Re-Instituting the War on Terror

The U.S. has reached a very low point as revelations daily show how deeply mired the country's government has been in unspeakably immoral behavior. Torture is anathema to the civilized world, yet it has been brought into the fold of this occupied White House.

A public that has grown almost accustomed to the brutalization of this administration has rejected its use of brutish methods, and has turned against it. Some of us liberals are getting weary of the mounting criminal acts, and destruction of our constitution. So when I ran across an extensive interview with Noam Chomsky in Japan Focus, I thought it would be worthwhile to bring it to our attention.

Hewison: Right at the beginning of At War with Asia, you have a quote from Professor J. K. Fairbank, where he is cited as worrying that the Vietnam War was not only a war against the people of Asia, but resulted in a totalitarian menace in the US itself. Is there a comparison with the so-called War on Terror?

Chomsky: First of all, with regard to the War on Terror, we should bring up something that is constantly repressed. On 11 September 2001, Bush re-declared the War on Terror. It had been declared by Ronald Reagan when he came into office in 1981. He announced right away that the focus of US foreign policy would be on state-directed international terrorism. His administration called it the plague of the modern age, a return to barbarism in our time and so on.[16] And then came something people would prefer to forget. This was a major terrorist war launched by the United States which devastated Central America, killed hundreds of thousands of people, had horrifying results in southern Africa and the Middle East and so on, extending to Southeast Asia.

That was the first War on Terror. So Bush re-declared it. Now when you declare war, whatever it is going to be, it's going to come with internal constraints. That's what a war is. The population has to be mobilized. There aren't a lot of ways of mobilising a population. The simplest way is fear. Fear often has some justification, but we have to remember that the Bush administration is increasing the risk, not decreasing it. Intelligence agencies anticipated that the invasion of Iraq would probably increase the threat of terror and proliferation. Well, it did, but far beyond what was anticipated. The latest studies reveal that terror increased about seven-fold. This is what the analysts call the "Iraq effect." There are many examples where the Bush administration is not decreasing the risk of terrorism. Mobilise the population through fear and try to institute controls. Well, they have tried. A lot of things they have done are outrageous - the Military Commissions Act, which was passed by bipartisan vote last year, is one of the most disgraceful pieces of legislation in American history - but we shouldn't exaggerate.

With all of this, it is nowhere near as bad as it has been in the past. It's a much freer society than it used to be. This is nothing like Woodrow Wilson's Red Scare. It's nothing like the COINTELPRO which ran from the Eisenhower up to the Nixon administration, which was a major FBI programme aimed at destroying opposition movements from the Black movement to the women's movement and the entire New Left.[17] It's nothing like that. Bad enough, but we shouldn't exaggerate; a lot of freedom has been won and it is not going to be given up easily. So, yes, there are efforts to restrict freedom - and that's what states are all about, taking any chance they can get to restrict freedom. But the population has won a lot of rights and it's not going to abandon them easily.

I totally agree. We feel discouraged when we hear idiotic remarks about keeping the war going on so that more death will repay earlier troops for giving up their lives for a lie, calls for supporting the president despite his rejection of our values and our interests, and the like. This isn't a country that will fit into an authoritarian mold, though, not ever.

Another part of the interview in Japan Focus was particularly interesting as well, on plans to end the war in Iraq:

....this is not withdrawal.

There's a good reason for it - which we're not allowed to discuss because we'd bring up that unpronounceable word, O-I-L, and you can't mention that because we have to be benign and so on.

But if Iraq was granted sovereignty, it wouldn't be like Vietnam. Sovereignty in Iraq means under majority Shiite influence. Undoubtedly, a Shiite-dominated Iraq would continue to improve relations with Shiite Iran, as it's doing already. It would incite the Shiite population of Saudi Arabia, on the border, which happens to be where most of the Saudi oil is, and one can imagine a loose Shiite alliance controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the United States. That's like a nightmare. And it gets much worse. Iran already has observer status with the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, which begins to draw the Middle East - the West Asian energy resources - towards the Asian system. If Shiite-dominated Saudi and Iraqi oil systems joined, that's the world's major energy resources moving off into the enemy camp - China, Russia, India.

India's kind of playing a double game, improving relations with China and they also have observer status with the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation and they've had joint energy planning with China. At the same time, India is happy to play games with the United States if the Bush administration authorises their nuclear weapons - as it just did, leaving the international regime on missile control and nuclear weapons controls shattered. They are happy to keep a foot in both camps.

This administration is throwing away not just our moral values, but also our influence in the world of nations. It plays an obvious and manageable game that smarter nations are winning.

It is far past time to take the powers from hands that are incapable of using them. In the interests of this country, impeachment is needed. It is given to the congress to prevent the kind of damage the country is suffering now. It is time to preserve our country from harm, and to begin to rebuild the rule of law that has been chipped away, but not yet destroyed, before it is ripped away from us.