The New War Against Terror
By Noam Chomsky
October 18, 2001 - Transcribed from audio recorded at The Technology & Culture Forum at MIT The Talk (audio).
The Are Telling Us What They Think
They are telling us just what they think. The United States wants to silence the one free television channel in the Arab world because it’s broadcasting a whole range of things from Powell over to Osama bin Laden. So the US is now joining the repressive regimes of the Arab world that try to shut it up. But if you listen to it, if you listen to what bin Laden says, it’s worth it. There is plenty of interviews. And there are plenty of interviews by leading Western re-porters, if you don’t want to listen to his own voice, Robert Fisk and others. And what he has been saying is pretty consistent for a long time. He’s not the only one but maybe he is the most eloquent. It’s not only consistent over a long time, it is consistent with their actions. So there is every reason to take it seriously. Their prime enemy is what they call the corrupt and oppressive au-thoritarian brutal regimes of the Arab world and when the say that they get quite a resonance in the region. They also want to defend and they want to replace them by properly Islamist governments. That’s where they lose the people of the region. But up till then, they are with them. From their point of view, even Saudi Arabia, the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world, I suppose, short of the Taliban, which is an offshoot, even that’s not Islamist enough for them. Ok, at that point, they get very little support, but up until that point they get plenty of support. Also they want to defend Muslims elsewhere. They hate the Russians like poison, but as soon as the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan, they stopped carrying out terrorist acts in Russia as they had been doing with CIA backing before that within Russia, not just in Afghanistan. They did move over to Chechnya. But there they are defending Muslims against a Russian invasion. Same with all the other places I mentioned. From their point of view, they are defending the Muslims against the infidels. And they are very clear about it and that is what they have been doing.
Why did they turn against the United States?
Now why did they turn against the United States? Well that had to do with what they call the US invasion of Saudi Arabia. In 1990, the US established permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia which from their point of view is comparable to a Russian invasion of Afghanistan except that Saudi Arabia is way more important. That’s the home of the holiest sites of Islam. And that is when their activities turned against the Unites States. If you recall, in 1993 they tried to blow up the World Trade Center. Got part of the way, but not the whole way and that was only part of it. The plans were to blow up the UN building, the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, the FBI building. I think there were others on the list. Well, they sort of got part way, but not all the way. One per-son who is jailed for that, finally, among the people who were jailed, was a
Egyptian cleric who had been brought into the United States over the objec-tions of the Immigration Service, thanks to the intervention of the CIA which wanted to help out their friend. A couple years later he was blowing up the World Trade Center. And this has been going on all over. I’m not going to run through the list but it’s, if you want to understand it, it’s consistent. It’s a con-sistent picture. It’s described in words. It’s revealed in practice for twenty years. There is no reason not to take it seriously....And of course their support for the Israeli military occupation which is harsh and brutal. It is now in its thirty-fifth year. The US has been providing the overwhelming economic, mili-tary, and diplomatic support for it, and still does. And they know that and they don’t like it. Especially when that is paired with US policy towards Iraq, to-wards the Iraqi civilian society which is getting destroyed. Ok, those are the reasons roughly. And when bin Laden gives those reasons, people recognize it and support it.
Leaderless Resistance
You know, it could be that the people who did it, killed themselves. Nobody knows this better than the CIA. These are decentralized, nonhierarchic net-works. They follow a principle that is called Leaderless Resistance. That’s the principle that has been developed by the Christian Right terrorists in the United States. It’s called Leaderless Resistance. You have small groups that do things. They don’t talk to anybody else. There is a kind of general back-ground of assumptions and then you do it. Actually people in the anti war movement are very familiar with it. We used to call it affinity groups. If you as-sume correctly that whatever group you are in is being penetrated by the FBI, when something serious is happening, you don’t do it in a meeting. You do it with some people you know and trust, an affinity group and then it doesn’t get penetrated. That’s one of the reasons why the FBI has never been able to fig-ure out what’s going on in any of the popular movements. And other intelli-gence agencies are the same. They can’t. That’s leaderless resistance or af-finity groups, and decentralized networks are extremely hard to penetrate. And it’s quite possible that they just don’t know. When Osama bin Laden claims he wasn’t involved, that’s entirely possible. In fact, it’s pretty hard to imagine how a guy in a cave in Afghanistan, who doesn’t even have a radio or a telephone could have planned a highly sophisticated operation like that. Chances are it’s part of the background. You know, like other leaderless resis-tance terrorist groups. Which means it’s going to be extremely difficult to find evidence.
Reactions in Afghanistan
Well, what about the reactions in Afghanistan. The initial proposal, the initial rhetoric was for a massive assault which would kill many people visibly and also an attack on other countries in the region. Well the Bush administration wisely backed off from that. They were being told by every foreign leader, NATO, everyone else, every specialist, I suppose, their own intelligence agencies that that would be the stupidest thing they could possibly do. It would simply be like opening recruiting offices for bin Laden all over the re-gion. That’s exactly what he wants. And it would be extremely harmful to their own interests. So they backed off that one. And they are turning to what I de-scribed earlier which is a kind of silent genocide. It’s a…. well, I already said what I think about it. I don’t think anything more has to be said. You can figure it out if you do the arithmetic.
A sensible proposal which is kind of on the verge of being considered, but it has been sensible all along, and it is being raised, called for by expatriate Af-ghans and allegedly tribal leaders internally, is for a UN initiative, which would keep the Russians and Americans out of it, totally. These are the two coun-tries that have practically wiped the country out in the last twenty years. They should be out of it. They should provide massive reparations. But that’s their only role. A UN initiative to bring together elements within Afghanistan that would try to construct something from the wreckage. It’s conceivable that that could work, with plenty of support and no interference. If the US insists on running it, we might as well quit. We have a historical record on that one.
You will notice that the name of this operation….remember that at first it was going to be a Crusade but they backed off that because PR (public relations) agents told them that that wouldn’t work [audience laughter]. And then it was going to be Infinite Justice, but the PR agents said, wait a minute, you are sounding like you are divinity. So that wouldn’t work. And then it was changed to enduring freedom. We know what that means. But nobody has yet pointed out, fortunately, that there is an ambiguity there. To endure means to suffer. [audience laughter]. And a there are plenty of people around the world who have endured what we call freedom.
http://www.e-text.org/text/Chomsky - America's war on terror
No comments:
Post a Comment