Today's Stories

June 17, 2008

Conn Hallinan
The Brain Trauma Vets

June 16, 2008

Uri Avnery
An Apology

Corey D. B. Walker
The Racial Politics of Symbols

Howard Lisnoff
Files Upon Files

Dennis Loo
2008 Elections: Of Whales and Worms

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama and the Fall Into Tyranny

June 13 / 15, 2008

Douglas Valentine
McCain: War Hero or Go-To Collaborator?

Alexander Cockburn
Change, What Change?

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft

Peter Linebaugh
On Wat Tyler Day

Ishmael Reed
The Colossus: Sonny Rollins, Take One

Joe Bageant
Old Dogs and Hard Time

Harry Browne
Ireland Shows the Way!

Andy Worthington
The Supreme Court's Gitmo Decision: What Does It Mean?

Jeff Sharlet
The F-Word

Binoy Kampmark
They Gassed Us: Agent Orange in OZ

Alan Farago
His Little Piece of the Pie

Brian Cloughley
America the Detested: the Pakistan Airstrikes

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
How to Stretch Gasoline

Reza Fiyouzat
Oil and Racism

Patrick Bond /
Richard Kamidza
How Europe Underdevelops Africa

David Yearsley
Music in the Rubble

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Thank You, Dennis Kucinich!

Ronnie Cummins
Don't Panic; Go Organic

Dan Bacher
Bush Tries to Raid Salmon Disaster Funds

Michael Dickinson
Jesus in Megiddo Prison

Seth Sandronsky
My Father's World

Poets' Basement
Tu Fu / Rexroth

Website of the Weekend
Torture and the American Psyche

June 12, 2008

Judith Levine
As Cranes Fall and People Die

Patrick Cockburn
Amid Iraqi Fury, U.S. Offers Concessions on Military Bases

Saul Landau
The Iraq War Becomes Suicidal

Christopher Brauchli
Bush Bling-Bling: Government by Crony

Norman Solomon
Deadly Diplomacy

Helen Redmond
Why Can't We All Get KennedyCare?

Laura Carlsen
No Rest for the Working Poor

Jeremy R. Hammond
Threats Against Iran Escalate

Anne Landman
Pinkwashing: Can Shopping Cure Breast Cancer?

Website of the Day
Fire in Watts

June 11, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Oil Prices Are So High

Ralph Nader
Wall Street Gamblers

Joshua Frank
Why I Can't Support Barack Obama

Clifton Ross
Conversation in Miami: the Neoliberal Left and Socialism

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Whatever Happened to "Democracy Now?"

Stephen Lendman
Exposing Pentagon and CIA Corruption

Diane Farsetta
Talking Back to Bill O'Reilly

Ron Jacobs
The Sixties Painted Black

Deborah Rich
Hay Belly Nation: the FDA and the O-Word

Hop Wechsler
A Friend of Women? My Bill Clinton ... and Ours

Website of the Day
A New Path to the Waterfall

June 10, 2008

Alan Farago
John McCain and the Company He Keeps

James G. Abourezk
Deadly Fallout From Obama's Groveling Before Israel Lobby

Saree Makdisi
Banned in the U.S.A. (Almost)

Malini Johar Schueller
A Picture From Beirut

John Ross
Killing Foods, Killing People

Wajahat Ali
Rumi and Sufism

Peter Morici
Bernanke Aggravates Recession Risks

Jordan Flaherty
Inside Angola Prison, Louisiana's Last Slave Plantation

Gary Macfarlane
Collaboration on the Clearwater: Is It Legitimate?

Joanne Mariner
The Gitmo Trials: an Inglorious Start

Website of the Day
The End of the Clinton Machine?

June 9, 2008

Uri Avnery
No, I Can't: Obama, Israel and AIPAC

Nikolas Kozloff
McCain & the Republican Insitute: Promoting Iraqi Occupation for "a Million Years"

Allan Nairn
Drawing Your Last Breath Hungry

Dennis Loo
Threats on Iran and the "Batterer's Defense"

Harry Browne
Irish Euro Vote Comes Down to the Wire

C. Hand
U. S. Bid to Hike Iran's Gas Prices Seems Doomed

Peter Morici
An Unsustainable Trade Deficit

Kenneth Couesbouc
A Ripe Time for Inflation

Martha Rosenberg
The Inconvenient Senator Grassley

James L. Secor
Chinese Superstition or Unconscious Oracle?

Website of the Day
Pay Bo Diddley!

June 7 / 8, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama Goes Over the Top

Ishmael Reed
How Miles Davis Changed My Life

Jeffrey St. Clair
What a Miner's Life is Worth

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet the King the Beers: John McCain and Latin America

Dave Lindorff
The High Cost of a Single War-Like Remark: Oil Prices, Israel, Iran and the U.S.

Robert Fantina
When Truth is the Casualty

Conn Hallinan
Iran and Rumors of War

Neve Gordon
The Occupation and the Politics of Death

Tom Barry
The Deterrence Strategy of Homeland Security

Patrick Irelan
Raiding the Packing House

Tim Wise
Your Whiteness is Showing

David Ker Thomson
The Hard Question

Joshua Frank
"Socialist" Wins Republican Nomination in Montana

David Yearsley
Disaster Music

James T. Phillips
1968: Year of the Rat

Joe Allen
The Real Bobby Kennedy

P. Sainath
Making Life Brighter in Kondapur

David Macaray
Should Unions be More Democratic?

B.R. Gowani
Experience and the Two-for-One

Fred Gardner
What Happened (at the DA's Office)

Peter Harley
Technology to the Rescue? Kurzweil and the Human Machines

Michael Dickinson
Surrender the Bones of Geronimo!

Jen Roesch
Where are the Real Women in Sex and the City?

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Landau, and Buknatski

Website of the Day
Partying with the Waltons

June 6, 2008

Frank Barat
An Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky on the Future of Israel / Palestine

Patrick Cockburn
U.S. Extorts Iraq to Approve Military Deal

Gary Leupp
Cheney Enrages Iraqis Over Security Deal

James Abourezk
Name That Terrorist

Peter Morici
Recession Grips the Jobs Market

Faheem Hussain
What is NATO Doing in Afghanistan?

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Britons Go on Hunger Strike

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
How Will Musharraf Go? Impeachment or Safe Exit?

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs to Defend Itself

Website of the Day
Backstage with Bo Diddley

June 5, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Bush's Secret Deal Would Ensure Permanent U.S. Occupation of Iraq

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Wreckage

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Electoral Dilemma: Latinos or Reagan Democrats?

Linn Washington, Jr.
Police Brutality and Cover-Up in Philly

Omar Barghouti
60 Years of Nakba, 41 Years of Occupation ...

Scott Pellegrino
Jim Crow Radio: Bob Grant's Lifetime Achievement Award

John Walsh
Obama Woos AIPAC

Dan Bacher
The Parching of California

DC Larson
Nazi Rockers ... F-Off

Robert Jensen
Masculine, Feminine or Human?

Website of the Day
Ohio Cops Attack Long Walkers

June 4, 2008

Eric Walberg
Princess Patricia and the Taliban

Gary Leupp
Iran and EFPs: Chronology of a Lie

Ralph Nader
Disenfranchised Youth

Dave Lindorff
Of Whiners and Poor Losers

George Wuerthner
Farm Economics

Victor M. Rodriguez
The Puzzle of Race and Politics

Remi Kanazi
Why a Cultural Boycott of Israel is Needed

Stephane Luçon
Renault's Romanian Fairyland Suspended

Farzana Versey
The Tablighi Jamaat Movement

Laray Polk
The Militarization of Space

Website of the Day
Red State Rebels

June 3, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts /
Lawrence M. Stratton
Legislating Tyranny

Mike Whitney
The Withering Economy

Steve Early
San Juan Showdown

Manuel Otero
Why Hillary Won Puerto Rico: the View from the Colony

George Bisharat
The Hope of a Victimized People

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's VP Quandry

Dan Bacher
Death on the Salmon Highway

Website of the Day
Censoring Bill Knott?

June 2, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Olmert Scandal

Nikolas Kozloff
Obama's Latino Problem Getting Worse

Allan J. Lichtman
Revisionist History: Bush, Borah and Hitler

Malini Johar Schueller
The Color of Randomness: Returning to the US From Beirut Via Syria

Robert Weissman
What's Driving Skyrocketing Oil Prices?

Peter Morici
Bailing Out Wall Street

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Don't Get Burned: How to Protect Yourself From Raytheon's Pain Gun

John Ross
Celebrating Catholic Fanaticism in Mexico

Ahmad Al-Akhras
Encounters with the Watch List

Website of the Day
Man on Earth

May 31 / June 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Worst is Yet to Come

Jeffrey St. Clair
Arkansas Bloodsuckers

Gary Leupp
How McClellan Prettifies Bush

Stan Cox
Broken Agriculture

Rannie Amiri
Lebanon: the Domino That Wouldn't Fall

P. Sainath
A Guaranteed Day's Work--in the Fields, at 110 Degrees, for $2 a Day

Binoy Kampmark
Going Bankrupt in Vallejo

Robert Fantina
Bush, Rice and McClellan

Seth Sandronsky
Will There be Water Riots, as Sacramento Goes Dry?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Death Penalty for Bush?

Anthony DiMaggio
Gaming the Ghetto: Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle

Karl Grossman
A Half-Trillion for Nukes

Matt Reichel
From Vegas to the Heartland and Back Again

Paul Myron Hillier
Of Gas and God

Andy Worthington
Suicide at Guantánamo

David Yearsley
And the Winner is ... Wayne Shorter

Daniel Cassidy
Free Lunch

Charles Thomson
If Hitler Had Been a Hippy ...

Gary Corseri
A Dream Deferred: Activism and the Arts

Wajahat Ali
Sex and the City Through a Man's Eyes

Ron Jacobs
Robins Weep

Poets' Basement
McNeill and Davies

Website of the Day
Last Charge of the Light Horse

May 30, 2008

Bassam Aramin
Here's the Truth You've Been Running From

Andrew Cockburn
Petraeus' Iran Obsession

Saul Landau
How We Got Into This Mess

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet South America's New Secessionists

Robert Sandels
Turning Back the Clock on Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Talk is Cheap

Martha Rosenberg
Raiding Big Meat; Arresting the Wrong People

Harvey Wasserman
Lieberman & McCain: Linking Internet Censorship and Atomic Reactor Terror

Doug Giebel
A Plague on Both Your Houses (of Congress)

Shaun Harkin
The Trial of the Raytheon 9

Website of the Day
The Once and Future Environmental Movement

May 29, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bill Clinton and the Rich Women

Nikolas Kozloff
Puerto Rico, Obama and the Politics of Race

Col. Dan Smith
Deceiving the Dead

Karl Grossman
The Most Lucrative Incentive for Nuclear Power in the History of the United States

William S. Lind
Inside the Washington Game

Robert Weissman
What to do About the Price of Oil

Dave Lindorff
Why Puerto Rico Won't Matter

David Macaray
A Union Fable

Chris Genovali
Fear and Loathing in the Northern Rockies

Laura Carlsen
Mexico's Battle Over Oil

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

May 28, 2008

Wajahat Ali
The Libertarian Dark Horse: An Exclusive Interview with Ron Paul

Ralph Nader
What's Really Driving the High Price of Oil?

Brian McKenna
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War College

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Vincent Bugliosi Wants to Prosecute George W. Bush for Murder

Brian Cloughley
The Attack on Damadola

Eric Walberg
Opium for the Masses from Afghanistan

Michael Dickinson
Raytheon's Pain Ray: Coming to a Protest Near You

Ijaz Khan
Opening Windows in Pakistan

Website of the Day
Older Than America

May 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Her Mind She's Killed Before: the Plot to Assassinate Ralph Nader

Greg Kafoury
Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?

Jean Bricmont
Western Delusions

Tim Wise
Farrakhan is not the Problem

Ricardo Alarcón
Puerto Rico's Turn

Stephen Soldz
APA Supports Psychologist Engagement in Bush Regime Interrogations

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo 16

Alan Singer
Vapid, Stupid and Insulting: Chuck Schumer Speaks to the Graduates

Richard Neville
Storm in an A-Cup

Susie Day
Gone with the W

May 26, 2008

Uri Avnery
The Syrian Option

Bill Quigley
War Immemorial Day

Col. Dan Smith
Retreating from Hell: a Different Memorial Day

Cindy Sheehan
Why Memorial Day is a Double-Whammy for Me

Marjorie Cohn
Hillary's Assassination Politics: Her Last Shot?

Fred Gardner
Does the VA Care?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Pain Pays: Getting Rich at NY Presbyterian Hospital

Harvey Wasserman
Mugging the Election System

Moncia Benderman
Truth Matters

David Rovics
In Praise of Utah Phillips

Website of the Day
Fox News Jokes About "Knocking Off" Osama and Obama

May 24 / 25, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Death-Wish Hillary Primes Manchurian Candidate

Jeffrey St. Clair
Yellowstone: How Sununu Shrank the Ecosystem

Barbara Rose Johnston
Dam Legacies, Damned Futures

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Fourth Fleet in Venezuelan Waters

Adriana Kojeve
The Environment and the 2008 Elections

Robert Fantina
Justice Department's Revelations on Torture

Dave Lindorff
Bush's War on Children in Iraq

David Yearsley
The War on Kitsch

Nelson P. Valdés
The Buying of "Democracy" Agents in Cuba

Kathleen M. Barry
Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing

John Ross
Mexico's Narco Opera Reaches for High Point

Allison Kilkenny
Apathy Doesn't Live in Bronx

Fred Gardner
Orangeburg, 1968

Elizabeth Schulte
Can the Whole World be Fed?

Daniel Gross
Remembering the Wendy's Massacre: the Dangerous Side of Retail Work

Christopher Brauchli
The Search for a Token Right-winger

Richard Rhames
A Nation of Sheep

Daniel Cassidy
My Mother

Poets' Basement
Davies, Klipschutz and Willson

Website of the Weekend
Happy Birthday, Bob

May 23, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
War Abroad, Poverty at Home

Alan Farago
The Radical Extremists of the Building Industry

Conn Hallinan
Ballots and Bullets: From Beirut to Bolivia

Mark Engler
The World After Bush

George Wuerthner
Cars and Cows: Living Large in America

Kamran Matin
The Kurds and American Neo-Imperialism

Sandy Boyer /
Shaun Harkin
The Long Incarceration of Pol Brennan

Robert Weitzel
A "Holey" Instrument of Peace in Iraq

Cindy Sheehan
An Uphill Battle

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Futile Constitutional Amendment

Website of the Day
A Message from the Moral Compass of the McCain Campaign

May 22, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Racist Grammar

Joanne Mariner
A Military Commissions Cheat Sheet

Sharon Smith
60 Years of Apartheid

Jeff Birkenstein
Disaster Redux: Some Early Thoughts on the Earthquake in China

Brendan McQuade
From Obama to the PRTs in Iraq

Peter Morici
The Sorry State of the Banking Industry

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Restoration Boulevard

Dave Zirin
What I Want to Ask Mary Tillman

Ron Jacobs
CPR for the Antiwar Movement

Stephen Lendman
Immoral Hazard

Website of the Day
Hagee: God Sent Hitler to Drive the Jews to Israel

May 21, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Gothic Politics of Hillary Clinton

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. Military Bases in South America

Alan Farago
Miami, Cuba and the Presidential Campaign

Dave Lindorff
Big John and the Scary, Scary Iran Threat

David Model
Genocide in Iraq?

Eric Walberg
Afghanistan: Who is the Enemy?

Franklin Lamb
Lebanon Gets a President

Kenneth Couesbouc
Tax Against Tyranny

Website of the Day
Child Labor and War-Affected Children: a Photo Essay

May 20, 2008

Ralph Nader
A Trip Inside Google

Uri Avnery
With Friends Like These

Patrick Irelan
The Empire and the Fleet

Ray McGovern
Come Out, Admiral Fallon, Wherever You Are

David Macaray
The UAW Strike Against American Axle

Chris Genovali
Big Oil on the Water: Skating Around the Tanker Issue

Ibrahim Fawal
Birmingham, Israel and the Nakba

Christopher Ketcham
Let Us Now Praise Famous Suicides

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Trial Delayed

Martha Rosenberg
Merck is a Repeat Offender

Website of the Day
Defend the Students Who Pied Tom Friedman

May 19, 2008

Saul Landau
Cuba Will Live

Paul Craig Roberts
The Metamorphosis of the Conservative Movement

Brian McKenna
Brotherly Love in Philly's Badlands

Patrick Cockburn
City of the Dead: Mosul on Lockdown

B. R. Gowani
The Central Problem Pakistan Needs to Tackle

Dr. Trudy Bond
Psychologists and Torture: If Not Now, When?

Cindy Sheehan
Whose War is It?

John Mohawk
The Warriors Who Turned to Peace

Remi Kanazi
When Free Speech Doesn't Come for Free

Robert Day
I Get a Horse

Website of the Day
Evolve or Die

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On Iraq, Iran and Norman Finkelstein

Chomsky Speaks

By WAJAHAT ALI

"I’m absolutely deluged with requests right now, but I really would like to do this interview, I just don’t know when,” replied the 79 year old, prolific author, linguist, scholar and political dissident to the first of my many emails over a six-month correspondence. Noam Chomsky is the most cited, and perhaps most controversial, leading living public intellectual according to the 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll. Although mainstream media refuses him airtime, The New York Times states Chomsky remains one of the most “influential” intellectuals alive, constantly sought by students, Universities, activists, academic symposiums, and even world leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

I first met the infamous and controversial scholar activist in 2002 when I moderated a question and answer session with him at my old alma mater, U.C. California, Berkeley. [The educational and informative event was later transcribed in the book Power and Terror: Post 9-11 Talks and Interviews.] Before the program, we had a nice hour to chat, and I was impressed by his inexhaustible memory, low key demeanor, and razor sharp recollection of facts, names and dates when answering my endless questions. When I asked whether he identified himself more as a scholar or an activist, he said neither exclusively, but mentioned dissent was firmly ingrained in him after he wrote his first article condemning the rise of fascism during the Spanish Civil War. [He was ten when he wrote it.] Although many academics and intellectuals’ arrogance is outmatched only by their insecurity thereby reflecting a cold, selfish elitism, I’ve always found Chomsky to be gracious, accommodating and agreeable with his time and knowledge.

Thus, it was no surprise that after six months of email tag, Professor Chomsky “finally found a little time to respond to the questions.” In this exclusive interview, Chomsky discusses the “threat” of Iran, the parallels and dissimilarities between Vietnam and Iraq, the American media, his critics and detractors, Pakistan, and the Norman Finkelstein tenure debacle. 

ALI: In 1969, you published your first major political work, American Power and the New Mandarins, a scathing critique of the United States involvement in Vietnam and South East Asia. As you know, many have drawn parallels between our current War in Iraq with our military actions in Vietnam. (Others, of course, reject this comparison). As one with considerable experience researching both significant moments in history, are these parallels premature and presumptuous? Or, are there significant similarities that can be gleaned from both wars in relation to the United States involvement?

CHOMSKY: The primary similarities have to do with how the wars are viewed in the U.S. (and the West generally).  Apart from the margins, opinions range from “hawk” to “dove.” In both cases, the hawks say that with more commitment the U.S. could win.  The doves, in both cases, take the stand expressed by Barack Obama about Iraq (a “strategic blunder,” too costly to ourselves), or by the prominent liberal historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger in 1966, when Vietnam was coming to be seen as a venture that is too costly for the US.  Schlesinger explained that “we all pray” that the hawks will be right, and that more troops (the “surge” of the day) will bring victory.  And if they prove to be right, we may all be praising “the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government” in winning victory while leaving “the tragic country gutted and devastated by bombs, burned by napalm, turned into a wasteland by chemical defoliation, a land of ruin and wreck,” with its “political and institutional fabric” pulverized.  But escalation probably will not succeed, he felt, and will prove to be too costly for ourselves, so perhaps strategy should be rethought.  The position of the doves on Iraq is rather similar.  If, for example, General Petraeus could achieve anything like what Putin has achieved in Chechnya, he would be elevated to the Pantheon, with the applause of liberal doves.

It is next to inconceivable, within the mainstream of Western intellectual culture, that one might give a principled critique of the war – that is, the kind of critique we give reflexively, and properly, when some enemy state commits aggression: for example, when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia, or Afghanistan, or Chechnya.  We do not criticize those actions on grounds of cost, error, blunder, quagmire.  Rather, we condemn the actions as horrendous war crimes, whether they succeed or not.

The Vietnam and Iraq wars themselves, however, are quite different in motivation and character.  Vietnam was of no particular value to the U.S. in itself, even though President Eisenhower tried to arouse some support for his undermining of the Geneva peace agreements by bringing up resources of tin and rubber.  If Vietnam had disappeared into the sea, it would have been of little concern to U.S. planners. Iraq is entirely different.  It has perhaps the second largest oil reserves in the world, which are, furthermore, very cheap to extract: no permafrost or tar sands.  And it is right at the center of the world’s greatest resources of easily exploitable energy.

In the case of Vietnam, the concern was that successful independent development there might be a “virus” that would “spread contagion” to others, to borrow Henry Kissinger’s rhetoric with regard to democratic socialism in Chile.  That has been a primary motive for military intervention and subversion throughout the world since World War II – the rational version of the “domino theory.” The “contagion” is that others suffering similar burdens might see successful independent development as a model and might try to pursue the same path, and the system of domination might erode.  Even the weakest and tiniest country therefore poses extreme threats to order.

International affairs are much like the Mafia: the Godfather cannot tolerate disobedience even from a small storekeeper who fails to pay protection money, or “the rot might spread and spoil the barrel,” in the terminology of US planners: the rot of successful independent development, out of US control.  Vietnam, it was feared, might infect surrounding countries, even Indonesia, with its rich resources.  And Japan – what the prominent Asia historian John Dower called “the superdomino” – might “accommodate” to an independent East Asia, becoming its industrial and technological center, effectively recreating the “New Order” that fascist Japan had sought to construct by force during World War II.  The U.S. was not prepared to lose the Pacific phase of World War II a few years later.

When there is fear that a virus may spread contagion, the proper steps are to destroy the virus and inoculate those who might be infected.  That was done.  Vietnam was virtually destroyed (along with Indochina altogether, as the U.S. expanded its war to Laos and Cambodia).  By the late 1960s it was clear that it would never be a model for anyone, and would be lucky to survive.  And the region was “inoculated” by imposition of murderous tyrants: Suharto in Indonesia, Marcos in the Philippines, and so on.  Suharto’s military coup in 1965 was particularly important.  It was described fairly accurately.  The New York Times described it as a “staggering mass slaughter” – and also as “a gleam of light in Asia” -- as Suharto’s military forces led the massacre of perhaps a million people, mostly landless peasants; destroyed the only mass popular political party in the country, a party of the poor, as it was described by Australian Indonesia specialist Harold Crouch; and opened the rich resources of the country to exploitation by Western corporations.  Euphoria was unconstrained.  In retrospect, Kennedy-Johnson National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy reflected that the U.S. should have called of the Vietnam war in 1965, after this grand victory for freedom and justice.

The U.S. achieved a significant victory in Indochina, though it did not achieve its most far-reaching objective: installing a client state.  For the imperial consciousness, the Vietnam war is therefore a “disaster.”

Iraq, as noted, is entirely different.  It is far too valuable to destroy.  It is imperative that it remain under U.S. control, if at all possible, with an obedient client state that will also house major U.S. military bases.  That these were the primary goals of the invasion was always quite obvious, but there is no longer any need to debate it.  These plans were made explicit by the Bush administration in its November 2007 declaration and subsequent pronouncements, along with the rather brazen demand that U.S. corporations must have privileged access to Iraq’s enormous oil reserves.

ALI: It seems the American public has finally discovered the existence of Pakistan after 60 years. How sincere was General Musharraf’s intentions in rebuilding a democracy in Pakistan? Specifically, why does the United States trust Musharraf over potential rivals, such as Bhutto and Zardari’s PPP, Nawaaz Sharif and others, in their “War on terrorism” and “hunt for Bin Laden?”

CHOMSKY: We need not tarry on Musharraf’s sincere intentions to rebuild democracy.  The U.S. supported him as long as possible, just as it supported earlier tyrants, like Zia ul-Haq.  Choice of allies follows a simple criterion: it depends on who is perceived to be the most loyal client, the one who can most be depended on to follow orders.  Despite occasional exceptions, the uniformity is impressive.

ALI: Recently, an U.S. intelligence report concluded that Iran had successfully stopped a nuclear weapons program 4 years ago. Iran maintains it never advanced a program in the first place. Regardless, President Bush, Israel President Olmert and ranking officials in Washington claim Iran remains a “dangerous threat” and is still in pursuit of “nuclear weapons.” How tenable are both parties’ claims (U.S. and Iran)? If it is unsubstantiated, why then the aggressive and confrontational rhetoric against Iran, and how does this benefit U.S foreign policy in the Middle Eastern region?

CHOMSKY: The claims should be evaluated by the International Atomic Energy Agency.  I have no special knowledge, of course.  It would hardly be surprising if it were discovered that Iran has some kind of nuclear weapons program, perhaps contingency plans.  The reasons were explained by one of Israel’s leading military historians, Martin van Creveld.  He argued that Iran would be “crazy” if it were not developing a nuclear deterrent in its current predicament: with hostile forces of a violent superpower on two borders and a hostile regional power (Israel) brandishing hundreds of nuclear weapons, both calling loudly for “regime change.”  Nevertheless, the available evidence indicates that if Iran had such a program, they stopped pursuing it several years ago.

From the U.S. perspective, Iran committed a grave crime in 1979.  As we know, in 1953 the U.S. and UK dismantled Iranian parliamentary democracy and installed a brutal tyrant, the Shah, who remained a pillar of U.S. control over the energy-rich region until 1979, when he was overthrown by a popular uprising.   That was rather like Cuba’s overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1959, or other acts of “successful defiance” of Washington’s principle, to borrow the terms used in internal documents.  The Godfather cannot tolerate “successful defiance.” It is far too great a threat to what is called “stability” – that is, obedience to the master. 

Iranian independence is no slight problem.  It threatens U.S. domination of one of the most valuable prizes in the world, Middle East oil.  Accordingly, from 1979 the U.S. has been bitterly hostile to Iran.  Washington backed Saddam Hussein’s vicious and murderous assault against Iran, and even after the war, continued to provide strong support to its friend Saddam, even inviting Iraqi nuclear engineers for advanced training in nuclear weapons development in 1989.  It then turned to severe sanctions against Iran, along with regular threats to attack Iran and overthrow the government.

That continues to the present.  As I write (June 15, 2008), Reuters reports that ‘Analysts believe that offering Iran security guarantees, an idea floated by Russia, could help end the deadlock, seeing such guarantees as Iran's fundamental goal given the Bush administration's "regime change" policy toward it. But the United States last month said major powers had no plans to make such security pledges to Tehran.’

In simple words, the US insists on maintaining its stance as an outlaw state, dismissing core principles of international law, including the UN Charter, which outlaws the threat or use of force in international affairs.  Bush is joined by both 2008 presidential candidates and by elite opinion in the U.S. and Europe – but not by the American public, which by a large majority favors diplomacy and opposes the threat of force.  But public opinion is largely irrelevant to policy formation, not just in this case.

The political class, across the spectrum with rare exceptions, is committed to maintaining U.S. control over the world’s major energy resources, and to punishing “successful defiance.” Therefore, the U.S. has tried very hard to mobilize an anti-Iranian alliance among the Sunni states of the region, though without much success.  Bush’s two trips to Saudi Arabia in early 2008 were complete failures in this regard.  The Saudi press, normally very polite to important visitors, condemned the policies proposed to them by Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as “not diplomacy in search of peace, but madness in search of war.” The Gulf monarchies are no friends of Iran, but appear to prefer accommodation to confrontation, a bitter blow to U.S. policies.  Washington is facing similar problems in Iraq and Lebanon.  In the background lies a much broader concern: that the energy producers of the region may turn to the East, perhaps even following Iran to establish links to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes China, Russia, and the Central Asian states, with India, Pakistan, and Iran as observers, a status denied to Washington.

ALI: A significant rise in Sunni-Shia conflict has arisen over the past few years specifically in Iraq due to the rising insurgency and civil war catalyzed by Saddam  Hussein’s fall and the resulting power vacuum. How will the “Sunni-Shia” conflict, if at all, reverberate throughout the Middle East, specifically in countries like Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon and in relation to “The War on Terror?” Are we going to see a rise in terrorism, extremism and Anti-Americanism, or will this lead the way for “Divide and conquer” and help American forces and foreign policy “pacify” the region?

CHOMSKY: According to the studies of popular opinion in Iraq by the Pentagon, sectarian conflict in Iraq was not “catalyzed by Saddam Hussein’s fall and the resulting power vacuum,” but by U.S. aggression.  To quote the Washington Post summary of the Pentagon findings released in December 2007, “Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of `occupying forces’ as the key to national reconciliation.” As noted, the U.S. has not had great success in inspiring a regional Sunni-Shia conflict, though the tensions and conflicts are real, and ominous.

The Iraqi invasion has increased terrorism, far more than was anticipated: seven-fold, according to an analysis of quasi-official figures by terrorism specialists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank.  What happens next depends in no slight measure on what U.S. policies will be, though there are many internal factors in this complex region.

ALI: On September 20, 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez promoted your book, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, during his speech at the U.N. General Assembly praising the book for articulating why the greatest danger to world peace currently is the United States. Consequently, there was a media barrage and blitz. You rejected most of the interviews, because you mentioned the reporters didn’t bother or care to actually read the book and discuss its contents, they were instead chasing sensationalism. Does the U.S. media provide an outlet for informative and educational journalism and accurate information that is not tainted by “sensationalism” and ratings-grabbing rhetoric? Does the advent of the Internet and blogs, YouTube, webzines and the like, counter what you have called the “manufacturing of consent,” whereby powerful entities, such as corporations and the U.S. government, spoon feed the media and public convenient propaganda and half truths?

CHOMSKY If I were restricted to a single newspaper, I would choose the New York Times, even though I have written hundreds of pages documenting in detail its misrepresentations, distortions, and crucial omissions in the service of power – selecting the NYT for close examination specifically because of its importance and unmatched resources.  One can learn a great deal by careful and critical reading of the mainstream media, though other sources are very valuable.  The internet provides access to an extraordinary range of information, opinion, and interpretation.  But as with any source, it is useful to the extent that it is used with discrimination and insight.  The best biologists are not the ones who have read the most technical papers in their field, but the ones who have a framework of understanding that enables them to select what is likely to be significant, even in a paper that is otherwise of little value.  The same kind of discernment is necessary in the study of human affairs.

ALI: Your critics, and there are many, state your rhetoric and ideologies belie a broken record – an endless litany and screed of repetitive assaults against the U.S., its foreign policy, and its military actions. How do you respond to critics who insist your painting of U.S. foreign policy is both simplistic and cynical? Is the U.S. truly an evil empire? Can we not point to instances where U.S. intervention or aid was truly selfless and altruistic as per the ideals of the Constitution?

CHOMSKY: The kind of criticisms to which you refer are leveled against dissidents in just about every society in history, and are therefore rightly ignored.  If critics have arguments and evidence, I am glad to look at them, in this domain or others.  When they simply produce tantrums, of the kind to which you refer, we can dismiss the performances as another illustration of what the founder of realist international relations theory, Hans Morgenthau, called “our conformist subservience to those in power,” referring to American (in fact Western) intellectuals, always with a margin of exceptions.  I do not respond to the charge that I describe the U.S. as an “evil empire” because the charge is an infantile fabrication by desperate apologists for state power.  In fact, I repeatedly stress that the U.S. is very much like other systems of power.  True, that stance that is intolerable to nationalists, who insist on U.S. “exceptionalism” – as do the political leadership and the intellectual classes in other powerful states, past and present, quite commonly.  As for genuine “selfless and altruistic” intervention, it is very hard to find examples in the historical record, as scholarship has reviewed, though of course virtually every intervention is depicted in such terms by the perpetrators, even the worst monsters.  The picture is more ambiguous with regard to aid, but not all that different, when we look closely, again close to a historical universal, as I have discussed.

ALI: What does the Norman Finkelstein tenure debacle at Depaul and his scathing critique and dismantling of Alan Dershowitz’s book, Case for Israel, tell of intellectual honesty and integrity in the United States? Is this a warning for academics and intellectuals who don’t “play by the rules” and openly challenge ideologies espoused by powerful interest groups and lobbies? Or, is this just an isolated incident without profound implications or reflections regarding the intellectual environment of post 9-11?

CHOMSKY: The behavior of the DePaul administration in overturning the faculty recommendation for tenure was of course deplorable, but this case should not be generalized too far.  It had special features, notably the role of the desperate and fanatic Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz.  Finkelstein demonstrated with impeccable scholarship that Dershowitz is a slanderer, a liar, and a vulgar apologist for the crimes of his favored state.  Dershowitz turned over heaven and earth to try to prevent the book from being published, and after he failed, launched a hysterical crusade to try to suppress its contents.  He is not a fool, and knows that he cannot respond at the level of fact and argument, so turned to what comes naturally to him: a stream of vilification and abuse, and an extraordinary campaign of intimidation, to which the administration finally succumbed, presumably because of concerns that funders would be mobilized.  The depraved performance is reviewed with fair accuracy in standard journals, like the Chronicle of Higher Education, and I need not comment further here.

It is true that there are major efforts to prevent honest and independent discussion of Middle East issues, particularly anything relating to Israel.  Nonetheless, this is a special case.  And it has nothing to do with the post-9/11 environment.

Wajahat Ali is Pakistani Muslim American who is neither a terrorist nor a saint. He is a playwright, essayist, humorist, and Attorney at Law, whose work, “The Domestic Crusaders” is the first major play about Muslim Americans living in a post 9-11 America. His blog is at http://goatmilk.wordpress.com/. He can be reached at wajahatmali@gmail.com

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