TEXT: December 2001 Contents The world's new look
Terrorism, weapon of the powerful The leaders of the United States do not realise that their desire to win at everything always has consequences, and that their present exploits are likely to have high future costs. Osama bin Laden was the price of the US victory over the USSR in Afghanistan. What will be the next bill due? by NOAM CHOMSKY * Two things have to be assumed: first, that the events of 11 September caused probably the most devastating instant death toll of any crime in history outside war. Second, that our goal is to reduce the likelihood of such crimes, whether they are directed against us, or someone else. If you do not accept those assumptions, then I am not addressing you. If you do, questions arise. Let us start with Afghanistan, where there are seven or eight million people on the verge of starvation, surviving on international aid, since way before 11 September. On 16 September, the United States demanded that Pakistan stop the truck convoys that provided much of the food and supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population. As far as I can determine, there was no reaction to this in the US or Europe. Removing international aid workers further crippled assistance programmes. After the first week of US bombing, when the aid delivery rate was already down to half of what was needed, the United Nations warned that the harsh winter would make deliveries to many areas impossible. The major aid agencies, Oxfam and Christian Aid, and the Special Rapporteur of the UN in charge of food, pleaded with the US to stop the bombing; this was not even mentioned in the New York Times. There was a line in the Boston Globe, hidden in a story about Kashmir. By October, western civilisation was resigned to the idea of the death of hundreds of thousands of Afghans. At the same time, the "leader of western civilisation" [President George Bush] dismissed with contempt offers to negotiate for the delivery of Osama bin Laden and a request for evidence to substantiate the US demand for total capitulation. But let us return to 11 September. There have been terrorist crimes with more extreme, if more prolonged, effects. But the events of that day were historic, because there was a radical and new change in the direction in which the guns were pointed. Pearl Harbor is the usual analogy, but it is not a good one, as in 1941 the Japanese bombed military bases in two US colonies (colonies disgracefully taken from their inhabitants). On 11 September US national territory was attacked on a large scale for the first time. For nearly 200 years we, the US, expelled or mostly exterminated indigenous populations, many millions of people, conquered half of Mexico, depradated the Caribbean and Central America, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing 100,000 Filipinos). Since the second world war, the US has extended its reach around the world. But the fighting was always somewhere else and it was always others who were being slaughtered. The difference is immediately apparent if you look at the IRA and terrorism. There are very different reactions to it on either side of the Irish Sea, in Ireland and Britain. The world looks very different, depending on whether you are holding the lash or whether you have been whipped by it for centuries. Perhaps that is why the rest of the world, although almost uniformly horrified by the 11 September attacks, nevertheless sees them from a different perspective. Reservoir of sympathy To understand the origins of 11 September, we have to distinguish between the agents of the crime and the reservoir of sympathy, sometimes support, to which they appeal, a reservoir that exists even among people who oppose both the criminals and their actions. Let us assume the crimes' perpetrators come from Bin Laden's network. Nobody knows about where they come from better than the CIA, because it helped organise and nurture them. President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, says proudly that the US drew the Russians into "an Afghan trap" in 1978 by supporting the mujahedin, getting the Russians to invade the following year. In 1990 the US established permanent military bases in Saudi Arabia, home of the holiest sites of Islam; and that is when Islamist activities began to be directed against the US. What about the support Bin Laden's networks enjoy even among the governing classes of countries in the South? Those people are angry at the US because it supports authoritarian and brutal regimes (and is in its 35th year of supporting Israel's harsh military occupation), and because its policies devastate the civilian society of Iraq while strengthening Saddam Hussein. The New York Times asked: "Why do they hate us?" On the same day the Wall Street Journal published a survey of the opinions of bankers, professionals and international lawyers, who said they hate us because we are blocking democracy, preventing economic development, and supporting terrorist regimes. The war against terrorism has been described in high places in the West as a struggle against a plague spread by barbarians, by "depraved opponents of civilisation". That is a feeling I share but the words I am quoting are 20 years old, and were said by President Ronald Reagan and his Secretary of State, Alexander Haig. The Reagan administration came into office with a declaration that that war against international terrorism would be the core of US foreign policy, and it responded to the plague by creating its own extraordinary international terrorist network, unprecedented in scale, which carried out massive atrocities all over the world, and primarily in Latin America. One such case is Nicaragua and it is incontrovertible, because of the judgments of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the UN Security Council. But how often has this precedent for a law-abiding state's response to international terrorism been mentioned since 11 September? The Reagan-US war against Nicaragua was more extreme than 11 September: it left tens of thousands of people dead, and the country ruined, perhaps beyond recovery (see articles by Raphaklle Bail and Frangois Houtart). Nicaragua did respond, not by bombing Washington but by taking Washington to the ICJ. The ICJ accepted Nicaragua's case, ruled in its favour, condemned what it called the "unlawful use of force" by the US (which had mined Nicaragua's ports), ordered the US to end the crime and to pay massive reparations. The US, of course, dismissed the judgment with total contempt and announced that it would not accept the jurisdiction of the court. Nicaragua then went to the UN Security Council, which considered a resolution calling on all states to observe international law. No state was mentioned but everyone understood which was meant. The US vetoed the resolution. The US now stands as the only state on record which has been condemned by both the ICJ for international terrorism and has vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law. Nicaragua then went to the UN General Assembly, where there is technically no veto, but where a negative US vote amounts to a veto. It passed a similar resolution, which only the US, Israel, and El Salvador opposed. The year after that, the US could only rally Israel, so just the two votes opposed observing law. At that point, Nicaragua could do no more that was lawful. It had tried all measures. They did not work in a world ruled by force. Nicaragua's case is incontrovertible, but how often is it taught in schools? How often is it front page news? This is the culture in which we live. It offers certain revelations. It reveals that terrorism works. That violence usually works (that is world history). That it is a serious error to claim that terrorism is the weapon of the weak; like other means of violence, it is primarily, indeed overwhelmingly, a weapon of the strong. It is thought to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems, and because their terrorism does not count as terror. The nature of our culture is indicated by the way in which all this is approached. One approach is simply to suppress things so that almost nobody has ever heard about them. And the power of American propaganda is so strong that even the victims barely know. When you talk to people in Argentina, you have to remind them about these things and they will say: "Yes, that happened, we forgot about it." Nicaragua, Haiti and Guatemala are the three poorest countries in Latin America. They were also victims of US military intervention. This was not necessarily coincidence. The intervention happened at the same time as Western intellectuals were enthusiastically congratulating themselves (another event that probably has no counterpart in history). Just a few years ago there was massive self-adulation the West was so magnificent; we were standing up for principles and values, dedicated to ending inhumanity everywhere in the new era of this-and-that. We could not tolerate atrocities near the borders of Nato only within the borders of Nato, where not only can we tolerate much worse atrocities but we contribute to them. But how often has this been mentioned? The silence is an impressive feat for a propaganda system in a free society. I do not think it could be done in a totalitarian state. Defining terrorism That brings us back to the question, what is terrorism? A brief definition, from a US army manual, is that "terror is the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to attain political or religious ideological goals through intimidation, coercion or instilling fear". The problem with this is that it corresponds almost exactly with what the US calls low intensity warfare, which is official US policy. In December 1987, when the UN General Assembly passed a strong resolution against terrorism, one country, Honduras, abstained. Two countries voted against the resolution, the US and Israel. Why? Because the resolution has one paragraph that says that nothing in it infringes on the rights of people struggling against racist and colonialist regimes or foreign military occupation. At the time, South Africa was an ally of the US. Apart from attacks against neighbouring countries (Namibia, Angola), that killed about 1.5m people and did $60bn in damage, the apartheid regime fought a so-called "terrorist" force, the African National Congress (ANC), inside the country. Israel has occupied the Palestinian territories since 1967 and others in Lebanon since 1978, opposed by what the US calls a "terrorist force", Hizbollah. None of that appeared in the annals of terrorism, or in scholarly works on terrorism because the wrong people held the guns. You have to hone the definitions and the scholarship carefully so that you come up with the right conclusions; otherwise it is not considered respectable scholarship or honourable journalism. Colombia was the worst human rights violator in the 1990s, and it was also by far the leading recipient of US military aid (excluding Israel and Egypt, in a separate category). Turkey has also been a prime beneficiary of US military aid until 1999. It is a strategically placed member of Nato, but the arms flow to it increased sharply in 1984. This had nothing to do with the cold war, as Russia was already collapsing: 1984 was the year that Turkey launched a major terrorist campaign against the Kurds. In 1997 US military aid to Turkey was more than for the entire 1950-83 cold war period an indication of how much the cold war has affected policy. The results were awesome, with two or three million refugees, tens of thousands of people killed, 350 towns and villages destroyed. The US provided 80% of the arms, peaking in 1997. The supply declined in 1999 because Turkish terrorism (called, of course, counter-terrorism) worked; it usually does when executed by the powerful. Turkey was grateful. The US had supplied it with F-16s to bomb its own people; in 1999 it used them to bomb the Serbs. Just after 11 September the Turkish prime minister announced that Turkey would actively join the coalition against terror. It owed a debt of gratitude to the US, because the US had been the only country willing to contribute so massively to Turkey's own "counter-terrorist" war. Other countries helped Turkey a little against the Kurds, but the US contributed enthusiastically and decisively and was able to do so because of the silence even servility of the educated classes in the US, who could easily have found out about it. The US is a free country: we can read human rights reports, we can read anything. But we chose to contribute to the atrocities. The present coalition against terror includes other choice recruits. The Christian Science Monitor, one of the best US newspapers with real coverage of the world, recently led with a story about the way that people and countries who used to dislike the US were beginning to respect it. A prime example given was Algeria. The author of the article is an expert on Africa and must know that Algeria has had a war of terror against its own people for years. Another leading member of the coalition is Russia, delighted to have the US support its murderous terrorist war in Chechnya. China is joining enthusiastically, too, grateful for support for its atrocities in western China against what it calls "Muslim secessionists". What are the policy options? The pope a far-out radical suggested trying to find and bring to justice the perpetrators of the 11 September attacks. But the US does not want to use normal legal process. It would rather offer no proof and has rejected the jurisdiction of the ICJ. For the last few years, Haiti has been asking the US to extradite Emmanuel Constant, a leading figure in the slaughter of thousands after the coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September 1991. The Haitians have plenty of evidence, but their request has made no impact on Washington and there has been no public debate of the issue. To combat terrorism we must start by reducing the level of terror, rather than by escalating it. When the IRA detonates bombs in London, London does not destroy Boston, the source of most of the finance, nor does it wipe out West Belfast. The UK hunts the perpetrators, brings them to trial and looks for the reasons for the violence. There is one easy way to reduce the level of terror: stop participating in it. We need to rethink the policies that are creating support, and benefiting the people behind the attacks. One of the few rays of light recently has been an increased openness. Many issues are now open for discussion, even in elite circles, and certainly among the public. These are opportunities and they should be used, at least by those who accept the goal of trying to reduce the level of violence and terror. * Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This is an edited extract of a talk he gave there on 18 October. His many books include Rogue states: the rule of force in world affairs, South End Press, 2000, and The culture of terrorism, South End Press, 1994 Original text in English ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ) 1997-2001 Le Monde diplomatique Joe Baptista http://www.dot-god.com/ The dot.GOD Registry, Limited
