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Noam Chomsky
9/02
It is widely argued
that the September 11 terrorist attacks have changed the world
dramatically, that nothing will be the same as the world enters into an
"age of terror" -- the title of a collection of academic essays by Yale
University scholars and others, which regards the anthrax attack as even
more ominous.
There is no doubt
that the 9/11 atrocities were an event of historic importance, not --
regrettably -- because of their scale, but because of the choice of
innocent victims. It had been recognised for some time that with new
technology, the industrial powers would probably lose their virtual
monopoly of violence, retaining only an enormous preponderance.
No one could have
anticipated the specific way in which the expectations were fulfilled, but
they were. For the first time in modern history, Europe and its offshoots
were subjected, on home soil, to the kind of atrocity that they routinely
have carried out elsewhere. The history should be too familiar to review,
and though the West may choose to disregard it, the victims do not. The
sharp break in the traditional pattern surely qualifies 9/11 as a historic
event, and the repercussions are sure to be significant.
Several crucial
questions arose at once: who is responsible? What are the reasons? What is
the proper reaction? What are the longer-term consequences?
To begin with, it
was assumed, plausibly, that the guilty parties were Osama bin Laden and
his Al Qaeda network. No one knows more about them than the CIA [Central
Intelligence Agency], which, together with its counterparts among US
allies, recruited radical Islamists from many countries and organised them
into a military and terrorist force, not to help Afghans resist Russian
aggression, which would have been a legitimate objective, but for normal
reasons of state, with grim consequences for Afghans after the mujahideen
took control. US intelligence has surely been following the other exploits
of these networks closely ever since they assassinated President Anwar
Sadat of Egypt 20 years ago, and more intensively since the attempt to
blow up the World Trade Center and many other targets in a highly
ambitious terrorist operation in 1993.
Nevertheless,
despite what must be the most intensive international intelligence
investigation in history, evidence about the perpetrators of 9/11 has been
hard to find. Eight months after the bombing, FBI [Federal Bureau of
Investigation] director Robert Mueller, testifying to Congress, could say
only that US intelligence now "believes" the plot was hatched in
Afghanistan, though planned and implemented elsewhere. And long after the
source of the anthrax attack was localised to US government weapons
laboratories, it has still not been identified. These are indications of
how hard it may be to counter acts of terror targeting the rich and
powerful in the future. Nevertheless, despite the thin evidence, the
initial conclusion about 9/11 is presumably correct.
Next, the question:
what are the reasons? On this, scholarship is virtually unanimous in
taking the terrorists at their word, which matches their deeds for the
past 20 years: their goal, in their terms, is to drive the infidels from
Muslim lands, to overthrow the corrupt governments they impose and
sustain, and to institute an extremist version of Islam.
More significant, at
least for those who hope to reduce the likelihood of further crimes of a
similar nature, are the background conditions from which the terrorist
organisations arose, and that provide a mass reservoir of sympathetic
understanding for at least parts of their message, even among those who
despise and fear them.
In George Bush's
plaintive words, "Why do they hate us?" The question is not new, and
answers are not hard to find. Forty-five years ago, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower and his staff discussed what he called the "campaign of hatred
against us" in the Arab world, "not by the governments but by the people".
The basic reason, the National Security Council advised, is the
recognition that the US supports corrupt and brutal governments that block
democracy and development, and does so because of its concern "to protect
its interest in Near East oil". The Wall Street Journal found much the
same when it investigated attitudes of wealthy westernised Muslims after
9/11, feelings now exacerbated by specific US policies with regard to
Israel-Palestine and Iraq.
Commentators
generally prefer a more comforting answer: their anger is rooted in
resentment of our freedom and love of democracy, their cultural failings
tracing back many centuries, their inability to take part in the form of "globalisation"
(in which they happily participate), and other such deficiencies. More
comforting, perhaps, but not wise.
What about proper
reaction? The answers are doubtless contentious, but at least the reaction
should meet the most elementary moral standards: specifically, if an
action is right for us, it is right for others; and if wrong for others,
it is wrong for us. Those who reject that standard simply declare that
acts are justified by power. One might ask what remains of the flood of
commentary on this question (debates about "just war", etc.) if this
simple criterion is adopted.
To illustrate with a
few uncontroversial cases, 40 years have passed since President John F.
Kennedy ordered that "the terrors of the earth" must be visited upon Cuba
until their leadership is eliminated, having violated good form by
successful resistance to US-run invasion. The terrors were extremely
serious, continuing into the 1990s. Twenty years have passed since
President Reagan launched a terrorist war against Nicaragua, conducted
with barbaric atrocities and vast destruction, leaving tens of thousands
dead and the country ruined perhaps beyond recovery -- and also leading to
condemnation of the US for international terrorism by the World Court and
the UN Security Council (in a resolution the US vetoed). But no one
believes that Cuba or Nicaragua had the right to set off bombs in
Washington or New York or to assassinate US political leaders. And it is
all too easy to add many far more severe cases, up to the present.
Accordingly, those
who accept elementary moral standards have some work to do to show that
the US and Britain were justified in bombing Afghans in order to compel
them to turn over people who the US suspected of criminal atrocities, the
official war aim, announced by the president as the bombing began; or to
overthrow their rulers, the war aim announced several weeks later.
The same moral
standard holds of more nuanced proposals about an appropriate response to
terrorist atrocities. The respected Anglo-American military historian
Michael Howard proposed "a police operation conducted under the auspices
of the United Nations... against a criminal conspiracy whose members
should be hunted down and brought before an international court, where
they would receive a fair trial and, if found guilty, be awarded an
appropriate sentence" (Guardian, Foreign Affairs). That seems reasonable,
though we may ask what the reaction would be to the suggestion that the
proposal should be applied universally. That is unthinkable, and if the
suggestion were to be made, it would arouse outrage and horror.
Similar questions
arise with regard to the "Bush doctrine" of "pre-emptive strike" against
suspected threats. It should be noted that the doctrine is not new.
High-level planners are mostly holdovers from the Reagan administration,
which argued that the bombing of Libya was justified under the UN Charter
as "self-defence against future attack". Clinton planners advised
"pre-emptive response" (including nuclear first strike). And the doctrine
has earlier precedents. Nevertheless, the bold assertion of such a right
is novel, and there is no secret as to whom the threat is addressed. The
government and commentators are stressing loud and clear that they intend
to apply the doctrine to Iraq. The elementary standard of universality,
therefore, would appear to justify Iraqi pre-emptive terror against the
US. Of course, no one accepts this conclusion.
Again, if we are
willing to adopt elementary moral principles, obvious questions arise, and
must be faced by those who advocate or tolerate the selective version of
the doctrine of "pre-emptive response" that grants the right to those
powerful enough to exercise it with little concern for what the world may
think. And the burden of proof is not light, as is always true when the
threat or use of violence is advocated or tolerated.
There is, of course,
an easy counter to such simple arguments: WE are good, and THEY are evil.
That useful principle trumps virtually any argument. Analysis of
commentary and much of scholarship reveals that its roots commonly lie in
that crucial principle, which is not argued but asserted. Occasionally,
but rarely, some irritating creatures attempt to confront the core
principle with the record of recent and contemporary history. We learn
more about prevailing cultural norms by observing the reaction, and the
interesting array of barriers erected to deter any lapse into this heresy.
None of this, of course, is an invention of contemporary power centres and
the dominant intellectual culture. Nonetheless, it merits attention, at
least among those who have some interest in understanding where we stand
and what may lie ahead.
Let us turn briefly
to the question: what are the long-term consequences? In the longer term,
I suspect that the crimes of 9/11 will accelerate tendencies that were
already under way: the Bush doctrine is an illustration. As was predicted
at once, governments throughout the world seized upon 9/11 as a window of
opportunity to institute or escalate harsh and repressive programmes.
Russia eagerly joined the "coalition against terror" expecting to receive
authorisation for its terrible atrocities in Chechnya, and was not
disappointed. China happily joined for similar reasons. Turkey was the
first country to offer troops for the new phase of the US "war on terror",
in gratitude, as the prime minister explained, for the US contribution to
Turkey's campaign against its miserably-repressed Kurdish population,
waged with extreme savagery and relying crucially on a huge flow of US
arms. Turkey is highly praised for its achievements in these campaigns of
state terror, including some of the worst atrocities of the grisly 1990s,
and was rewarded by grant of authority to protect Kabul from terror,
funded by the same superpower that provided the military means, and the
diplomatic and ideological support, for its recent atrocities. Israel
recognised that it would be able to crush Palestinians even more brutally,
with even firmer US support. And so on throughout much of the world.
More democratic
societies, including the US, instituted measures to impose discipline on
the domestic population and to institute unpopular measures under the
guise of "combating terror", exploiting the atmosphere of fear and the
demand for "patriotism" -- which in practice means: "You shut up and I'll
pursue my own agenda relentlessly." The Bush administration used the
opportunity to advance its assault against most of the population, and
future generations, in service to the narrow corporate interests that
dominate the administration to an extent even beyond the norm.
In brief, initial
predictions were amply confirmed.
One major outcome is
that the US, for the first time, has major military bases in Central Asia.
These are important to position US multinationals favourably in the
current "great game" to control the considerable resources of the region,
but also to complete the encirclement of the world's major energy
resources, in the Gulf region. The US base system targeting the Gulf
extends from the Pacific to the Azores, but the closest reliable base
before the Afghan war was Diego Garcia. Now that situation is much
improved, and forceful intervention, if deemed appropriate, will be
greatly facilitated.
The Bush
administration perceives the new phase of the "war on terror" (which in
many ways replicates the "war on terror" declared by the Reagan
administration 20 years earlier) as an opportunity to expand its already
overwhelming military advantages over the rest of the world, and to move
on to other methods to ensure global dominance. Government thinking was
articulated clearly by high officials when Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
visited the US in April to urge the administration to pay more attention
to the reaction in the Arab world to its strong support for Israeli terror
and repression. He was told, in effect, that the US did not care what he
or other Arabs think. As the New York Times reported, a high official
explained that "if he thought we were strong in Desert Storm, we're 10
times as strong today. This was to give him some idea what Afghanistan
demonstrated about our capabilities". A senior defence analyst gave a
simple gloss: others will "respect us for our toughness and won't mess
with us". That stand too has many historical precedents, but in the
post-9/11 world it gains new force.
We do not have
internal documents, but it is reasonable to speculate that such
consequences were one primary goal of the bombing of Afghanistan: to warn
the world of what the US can do if someone steps out of line. The bombing
of Serbia was undertaken for similar reasons. Its primary goal was to
"ensure NATO's credibility", as Blair and Clinton explained -- not
referring to the credibility of Norway or Italy, but of the US and its
prime military client. That is a common theme of statecraft and the
literature of international relations; and with some reason, as history
amply reveals.
The basic issues of
international society seem to me to remain much as they were, but 9/11
surely has induced changes, in some cases, with significant and not very
attractive implications.
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