitation workers have decent wages or letting poor people participate in the political and economic system? That's something quite different. Now you're overstepping the line.

The same simple principles, [it's] not obscure. This isn't quantum physics. There are complexities and details. You have to learn a lot of…get the data right, but the basic principles are so transparent, it takes a major effort not to perceive them.