Latest from Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
MIT professor, writer, activist
Tuesday February 4, 2003
There's never been a time that I can think of when there's been such massive opposition to a war before it was even started. And the closer you get to the region, the higher the opposition appears to be. In Turkey polls indicated close to 90% opposition, in Europe it's quite substantial.
In the United States the figures you see in polls, however, are quite misleading because since September there's been a drumbeat of propaganda trying to bludgeon people into the belief that not only is Saddam a terrible person but in fact he's going to come after us tomorrow unless we stop him today. And that reaches people.
They have to terrify the population to feel there's some enormous threat to their existence and carry out a miraculous, decisive and rapid victory over this enormous foe and march on to the next one.
Remember the people now running the show in Washington are mostly recycled Reaganites, essentially reliving the script of the 1980s. So one year it was an airbase in Grenada which the Russians were going to use to bomb the US. Nicaragua was "two days marching time from Texas". Nicaragua might conquer us on its way to conquer the hemisphere. A national emergency was called because of the threat posed to national security by Nicaragua.
I don't want to suggest that they have no reasons for wanting to take over Iraq. Of course they do. Controlling Iraq will put the US in a very powerful position to extend its domination of the major energy resources of the world. That's not a small point.
North Korea is a different case. What they are demonstrating to the world with great clarity is that if you want to deter US aggression you better have weapons of mass destruction, or else a credible threat of terror. That's a terrible lesson to teach, but it's exactly what's being taught.
In this particular case you can't predict what will happen once a war starts. In the worst case it might be what the intelligence agencies and the aid agencies are predicting - namely an increase in terror as deterrence or revenge, and for the people of Iraq, who are barely on the edge of survival, it could be the humanitarian catastrophe of which the aid agencies and the UN have been warning.
On the other hand, it's possible it could be what the hawks in Washington hope - a quick victory, no fighting to speak of, impose a new regime, give it a democratic facade, make sure the US has big military bases there, and effectively controls the oil.
The chances that they will allow anything approximating real democracy are pretty slight.
One major problem is that 60% of the population roughly is Shiite. If there's any form of democratic government, they're going to have a say, in fact a majority say, in what the government is. Well they are not pro-Iranian but the chances are that a Shiite majority would join the rest of the region in trying to improve relations with Iran and reduce the levels of tension generally in the region by reintegrating Iran within it.
That's the last thing the US wants. Iran is its next target.
Matthew Tempest
guardian.co.uk |
