Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Noam Chomsky sull'Iraq e le elezioni

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/2/26/noam_chomsky_why_is_iraq_missing
      Not very long ago, as you all recall, it was taken for granted
that the Iraq war would be the central issue in the 2008 election, as
it was in the midterm election two years ago. However, it's virtually
disappeared off the radar screen, which has solicited some puzzlement
among the punditry.
      Actually, the reason is not very obscure. It was cogently
explained forty years ago, when the US invasion of South Vietnam was
in its fourth year and the surge of that day was about to add another
100,000 troops to the 175,000 already there, while South Vietnam was
being bombed to shreds at triple the level of the bombing of the north
and the war was expanding to the rest of Indochina. However, the war
was not going very well, so the former hawks were shifting towards
doubts, among them the distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger,
maybe the most distinguished historian of his generation, a Kennedy
adviser, who--when he and Kennedy, other Kennedy liberals were
beginning to--reluctantly beginning to shift from a dedication to
victory to a more dovish position.
      And Schlesinger explained the reasons. He explained that--I'll
quote him now--"Of course, we all pray that the hawks are right in
thinking that the surge of that day will work. And if it does, we may
all be saluting the wisdom and statesmanship of the American
government in winning a victory in a land that we have turned," he
said, "to wreck and ruin. But the surge probably won't work, at an
acceptable cost to us, so perhaps strategy should be rethought."
      Well, the reasoning and the underlying attitudes carry over with
almost no change to the critical commentary on the US invasion of Iraq
today. And it is a land of wreck and ruin. You've already heard a few
words; I don't have to review the facts. The highly regarded British
polling agency, Oxford Research Bureau, has just updated its estimate
of deaths. Their new estimate a couple of days ago is 1.3 million.
That's excluding two of the most violent provinces, Karbala and Anbar.
On the side, it's kind of intriguing to observe the ferocity of the
debate over the actual number of deaths. There's an assumption on the
part of the hawks that if we only killed a couple hundred thousand
people, it would be OK, so we shouldn't accept the higher estimates.
You can go along with that if you like.
      Uncontroversially, there are over two million displaced within
Iraq. Thanks to the generosity of Jordan and Syria, the millions of
refugees who have fled the wreckage of Iraq aren't totally wiped out.
That includes most of the professional classes. But that welcome is
fading, because Jordan and Syria receive no support from the
perpetrators of the crimes in Washington and London, and therefore
they cannot accept that huge burden for very long. It's going to leave
those two-and-a-half million refugees who fled in even more desperate
straits.
      The sectarian warfare that was created by the invasion never--
nothing like that had ever existed before. That has devastated the
country, as you know. Much of the country has been subjected to quite
brutal ethnic cleansing and left in the hands of warlords and
militias. That's the primary thrust of the current counterinsurgency
strategy that's developed by the revered "Lord Petraeus," I guess we
should describe him, considering the way he's treated. He won his fame
by pacifying Mosul a couple of years ago. It's now the scene of some
of the most extreme violence in the country.
      One of the most dedicated and informed journalists who has been
immersed in the ongoing tragedy, Nir Rosen, has just written an
epitaph entitled "The Death of Iraq" in the very mainstream and quite
important journal Current History. He writes that "Iraq has been
killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more
disastrous than that of the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in the
thirteenth century," which has been the perception of many Iraqis, as
well. "Only fools talk of 'solutions' now," he went on. "There is no
solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained."
      But Iraq is, in fact, the marginal issue, and the reasons are
the traditional ones, the traditional reasoning and attitudes of the
liberal doves who all pray now, as they did forty years ago, that the
hawks will be right and that the US will win a victory in this land of
wreck and ruin. And they're either encouraged or silenced by the good
news about Iraq.
      And there is good news. The US occupying army in Iraq--
euphemistically it's called the Multi-National Force-Iraq, because
they have, I think, three polls there somewhere--that the occupying
army carries out extensive studies of popular attitudes. It's an
important part of counterinsurgency or any form of domination. You
want to know what your subjects are thinking. And it released a report
last December. It was a study of focus groups, and it was
uncharacteristically upbeat. The report concluded--I'll quote it--that
the survey of focus groups "provides very strong evidence" that
national reconciliation is possible and anticipated, contrary to
what's being claimed. The survey found that a sense of "optimistic
possibility permeated all focus groups...and far more commonalities than
differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis"
from all over the country and all walks of life. This discovery of
"shared beliefs" among Iraqis throughout the country is "good news,
according to a military analysis of the results," Karen de Young
reported in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago.
      Well, the "shared beliefs" are identified in the report. I'll
quote de Young: "Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe
that the US military invasion is the primary root of the violent
differences among them, and see the departure of [what they call]
'occupying forces' as the key to national reconciliation." So those
are the "shared beliefs." According to the Iraqis then, there's hope
of national reconciliation if the invaders, who are responsible for
the internal violence and the other atrocities, if they withdraw and
leave Iraq to Iraqis. That's pretty much the same as what's been found
in earlier polls, so it's not all that surprising. Well, that's the
good news: "shared beliefs."
      The report didn't mention some other good news, so I'll add it.
Iraqis, it appears, accept the highest values of Americans. That ought
to be good news. Specifically, they accept the principles of the
Nuremberg Tribunal that sentenced Nazi war criminals to hanging for
such crimes as supporting aggression and preemptive war. It was the
main charge against von Ribbentrop, for example, whose position was--in
the Nazi regime was that of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. The
Tribunal defined aggression very straightforwardly: aggression, in its
words, is the "invasion of its armed forces" by one state "of the
territory of another state." That's simple. Obviously, the invasion of
Iraq and Afghanistan are textbook examples of aggression. And the
Tribunal, as I'm sure you know, went on to characterize aggression as
"the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes
in that it contains within itself all the accumulated evil of the
whole." So everything that follows from the aggression is part of the
evil of the aggression.
      Well, the good news from the US military survey of focus groups
is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand
that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained
within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders. I
think they were not asked whether their acceptance of American values
extends to the conclusion of Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor
for the United States at Nuremberg. He forcefully insisted that the
Tribunal would be mere farce if we do not apply the principles to
ourselves.
      Well, needless to say, US opinion, shared with the West
generally, flatly rejects the lofty American values that were
professed at Nuremberg, indeed regards them as bordering on obscene,
as you could quickly discover if you try experimenting by suggesting
that these values should be observed, as Iraqis insist. It's an
interesting illustration of the reality, some of the reality, that
lies behind the famous "clash of civilizations." Maybe not exactly the
way we like to look at it.
      There was a poll a few days ago, a really major poll, just
released, which found that 75 percent of Americans believe that US
foreign policy is driving the dissatisfaction with America abroad, and
more than 60 percent believe that dislike of American values and of
the American people are also to blame. Dissatisfaction is a kind of an
understatement. The United States has become increasingly the most
feared and often hated country in the world. Well, that perception is
in fact incorrect. It's fed by propaganda. There's very little dislike
of Americans in the world, shown by repeated polls, and the
dissatisfaction--that is, the hatred and the anger--they come from
acceptance of American values, not a rejection of them, and
recognition that they're rejected by the US government and by US
elites, which does lead to hatred and anger.
      There's other "good news" that's been reported by General
Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker that was during the extravaganza
that was staged last September 11th. September 11th, you might ask why
the timing? Well, a cynic might imagine that the timing was intended
to insinuate the Bush-Cheney claims of links between Saddam Hussein
and Osama bin Laden. They can't come out and say it straight out, so
therefore you sort of insinuate it by devices like this. It's intended
to indicate, as they used to say outright but are now too embarrassed
to say, except maybe Cheney, that by committing the supreme
international crime, they were defending the world against terror,
which, in fact, increased sevenfold as a result of the invasion,
according to a recent analysis by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen
and Paul Cruickshank.
      Petraeus and Crocker provided figures to explain the good news.
The figures they provided on September 11th showed that the Iraqi
government was greatly accelerating spending on reconstruction, which
is good news indeed and remained so until it was investigated by the
Government Accountability Office, which found that the actual figure
was one-sixth of what Petraeus and Crocker reported and, in fact, a 50
percent decline from the previous year.
      Well, more good news is the decline in sectarian violence,
that's attributable in part to the murderous ethnic cleansing that
Iraqis blame on the invasion. The result of it is there are simply
fewer people to kill, so sectarian violence declines. It's also
attributable to the new counterinsurgency doctrine, Washington's
decision to support the tribal groups that had already organized to
drive out Iraqi al-Qaeda, to an increase in US troops, and to the
decision of the Sadr's Mahdi army to consolidate its gains to stop
direct fighting. And politically, that's what the press calls "halting
aggression" by the Mahdi army. Notice that only Iraqis can commit
aggression in Iraq, or Iranians, of course, but no one else.
      Well, it's possible that Petraeus's strategy may approach the
success of the Russians in Chechnya, where--I'll quote the New York
Times a couple of weeks ago--Chechnya, the fighting is now "limited and
sporadic, and Grozny is in the midst of a building boom" after having
been reduced to rubble by the Russian attack. Well, maybe some day
Baghdad and Fallujah also will enjoy, to continue the quote,
"electricity restored in many neighborhoods, new businesses opening
and the city's main streets repaved," as in booming Grozny. Possible,
but dubious, in the light of the likely consequence of creating
warlord armies that may be the seeds of even greater sectarian
violence, adding to the "accumulated evil" of the aggression. Well, if
Russians share the beliefs and attitudes of elite liberal
intellectuals in the West, then they must be praising Putin's "wisdom
and statesmanship" for his achievements in Chechnya, formerly that
they had turned into a land of wreck and ruin and are now rebuilding.
Great achievement.
      A few days ago, the New York Times--the military and Iraq expert
of the New York Times, Michael Gordon, wrote a comprehensive review,
first-page comprehensive review, of the options for Iraq that are
being faced by the candidates. And he went through them in detail,
described the pluses and minuses and so on, interviewing political
leaders, the candidates, experts, etc. There was one voice missing:
Iraqis. Their preference is not rejected; rather, it's not mentioned.
And it seems that there was no notice of that fact, which makes sense,
because it's typical. It makes sense on the tacit assumption that
underlies almost all discourse on international affairs. The tacit
assumption, without which none of it makes any sense, is that we own
the world. So, what does it matter what others think? They're
"unpeople," nice term invented by British diplomatic historian [Mark]
Curtis, based on a series of outstanding volumes on Britain's crimes
of empire--outstanding work, therefore deeply hidden. So there are the
"unpeople" out there, and then there are the owners--that's us--and we
don't have to listen to the "unpeople."


#_Grande, sempre, il nostro Chomsky!
Giano