May 27, 2002
NOAM CHOMSKY: Unfortunately, I can't see anybody
out there but I assume there are people there. I'm going to be
talking--I'll be talking primarily about West Asia, which overlaps pretty
closely with what we call, here, the Middle East or the Near East. Some of
these remarks are going to be highly critical of the practices of states in
the region, including the currently most powerful states, Israel and
Turkey. Supporters of their criminal practices often charge that these
criticisms are unfair, they overlook the conflicts and the threats that the
states face, the states and the societies face. And I think those charges
are, in part, correct. The criticism has an element of unfairness, but for
a different reason. The conflicts and the threats are certainly real and
serious, but they in no way justify the continuing barbarous practices and
actions that have gone on over many years and are in large measure
responsible for the threats that now exist.
But these vicious practices are only to be
expected. In a situation of conflict and threat, the state authorities will
resort to any means that they can get away with; that includes serious war
crimes, crimes against humanity, and they will do so, as long as their
crimes are tolerated and supported and sometimes encouraged by the
overlord. If the master says that's enough, they stop. Therefore, it
follows that our criticisms should be directed primarily to ourselves.
Indignation about the crimes of others is easy and cheap and not
particularly attractive, sometimes even shameful. Looking in the mirror is
far more important, much more difficult. And in these, and many other
cases, our participation in crimes is quite real, and it proceeds at several
different levels.
In the first place, it's a matter of government
policy, decisive military, economic, diplomatic support for crimes, all with
full awareness, over many decades. At the second level, it goes on at the
level of doctrinal institutions--media, schools, universities, intellectual
journals, often scholarship. That includes evasion or suppression of
crucial facts, plenty of outright falsification, sometimes even
unconstrained enthusiasm for atrocities.
And at the third, and most important, level, it's a
matter of our own choices. None of this is graven in stone. There are many
examples rather similar to this, where things have been changed by public
action. We may remember that this month, March, 2002, happens to be the
40th anniversary of the first public announcement of the U.S. attack against
South Vietnam. In March, 1962, the Kennedy administration announced that
the U.S. Air Force would be flying missions against the South Vietnamese.
Use of chemical warfare was instituted to destroy food crops. Hundreds of
thousands, ultimately millions of people were driven into concentration
camps, urban slums. Napalm was authorized.
All of this proceeded with no protest. That's why
there's no commemoration, today, of the 40th anniversary. Nobody even
remembers. There was no protest, virtually none, here in Berkeley or in
anyplace, for a long time. It took years before substantial public
opposition developed. It did finally develop, as somebody, Barbara,
somebody pointed out, and it made a big differences.
One of the differences it made is that it
contributed, along with the civil rights movement and other activism of the
time, to making this a much more civilized country, in many ways. I'm not
talking about the leadership, I'm not talking about the intellectual
classes, but the general population has changed. No American president
could dream of anything remotely like that today. And the same is true in
many other areas. And it didn't happen by magic or "gifts from angels" or
anything like that. It came from committed, dedicated public activism on
the part of millions and millions of people. And it did make a much better
country. There's plenty wrong, but, as compared with 40 years ago, the
improvement is enormous.
And there are many specific cases just like this
one. Again, I couldn't hear clearly from the back, but somebody mentioned
South Africa, which is a rather similar case. We may remember that, as late
as 1988 the U.S. government condemned Nelson Mandela's African National
Congress as a terrorist organization-- in fact, in their words, one of the
world's "more notorious" terrorist organizations, and supported, accepted
South Africa, in its worst days of apartheid, accepted it as a welcome
ally. That was, after just during the Reagan/Bush years alone, South
Africa, with U.S. and British support, had killed about a million and a half
people in the surrounding countries, forgetting what happened inside, and
caused about $60 billion of damage in the surrounding countries. But it was
a welcome ally and its opponents that were struggling for liberation were
one of the more notorious terrorist organizations in the world.
Within a few years, Washington was compelled to
abandon and reverse that stance. It was compelled by an aroused and
activist public, if you trace the revision to its roots, and that's far from
the only case. In fact, there really are choices, in these and in other
cases. If we don't make the choices, we are participants in the crimes,
knowing participants.
Well, let me turn to West Asia with that in the
background. Policy makers want us to focus on what they call the "axis of
evil", which I think is worth doing, I think we should laugh at it, and I
want to return to that. But they understand that, to pursue their goals,
they're going to have to make some gestures, at least, about what's called,
here, the Israel-Palestine conflict, a phrase which suggests a certain
symmetry, although the actual coverage regards Israel as the victims of
mindless and insane Palestinian terrorism.
Well, since some gestures are necessary to pursue
the other goals, the U.S. government ordered the Israeli government to
withdraw its tanks and armed forces from Palestinian towns and refugee
camps, and they instantly obeyed, as always. Cut a few corners, but they
followed orders quickly. That demonstrates once again, not the first time,
where power lies and where responsibility lies. For the rest of the world
it underscored again what they already knew: that it's not a symmetrical
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's a military occupation now in its 35th
year--harsh, brutal and oppressive. Continues because of the decisive
unilateral support by the United States at all the levels I described. It's
in gross violation of international law and has been from the outset.
And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even
by the United States, which has overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral
responsibility for these crimes. So George Bush No. 1, when he was the U.N.
ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated Washington's condemnation
of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He happened to be
referring specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in
violation of the provisions of international law governing the obligations
of an occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure "to
acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as
its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention."
That Convention is no minor affair. It's one of
the core principles of international law. It was established in 1949, to
formally criminalize the actions, the practices, of the Nazis in occupied
Europe. Well, George Bush's condemnation of Israeli practices in violation
of international law, as the occupying power, that expressed official US
policy at that time. However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was
developing, between official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is
that by then, by late 1971, the United States was already providing the
means to implement the violations that Ambassador Bush deplored. It was
backing what had happened in that year.
To recall to you, those who may not know or have
forgotten, in February, 1971, Egypt offered a full peace treaty to Israel,
exactly in terms of official U.S. policy. It didn't even mention the
Palestinians, wasn't an issue at the time, didn't mention the West Bank. It
just mentioned Egyptian territory. Israel recognized it as a genuine peace
offer, considered accepting it, decided not to--remember, this is the dovish
labor party, this is Golda Meir's government, not Ariel Sharon, although
Sharon in fact was, under their orders, implementing some of his worst
atrocities at that time. These were bipartisan programs.
So, no mention of the Palestinians, full peace
treaty. Israel decided not to accept the full peace treaty that was offered
by its major adversary, Egypt, on the assumption, openly discussed
internally, in Hebrew, that they thought if they held out they could do
better in gaining more territory. The United States had to make a
decision. Should it continue to support the official policy, the one Bush
reiterated at the U.N. a couple of months later, and go along with Egypt,
call for a full peace treaty? Or should it follow Henry Kissinger's
preference of what he called "stalemate," meaning no negotiations, just
delaying tactics, slow integration of the territories within under Israeli
control, of course funded and backed and supported by the United States,
while the U.S. continued to block diplomatic settlement.
Well, Kissinger won the internal conflict, and from
that point on U.S. official policy and U.S. actual policy have diverged and
continue to diverge. It wasn't until Clinton that the official policy was
formally abandoned, including the concern for international law and U.N.
resolutions, which were effectively rescinded by Clinton. But until that
time, the policy officially remained as Bush had described it, though the
practice was as Kissinger had laid it out.
This program of blocking diplomatic settlement, a
diplomatic settlement that has almost universal international support, that
program has a name, it's called the peace process in standard rhetoric. So
you read about the U.S. implementing the peace process and calls for the
U.S. to intervene more directly to advance the peace process. What the
peace process is, not only in this case--this is common--the peace process
refers to anything the United States happens to be doing, maybe blocking
peace, as in this case.
That's one of the levels of participation in
atrocities. Well, during these, by now, over 30 years of extreme
rejectionism and obstruction of diplomacy, United States policy has
continued a dual track, up till Clinton. It's officially kept the position
that Bush had enunciated, in practice kept to Kissinger's preference for
stalemate, slow integration of the territories, delaying tactics,
consolidation within Israel, meaning U.S. and Israel.
What about the Palestinians. Well, the plans for
the Palestinians were enunciated at the same time. This happens to have
been internally, in secret cabinet meetings, but the records have been
released, in Israel. Moshe Dayan advised the cabinet, this is the dovish
cabinet, that, with regard to the Palestinians, we should tell them that
they will live like dogs and whoever will leave will leave, and we'll see
where that goes, while we quietly proceed to establish what he called
"permanent rule" over the territories. Notice, I'm not quoting an
extremist, except an extreme dove. Within the spectrum, Moysha Dyan was one
of the leaders who was most sympathetic to and understanding of the position
of the Palestinians and their needs and what was happening to them.
Well, those policies continue. They go on right to
today. They go on through the Oslo phase of what's called the peace
process. Internally in Israel, in Hebrew again, which is a secret language,
trusting the Western commentators not to report it, at the dovish end the
official negotiator for Barak, Shlomo ben Ami who's sort of on the dovish
side of the spectrum, he, just as he entered the government, in 1998, he
wrote a book in Hebrew in which he discussed the Oslo process. And he
pointed out that the goal of the Oslo process is to establish what he called
a permanent neo-colonial dependency for the Palestinians in the occupied
territories. Which is accurate, that was the goal of the Oslo process. It
was perfectly transparent, in the original documents, the declaration of
principles that was signed with great fanfare in September, 1993. The
Palestinians, unwisely, chose to disregard the evident facts and to believe
otherwise.
The perpetrators of crimes can choose to delude
themselves, if they like, but the victims would be well-advised to pay close
attention, not just in this case. What that meant is, and what ben Ami
repeated in 1998, is that the goal of the Oslo process, the long-term goal,
was to establish something like what South Africa established in 1962, when
Transkei, the first of the Bantustans, was formerly established, I think
that was the year, as a state, black state, run by black people. In fact,
more viable than what's intended for the neo-colonial dependency in
Palestine. They actually even put resources into it, contrary to what the
U.S. and Israel do, not because they're nice guys but because they were
hoping to get international recognition.
If the "master of the world" had recognized it, we
would be celebrating the independence of Transkei today, if they could have
gotten away with it. Fortunately, they couldn't. Well, Ehud Barak, while
he and Clinton were being praised for their magnanimous offers at Camp David
in mid-2000, he was going ahead with the standard project, establishing
illegal settlements. In fact, the last year of his term in office, the
settlement program reached its highest level since 1992, the year before the
Oslo process began. The goal was to ensure that whatever came out would be
a permanent neo-colonial dependency, exactly as they said. It's a secret
only if we choose not to hear what's being said.
At the time of the Camp David agreements, the
Israeli government--when I say Israel, I always mean U.S.-Israel. They
can't do it without U.S. support and encouragement. So the government had
established, according to Amnesty International, 227 Palestinian enclaves in
the West Bank, all separated from Jerusalem and from Gaza, also, which was
also cantonized -- a lot of them, most of them in fact, a couple of square
kilometers, little dungeons. And in fact, the magnanimous offer at Camp
David that we were all supposed to applaud, was an improvement. It
assembled these 227 enclaves into four distinct, separate cantons in the
West Bank, northern,central and southern, separated by salients that broke
the area, virtually bisected it up, in the north and again in the south, all
separated from Jerusalem, small area of Jerusalem, which is traditionally
the center of Palestinian life.
With regard to Gaza it was kind or vague, but
probably more or less the same. If you recall the period of celebration of
Clinton and Camp David--well, you can check this yourself. I don't read the
California newspapers, but I looked pretty hard and I could not find, in the
United States, any maps. I mean, we're all applauding the settlement that
Clinton and Barak proposed, but it was impossible to find a map describing
them, in the United States. It was easy if you looked anywhere else. So
the Israeli press published the maps, the British press published them, but,
as far as I'm aware, no maps were published in the United States, at least
not in the national press.
And I think there's a reason for that. If you
looked at the maps, you immediately saw that you can't possibly be praising
this as a magnanimous and forthcoming offer. In fact, it didn't even
approach what South Africa had done, 40 years earlier. All of this
continues thanks to U.S. support and encouragement at all three of the
levels that I mentioned--at the level of policy, at the level of the press,
doctrinal institutions. In the press, I guess the most extreme example of
sort of fanaticism or whatever the right word is, is Thomas Friedman of the
New York Times. He wrote, at the time, that President Clinton has spoken
and now we know, as he said, what the outcome must be. Of course, we have
the words of the master. You have to go back to the darkest days of
Stalinism to find anything comparable to that. When the Palestinians
refused, that shows how terrible they are.
The third level of support for this is, of course,
ourselves. There were protests, but not enough. Well, let me come forward
right to the present moment. Just last week the two major human rights
groups in the world, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, issued
very eloquent pleas to allow international monitors to be sent to the
territories. Amnesty International, to save Palestinian and Israeli lives,
and, Human Rights Watch, once again, "to end Israel's excessive and
indiscriminate force" against civilians.
Amnesty International's appeal begins by saying
that Palestinian and Israeli children are slaughtered; ambulances carrying
wounded Palestinians are shot at; Palestinian homes are demolished, their
towns and villages sealed off. Remaining silent amounts to condoning the
escalation of killings, violence, and retaliation. Here, the Jewish Voices
against Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, which was mentioned
earlier. They'll have an ad in the New York Times, I think this Sunday,
saying pretty much the same things. And in fact, as you heard, calling for
suspension of military aid to Israel, which is used to maintain the
occupation, until Israel withdraws from the territories and reduction of
economic aid, by the amount that's spent on maintaining the illegal
settlements.
And there are other such voices. These pleas, all
of them, are addressed to the United States, which has refused to allow
international monitors and is blocking them. And everyone knows that that's
the easiest short-term way to lessen and reduce the level of violence. The
most recent case, explicit case, was on December 14th, the Security Council
of the U.N. debated a resolution calling for implementation of the U.S.
Mitchell Plan, reduction of violence and dispatch of international monitors
to monitor, to observe, and facilitate the reduction of violence. It was
vetoed by the United States. A U.S. veto means, of course, it's finished.
It also means silence here, so it's scarcely reported, and out of history,
like the February, 1971 affair that I mentioned earlier.
It went to the General Assembly immediately and
there was the usual outcome, an overwhelming vote in support of the
resolution, essentially unanimous. U.S. and Israel opposed, joined by
Micronesia and another Pacific island, one of the small Pacific islands, I
forget which one, Nauru, I think, so it wasn't universal. And that of
course wasn't reported, it's not the "right" story.
All of this was at a very important moment. It was
in the midst of a long, three-week cease fire. During that cease fire one
Israeli solider was killed, 21 Palestinians were killed, 11 children,
according to journalist Graham Usher. That's technically called a period of
quiet, which lasted for three weeks, broken a couple of weeks later. This
was right in the middle of it. Right before that, on December 5th, there
had been an important international conference, called in Switzerland, on
the 4th Geneva Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible for
monitoring and controlling the implementation of them. The European Union
all attended, even Britain, which is virtually a U.S. attack dog these
days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen countries all together, the
parties to the Geneva Convention.
They had an official declaration, which condemned
the settlements in the occupied territories as illegal, urged Israel to end
its breaches of the Geneva Convention, some "grave breaches," including
willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, unlawful depriving of the
rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and appropriation of
property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and
wantonly. Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that's a serious term,
that means serious war crimes.
The United States is one of the high contracting
parties to the Geneva Convention, therefore it is obligated, by its domestic
law and highest commitments, to prosecute the perpetrators of grave breaches
of the conventions. That includes its own leaders. Until the United States
prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of grave breaches of the Geneva
Convention, that means war crimes.
And it's worth remembering the context. It is not
any old convention. These are the conventions established to criminalize
the practices of the Nazis, right after the Second World War. What was the
U.S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The U.S. boycotted the meeting,
along with Israel and Australia. Australia was a surprise. According to
the Australian press, that was done under very heavy U.S. pressure. They
were the three countries that boycotted, and that has the usual consequence,
it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media. As for
ourselves, that's for each person to decide.
Even the Clinton administration, which broke all
records in supporting Israeli government policies, was unwilling to publicly
oppose the applicability of the Geneva Conventions, particularly in the
light of the circumstances in which they were established. On October 7th,
2000, that's a week after the intifada broke out, the Security Council
adopted a resolution deploring Ariel Sharon's provocation at the mosque, the
Haram al-Sharif, on September 28th, and the violence there the next day,
which was under the command of Ehud Barak and his minister of security,
Shlomo ben Ami, when a massive police presence was sent to the mosque, as
people left the mosque after Friday prayers, the presence of the police
predictably led to stone throwing and shooting into the crowd and elsewhere,
with deaths and many wounded. And that set off the current intifada.
The resolution condemned all that. It also called
upon Israel, the occupying power, to abide scrupulously by its legal
obligations under the 4th Geneva Convention. The vote was 14 to 0, one
abstention. A U.S. abstention means a veto, in effect. A veto, also, from
reporting, because it wasn't reported as far as I noticed, and it's out of
history. But it stands as international law, adopted without dissent, and
in fact it simply reiterates what George Bush said in September, 1971.
Well, there were other events at the same time, in
September of 2000. The intifada began right after the September 28th and
29th provocations. On October 1st what are called Israeli helicopters--when
you hear Israeli helicopters, that means U.S. helicopters flown by Israeli
pilots. Israel doesn't produce helicopters, it doesn't produce F-16s, so
Israeli jets and helicopters means our jets and helicopters. They, on
October 1st, began attacking civilian targets, apartment complexes and
others, killing and wounding dozens of people. That went on October 1st and
October 2nd.
There was a U.S. reaction, at all the levels. At
the level of government, the Clinton administration reacted, on October 3rd,
by finalizing the biggest deal in a decade to send military helicopters to
Israel, Black Hawk helicopters, others, also spare parts for Apache attack
helicopters that had just been delivered. Biggest deal in a decade. The
press collaborated by refusing to publish it. A friend of mine did a
database search and found one reference in the country, in a letter written
to a Raleigh, North Carolina, newspaper. There were efforts to persuade
editors to at least allow publication of the facts that they knew--this is
no secret, it was perfectly public information. They knew it, but they
wouldn't report it. So it's not failure to publish, it's refusal to
publish.
There were efforts to reach the public in other
ways. Limited effects. To this day, it is scarcely known that the U.S.
reaction to what I just described, the dispatch of the biggest shipment in a
decade of helicopters, immediately after those helicopters had been used to
attack civilian targets and kill and wound dozens of people. The reaction
was what I described and the press, silence.
Shortly after, Israel began using U.S. helicopters
for targeted assassinations, began a few weeks later. By now there are
about 50 of them. These are just straight murder. I mean, there's no
evidence presented, and none is needed. Also about 25 cases of the famous
collateral damage--wives, children, bystanders, figures vary a little but
they're in that neighborhood.
A petition was brought to the High Court,
essentially Supreme Court, in Israel, to call on the High Court to ban the
murder of people by U.S. helicopters. The court denied the appeal, saying
that it saw no reason, were its words, to ban this. The U.S. reaction:
send more helicopters, and jets and armaments, a huge flow. All with the
goal, it's got to be the goal because it's conscious, of enhancing terror,
to borrow George Bush's words, referring to the official "bad guys."
What about diplomacy. Well, it continues. Last
week there was a U.N. resolution, the first one the United States has
proposed in 25 years. A lot of fanfare about that. Why did the United
States propose a Security Council resolution on Israel and Palestine? Well
the answer was given by the more serious part of the press, the Wall Street
Journal, which, actually, it often does do the best reporting. The point
was, they said, to block a resolution that called for an end to
violence--that was coming along--but also referred to Israel as an occupying
power, and was therefore, in their words, an anti-Israeli resolution. And
clearly the U.S. must block these anti-Semitic moves, so the U.S. blocked
the anti-Israeli resolution that referred to Israel as an occupying power,
by advancing its own resolution.
Out of history is the fact that Israel, of course,
is the occupying power. It's recognized as such, officially, by the United
States, going back to George Bush No. 1, and even Clinton, who, as I
mentioned, his support for the Israeli government was extreme, only
abstained when the Security Council unanimously reiterated the position that
Israel is the occupying power, bound by the requirements of the Geneva
Conventions, but, for the Wall Street Journal, that's an anti-Israel
position. It's not surprising that's the standard rhetoric on the issue.
What about the U.S. resolution? Well, it's totally
vacuous. What it says is we have a vision, somewhere in the future, of two
states. Notice that that doesn't even approach South African racists, 40
years ago. They didn't have a vision of black states, they established
them. But we don't go as far as South African racists in the deepest days
of apartheid, and we praise ourselves for this progressive stance.
Well, again, the question is, do we tolerate it? I
mean, you can tolerate it, it continues. There's also much discussion of a
Saudi Arabian plan that was introduced by Thomas Friedman as a real
breakthrough, with a lot of self-congratulation. He's rather stuck on
himself, as those who subject themselves to reading his column are aware,
but he's very proud of having made a real breakthrough in the peace
process. The press reported that maybe the Arabs have at last, I'm quoting,
come to drop their "implausible notion" that Israel is just somehow going to
go away," and they will finally grant Israel the simple gift for which it is
always yearned, namely, recognition of its right to exist-- Wall Street
Journal and other national newspapers.
Again, more serious journals, like the Wall Street
Journal, recalled, I'm quoting, that the idea of the Saudi Arabian
resolution proposal is not new. Saudi Arabia first presented it in 1981,
but the "hard line Arab states" shot the plan down. But now, two decades
later, they seemed to have softened. The plan at that time was blocked by
Syria, Iraq, and Arafat's PLO. Although, possibly, Israel wouldn't have
accepted it anyway. We can't be sure. That's quoting the Boston Globe.
Well, let's return to the real world. The PLO
approved the resolution, didn't shoot it down. It did officially approve
it, with qualifications however. The qualification was that the 1981 Saudi
plan did not mention the PLO. As for Syria, it objected to one thing,
namely, the fact that the Saudi Arabian proposal did not refer to the
conquered Syrian Golan Heights.
The other Arab states, their reaction was
ambivalent. They didn't reject it, but they awaited some sign that the
United States and Israel would show some interest.
What about Israel's reaction? It's not mentioned
in the reporting but it was there. Shimon Peres condemned the Saudi
proposal, this is '81, because it threatened Israel's very existence. The
official Labor Party newspaper, Davar, reported that the Israeli air force
had carried out military flights, with U.S. planes, over the Saudi Arabian
oil fields. This was, they interpreted, as a warning to the United States
not to take the proposal seriously, or else. If it did, Israel would use
its U.S. supplied military capacity to blow up the oil fields. The Labor
Party newspaper described this as so irrational as to cause foreign
intelligence services to be concerned over Israeli bombing of the Saudi oil
fields.
One of the leading Israeli intellectuals,
well-known in the United States, Amos Elon, described the Israeli reaction
as shocking, frightening, if not downright despair producing. Over toward
the center right, correspondent Yoel Marcus condemned what he called the
frightened, almost hysterical response to the Saudi plan, which he regarded
as a grave mistake.
The most interesting reaction was that of Israel's
president, Haim Herzog, also something of dove. He wrote that the real
author, his words, the "real author"of the Saudi plan was the PLO. And he
went onto say that the plan that the PLO had written was even more extreme
than the Security Council resolution of January, 1976, "prepared by" the
PLO, he claimed, proposed by the Arab confrontation states, Syria, Egypt and
Jordan. Supported literally by the entire world but fortunately vetoed by
the United States, as usual vetoing it from history. That resolution called
for full implementation of UN 242, those of you who follow this know that
that's the core resolution guaranteeing the rights of all states in the
region to live in peace and security within recognized borders. It included
all that wording. But it added to it the Palestinian state in the occupied
territories.
So the U.S. vetoed it, as it continued to veto or
block others in subsequent years, up to the 1981 plan that caused such
hysteria, and in fact beyond and right up to the president. Herzog had been
the U.N. Ambassador of Israel, in 1976, when the terrible resolution came
up. He was actually wrong in what he said. The Saudi Arabian plan in '81
was virtually the same as the Security Council resolution that the U.S. had
vetoed. And of course the idea that the PLO had prepared either of them is
absurd, but they did support them.
But it does reflect the hysteria, among Israeli
doves, over the Saudi peace proposals, backed by--the United States made it
very clear, in 1981, that it would not consider the Saudi plan. That's what
in fact happened. The coverage today is a little bit different.
Something else was happening at the time of the
Saudi plan in 1981. Israel was at that time just beginning the preparations
for the invasion of Lebanon, which took place a couple of months later. At
that point, they began the provocations in Lebanon to try to elicit some PLO
action which could be used as a pretext for the invasion. There were
bombings, killings, sinking fishing boats, all sorts of other things. They
were unable to elicit a pretext, so they just invaded anyway, with U.S.
support, killing about 20,000 people. A couple of U.S. vetoes of Security
Council resolutions let it continue.
What was the point? Well, at last I can quote the
New York Times saying something accurate. The goal of the invasion, I'm
quoting the New York Times, this January--the Israeli government's goal in
invading Lebanon was to "install a friendly regime and destroy Mr. Arafat's
Palestinian Liberation Organization. That, the theory went, would help
persuade Palestinians to accept Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip." So that was the point of the invasion of Lebanon.
That report is quite correct, and, as far as I'm
aware, it's the first time in the United States that any public, any media
or often even scholarship or anything else, has recognized what was
completely transparent, open and obvious all throughout the Israeli press
and commentary, 20 years earlier. That was announced right away. If you
read dissident literature, you knew it. But finally, on January 24th, 2002,
the New York Times permitted itself to publish a line, hidden in a column on
something else, which told the truth, that they had all known for 20 years,
namely that the U.S.-Israeli attack on Lebanon--not small, 20,000 killed,
approximately--that that was a textbook illustration of international
terrorism, as defined in the U.S. code and by U.S. army manuals, the use of
extreme violence, in this case, to obtain political ends, by intimidation,
coercion and imposing fear.
Maybe it's not international terrorism, maybe it's
the more serious war crime of aggression, in which case we should have
Nuremberg trials instead of just an international tribunal, but at least
that. That's what was going on in 1981 at the time of the Saudi Arabian
peace plan.
Well, that's diplomacy today. The U.S.
rejectionism, the--
END SIDE A
NC: However--and in fact, the person who was most influential in preventing
people here from knowing anything about this was good old Thomas Friedman,
the man who's now taking credit for the breakthrough of reintroducing the
Saudi plan of 20 years ago that the U.S. and Israel shot down, contrary to
reporting. So, right through the 1980s, when he was the New York Times'
correspondent in Jerusalem, he was denying explicitly what he knew to be a
fact. You could read a headline in the mainstream Israeli press, which he
reads, which would say "PLO Arafat offers negotiations, Peres says no." A
couple of days later you read a column in the New York Times by Thomas
Friedman saying that Shimon Peres and Israeli doves lament the fact that
there's no Arab peace partner. All the Palestinians want to do is kill.
Arafat refuses to negotiate. That's within a few days.
This continued through the 1980s. Friedman's own
position, which he reported in interviews in the Israeli press in April,
1988, at the time when he won the Pulitzer prize. His own advice to Israel
was that they should run the occupied territories the way they run Southern
Lebanon, that is, with a military occupation, a mercenary terrorist army, to
keep people under control, major torture chamber in Khiam, in case anybody
gets out of line--all common knowledge. And that's what he advised for the
occupied territories, but, being a liberal he said, you should allow the
Arabs to have something, I'm quoting, because "if you give Ahmed a seat in
the bus he may lessen his demands."
Now you can imagine, back on the darkest days of
apartheid, that someone might have suggested that "if you give Sambo a seat
in the bus he may lessen his demands," but the chances that that person
would then get a Pulitzer prize and be appointed to chief diplomatic
corespondent on the New York Times are perhaps less than 100%
Anyhow, he's improved. You got to give credit
where credit is due. He's improved a lot since then. It might be helpful if
he told us what he was doing in the 1980s and the press told us what they
were doing, but you can't have everything. The U.S. stand at the time, the
official U.S. stand, in December, 1989, was the Bush-Baker plan. That
called for--here's the wording. It opposed the establishment of "an
additional Palestinian state" between Israel and Jordan. The word
"additional" means that there already is a Palestinian state, namely Jordan,
so there's no moral issues. And they didn't want that there to be an
additional Palestinian state, additional to Jordan.
Furthermore, the affairs of the occupied
territories, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, will be resolved in accord with
the policies of the government of Israel. The third position was that there
would be a free election in the occupied territories held under Israeli
military occupation, with most of the Palestinian intelligentsia in jail,
under administrative detention, under torture. That was, of all of that,
the only part that made it to the public was the forthcoming gesture in
support of a free election--no conditions mentioned. That's the U.S. plan
of December 1989. Shortly after that came the Gulf War. The world backed
off, knew the U.S. is going to run this region by force. That's the end of
international diplomacy. On the issue of the pressures that the U.S. had
resisted, the U.S. was at that point able to institute its own unilateral
rejectionist program, leading to the permanent colonial dependency and the
227 "little dungeons" of December 1999, to be united into four cantons in
the West Bank under Israeli control, while we all applaud Clinton's
magnanimity.
Well, I'm going to skip the disgusting record of
how the United States and Israel have implemented Dayan's prescription for
35 years, and let's turn to other parts of West Asia, the last couple of
minutes. Back to the axis of evil. Why an axis of evil? Well, what's in
the mind of George Bush's speech writers when they give him that phrase to
read? I mean, we don't have internal documents so I'm speculating now. But
a reasonable speculation, I think, is that all of this stuff, it's really
aimed at a domestic audience, primarily.
September 11th did have an effect around the world,
same effect everywhere, perfectly predicable. The effect was that harsh and
repressive elements around the world recognize that they have a window of
opportunity. They can pursue their own agenda relentlessly, while the
population is frightened, obedient, silenced by a one-sided appeal to
patriotism, meaning you shut up and I'll pursue my own plans even more
aggressively and more relentlessly than before. Exactly how that's
implemented, well, it varies country to country. In Russia, China, Turkey,
Israel, other countries, Algeria, it means increasing the repression. We
got our chance, we're going to increase violence and repression.
In the more democratic countries, like the United
States, it means doing whatever you can to impose, to strength state power,
subdue the population, protect the powerful state from scrutiny, and here,
particularly, to escalate an attack against the domestic population and
future generations, which is quite severe and which I don't have to review,
you're familiar with it. That's what's been going on since September 11th,
and it's crucially important to keep people from paying attention to it.
Well, how do you keep people silence and
submissive? Everybody understands this. The best way to control people is
by fear, and the easiest way to do it is to just pull a couple of lines out
of standard children's stories or ancient epics about how an evil monster is
coming to destroy you and the incarnation of --
It happened that while this stuff was going on, I
was in India, and to sort of try to get to sleep at night, I was reading
Indian epics, which are kind of fun. The main epic, the Ramayana, is about
exactly this. I think Bush's speech writers must have plagiarized it. The
incarnation of Vishnu comes down to earth, is the perfect man, he's going to
drive evil from the world. And it becomes the story of how he does it.
That had some literary value, as compared with the plagiarism, but its
picture is about the same. So that's where the evil is, and the hero, and
you huddle under the shadow of the hero, and so on. Namely, don't look at
what the hero's doing to you, which is not pretty.
Why axis? Well, I doubt that Bush knows what the
word refers to, but the population is supposed to recognize the
connotations. You're supposed to think of the Nazis, and Italy, and Japan,
so on. Well, going back to the real world again, the three countries that
are the axis of evil, Iraq and Iran have been at war for the past 20 years.
North Korea has less to do with either of them than France does. North
Korea is tossed in presumably for two reasons. For one thing, it's totally
defenseless, therefore it's isolated, perfect target to attack, easy, cheap,
nobody will object. Of course, bringing it into the axis of evil does
severely increase threats in the region. South Koreans don't like it at
all, or the Japanese or others, but that's a marginal issue.
Furthermore, North Korea's not Muslim, so therefore
it may deflect the belief that U.S. policies are targeting the Muslim world.
What about Iran? Well, Iran's plenty of evil,
undoubtedly. There's an internal conflict in Iran, between the reformist
elements, which have an overwhelming popular support and are trying to
improve the situation, and a reactionary and dangerous clerical element,
serious. And they got a real shot in the arm from this. For Iran to be
called part of the axis of evil is a tremendous boon to the most dangerous
and reactionary sectors of the society and very harmful to the reformists.
The history of Iran, in the last 50 years, explains
the notion evil very clearly. Again, it takes kind of discipline for the
press and intellectual community not to point out what's pretty obvious. In
1953, Iran was evil. What had happened was that a conservative nationalist
government was elected and was making moves to try to take control of Iran's
own resources, which had been run by the British. So that was evil, and it
had to be overthrown by a U.S.-British military coup, which installed the
Shah, a brutal,harsh ruler, who went on, for 26 years, to compile one of the
worst human rights records in the world. He was always ranked right at the
top by Amnesty International and others, serving U.S. interests, major
military power.
So Iran was good. If you look at the coverage in
that period, there's little discussion of Iranian crimes. Actually, some
interesting reviews of this. Then, in 1979 they became evil again, namely,
the overthrew the Shah and turned toward independence, and since then
they've been evil, meaning out of control. Actually, exactly why they
remain evil is an interesting question. Usually U.S. policy in that region
is influenced heavily by the energy corporations. And they've been trying
for some years to join the rest of the world in supporting Iranian reformers
and bring them back into the international system. But the U.S. government
is opposed to that. It insists on isolating and attacking Iran and
supporting the harshest elements, and that leads us to ask why.
My suspicion is that it's once again a factor,
which is indeed a guiding factor in world affairs, it even has a name, in
the international affairs literature. It's called "establishing
credibility." That was the primary public reason given, official reason
given, by Britain and the United States for bombing Serbia. We had to
establish our credibility. What does that mean? Well, if you want to know,
then go to your favorite Mafia don and he'll explain it to you. If some
storekeeper doesn't pay protection money, you don't go get the money, you
make an example of him. You beat him to a pulp. Then people get to
understand that you do not defy the orders of the master. That's called
credibility. And if anyone gets out of line, you have to make an example.
Iran did get out of line, and even if there would
be economic interests and so on in restoring them, there's an overriding
need, understandable, on the part of the "masters", to make sure that no one
else gets the wrong idea. I suspect that's the guiding reason, once again,
as it often is, even publicly announced to be.
What about Iraq? Well, Bush and Tony Blair, who
the London Financial Times recently described as the U.S. Ambassador to the
world. The other press describes him in a little less complimentary
terms--America's poodle and things like that. Bush and Blair have recently,
just a couple of days ago, have repeated the standard line, of Clinton and
others, that we've got to get rid of Saddam Hussein. He's such a criminal
that he has even used chemical weapons against his own people. You heard
that in Bush's presidential news conference a couple of days ago. And
that's perfectly true, he did use chemical weapons against his own people,
an ultimate crime. All that's missing is that he did it with the full
approval of Daddy Bush, who continued to support him right through that
period and beyond, as did Britain. They thought it was just fine for him to
use gas against his own people, to develop weapons of mass destruction,
which he was doing with the support of the United States and Britain, which
continued, irrespective of his atrocities, because he was useful at that
time.
Until those words are mentioned, we know that you
can't even use the term hypocrisy, it's unfair to the term hypocrisy to talk
about the coverage of this with the omission of the fact that the crimes are
very real and we supported them, and continue to support them afterwards.
Bush's support was particularly fulsome. In early 1990, well after that, he
actually sent a high level senatorial delegation to Iraq, just a couple of
months before the invasion of Kuwait. It was headed by Bob Dole, soon to be
presidential candidate. The purpose of the delegation was to convey to
Bush's friend Saddam his greetings and good wishes, and to assure him that
he shouldn't pay attention to the occasional criticisms he hears in the
United States. It's just that some of the American reporters are kind of out
of control and we've got this free press thing and don't have a way to shut
him up. But in fact, we think you're a fine guy.
Until some of that is brought in, we know that all
the talk about those reasons are just--don't even rise to the level of
nonsense. So we put that aside. I mean, it's true that he's a monster. He
was much more of a monster then. It's probably true that he's developing
weapons of mass destruction. Then, he was certainly doing it with our
support, and he was far more dangerous, way more powerful and much more
dangerous. He's a threat to anybody within his reach, but the reach is
smaller now. He's evil, all right, but his crimes can't possibly be the
reason for the planned attack.
So what is the reason? Well, I don't think it's
very obscure. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, after
Saudi Arabia. It's been clear all along that the United States, one way or
another, will find a way to regain control over those enormous resources,
and it will certainly not permit privileged access to them on the part of
its adversaries. France and Russia have the inside track now, and that's
not tolerable. Maybe close behind them is Dick Cheney, according to what I
understand, who seems to be getting Iraqi oil into the country, but I don't
know about that.
Anyway, France and Russia can't have privileged
access. The U.S. has to take control over them. And, sooner or later, will
do so, try to do so. They may regard this as a window of opportunity.
However, it's not going to be easy. There's a lot of talk about the
technical difficulty, but there's a much more fundamental one. Any regime
change in Iraq has to be carried out in a way which ensures that it is not
even marginally democratic, and there's a good reason for that. The
majority of the population of Iraq is Shi'ite, and if they have any voice in
a new regime, they might draw Iraq closer to Iran, which is the last thing
the United States wants. The Kurds are going to press for some kind of
autonomy, so that can't be allowed. It will drive Turkey berserk.
And therefore the new regime, whatever it is, has
to be ruled by Sunni generals, military force. That's why the C.I.A. and
State Department are now convening meetings of generals who are defectors
from the Iraqi army in the 1990s. Unfortunately, their favorite according
to the press, General Khazraji, can't come, he's being detained in Denmark
where he's under investigation for participation in the Halabja massacre,
the chemical attack on the Kurds, so he can't come, even though he's the guy
we really want.
But that's the kind of regime that they'll kind of
somehow impose. Again, none of this is secret, and we can thank Thomas
Friedman once again for having explained it all. You may recall, in March
1991, right at the end of the Gulf War when the U.S., of course, had total
control over the whole area, there was a rebellion, in the south, a major
rebellion, a Shi'ite rebellion, which could well have overthrown the
monster, probably would have, except for the fact that the U.S. authorized
Saddam to use his air force helicopters, planes, military helicopters to
devastate the resistance. In fact, there were probably more people killed
then, more civilians, than during the war.
This is all while General Stormin' Norman
Schwartzkopf was sitting there, watching it. He later said that the Iraqis
had fooled him, when they asked him for authorization to use helicopters, he
didn't really understand that they were going to use them. As he put it, he
was "suckered by the Iraqis", these deceptive creatures, and therefore he
didn't realize, and they sort of destroyed the resistance while he was
looking the other way.
At that point, it was so obvious, you just couldn't
refuse to report it. And it was reported. Thomas Friedman who was chief
diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, then. Chief diplomatic
correspondent means State Department spokesperson at the New York Times.
You have lunch with somebody in the State Department, he tells you what to
write, that sort of thing. He had a column, a good column, in which he
explained the US position. He said, we just had to allow Saddam to smash
the opposition, and then he explained, and it still holds, that "the best of
all worlds" for the United States would be "an iron-fisted military junta"
that would rule Iraq the same way Saddam did, and with the support of Saudi
Arabia and Turkey and of course the United States. That's the best of all
worlds, and we'll try to achieve it somehow. It's best if the name of the
head is not Saddam Hussein, that's a little embarrassing, but some clone
will do. That's what we have to aim at. And that's not easy to achieve.
So, quite apart from all the technical problems,
that has to go on. Well, the phrase axis of evil is pretty much in the eye
of the beholder. There are others who see an axis of evil but a different
one. I'll finish with that. The semi-official Egyptian newspaper, al-Ahram,
had a long column a couple of days ago, called The Axis of Evil, in which
they referred to the evil axis of the United States, Turkey and Israel.
That's a realistic axis. [applause]. For one thing, there's a close
alliance, and the alliance is not secret, it's overt, it's strong. These
are the three. The U.S., obviously world rule, Israel and Turkey the two
major military powers in the region, both of them more or less U.S. offshore
military bases. They have been aligned, for a long time, as part of a
system aimed at the Arab world, at the oil-producing regions. It's what
Nixon's administration called "local cops on the beat", with headquarters in
Washington, to make sure that people don't get out of control in the
oil-producing regions.
At that time, the Shah, Iran at that time,
remember, was still good, it wasn't evil yet, so it was part of the system,
too. There was an alliance between Israel, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, U.S.
in the background, Britain helping out, as part of the way of controlling
the region. And that axis of evil, the membership has shifted slightly with
Iran having become evil again, like in 1953, but it's still there. And
that's the axis that they see. And it's active.
Just the last couple of days, again today, the
United States is trying to convince, and apparently has convinced, Turkey to
become the military force which will fight the war on terror in
Afghanistan. Well, maybe that passes here, but everyone in the region,
including Turkey--I just returned from there--including the regions most
devastated by Turkish atrocities in the last decade. Everyone knows that
Turkey's a leading terrorist state, maybe one of the worst in the world.
And again, when I say Turkey, I mean the U.S. and Turkey. In the 1990s, in
the area that I just visited, southeastern Turkey, the Kurdish areas, this
is the site of some of the worst atrocities and "ethnic cleansing" of the
1990s. It was bad enough in the '80s, got much worse under Clinton. The
U.S. supplied 80% of the arms. They peaked in 1997--1997 alone, more arms
were sent to Turkey than the whole cold war period put together, up to 1984,
when the counter-insurgency campaign began. A couple of million refugees,
country devastated, tens of thousands of people killed. Far worse than
anything attributed to Milosevic, in Kosovo before the NATO bombing.
Right through the late nineties Turkey became the
leading recipient of U.S. arms in the world, after Israel and Egypt. And
the atrocities included every imaginable form of barbarity and torture and
terror you can think of. But none of it happened. None of it happened for
the usual reason: we did it. Therefore, silence, out of history, and in
this case, applause. So Turkey is lauded by the state department and the
New York Times, front page stories by their terrorism expert, Judith Miller,
and others, as providing a model for how to deal with terrorism.
Here's one of the major, the perpetrator of some of
the major terrorist atrocities of the 1990s, and, remember, international
terrorism, because you and I are doing it, which is lauded as a model for
how to put down terror. Well, that's pretty normal, and again, same three
levels that I mentioned before are worth thinking about.
Well, West Asia is going to face very difficult
days. The stakes for the world are enormous. This is the location of the
world's major energy resources. There are a lot of factors involved in
this. However, the most important of them happen to be right here, which is
a good thing, at least for those who hope to stave off the worst outcomes
and to offer some hope to the victims. Thanks.
---
NC: If I can add one notice, I can't give the details and it's from memory,
but one of the really important things going on in Israel, as you heard, is
the refusal of reserve officers, a couple of hundred of them now, to serve
in the occupied territory. It's having a big impact, it's very brave and
honorable thing to do. And there are support groups from them, some here.
I'm pretty sure that Tikkun magazine, which is located here, is organizing a
support program for them, and I think you ought to pay careful attention to
it.
What can young people do to begin rebuilding this
world? Well, you know, same thing young people have been doing for years.
I mentioned before that this country's a lot more civilized than it was 40
years ago. A good part of the reason is what young people then were doing,
here in Berkeley and many other places, and it had an effect. I mentioned
one effect, namely, barriers against the use of state violence. It's not
insignificant for much of the world. But that's not the only one. Forty
years ago there was no feminist movement, there was no environmental
movement, there were no third world solidarity movements, there was no
significant mass-based anti-nuclear movement, no anti-apartheid movement,
and on and on.
These are all things that developed through the
active--to a large extent, through the active participation of people who
were then young people, continued when they became older people, more young
people came along in the 1990s. There's new initiatives, like, say, the
anti-sweatshop movement throughout the world is mostly people your age. The
movements opposed to what is ludicrously called globalization, meaning what
the Wall Street Journal, my favorite paper, calls free investment agreement,
called for us free trade agreements. The people who are opposing that are
mostly young people, many of them here. Actually, the major movements
against that are in the south, in Brazil and India and places like that.
But we've joined in, the north has joined in, with plenty of initiative from
young people. There's no limit to the things that can be done. And there's
plenty of models, right in front of you, last few years.
Q: At your talk Tuesday at U.C. Berkeley, you were not very enthusiastic
about the movement to divest from --that says Palestine but I think it means
Israel. Could you explain why?
Well, I just expressed my reservations, the same
ones I expressed here already. I don't say it's the wrong thing to do. I
never trust my own judgment on issues of tactics, which is not very good, my
judgment. But there are some problems that I see. The problem is that the
protest should be directed here. It's easy to criticize others, but when
those others are doing it because we allow them to and arm them to do it and
support them to do it and encourage them to do it, there are some questions
about directing our actions to them. And that would be true if it's Israel
or Turkey or other agents of U.S. atrocities. So that's my reservation.
How you figure out a way around that you have to think through yourselves.
Q: You've said that we as citizens should not speak truth to power but,
instead, to people. Shouldn't we do both, speak more on this subject?
This is the reference to about the only thing on
which I find I disagree with my Quaker friends. On every practical activity
I usually agree with them, but I do disagree with them about their slogan,
speaking truth to power. First of all, power already knows the truth. They
don't have to hear it from us, so it's largely a waste of time.
Furthermore, it's the wrong audience. You have to speak truth to the people
who will dismantle and overthrow and constrain power. Furthermore, I don't
like the phrase "speak truth to." We don't know the truth, at least I
don't.
We should join with the kind of people who are
willing to commit themselves to overthrow power, and listen to them. They
often know a lot more than we do. And join with them to carry out the right
kinds of activities. Should you also speak truth to power? If you feel
like it, but I don't see a lot of point. I'm not interested in telling the
people around Bush what they already know.
Q: My friend is a young Afghan American woman who is still in high-school
and has chosen not to live her life her; instead she's chosen to earn a
degree in teaching and move to Afghanistan, to reach and help Afghan
children. What advice would you offer her? Specifically, what can she do
to be most effective and protect herself as a woman?
I mean, she knows, without knowing her, she knows 100 times as much about
this topic as I do, so I wouldn't offer her any advice. I would offer
ourselves advice. We have a responsibility to Afghanistan. The United
States and Russia, those two countries, destroyed Afghanistan. In the last
20 years the two countries have destroyed Afghanistan. We shouldn't be
giving them aid. We should be paying them reparations. We should be honest
enough to do that. And we certainly shouldn't be bringing in a leading
terrorist state, which we have turned into a terrorist state, in order to
help them overcome terrorism, which is what we're doing now. Just as we
shouldn't have done to them what we did in the last couple of months.
But there's a lot that we could do. It's not the
only country in the world to which we owe reparations, but it's one. And
the way we could assist this young Afghan woman is by doing the kind of
thing that she and others like her would ask us to do. And we should follow
their lead. We don't have anything to tell them.
Q: What's your opinion on the U.S. government knowing about the September
11th attack but letting it occur in order to have justification for an
already planned war in Afghanistan?
It's a common view, and I've read it, over the
internet, many times. I think it's extremely implausible. Unless some
really serious credible evidence is produced, personally I wouldn't take it
very seriously, and I haven't seen any such evidence. It's very unlikely.
It's not the kind of thing that happens. I can't think of anything remotely
like it in history--maybe the Reichstag fire. But it would be an extremely
rare and implausible event, and there'd have been no reason to do it. It
would have been crazy, in my opinion.
If you think it's worth investigating, go ahead and
investigate it, but personally, I don't think it's credible or even, in my
view, at least, even serious enough to investigate.
Q: Recently, there has been talk of assigning the peacekeeping role in
Afghanistan to the Turkish military. Please comment on this.
Well, I already have. Will the Turks closely
adhere to U.S. policy? Sure, they'll do whatever we tell them. You provide
some country with 80% of their arms, you support them in all their
atrocities and repression, yeah, they're going to listen to what you say.
Just like Israel will, just like they did last week. Not entirely. So,
like I said, I just was in Turkey a couple of weeks ago, and one of the big
issues there being discussed in the press and among people interested in
foreign policy and so on, is that they claim--I can't confirm it--but they
claim that the U.S. is putting a lot of pressure on them to serve as a
military force for the planned attack against Iraq. I don't know for sure
that it's true, but it could be, and they certainly believe it.
They've been saying publicly that they don't like
it. The Prime Minister said, No, we don't want to do it. And you can see
the conflict there in Turkey. On the one hand there's kind of an up side.
If they do do it for the United States, they'll get the benefits of serving
as a client. Also, there's a specific thing here. A good bit of the
population--the Iraq-Turkey border is an artificial border, like just about
every border, including our borders. It's established by conquest. In
fact, it was drawn by the British, to ensure that Britain would have the
control over the oil resources of Northern Iraq, not Turkey. And the Turks
are not particularly happy about that. In fact a lot of the population on
the Iraqi side of the border is basically Turkish. And if they could
somehow get their hands on the oil around Kirkuk and Mosul they would not be
at all unhappy about it, they sort of think of it as their own, with some
reason, I should say. So that's kind of like an upside.
The downside is that that's Kurdish, a lot of that
area is Kurdish. They have carried out a vicious repression of their own
Kurdish population every since the 1920s when the state was established.
It's gotten a lot worse in the last 15 years, thanks to us. And they don't
want a bigger Kurdish population on their hands. And they're concerned
that--first of all, if there is an invasion of Iraq it could turn into a
slaughterhouse for the Kurds. I mean, it's hard to predict what will
happen, but they're right in the path of every possible atrocity that might
come along. And there might be a Kurdish uprising and there might be a
blow-up in the Kurdish areas of Turkey, even though they are under tight
military control, you can never predict how that's going to work. And
they're not happy about that.
So, would they follow U.S. policy? Well, you know,
mostly, but there's some limits, for anyone. Even England might not follow
U.S. policies, in some respects.
Q: How have your studies in linguistics contributed to your analysis of
world events.
That's easy. Zero.
Actually it's negative, because it's taken time
away from thinking about world events.
Q. I've considered not paying my taxes, to protest
the use of our tax dollars to fund our government's military actions. What
do you think of this?
Well, as I said before, I never trust my own
tactical judgment. Just to give my own experience, back in 1965, along with
a couple of friends, I did try to organize a national tax resistance
movement. I can't claim it was overwhelmingly successful, it wasn't, but
quite a fair number of us didn't pay taxes for quite a few years, in my case
about ten years. I don't know if it was effective or not, I just can't
judge. I mean, I know what happened to some--the government responds, it
looks kind of random, the way they respond.
In some cases, they can go after you. Like, I know
cases where they went after people, took their houses and cars, and so on.
In my personal case, it was mostly a matter of sending passionate letters to
the IRS which were read by some computer which returned to me a form letter
that said whatever it said. Since there's no way, in my case, not to pay
taxes, they can go right to the source, which they did, the source of the
salary and take the taxes, plus a penalty, so they got the taxes. And they
didn't do anything more. But in some cases they did.
How much effect it had on policy and what it would
be if there was really a massive tax resistance movement, which we were
unable to develop, I just don't know. These are hard, tactical judgments, I
don't have any particular insight. I don't trust my own advice, and there's
no reason why you should.