THE BEGINNING

WHO RULES THE WORLD

Coming soon from the same author . . .

‘As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, the powerful can do as they please and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.’

In the post-9/11 era, America’s policy-makers have increasingly prioritised the pursuit of power, both military and economic, above all else – human rights, democracy, even security. Drawing on examples ranging from expanding drone assassination programs to civil war in Syria to the continued violence in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, Noam Chomsky examines the workings of imperial power across our increasingly chaotic planet.

‘The world’s greatest public intellectual’ Observer

‘One of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time. When the sun sets on the American empire, Chomsky’s work will survive’ Arundhati Roy

‘[Chomsky is] the closest thing in the English-speaking world to an intellectual superstar’ Guardian

Who Rules the World?

5 May 2016

www.penguin.co.uk

Contents

PREFACE

Stephen R. Shalom

There’s a well-known college admissions interview question that asks, “If you could have dinner with any two people in history, whom would you choose?” Opinions will no doubt vary when considering the range of historical figures over all the domains of human knowledge, but if one were interested in learning about the modern-day Middle East from contemporary analysts, I can’t imagine more engaging and informative dinner companions than Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar.

I first met Noam Chomsky in 1966, when I was a student at MIT. He was at this time already renowned for revolutionizing the field of linguistics and had recently become an outspoken critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam. For four decades since, I have read and learned immensely from his analysis of foreign policy, the media, and the role of intellectuals in society. But even more impressive than his prodigious intelligence has been his extraordinary commitment to social change. As an undergraduate, I was struck that such a distinguished scholar would join with students at sit-ins and demonstrations. In the early 1970s when I was working on a small newsletter challenging martial law in the Philippines, the first subscription renewal we’d receive in the mail each year would be from Noam Chomsky. This has been a consistent pattern as long as I’ve known him. He has helped innumerable political organizations and publications, answered countless letters from around the globe, and taken the time to talk to, advise, and inspire all those struggling for a better world.

In the early 1970s Chomsky began writing about the Middle East, returning to a topic that had concerned him since his involvement as a youth in the left-wing Zionist movement. In the early 1950s, he and his wife had considered living on an Israeli kibbutz, and though they ultimately decided not to, he has always had an intense interest in the region and in questions of peace and justice there. In 1974, his book Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood¹ was published. His next book-length study of the Middle East was written in the aftermath of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon: The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians.² Many of Chomsky’s other books include sections or essays on the Middle East—as any consideration of U.S. foreign policy must, given the importance and volatility of the region—but this current volume is his first entirely new book since The Fateful Triangle to focus exclusively on that part of the world.

Gilbert Achcar has shared Chomsky’s strong commitment to international peace and justice and his keen interest in understanding U.S. foreign policy. In addition, Achcar has a deep firsthand as well as scholarly knowledge of the Middle East. Having grown up and lived in Lebanon for many years, Achcar was intimately involved in the politics of the region and well acquainted with left circles in the Arab world. After moving to France, he continued to carefully follow Middle East events, both as an academic and as an antiwar activist.

I first met Gilbert in February 2003, shortly before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, when he spoke as part of a book tour at William Paterson University in New Jersey, where I teach. Over the next few years, I found his analyses of Iraq and of the wider Middle East extremely valuable, based on his expertise and his close reading of the Arabic-language press. I frequently posted his articles and translations on ZNet, a progressive website on which I work, hoping to bring his insights to a wider English-speaking audience.³ Though most of our communication has been by trans-Atlantic e-mail, we have become friends, and in late 2005 Gilbert and I coauthored an article assessing various plans being put forward for the “redeployment” of U.S. troops from Iraq.⁴

Achcar’s writings are informed by an appreciation of the broader considerations of international relations, especially the strategic triad among the United States, China, and Russia, elaborated in his La Nouvelle Guerre Froide (The New Cold War).⁵ In his volume The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder,⁶ he established himself as a perceptive analyst and uncompromising critic both of Washington’s quest for global domination and of Islamic fundamentalism. At the same time, he has always shown a sensitive understanding of some of the emotions ignited by the Israel-Palestine conflict, even among progressive circles, as he demonstrated in his editing of an exchange of letters between two Jewish leftists.⁷ Achcar’s numerous articles–some of which are collected in his book Eastern Cauldron: Islam, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq in a Marxist Mirror⁸—have provided hard-headed yet passionate analysis and practical advice to those seeking global justice. His April 2003 essay, “Letter to a Slightly Depressed Antiwar Activist,” has rightly become a classic.⁹

This current book is not two writers’ separate essays strung together. It is based on a dialogue between them—sometimes agreeing, sometimes complementing one another’s analysis based on their own perspectives and information, and sometimes disagreeing—and as such it represents more than the sum of its parts. Through their conversation, a richer understanding emerges from their shared commitments and their varied expertise and experiences.

Chomsky and Achcar decided from the outset that it would be useful to have a third person present to moderate their face-to-face conversation. This project was to be a two-way conversation, but a third party would pose the questions, keep the discussion on track, and take care of the technical process of recording, enabling the two discussants to concentrate on their analyses and arguments. I was invited to serve in this role. As much as possible, I tried to keep out of the conversation, just moving it along as necessary.

The procedure we followed involved several steps. We began by developing a list of questions to be addressed. The aim here was to generate questions that could not be answered by resorting to an encyclopedia, but that sought to reveal the underlying factors and dynamics at work. Events in the Middle East are so fast moving that any attempt to provide a factual description would soon be outdated, but an analysis of the major forces at play and of the way to approach the critical issues would enable readers to make sense of the past and understand current and future developments. Though this was to be a book about the Middle East, the region cannot be understood apart from the interests and interventions of outside powers, especially in recent years the United States. So we tried to include broad themes relating to the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy as well as to particular areas of conflict. The themes included terrorism (what it is, the extent of the threat, and how it should be dealt with), conspiracies (to what extent do they help us understand political developments), fundamentalism (what drives it, where it is strongest), democracy (its state in the Middle East, how it has been affected by the Iraq war), and the roots of U.S. foreign policy in the region (especially the role of oil and the significance of the “Israel lobby”). The specific conflicts we focused on were Afghanistan following September 11, Iraq in all its dimensions—the U.S. role, political developments, the situation of the Kurdish people (in Iraq and also in Turkey)—as well as potential conflicts in Iran and Syria. And, of course, we wanted to devote considerable attention to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: its historical roots, current dynamics, and potential solutions, taking up as well the nature of Israeli society, the various Palestinian political forces, and the issues of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Arab racism.

With the questions finalized, the three of us got together in Noam’s office at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for three days of conversation from January 4 to 6, 2006. Squeezing in three days with Noam is never an easy task, given his incredibly busy schedule—and indeed, we had to pause once for a previously arranged interview with a foreign journalist. Nevertheless, we were able to get in about fourteen hours of conversation. Our sessions were genial and lively, yet when there were disagreements, neither Noam nor Gilbert held back from stating his opinion strongly. (The discussion was sufficiently intense that twice we neglected to eat lunch.)

The fourteen hours of recordings that we generated were then ably transcribed by Melissa Jameson. From the transcription, I prepared a rough edit, eliminating redundancy and tangents, reordering some of the sections, and improving readability. Then Gilbert and Noam each went through and edited their remarks. The goal here was not to produce a faithful verbatim transcript of the conversation. Rather the idea was to allow each of them to clarify or expand on their remarks (though not to change a major argument to which the other had already responded). We took the view that oral comments made without access to sources should not serve as the last word. So we verified facts and checked and filled in quotations as necessary. And, because we believe that readers should not be expected to take what authors say on faith, we felt it important to add in documentation for all nonobvious or controversial claims.

In any work of this sort, the question of updating the material invariably arises. We thought it would be misleading and confusing to bring the conversations up to date by means of the editing process. There is no doubt that as you are reading this preface, important new events will have already taken place in the Middle East. So we decided to let the main text remain as a record of Chomsky’s and Achcar’s assessments as of January 2006, but to include a separate Epilogue, prepared six months later, in which each of the authors could comment on significant new developments.

I hope that this book, bringing you Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar as dinner companions to discuss the Middle East, will provide much food for thought.

Chapter One
Terrorism and Conspiracies

Defining Terrorism

Shalom: What do you think is a reasonable way to define terrorism?

Chomsky: I’ve been writing about terrorism since 1981. That’s the year the Reagan administration came into office, and they declared very quickly that a focus of the administration was going to be a war on terrorism–in particular, state-directed International terrorism. President Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and other officials of the administration spouted elaborate rhetoric about “the plague of the modern age,” a return to “barbarism in our times,” the “scourge of terrorism,” and so on.

Anyone with even a minimal acquaintance with history knew what was going to happen. It was going to turn into a terrorist war. You don’t declare a war on terrorism unless you’re planning yourself to undertake massive International terrorism, which is indeed what happened. And I expected that, as did my friend Ed Herman,¹ and together and separately we began writing about terrorism. Since this was in the context of the Reagan administration’s declaration of the war on terror, the natural thing to do seemed to be to take the official definitions of the U.S. government. So I took the definition that’s in the U.S. Code, the official system of laws, which is pretty reasonable; and shorter versions are in army manuals and so on. That’s the definition I’ve been using ever since. It is pretty much a commonsense definition. It says that terrorism is “the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature… through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.”²It’s also essentially the same as the official British definition, at present. However, the U.S. definition was rescinded in practice, presumably because of its obvious implications. If you take it literally, it turns out, almost trivially, that the United States is a leading terrorist state, and that the Reagan administration in fact was engaging in extensive International terrorism. So it had to change the definition, obviously, because it couldn’t allow that consequence. And since that time there have been other problems.

For example, under Reagan administration pressure, the United Nations passed resolutions on terrorism; the first major one was in December 1987, a resolution condemning the crime of terrorism in the strongest terms, calling on all States to work together to eradicate the plague and so on–a long, detailed resolution. It passed, but not unanimously. It passed 153 to 2 with 1 abstention. Honduras abstained. The two who voted against it were the usual two, the United States and Israel.³ In the General Assembly proceedings, the U.S. And Israeli ambassadors explained their votes, pointing out that there was an offending passage in the resolution that said: “Nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right… particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination, nor, in accordance with the principles of the Charter and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration, the right of these peoples to struggle to this end and to seek and receive support.”⁴ The United States and Israel couldn’t accept that, obviously. The phrase “colonial and racist regimes” meant South Africa, which was still an ally under the apartheid regime. Technically, the United States had joined the embargo against South Africa—but in fact it had not. Trade with South Africa increased, and methods were found for getting around the embargo so Washington could continue to support the Pretoria regime—and the same with Israel, which was in fact one of the conduits for getting around the South Africa embargo. And “foreign occupation” was obviously referring to the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, so neither the United States nor Israel could permit resistance against that occupation—even legitimate resistance, which of course does not include terrorist attacks against civilians. So, although it’s not technically a veto in the General Assembly, the United States and Israel effectively vetoed the resolution.⁵

And when the United States vetoes something, it’s a double veto: For one thing, it’s blocked; and for another thing, it’s erased from history. And so this U.S. action wasn’t reported, right in the midst of the furor about terrorism, and it’s out of history. You can barely find it in scholarly studies, since it leads to the wrong conclusions. And the same is true of the official definitions—they are down the memory hole. I continue to use them, and they continue to be the official definitions. But since then, since the mid-1980s, a scholarly industry has developed, with conferences, and ponderous tomes and meetings of the United Nations and so on, to see if someone can solve this “very difficult problem” of defining terrorism. There are dozens of different definitions and analyses in the legal journals, and nobody can quite do it. It’s perfectly obvious why, but no one will say so. You have to find a definition that excludes the terror we carry out against them, and includes the terror that they carry out against us. And that’s rather difficult. People have tried to restrict it to subnational groups. But that doesn’t work because they want to talk about terrorist states. In fact, it’s extremely hard, probably impossible, to formulate a definition that would have the right consequences, unless you define it just in terms of those consequences.

The operative definition of terror ought to be, from the point of view of U.S. policymakers: Terror is terror in the standard sense if you do it to us; but if we do it to you, it’s benign, it’s humanitarian intervention, it’s with benign intent. That’s the definition that’s actually used. If the educated sectors were honest, that’s what they’d say. Then the whole problem of defining would be over. But short of that, we have only two choices: either to use the official definitions, which I do; or to say, well, it’s an impossible problem, very deep, and so on. And so it will remain unless we’re able to recognize the operative significance.

Achcar: One might point also to attempts at expanding the concept: for instance, the European Union’s definition of terrorism in June 2002,⁶ which included “causing extensive destruction to a Government or public facility… a public place or private property likely to… result in major economic loss,” or even “threatening to commit” any such destruction. This could encompass acts of the kind that global justice or environmentalist or peasant protestors have committed against, say, a McDonald’s restaurant or an experimental agricultural field with genetically modified organisms or the like, and these would fall therefore under the category of terrorism. This is a serious and dangerous expansion of the definition.

Chomsky: It’s part of the expansion, and in a way it makes sense. What you should do is simply define terrorism as acts we don’t like. And acts we do like, they are not terrorism.

It’s the same dishonesty we see in discussions of aggression or intervention. Aren’t there perfectly straightforward definitions of aggression? Robert Jackson, the chief counsel for the prosecution at the post-1945 International Military Tribunal for Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, gave a careful, clear definition of aggression.⁷ And that was reaffirmed in 1974 by a General Assembly resolution that passed in a voice vote with no objections, so there is an authoritative General Assembly resolution that says approximately the same thing.⁸ But it’s useless, because according to that definition probably every American president could be charged as a war criminal. Not only are things like the war in Vietnam or Iraq, of course, aggression; but even the Contra war waged by the Reagan administration against Nicaragua counts not as International terrorism but as aggression under the Jackson and General Assembly definitions. Part of one of the subcases of the definition of aggression is about supporting armed groups on the territory of a state to carry out violent acts in the state under attack without the agreement of that state.⁹ That’s the Contra war by definition. So that’s aggression. Thus, all of the members of the Reagan administration and of course the Democrats who pretty much supported them are guilty of war crimes. But you can’t have that. So, therefore, the definition of aggression is also held to be very complex and obscure.

Achcar: We’ve been talking about the official definitions of terrorism, but what then would we agree among ourselves to be the definition of terrorism? In the public mind, I would say that terrorism is seen as basically that which targets civilian populations or democratic governments. That’s the most common view of terrorism, the targeting of civilians for goals that are linked to attempts to get governments or other collectivities to act in a certain way. Actions against an occupying army are not labeled terrorism by most people. The irony is that even in the final statement of the conference of the Iraqi political forces held in Cairo, Egypt, in November 2005, a distinction was made between the right to resist foreign occupation, deemed legitimate—which, although it was not stated explicitly, meant that actions against U.S. occupying troops in Iraq are an exercise of the right of resistance—and reprehensible terrorism, which was restricted to attacks on fellow Iraqis. And that’s quite ironic, because this was a conference involving representatives of the supposedly U.S.-allied Iraqi government, including the president and the prime minister.

I would think that the definition of terrorism that is least problematic is that which points to acts against unarmed innocent civilians. Taking innocent civilians as targets or hostages is definitely terrorism, even in the fight against a foreign occupation.

Chomsky: Then you do get into a definitional problem, because shooting somebody on the street isn’t necessarily an act of terrorism. So it has to be the threat or use of force, primarily against civilian targets, for ideological, religious, political, or other purposes, perhaps aimed at influencing a government. (Achcar: Or a collectivity.) Or a collectivity.

Achcar: Not acts targeting individuals as such, but trying to impose something on a collectivity or a government. (Chomsky: Exactly. That’s correct.) That would be, I think, a rounded definition of terrorism, though not exhaustive.

Chomsky: And that’s very close to the official U.S. definition, though it’s not used in practice because this would make the United States a leading terrorist state.

Shalom: And then there are tough cases about whether low-level government officials count as innocent civilians.

Chomsky: That’s true. Look, this isn’t physics. There are no terms of political or social discussion that have clear definitions.

Achcar: No. On the fringes, it becomes a legal matter. Then you have to discuss it case by case. It gets to the courts.

Chomsky: Even in the hard sciences, there weren’t clear definitions until the sciences became advanced. Even in mathematics: terms like “limit,” for example. Definitions don’t come until much later. So what you really want isn’t to find a sharp definition but to identify a concept. And this one’s easily identifiable; it’s just not acceptable. Because if you agree to this characterization, it’s going to turn out that the acts of the powerful fall under the definition of terrorism, and that’s not allowed.

Achcar: And then we might add to the definition the same distinction that you get in an International Relations 101 course, regarding the “actors”: the distinction between governmental, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental actors. The same distinction, the same categories, can be applied to terrorism. There is nongovernmental terrorism, which has been very prominent in the news these last few years, and there is governmental terrorism, and also intergovernmental terrorism, when you have NATO or such intergovernmental institutions conducting acts that we understand from our definition of terrorism to be terroristic. And the U.S. government itself cannot reject the idea that there is such a thing as governmental terrorism since it accuses many other States of being terroristic.

Chomsky: There have been efforts to restrict terrorism to subnational groups, but that runs against policy, because, exactly as you say, then you can’t label certain States as terrorist. But then you’re back to the same dilemma—how do you exclude yourself? (Achcar: Right.)

The Terrorist Threat

Shalom: Is there actually a terrorist threat to Europe or the United States, or is that all concoction?

Chomsky: No, there’s a very serious threat. In fact, the threat is being escalated, consciously. It didn’t start on 9/11. If you go through the 1990s—first of all, there was an attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, which came pretty close to succeeding; with a little better planning—I think you, Gilbert, wrote this in your Clash of Barbarisms¹⁰—it would have killed tens of thousands. Then they were going to blow up the tunnels and the UN building, the FBI buildings, and so on. They were stopped just in time. They were essentially jihadis, trained by the United States in Afghanistan, led by an Egyptian cleric who was brought into the United States under CIA protection. That was a serious act of terror.

Throughout the 1990s, there was a whole literature of technical books, published for example by MIT Press—what amount to cookbooks on terrorism, saying that terrorism is very likely.¹¹ And of course, since 9/11, there have been a lot more. And it’s a major terrorist threat. Former defense secretaries Robert McNamara and William Perry offer a subjective estimate of the likelihood of a nuclear detonation on a U.S. target in the next ten years at more than 50 percent. That’s pretty high, and U.S. intelligence regards such an attack as inevitable if the current course is pursued.¹² And other kinds of terrorism—bioterror and others—are also very possible. But this is a very low priority for the government; they don’t care very much, so they are acting very consciously in ways that actually increase the threat. And it’s not even secret, it’s just not a high priority for them. The clearest example is the invasion of Iraq. The invasion was undertaken with the expectation that it probably would increase the threat of terror. That was the advice given by the government’s own intelligence agencies and by others, by lots of specialists on terror, who said it was very likely to increase terror, for pretty obvious reasons. One reason is that we’re telling the world that we’re going to invade and attack anyone we feel like. So, therefore, any potential target is going to try to develop a deterrent. Nobody’s going to confront the United States on the battlefield. U.S. military expenditures are approximately the same as for the rest of the world combined, and U.S. weaponry is far more advanced technologically. You have to have another form of deterrent, and there are only two: One is nuclear weapons, and the other is terror. So what Washington is doing, in effect, is asking potential adversaries to develop a terrorist system and nuclear weapons.

And quite apart from that, and this I don’t think could have been predicted, the invasion of Iraq was such a total military catastrophe that it actually created an insurgency with no outside support. That’s almost unheard of. The partisans in Europe during the Nazi occupation couldn’t have survived if they didn’t have outside support; moreover, Germany was fighting a wider world at the time. But in Iraq, the United States created an insurgency, which is creating trained terrorists; it’s training people in terrorism. And it’s drawing some outsiders in for training in terrorism, and in fact the postwar assessments of the CIA and others are exactly that—that the war has created training grounds for professionalized terrorists who will spread around the world and carry out terrorism. It was predicted, and it happened to an extent beyond what was predicted, but it’s just a low priority in Washington, for which taking control of the energy resources of the Middle East is just a lot more important.

And this shows up in many other ways. There is an agency of the Treasury Department, OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which has the task of monitoring suspicious financial transfers around the world. That’s a big part of the so-called war on terror. OFAC officials testified to Congress in April 2004 on their operations. It turns out that they had four employees tracing financial transfers that might be attributable to Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, and almost six times that many monitoring possible evasion of the embargo against Cuba. Furthermore, this goes back to 1990, right through the Clinton years. From 1990 to 2003, they had opened 93 investigations related to terrorism and more than 100 times as many—10,683—related to Cuba. Since 1994, they had imposed $9,425 in terrorism-related fines and $8 million, more than 800 times more, in fines for evasion of the Cuba embargo,¹³ which embargo has been declared illegal by every relevant International body and which the United States is alone with Israel in backing. But those are the priorities. Punishing Cubans is way more important than cutting back terror. And this runs through case after case.

The current situation with Syria is a perfectly good example. Whatever you think of Syria is another question, but the Syrian government was providing substantial information to the United States on terrorism. They have much better connections and they can infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups in a way the CIA can’t. The Syrian regime doesn’t like the Islamic terrorists—it’s a secular monstrosity instead of a religious monstrosity—so it was providing the United States with valuable intelligence. But the U.S. was willing to give that up in order to make sure that there isn’t some part of the region that is not following orders. Not following orders is considered a major crime and that has to be punished. And the logic is understandable; any Mafia don can explain it. You cannot permit what’s called “successful defiance.” The charge against Cuba, back forty years ago, during the Kennedy-Johnson years, according to the internal records, is that Cuba’s “successful defiance” of U.S. domination—a domination that went back 150 years, meaning to the Monroe Doctrine—was intolerable. The problem had nothing to do with the Russians, just with Cuba’s successful defiance of policies going back 150 years. It’s unacceptable. It’s like some storekeeper not paying his protection money. You can’t accept that, because then other people would get the same idea, and the system of domination and control would erode. That’s far more serious to U.S. policymakers than protecting the country from terror.

A fairly high-level commission was set up to look at what went wrong on 9/11, and it made a whole series of recommendations, most of which were ignored. After the termination of the commission, they set up a private commission to continue monitoring it, and they keep producing reports, and they keep lamenting the fact that the recommendations are not being followed¹⁴—and the reason is that it’s just not a high priority. The Bush administration doesn’t care that much. And in fact, instigating terror is okay, too, if it serves some higher goal. This is all quite apart from the kind of terror that we carry out against others. But just limiting ourselves to the terror that fits the operative definition—what they do to us—simply is not a high priority. It never has been.

Achcar: Terrorism, as we’ve defined it, is more than a threat; it’s a reality. (Chomsky: And it’ll get worse.) There is an ongoing war, completely uneven, completely asymmetrical, between a huge, mighty, very powerful state and its allies, on the one hand, and on the other hand, nongovernmental terroristic Organizations with limited means, but which can inflict huge damage when they target civilians. First of all, it is impossible to protect any state from terrorism—and Israel is the main illustration of that. No state goes beyond the Israelis’ measures for preventing terrorism in security terms, and nevertheless, it’s not working. And obviously, at the level of the United States or Europe, this kind of prevention is absolutely impossible—you can’t surround the United States with a wall!

Chomsky: The U.S. government is reported to be planning to build a wall now along the Canadian border.

Achcar: Even that wouldn’t be effective.

Chomsky: No, if you look at the technical books on this, or the government studies, for example—like I said, they’re kind of cookbooks. One of the things they point out is that most U.S. import trade involves containers. There are huge numbers of containers coming in, which are almost impossible to inspect. They could hold radioactive materials, for example. You can’t inspect them at the point of origin. There were some calculations in one of these studies. If you tried to inspect the containers in, say, Rotterdam, which is one of the main shipping points from Europe, you would have gridlock all over Europe, literally.

Achcar: Aside from that, even if we supposed theoretically that there was a way to protect a country from foreign nongovernmental terrorism, you would still have the problem of local terrorism. After all, in the United States before 9/11, you had Oklahoma City, and then the anthrax episode after 9/11, which mysteriously has been forgotten.

Chomsky: The anthrax was apparently traced to a federal lab.

Responding to Terrorism

Shalom: So, what do we do? What can be done about terrorism?

Chomsky: Reduce the reasons for it. Take, say, al-Qaeda. They were carrying out terrorist acts in the Soviet Union, from Afghanistan, in the 1980s. These were pretty serious. In fact, at one point, they almost led to a war between the Soviet Union and Pakistan. After the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan, the terrorism stopped. Of course, they’re still carrying out terrorist acts from Chechnya, but not from Afghanistan. Whatever you think of these people—Osama bin Laden and the rest—their positions are pretty straightforward. And their words and their deeds are pretty much in accord. As far as I know, the specialists on the topic agree with this; bin Laden and others see themselves as defending Muslim lands from attack. So, if you stop attacking Muslim lands, you’ll reduce the threat of terror. Same with other kinds of terror.

Achcar: And there’s an economic aspect to this as well, because there is a very obvious correlation between the neoliberal turn of the last quarter-century and the increase in those forms of violence labeled as terrorism, or even urban violence in general. Neoliberal globalization has brought the disintegration of the social fabric and of social safety nets. People are more and more experiencing a state of disarray and social anxiety, and this leads to forms of violent assertions of “identity,” extremism or fanaticism, whether religious or political or whatever.

Chomsky: There are regular projections of the National Intelligence Council, the collective of U.S. intelligence agencies, that say the process of what they call globalization “will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide…. Regions, countries, and groups feeling left behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. They will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it.”¹⁵ The military projections say the same thing. Likewise, if you look at the Clinton-era studies of the space command,¹⁶ they say we’re going to need to militarize space because—same thing—the economic processes around the world, globalization, are creating a sharper and sharper divide between the haves and the have-nots. And the have-nots may even be able to develop nuclear weapons and other such means, and we’re going to need new weapons to protect ourselves from the predictable effects of the International measures that are being taken. So, again, you undertake the measures knowing what the consequences are going to be, and then you develop more brutal and violent means to suppress them. But if you actually want to suppress terrorism, then don’t carry out measures that are going to devastate societies.

Achcar: And more generally, I would say the antidote to terrorism is definitely not the so-called war on terror. Rather, it is justice: political justice, the rule of law, social justice, economic justice. This is the only real antidote to terrorism.

Chomsky: And ending repression. (Achcar: Of course.) In the case of Islamic terrorism, a lot of it is just—you’re attacking us, so we’re going to defend ourselves.

Shalom: Some of the grievances pointed to by al-Qaeda are clearly instances of aggression. But their list of grievances includes, for example, East Timor as a case of an attack on Islam. Presumably, there you don’t agree.

Chomsky: One doesn’t have to agree with what they think they have a right to. They supported Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor because a Muslim state invaded an animist, Christian state. It doesn’t mean we have to go along with that. It’s outright aggression.

Achcar: This has never been a major concern for al-Qaeda or bin Laden; this is really a very marginal issue for them.

Chomsky: The point is, they have a point of view. You can try to understand the point of view. As a matter of fact, the Pentagon understands it, as when Paul Wolfowitz announced, when he was still the deputy secretary of defense, that the United States was going to try and shift military bases out of Saudi Arabia—this was one of the reasons for invading Iraq. He said straight out: This will undercut some of al-Qaeda’s propaganda. We’ve occupied a holy, Muslim land.¹⁷

Achcar: Because U.S. officials knew that the origin of bin Laden’s turn against the United States was the deployment of U.S. troops in the Saudi kingdom. And they knew perfectly well all the dangers this implied, even though from a military point of view it made no sense: They could have deployed these troops in Kuwait. There were what—5,000 troops? That’s just nothing, you could put them anywhere in the area, in safer spaces, but they wanted to keep them in the Saudi kingdom for obvious reasons related to the importance of this huge oil reserve for the United States, in terms of global strategy. They were thus willing to pay the price for that, in a sense. Hardly anyone mentioned that fact in the 1990s. U.S. officials do things knowing they will breed terrorism, but they do them nevertheless, because they obey other considerations, which for them are far more significant than the lives of civilians.

9/11 Conspiracies

Shalom: So, this then raises the question: How do you assess the claims that 9/11 was plotted by the Bush administration, or by Mossad, etc?

Chomsky: I’m deluged with stuff about this. I don’t read a lot of it, because I generally don’t think it’s worth looking at. But I’ve looked at some of it, just out of curiosity, and it seems to me that those who make such claims just do not understand the nature of evidence. After all, why do scientists do experiments? Why not just take videotapes of what’s happening outside? Things that are going on in the phenomenal world are just too complicated to study. You’re not going to get sharp results from studying them; you’re going to get all kinds of confusion, strange things happening you can’t understand, and so on. So what you do are controlled experiments. But even in carefully controlled experiments, there are all sorts of anomalies—unexplained coincidences, apparent Contradictions, and so forth. If you read the letters column of a technical scientific journal, such as Science, the letters consist very substantially of people raising points like this about carefully controlled experiments, talking about this coincidence that you didn’t notice, or this went wrong and you didn’t notice. When you try to do the same thing for real-world phenomena, when you try to apply those standards to it, yes, you’re going to find all sorts of odd things. With the kind of evidence that is being used, you could prove that the White House was bombed yesterday.

Plus there is the style of the presentation of the evidence. People who know nothing about civil engineering, except what they picked up on the Internet somewhere, are giving learned treatises on what must have happened: How could a building do this, that, and the other thing? These are not trivial matters. You can’t just look up on the Internet and say, “I’m an accomplished civil engineer.” So those who make such claims just don’t understand the nature of evidence.

The second point is that the idea that the Bush administration would undertake something like this is almost beyond comprehension. First of all, it was very unclear what was going to happen—you could not predict the outcome. In fact, notice what happened when one of the airplanes was stopped in Pennsylvania: Suppose that had happened to all of them? Anything could have happened. So you’re carrying out a very chancy operation. A lot of people would have been involved in the planning. There are almost certain to be leaks. (Achcar: Of course.) If there was any leak at all, they’d all be lined up in front of firing squads without a trial, and that would be the end of the Republican Party forever. To gain what? Well, there’s the “who gains” argument; but that, too, is meaningless. Every power system in the world gained from 9/11. You could prove that the Chinese did it, because it gave them an opportunity to crush the Uighurs in western China. In the first interview I gave after 9/11, a couple of hours afterward, one of the first things I said was that every power system in the world is going to use this as an opportunity to increase violence and repression. This is exactly what happened everywhere—the Russians in Chechnya, Israel in the West Bank, Indonesia in Aceh, China in western China; half the governments in the world instituted protection against terrorist acts to try and control their own populations better. By the “who gained” argument, you could say that every power system did.

But the final point, and the most important, I think, is that these claims about 9/11 are diversions. Even if it were true that the Bush administration had planned and implemented the attacks, that would be a minor point compared with the crimes that they’re committing against the American people and the world. Just their instigation of terror is a far more serious danger to the people of the United States than destroying the World Trade Center. They’re increasing the danger of nuclear war, significantly. That’s very important. It’s not talked about much except in technical literature, but it’s very serious, and could lead to incredibly more tragic consequences than the destruction of the World Trade Center. So all of this focus on this highly unlikely, implausible scenario is simply diverting attention from the real crimes and the real threats, and I think that’s the reason why this theorizing is rarely criticized by the government or commentators. I think it’s welcomed by the administration. If you try to say anything about the fact that the United States invaded Iraq to get its oil, or anything serious, there’s a torrent of vilification and lies that is elicited immediately. The very striking fact about the 9/11 conspiracy theories is that there is very little criticism of them. Some people may make a joke or something, but they don’t come under any serious criticism. And the reason is, I think, that they’re welcomed as a diversion.

I recently came across a document that is relevant to this. It offered suggestions about declassification written for the Pentagon—and one suggestion was that DOD officials should periodically release information on the Kennedy assassination to keep the JFK assassination industry alive and focused on trying to figure out plots about the Kennedy assassination; as long as they’re on that wild-goose chase, they won’t be asking serious questions.¹⁸ And I expect much the same is true here.

Achcar: And then you have those who tell you: You say this is a “conspiracy theory” and doesn’t hold water, but the government’s version is also a conspiracy theory—a conspiracy by the al-Qaeda Organization and the nineteen hijackers. This is putting a purely phantasmagoric kind of construction on the same level as something that has gone through an investigation in which many countries and many agencies were involved. It’s preposterous.

On the other hand, however, there’s the so-called weak version, which says that although the Bush administration didn’t plan 9/11, nor did they work seriously on preventing it, they had some hints, which they didn’t want to take into consideration.

Chomsky: But we have a much stronger case than that. They have more than hints on further terrorist acts. For example, as I quoted before, very credible sources regard a terrorist nuclear attack as very likely. That’s serious. Are they doing anything about it? They’re only increasing the likelihood of it.

Achcar: