On a lecture given by Noam Chomsky on the subject of the 'War on Terror'

On Wednesday evening, Noam Chomsky gave a lecture on the subject of the 'War on Terror' (full text available here). The setting was the RDS here in Dublin, a venue normally used for large concerts, but appropriate for holding Chomsky's talk because of the size of the audience and the incredible interest generated by the visit of the American scholar. Over 2000 people gathered to hear Chomsky speak, and the waiting list was reported to be around the 4000 mark. Chomsky also spoke on other occassions during the week, on a range of different subjects.

The talk was organized jointly by Trinity college and the Irish branch of Amensty International, so we had to listen to a shakey and quite drab introduction by somebody from the college (when introducing someone who has lived such a full and interesting life, why is the first thing she tells us the number of times their name appears when googled, as though it were Chomsky's most outstanding achievement?). With that over, Chomksy walked out on stage, and began his lecture, in a style which I found a little surprising, having never heard the man speak in public before.

As Harry Browne noted in his article in the Village magazine on Chomsky's talk from the night before in UCD (on 'Democracy Promotion'), Chomsky's lectures are delivered in a very flat, unsensationalist style. His background is, after all, not that of a politician, or even a political activist, though he has been at the forefront of many political struggles in the past, but of an academic. It was the content of the lecture, and not its delivery, which made certain moments of his speech seem sensational, ironic, even humorous.

Chomsky is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This background in linguistics makes itself felt throughout his writing, and even when his attention is turned toward political matters, the way language is used to hide, alter, define or misrepresent political realities is often given importance. He began his talk on Wednesday by establishing three guidelines from which to proceed.

"(1) Facts matter, even if we do not like them.

(2) Elementary moral principles matter, even if they have consequences that we would prefer not to face.

(3) Relative clarity matters. It is pointless to seek a truly precise definition of “terror,” or of any other concept outside of the hard sciences and mathematics, often even there. But we should seek enough clarity at least to distinguish terror from two notions that lie uneasily at its borders: aggression and legitimate resistance.”

Having stated these guidelines, Chomsky went on to elaborate on each of the three points. To illustrate the first, that facts matter, he explained how the concept of the war on terror began with the Reagan administration 20 years earlier. He gave certain indisputable facts. This first war on terror, "was declared and implemented by pretty much the same people who are conducting the re-declared war on terrorism". The geographical focus of the Reagan administration's war was a little different to Bush II's, but many of the same people are behind it. John Negroponte, who now supervises US counter-terrorism operations, was Ambassador to Honduras in the 1980's, and head of the largest CIA operation in the world at the time, in charge of organizing and supporting much of the contra war against Nicaragua, and therefore somewhat responsible for the widespread murder and torture carried out by the CIA backed contras. Back then, Donald Rumsfeld, now leading the military wing of the re-declared war, was the US special representative in the Middle East.

"There, his main task was to establish close relations with Saddam Hussein so that the US could provide him with large-scale aid, including means to develop WMD, continuing long after the huge atrocities against the Kurds and the end of the war with Iran".

Saddam Hussein is now being tried for some of his brutal crimes against the Iraqi people, and the first of these trials is for crimes committed in 1982. Chomsky noted that it was also in this year that Iraq was removed from the list of states supporting terror, in order to facilitate US funding and military support for their Iraqi ally, while leaving a space on the list to be neatly filled by Cuba, at a time when American activity against Cuba had just peaked.
According to Chomsky,

"The first War on Terror quickly became a murderous and brutal terrorist war, in every corner of the world where it reached, leaving traumatized societies that may never recover."

Yet despite all the debate surrounding the current phase of the war on terror, the subject of how the original war on terror was carried out in the 1980's and its consequences is something of a taboo, and rarely comes up in discussion.

The second guideline, that of elementary moral principles, refers chiefly to the concept of universality, that "decent people apply to themselves the same standards that they apply to others, if not more stringent ones."
According to Chomsky, the war on terror has seen this principle rejected, both explicitly and tacitly. He refered to the Nuremburg trials, and the concept of universality outlined there when prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Crimes were defined as such only if they had not been carried out by the allies (so there were no prosecutions for the carpet bombing of civilian populations for example). Chomsky brings up the subject to draw attention to the 'self-exemption' of the powerful from elementary moral principles and international law when it is in their interest (for example, the US accepted World court juristiction in 1946 only if it were excluded from prosecution under all multi-lateral treaties, including UN charters), a 'moral flaw' that Chomsky feels pervades every aspect of both phases of the war on terror.

The third guideline relates to the difficulty in defining terrorism itself, and the related concepts of aggression and legitimate resistance.
Chomsky gave a couple of sample definitions. The British one is,

“Terrorism is the use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public and is for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause.”

The problem according to Chomsky is that while these definitions serve British and US government interests when used to define their enemies, if the same definitions are applied to their own governments the US would appear to be a "leading terrorist state". He gave the clear example of the Reagan administration's campaign against Nicaragua, and posed the question
of whether this kind of state interfernece would be better classified as 'aggression'.
At Nuremberg and afterwards more or less restated in a Gerneral Assembly resolution, 'aggression' was defined in this way:

"An “aggressor,” Jackson proposed to the Tribunal, is a state that is the first to commit such actions as 'Invasion of its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another State,' or 'Provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another State, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded State, to take in its own territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection.'"

Using this definition, Chomsky provided several examples, including the afore-mentioned sponsoring of contras in Nicaragua, the present US and British led war in Iraq and the bombing by CIA drone of an innocent village inside Pakistan last week where Al-Qaeda members where thought to be hiding. He points out that,

"aggression was defined at Nuremberg as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.

In Nicaragua,

"the terrorist war left the country in ruins, with a death toll equivalent to 2.25 million in US per capita terms, more than the total of all wartime casualties in US history combined. After the shattered country fell back under US control, it declined to further misery. It is now the second poorest country in Latin America after Haiti – and by accident, also second after Haiti in intensity of US intervention in the past century...Guatemala ranks third in both misery and intervention."

Another question Chomsky posed was over the boundary between terror and resistance, and the legitimcay of fighting to protect “the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations."

Chomsky went on to make a couple of interesting points regarding the US veto at the UN.
Firstly, that,

"technically, there are no vetoes at the General Assembly. In the real world, a negative US vote is a veto, in fact a double veto: the resolution is not implemented, and is vetoed from reporting and history."

and secondly that,

"a majority of the American public favors abandonment of the veto, and following the will of the majority even if Washington disapproves, facts virtually unknown in the US, or I suppose elsewhere."

He went on to give further examples of US involvement in what should technically be considered terrorist activites, and ridiculed Bush II's doctrine that, "those who harbour terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves", pointing out Venezuela's difficulties in extraditing Luis Posada Carriles from the US for the crime of blowing up a Cuban airplane in which 73 people died, a notorious terrorist who was later hired by the CIA to work with the contras. Bush's statement was made just two days after Venezuela's extradition request was refused.

With regard to the present war on terror, Chomsky highlighted the general consensus amongst those who work in the intelligence services that the invasion of Iraq has had a negative impact on defeating the threat of terrorism and has helped to strengthen the position of extremists like Osama Bin Laden. Much of the rest of the lecture was devoted to this topic, with specific detailed examples given, mainly taken from US intelligence sources themselves.

"Washington planners had been advised, even by their own intelligence agencies, that the invasion was likely to increase the risk of terror......Last May the CIA reported that “Iraq has become a magnet for Islamic militants similar to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan two decades ago and Bosnia in the 1990s......The CIA concluded that “Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.” Shortly after the London bombing last July, Chatham House released a study concluding that “there is `no doubt’ that the invasion of Iraq has `given a boost to the al-Qaida network’ in propaganda, recruitment and fundraising,` while providing an ideal training area for terrorists”.

Chomsky's point was simple: the best way to combat terrorism would be to stop acting in ways which are likely to enhance the threat, and to look at its origins. Neither in politics nor in the media is there much space permitted for possible responses to the threat of 'terrorism' beyond the simple military reactions and moral posturing of the US and its allies. In drawing attention to the inadequacies and failures of the first phase of the war on terror, and the suffering which continues to this day as a result of the measures taken in its name, Chomsky reminds us that when the most powerful nations are allowed to exempt themselves from moral principles and international law to fight the second phase of an unending war on terror, an exacerbation of the political crisis in which the world now finds itself is inevitable, and it is ultimately an approach which is counter-productive. Chomsky went on a little later in the lecture to say that,

"A serious counter-terror campaign would...begin by considering the grievances , and where appropriate, addressing them, as should be done with or without the threat of terror."

The unilateral approach of the US and its allies is counter-productive if what they truly seek are the spread of ideas such as democracy, justice and sovergnity, concepts which have been continuosly used, abused and ultimately corrupted by their own actions. He ended the lecture by saying that,

"there are ways to deal constructively with the threat of terror, though not those preferred by “bin Laden’s indispensable ally [the US],” or those who try to avoid the real world by striking heroic poses about Islamo-fascism, or who simply claim that no proposals are made when there are quite straightforward proposals that they do not like. The constructive ways have to begin with an honest look in the mirror,
never an easy task, always a necessary one."