(funk music)
- From Pacifica radio,
this is Democracy Now.
- President Bush, number 28,
said, "The world is safer today,
"because our coalition ended a regime
"that cultivated ties to terror
"while it built weapons
of mass destruction."
Well, you know, his speech
writers and his minders
and trainers know very
well that every word
there was an outrageous lie,
but why should it matter?
If you repeat it loudly enough,
it'll become the truth.
- Today, Noam Chomsky
on Hegemony or Survival,
America's Quest for Global Dominance.
All that and more, coming up.
(funk music)
Welcome to Democracy Now,
the war and peace report.
I'm Amy Goodman.
The United Nations General
Assembly yesterday approved
a resolution demanding
Israel stop building the
massive 150-mile wall
through Palestinian villages
in the West Bank.
The vote was 144 to four.
The only countries voting
against the measure
were the United States,
Israel, the Marshall Islands,
and Micronesia.
12 nations abstained.
Following yesterday's vote, Israel vowed
construction of the
barrier would continue.
17 Democratic senators
joined Republicans yesterday
to pass a new law banning
some forms of abortion.
This marks the first
time since Roe v. Wade
that Congress has barred
specific types of abortion.
Opponents of abortion have
long described the practice
banned as partial birth abortions,
but pro-choice groups say the
bill is deliberately vague
and bans often-used safe
and common procedures.
Three years ago, the Supreme
Court found a similar ban
in Nebraska unconstitutional
because the bill
was written so vaguely.
Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa,
who voted against the bill, said, quote,
"Congress has turned its
back on America's women.
"Their right to privacy,
the right to choose.
"America's women," he said,
"are now second-class citizens."
Iran yesterday pledged
to fully cooperate with
the International Atomic Energy Agency
by temporarily halting the
enrichment and reprocessing
of uranium, and by allowing
in international inspectors.
Iran reached the agreement
with foreign ministers
from Britain, France, and Germany.
In Iraq, the Guardian is
reporting the U.S. and
Iraqi officials were
preparing an arrest warrant
for the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr,
who, they charge, was
involved in the April murder
of a rival Shia cleric.
Sadr has been one of
the most vocal opponents
of the U.S. led occupation.
Last week he announced the
formation of a rival government
to the U.S. appointed
Iraqi governing council.
Observers in Iraq predict there
will be massive resistance
if Sadr is arrested.
In other Iraq news, defense
officials announced plans
yesterday to rotate 30,000
more reservists in Iraq.
U.S. officials said
yesterday they now believe
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
the alleged mastermind
of the September 11th attacks,
personally played a role
in the killing of Wall Street
Journal reporter Daniel Pearl,
who was murdered in Pakistan.
Defense secretary Donald
Rumsfeld announced
the Pentagon is launching an investigation
into public statements
made by Lieutenant General
William Boykin that cast
the so-called war on terror
in terms of a Holy war.
Boykin once said the U.S.
is battling a, quote,
"spiritual enemy named Satan."
On Friday, Boykin insisted
he was not, quote,
"anti-Islam", and said his
remarks had been misconstrued
or taken out of context.
And this news a week after a rare protest
backed by Saudi dissidents was put down
by police in Riyadh.
The London-based Islamist opposition group
is promising a new challenge
by calling on supporters
to take to the streets
tomorrow in several cities.
A new report by Human
Rights Watch has determined
that one in six U.S. prisoners
suffers from mental illness.
The group estimates the
nation's prisons holds
three times as many
mentally ill men and women
as do the nation's mental hospitals.
In Ecuador, a trial has
begun where 30,000 Ecuadorans
are suing Chevron Texaco
for one billion dollars
for polluting the nation's rain
forest and water resources.
Chevron, Texaco, which
later merged with Chevron,
is accused of dumping more
than 18 billion gallons
of toxic materials into
unlined pits and Amazon rivers
from 1972 to 1992.
Former U.S. President
George Bush is retiring
as senior advisor to the Carlyle group.
The financial Times
reported Carlyle offered
no explanation for Bush's retirement
other than his age and his desire
to move on to other endeavors.
Bush was one of many former top officials
employed by the secretive
private equity firm,
which invests in defense firms.
Others include former
British prime minister
John Major, former U.S.
secretary of state James Baker,
and former defense
secretary Frank Carlucci.
George W. Bush also
once served on the board
of a Carlyle-owned company.
Ties between the Bush family and Carlyle
become a growing political
liability for President Bush,
in part because of
Osama bin Laden's family
was major investors in Carlyle,
up until shortly after the
September 11th attacks.
And anti-war protesters
from across the country
are planning to march in
Washington and San Francisco
this weekend to oppose the
U.S. occupation in Iraq.
The demonstrations are
also timed to coincide
with the second anniversary of the passing
of the USA Patriot Act.
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts,
a judge yesterday
ruled in favor of 11
anti-war protesters who were
arrested for trespassing,
committing civil disobedience
outside the federal building
in Springfield, Massachusetts.
And you are listening to Democracy Now,
as we turn to Noam Chomsky,
institute professor of linguistics at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His latest book, Hegemony or Survival,
America's Quest for Global Dominance.
He spoke at Illinois State University
on October 7th.
This is Professor Noam Chomsky.
- Let's start with about a year ago.
September, 2002, in the normal course of
political life, as academic life,
September is usually an incipient month,
the thing when important
things begin to happen.
And September 2002 was
unusual in this respect.
There were three very significant
events, closely related.
One was the declaration of the
national security strategy,
on September 17th.
It announced very clearly and explicitly
that the United States, at
least this administration,
intends to dominate the world permanently,
if necessary, through the use of force.
It's the one dimension in
which the United States
reigns completely supreme,
probably by now outspends
the rest of the world
combined, or close to it,
in military expenditures,
as far ahead in developing
advanced and extremely
dangerous technology.
And it also announced
that it will eliminate any
potential challenge to that rule.
So it's to be permanent
hegemony, permanent domination.
That was the first event.
That's not without precedent.
In fact, there are quite
interesting precedents.
I don't have time to go
into them unless you want
to later, but this was unusual.
And it was correct for the reaction to be
as extreme as it was,
including the foreign policy elite here.
The second associated event
was that in September, the
war drums began to beat
loudly about the planned invasion of Iraq.
Early September, the
National Security advisor,
Condoleezza Rice warned
that the next evidence
we were likely to have
about Saddam Hussein
would be a mushroom cloud,
presumably over New York,
no matter how much everyone
else may have hated him
outside the United
States, no one feared him,
including his neighbors, who'd
been trying to reintegrate
Iraq back into the
region, who despised him,
including the countries he
invaded, but didn't fear him.
That was unique to the United States,
beginning last September.
So first there's gonna
be a mushroom cloud,
and then the propaganda
campaign began, very loud.
The invasion of Iraq that
was planned was understood
to be what's sometimes
called an exemplary action.
That is, it's an action intended
to demonstrate dramatically
that the doctrine that had been announced
is intended seriously.
It's not enough to just
promulgate a doctrine.
If you want people to take you seriously,
you have to do something
to show that you mean it.
And the invasion of Iraq
was understood correctly
to be a test case, a demonstration case,
of the doctrine that the
U.S. government arrogates
to itself the right to
attack any country it wants
without credible pre-text
and without any
international authorization.
In fact, the national
security strategy is,
as commentators quickly pointed out,
it doesn't even mention
international law and
the United Nations Charter.
In fact, the Bush administration
proceeded to make it
very clear to the Security
Council of the United Nations
that they had two choices.
They could be relevant,
was the term that was used,
by authorizing the United States
to use force as it wished,
or they could be a debating society,
as Colin Powell, the administration
moderate, pointed out.
But he, Powell, was also delegated to
address the World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland
the following January.
This is, you know what that
is, that's the group that
the Business Press only
semi-ironically calls
the masters of the universe.
The people who own the world,
the top corporate executives
who are spending 30,000
dollars for the privilege
of attending and other
great and important figures.
The mood in Davos was
completely different than any
of the early, earlier meetings.
It was very angry.
The top issue was Iraq, they
were strongly opposed to it,
just like the rest of the world.
Powell faced a very
hostile audience, and he,
they were not eager to accept
his message, which was,
as he put it, that the United
States has the sovereign
right to use military force.
When we feel strongly about
something, we will lead,
even if nobody else is following.
We'll do it because we
have the power to do it,
and if you don't like it, too bad.
The further comments
for the administration,
from the administration to the
Security Council and others,
were, we're not going to ask
for any authorization from you.
You can catch up, was
the term that was used,
and authorize us to do what
we are going to do anyway,
or you're irrelevant.
That was reiterated very
brazenly at the Azores Summit,
the Bush Blair Summit, right.
A couple of days before
the actual invasion,
they met at a military base on the Azores,
so they wouldn't have to
face mass popular opposition,
which would have happened anywhere else.
And they declared, they
issued an ultimatum
not to Iraq, but to the United Nations.
The ultimatum was, give
us your stamp of approval
for what we're gonna
do anyway, or else just
go off and be a debating society.
They also made it clear
that it didn't matter
whether Saddam Hussein and his cohorts
stayed in Iraq or not.
Bush announced even if
the, Saddam and his family
and associates leave,
we're gonna invade anyway,
because the goal is to,
for us to control Iraq.
That's my words, not his,
the rest is his words.
All very clear and
explicit, can't miss it.
And it wasn't missed.
The, I'll come back to that.
The third event, before I
come back to it, in September,
closely related, is that
the Congressional election
campaign opened, the
mid-term election campaign.
The main sort of campaign
advisor for the Republican party,
Karl Rove, one of the most
important people in Washington,
he had already, the preceding
summer, summer of 2002,
he had instructed party
activists that in going into
the electoral campaign, they're
going to have to emphasize
national security issues.
They cannot expect to enter
a political confrontation
with, if economic and social policies
are prominent on the agenda,
because their policies
are extremely unpopular,
which is not surprising,
since they are designed
to be extremely harmful
to the general population
and people know that,
and also to future generations.
And you can't go into a political campaign
with that kind of a platform.
So therefore, it had to be
national security issues,
on the assumption that people
would shift their priorities
and vote for the, those
who were gonna protect them
from imminent destruction.
Well, for the elections, it barely worked,
by a few tens of thousands
of votes, in fact,
but enough to allow them a
bare hold on political power.
The voters' preferences
at the polls remained,
as exit polls revealed, remained the same,
they didn't change,
but priorities shifted.
And enough people huddled
under the umbrella of power
in fear of the demonic
enemies that they could
maintain control, barely.
Well that illustrates one
of the dilemmas of dominance
that I had in mind.
One problem is, how do you
control the domestic population?
The Great Beast, as Alexander
Hamilton called the people,
they're always a problem,
the beast is always
getting out of control.
And one of the main
problems of governance,
I'm sure you study this in all your
political science courses,
is how do you keep
the Great Beast in a cage?
That's particularly difficult
when you're dedicated,
passionately, to carrying out policies
that are in fact going to be very harmful
to the mass of the population
and to future generations,
then it's difficult.
And only one effective way
has ever been discovered
by the people in office
now, or anyone else,
under those conditions,
and that is, inspire fear.
If you can do that, maybe
you can get away with it.
And for the people in office
now, it's second nature.
Important to remember this.
It's kind of striking that
it hasn't been discussed
extensively, but if
you think for a minute,
the people, the present
incumbents in Washington,
are almost entirely
recycled from the Reagan
and first Bush administration.
In fact, from their more
reactionary sectors,
or else they're immediate
two peas, you know,
it's essentially that administration.
And they're following
pretty much the same script
as the first 12 years they
had in political power,
in both domestically and internationally,
and you can learn a lot
about what they're doing
by just paying attention to what happened
in those 12 years.
They were, in fact, pursuing policies
that were highly unpopular.
Reagan's policies were strongly opposed
by the population, but they
did keep voting for him,
mainly out of fear.
They continually pressed the panic button
every year or two, I'll come back to that.
Reagan in fact ended up
in 1992 being the most
unpopular living U.S.
president, next to Nixon,
ranked slightly above
Nixon, well below Carter,
and even below the almost-forgotten Ford.
But they did manage to
hang on for 12 years,
and they're following
essentially the same script.
Well, except with much more arrogance
and commitment and optimism,
feeling that they can
do things that they
couldn't get away with then
for various reasons.
- You're listening to
Professor Noam Chomsky.
He is speaking at
Illinois State University.
He is author of Hegemony or Survival,
America's Quest for Global Dominance.
Back with Professor Chomsky in a minute.
(electronic music)
And you are listening to Democracy Now,
the war and peace report,
as we return to the
speech of Noam Chomsky.
He gave it October 7th at
Illinois State University.
Author of Hegemony or Survival,
America's Quest for Global Dominance.
Noam Chomsky.
- Well, let's go back to the other
two major events of September.
The national security strategy
and the invasion of Iraq.
It was understood that
this is to be the fir,
as the New York Times
put it, after the war,
though it was obvious
before, that this was to be
the first test of the
national security strategy,
not the last.
The invasion of Iraq,
they pointed out is the
petri dish for an experiment
in preemptive attack.
The term, and that was
understood around the world.
There was huge protests around the world,
and the United States too,
completely without any
historical precedent,
and it wasn't just over
the invasion of Iraq.
That was the same in
Davos, it's the same in the
foreign policy elite here.
It was about the, it was partly that,
but more because of the general strategy
of which Iraq is to be
an exemplary action.
It's supposed to create a new norm
in international relations,
which only those with
the guns can implement of course,
and it struck plenty of fear in the world.
That's mainly what the protest was about.
Well the phrase that the
Times used, preemptive strike,
is, preemptive attack,
is conventional, but completely wrong.
Preemptive war has a meaning
in international law.
It, it's kind of on
the border of legality,
if you think about the UN Charter,
it authorizes the use of
force under one condition,
two conditions.
Either the Security
Council calls for it, or,
in self-defense against armed attack
until the Security Council
has a chance to act.
And that has sort of a fringe of judgment.
So, for example, if, say, Russian bombers
were flying across the Atlantic
with the obvious intent of
bombing the United States,
it would be legitimate
under, or it would be
interpreted as legitimate under Article 51
to shoot them down before they bomb.
Maybe even to attack the
base they were coming from.
That's a preemptive strike.
It's a military action taken
against an imminent attack
when no other possibility is open
and there's no time to
notify the Security Council.
That's preemptive war.
But that's not what's being proposed.
Sometimes it's called more
accurately, preventive war,
or anticipatory self-defense.
Well, that's at least
not completely wrong,
but it's also mostly wrong.
There's nothing that has to be prevented,
and there's no self-defense involved.
The prevention is against an
imagined or invented threat.
There was no threat of attack
from Iraq, that was farcical.
The, so what's called for
is not even preventive war,
as the more cautious
commentators pointed out,
or anticipatory self-defense.
In fact, it's just straight
outright aggression.
And it, what was called the
supreme crime at Nuremberg,
the most serious of all crimes.
That's what the doctrine announces.
We have the right to carry
out the supreme crime
of Nuremberg, and we'll count
on international lawyers
and respectable
intellectuals to pretty it up
and make it look like something else.
But essentially, that's
what it comes down to,
and that's the way it was understood.
It was understood here,
too, by people who care
about the country.
So, the most extreme
condemnation of the war
that I came across was
right from the middle
of the mainstream.
When the U.S. bombed,
when the bombing began,
Arthur Schlesinger, a very
respectable American historian,
senior American historian,
highly respected,
one of Kennedy's advisors, had an article
in which he said that the bombing of Iraq
resembles the actions of
imperial Japan at Pearl Harbor
on a date which the
president at the time said,
a date that will live in infamy.
And he said President
Roosevelt was correct.
It's a date that will live in infamy,
except now it's Americans
who live in infamy,
and the world knows it.
And that's the reason why
the sympathy and solidarity
with the United States
that was evident after 9/11
has turned into a wave
of revulsion and fear
and often hatred, which
is horrible in itself,
but also an extreme danger.
Well, he was not alone.
The national security
strategy aroused many shudders
worldwide, that included the
foreign policy elite at home.
Right away, within weeks, the
main establishment journal,
Foreign Affairs, ran, of the
Council on Foreign Relations,
ran a article by a well-known
international relations
scholar in which he warned
that the imperial grand
strategy, as he called
it, posed great dangers
to the world, and the
population of the United States.
The United States was
declaring itself, he said,
to be a revisionist state that is
tearing to shreds the
framework of international law
and institutions,
and the effect of that
is, and hoping, expecting
to be able to permanently
dominate the world by force.
But it's, he said, not gonna work.
Aside from being wrong, it's
going to lead to efforts,
on the part of potential
victims, to counter it.
They're not going to sit there
and wait to be destroyed.
They can't compete with the
United States in military force,
nobody can, but there
are weapons of the weak.
Two, primarily.
One is weapons of mass
destruction, which by now
are becoming weapons of the weak,
and the other is terror.
So he and many other
foreign policy analysts
and intelligence agencies pointed out that
the strategy is essentially calling for
proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction
and increase in terror,
and hence a great danger
to the world altogether,
but to the United States in particular.
The war in Iraq was understood
exactly the same way.
The U.S. and British
intelligence agencies,
the British ones have just been exposed
in the Hutton inquiry in London, but
there were enough leaks before.
Both the British and the
U.S. intelligence agencies
and other intelligence agencies,
and plenty of independent analysts,
about anyone you pick,
predicted that one likely
consequence of the Iraq invasion
would be proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction
and terror.
Many commentators have pointed
out that it's pretty likely
that the Iranian and
the North Korean actions
since are a response to the, to the threat
of the national security
strategy and its implemetation
and are turning to the weapons
that are available to them,
weapons of mass destruction.
The U.S. indeed made that very clear,
and it was a very clear and
ugly lesson to the world
last winter.
North Korea is a far more vicious and ugly
and dangerous state than Iraq,
that is, Saddam Hussein was.
But the U.S. wasn't
gonna attack North Korea.
It was gonna attack Iraq
as the exemplary action.
I mean, in part, that's
because Iraq's just a lot
more important, you know,
as, right in the center
of the oil-producing region.
But in part it's because
Iraq was understood
to be completely defenseless.
And if you have any brains,
you don't attack anybody
who can defend themselves, that's stupid.
You wanna attack somebody
who's completely defenseless,
and Iraq was known to be
completely defenseless,
that's why nobody was afraid of it,
much as they might have hated it.
North Korea, on the other
hand, had a deterrent.
The deterrent was not nuclear weapons,
it was conventional weapons.
Masked artillery on the DMZ,
the border of South Korea.
Extensive masked artillery
aimed at the capital, Seoul,
of South Korea, and at the
U.S. troops in the south.
And, unless the Pentagon
can figure out a way
to get rid of that, with, you know,
precision weapons or something or other,
that's a deterrent to a U.S. attack.
In fact, U.S. troops
have since been withdrawn
from the DMZ, and that's
caused plenty of concern
in both South and North
Korea, in the region,
suggesting a very cynical strategy,
you can figure it out.
But what the U.S. was
telling the world is,
if you don't want us to
attack you and destroy you,
you better have some kind of deterrent.
And for most of the
world, that's gonna mean
weapons of mass destruction, and terror.
The result of the war, as far as we know,
verified that near universal prediction
of intelligence agencies and analysts.
It's been pointed out since that
to quote a few, that the
Iraq War was a huge setback
of the war on terror, led
to a sharp recruitment,
sharp spike in recruitment
for Al Qaeda and other
terrorist groups.
And in fact, Iraq itself
was turned into a haven
for terrorists for the first time.
It wasn't before, but now it is.
That was expected, and that's
another dilemma of dominance.
You have to control the
Great Beast at home,
and while violence is an effective device,
and may intimidate many
people and countries,
it's likely to incite others,
to incite them to revenge,
or simply to find means of deterrence.
And since no one can think
of competing with the
United States in military power,
well, that leaves the weapons of the weak.
Weapons of mass destruction and terror,
and those may sooner or later be united.
That's been predicted for years.
With contemporary technology,
it's not that hard
for terrorist groups with
a low level of financing
and sophistication to gain access
to even nuclear weapons,
small nuclear weapons.
And the chances, the
possibilities of smuggling them
into the United States are overwhelming.
If you're interested in
having a sleepless night,
you can read some of the
high level studies that have
been coming out for the
past six or seven years,
well before 9/11, but increasingly,
which are virtually
cookbooks for terrorists.
I mean, they're the
kind of things I suspect
we could do if we wanted to.
And maybe, maybe,
impossible to stop, for
all kind of reasons.
The Hart Rudman report which
came out about a year ago,
Gary Hart and Warren
Rudman, two former senators,
did a high level study of
threats, on threats of terror,
is one of many such examples.
So yeah, sooner or later,
weapons of mass destruction
and terror will be united,
and the consequences
could be quite horrific.
Well, with all of that
is the likely consequence
predicted, and so far happening,
of the security strategy
and the test case,
the dramatic test case to illustrate it.
Well, administration
planners know all of this
as well as everyone else.
I mean, they're intelligent, literate,
they read the same intelligence
reports everyone else does.
So they know that yes, that the
policies they're tearing out
are increasing the threat
to the security of the
American people and the
world and of course,
future generations.
And they don't want that,
they don't want that outcome.
It just doesn't matter very much.
If you look at the ranking of priorities,
it just doesn't rank very high.
Yeah, likely to happen,
might, could happen,
but other things are just more important.
The things that are more
important are establishing
global hegemony and tearing
out the highly regressive
domestic policies of trying to roll back
the New Deal and the
progressive legislation
of the past century in fact, and creating
a very different kind of domestic society,
one that most of the public
passionately opposes,
but may accept under the
threat of destruction,
manufactured and some increasingly real.
Well, this again gets
back to the first dilemma,
how do you control the domestic public,
the Great Beast.
In particular, the problem now
is winning the 2004 election.
Remember that they have a very narrow hold
on political power, you all know that.
The 2000 election was disputed.
The 2002 election was barely, you know,
barely managed to sneak through,
and now we're up to 2004,
and what do we do with that?
Well,
go back to last May.
On the first of May, you remember,
there was a carefully staged extravaganza
which elicited ridicule and
fear throughout the world,
but was played pretty seriously here,
when the president landed
on the Abraham Lincoln
aircraft carrier wearing
combat gear, and you know,
posing and so on and so forth.
It was pretty frightening for the world.
And here, you know, it
sort of, way to say,
played pretty straight.
The, he gave a victory speech.
We won a victory over in Iraq.
The front page story in the New York Times
used a phrase that I'll come back to,
it's important.
They said it was a
powerful Reaganesque finale
to the war in Iraq.
We'll come back to that.
More astute observers pointed out that the
extravaganza was the opening
of the 2004 election campaign,
which must be built on
national security themes.
That's the Wall Street Journal.
Karl Rove, same guy, announced right away
that the 2004 election is, the main theme
is gonna have to be what he
called the battle of Iraq,
and he emphasized battle,
the battle of Iraq,
not the war.
It's an episode in the war on
terror, which must continue.
And in fact, if you look at
the president's declaration
on the Abraham Lincoln,
he said that we had won a
victory in the war on terror
by removing an ally of Al Qaeda.
Notice that it's immaterial
that there is not the slightest
evidence of any connection
between Saddam Hussein
and his bitter enemy, Osama bin Laden,
and the idea of the
connection is dismissed by
every competent authority,
including the intelligence agencies.
But it doesn't matter.
It's a higher truth,
all you have to do is repeat it,
loudly enough and often enough.
Facts are irrelevant.
In particular, the specific facts,
(applause)
Again,
I mean, they didn't invent this formula.
It's not pleasant to think
about the antecedents,
but they're there.
The,
it's also irrelevant,
specifically that there is
actually a connection
between the war on terror
and the invasion of
Iraq, namely the invasion
increased the threat of terror,
exactly as predicted.
But this doesn't make any difference,
and it continues.
- You're listening to
Noam Chomsky speaking at
Illinois State University on October 7th.
Noam Chomsky's latest book
is Hegemony or Survival,
America's Quest for Global Dominance.
You can get more
information at our website
at democracynow.org.
We'll return to this speech in a minute.
(rap music)
♫ You will not be able to
plug in, turn, and cop out
♫ You will not be able
to lose yourself on skag
♫ And skip out for beer during commercials
♫ Because the revolution
will not be televised
♫ The revolution will not be televised
♫ The revolution will not
be brought to you by Xerox
♫ In four parts without
commercial interruptions
♫ The revolution will not
show you pictures of Nixon
♫ Blowing a bugle and leading a charge
♫ By John Mitchell, General
Abrams and Spiro Agnew
♫ To eat hog maws confiscated
from a Harlem sanctuary
♫ The revolution will not be televised
♫ The revolution will
not be brought to you
♫ By the Schaefer Award
Theatre and will not
♫ Star Natalie Woods and Steve McQueen
♫ Or Bullwinkle and Julia
♫ The revolution will not
give your mouth sex appeal
♫ The revolution will
not get rid of the nubs
♫ The revolution will not make
you look five pounds thinner,
♫ Because the revolution will
not be televised, Brother
♫ There will be no pictures
of you and Willie May
♫ Pushing that shopping cart
down the block on the dead run,
♫ Or trying to slide
that color television ♫
- Gill Scott-Heron, The
Revolution Will Not be Televised.
That was before, he wrote
that before Democracy Now
went on TV.
You are listening to Democracy Now,
I'm Amy Goodman.
As we return to the
speech of Noam Chomsky,
professor of linguistics
at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Author of many books.
His latest is Hegemony or Survival,
America's Quest for Global
Dominance, Noam Chomsky,
speaking at Illinois State University.
- A week or so ago,
in his weekly presidential radio address,
President Bush, number 28, said,
"The world is safer today
because our coalition
"ended a regime that
cultivated ties to terror
"while it built weapons
of mass destruction."
Well, you know, his speech
writers and his minders
and trainers know very
well that every word there
was an outrageous lie,
but why should it matter?
If you repeat it loudly
enough, it'll become the truth.
Well, how can Karl Rove
hope to get away with it?
Well, just have a look
back at what just happened
in September 2002, the
last election campaign.
That, as I said, was the
beginning of an onslaught
of government media propaganda,
which had a very substantial effect.
By the end of the month,
by the end of September,
about 60% of the population regarded Iraq
as a serious threat to the
security of the United States.
And remember, the United
States is alone in the world
in this respect.
I mean in Kuwait, and
Iran, which Saddam invaded,
they beat the light out
of Tehran, limb from limb,
but they're not afraid of him.
And they're not afraid
of him because they know
exactly what U.S. intelligence
and everyone else knows.
Iraq was the weakest
country in the region.
It had been devastated
by the U.S. sanctions,
which are called UN
sanctions, but if it wasn't
for U.S. pressure, they wouldn't exist.
They wiped out the population,
they happened to strengthen
the tyrant, but devastated the economy.
The country was virtually disarmed,
it was under total surveillance.
Its military budget was
about a third that of Kuwait,
which has 10% of its population,
and far below the other
states in the region,
including of course the
regional superpower,
which we're not allowed to talk about,
because there's an offshore
U.S. military base.
But outside the United
States, everyone knows
that there is one country in the region
that has extensive weapons
of mass destruction,
and has military forces,
which, according to its own
analysts, are more technically advanced
and more powerful than
those of any NATO country,
outside the United States.
Unmentionable here, but
known everywhere else.
That's the,
and Iraq isn't even in
the league of Kuwait,
let alone anything like that.
So it wasn't, certainly not a threat,
but by the end of September,
as the result of a propaganda campaign of
quite impressive character,
government campaign
transmitted uncritically by the media,
about 60% of the population believed
that there was a threat.
Pretty soon after that,
the proportion of the
population that believed
that Iraq was involved in 9/11,
may be responsible for it,
went up to 50%, higher,
depended on how you asked the question.
And also the belief that
Iraq was, you know, had
entered relations with Al Qaeda
and other gross misperceptions
which are rejected by
every intelligence agency,
including the U.S.,
but it did become, it
did work domestically,
not anywhere else.
That's the media, behavior,
I'm gonna, let me quote a
noncontroversial source,
the very respectable bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists.
The editor, Linda
Rothstein, wrote recently
that the charges dangled
in front of the media
failed the laugh test, but
the more ridiculous they were,
the more the media strove
to make wholehearted
swallowing of them the test of patriotism.
And it's sort of, it's pretty accurate,
it sort of worked, only domestically.
And not only in part, because
it was part of the population.
The rest of the population
was overwhelmingly
opposed to the war at a level
that literally has no precedent.
But it worked enough to
sneak by the election
and to build up a base
of support for the war,
and not surprisingly, a
belief in these fantasies
was highly correlated
with support for the war,
as you'd expect, if you
believed those things were,
sounds right.
Well, that's significant.
Congress, in October,
right after the propaganda
campaign began, passed a resolution
authorizing the government
to resort to force,
to defend the United States against the
continuing threat of Iraq.
Again, remember that the
United States was the only
country that was under that threat,
but Congress passed it.
The media and commentators
and the intellectual world
were silent about the fact
that I presume they were
aware of, that the
Congressional resolution
was a copy of it, still
following the script.
In 1985, President Reagan
declared a national emergency
in the United States
because of, and I'm quoting,
"the unusual and extraordinary threat
"to the security of the United States,
"posed by the government of Nicaragua",
which was two days' driving
time from Harlington, Texas,
so we had to quake in fear before that.
And notice that that's
much more severe than Iraq.
That was an unusual and
extraordinary threat.
In fact, Reagan went on
to a press conference
where he said, you know,
I know the enormous odds
against me, but I remember
a man named Churchill,
and he stood up against
terrific odds, fought Hitler,
and I'm not going to give
up, never, never, never,
despite the hoards of
Nicaraguans who are invading us
and about to conquer us.
(laughter)
And that passed the laugh
test in the United States.
If you checked back, just report it,
and yeah, people were afraid.
The rest of the world
couldn't believe it, you know.
But it happened, that's
another reason why they expect
that they can do it again.
It helps explain the confidence.
The, and it wasn't the only case.
I mean, through the 1980s,
year after year, there was one or another
threat of that nature.
Libyan hitmen were wandering
the streets of Washington,
about to assassinate our leader,
who was holed up in the White House,
surrounded by tanks.
The Russians were gonna build an airbase
in the nutmeg capital
of the world, Grenada,
if they could find it on a map.
And they were gonna bomb us.
That brings us back to
the New York Times phrase,
powerful Reaganesque finale.
What are they referring to?
Well, they know what they're referring to.
They're referring to Reagan's
speech after the United,
after the brave cowboy barely
saved us from destruction
from the Grenadans,
(laughter)
by sending 6,000 Special Forces
who were able to overcome a couple dozen
middle-aged construction workers,
(laughter, applause)
incidentally, won 8,000 medals for it.
But then there was a speech
saying, we're standing tall.
That's the powerful,
Reaganesque finale that the
front page of the New York
Times is referring to.
Maybe the reporter's being
ironic, I don't know,
but what gets to the public is
just the message, not
what's in the person's mind.
And the message is, yeah,
we're in constant danger.
After Grenada, it was Libya again,
and after that it was domestic threats.
George Bush the first
won his election by just
straight pulling the race card.
Willie Horton, the black
rapist, is going to come
after you unless you put me in.
Crime in the United States is like other
industrial countries, but fear
of crime is off the spectrum.
Same with drugs.
Drugs, yeah, problem, in other countries
about the same as here.
But fear of drugs is far higher here,
and it's constantly manipulated
by unscrupulous politicians
and obedient media,
and you get continual hysteria about drugs
and Nicaraguans on the march,
and Grenadans and the rest.
And so, there's a reason
for the confidence.
And remember that they
were able to hold power
for 12 years, even over
the fact that the pop, the,
most of the population
was considerably harmed
by the domestic policies,
and opposed them.
But they stayed in office,
and now they are much more confident.
Well, there's quite a
lot at stake for them.
It's not just a matter
of narrow political gain.
What's at stake is world
domination, by force.
And also control of the
major energy resources
in the world, which is not a small thing.
The hope is surely that
the, Iraq will end up
being some kind of client state, you know,
they'll call it a democracy
or something like that.
But some kind of client
state, what the British used
in their day used to call an Arab facade,
behind which the British
would effectively rule.
The U.S. will presumably
end up with military bases
right in the heart of
the oil producing region,
for the first time,
reliable military bases,
and that region is of extreme importance.
I mean, back in 1945, the
Gulf region was recognized
by the State Department
to be what they called
a stupendous source of strategic power,
and one of the great material
prizes of world history.
And ever since then, it's
been a leading feature
in U.S. policy, not surprisingly,
to maintain control over it.
Not access to the oil.
If the U.S. was running
on renewable energy,
it'd still need to control it.
It's a huge source of profit,
helps fuel the U.S. economy in many ways,
and it's a tremendous
lever to world control.
You control that, you've got
powerful controls over others.
And the others know it,
that's why they seek
energy independence somehow.
The U.S. intelligence
projections are that it's
gonna be about two-thirds
of the energy reserves
of the world in the
coming several decades.
They also predict that the U.S. itself
is not gonna rely on it particularly.
The U.S., they expect
will rely on more reliable
Atlantic basin sources,
like the Western Hemisphere
and the Andes, Canada, West Africa,
not so dangerous, but
you gotta control it.
Because it's a lever of world control
and a source of enormous material wealth.
Well, that's important.
The other aspect of
what's important is the
domestic policy.
The government is just completely redoing
what they did the first
time around, 20 years ago,
but now in a much more extreme form.
They're pursuing, they're
trying to drive the country
into what economists call
a fiscal train wreck.
The purpose is, to use
Reaganite terminology,
to starve the beast.
That was David Stockman's phrase, the,
Reagan's budget director.
The way we can destroy social programs,
you can't get up and
run for office and say,
I'm gonna get rid of Social
Security and Medicare
and schools, and so on and so forth.
But what you can do, is say,
well, we've got this huge
deficit, you know, tremendous debt.
In fact, they're now, the
government's own economists
are now estimating we're
gonna have 44 trillion dollars
of unpayable bills, and that's great.
Because that's a fiscal
train wreck and we'll starve
the beast, the beast being
anything in the government
that functions for the
benefit of the population.
They want a powerful state.
In fact, they've increased
federal spending radically.
It's the biggest increase
in federal spending
since the first time they
were in office 20 years ago.
So gotta be a very powerful
state, but oriented
towards the needs of the
rich and the powerful,
not the rest of us.
We'll survive somehow.
So the huge, you know,
unpayable debts are fine.
That's the way you starve the beast.
Massive tax cuts for the rich,
a huge increase in federal spending.
So it's kind of Reagan
policies, but much more extreme,
just like the international
ones are similar,
but more extreme.
And the only method, again,
is press the panic button.
Well, there are other
dilemmas of dominance,
and they're worth paying
some attention to.
One of the most spectacular
achievements of the
propaganda system, the doctrinal system,
in the past year.
And I don't mean just the media.
I mean the journals of opinion, you know,
the intellectuals, the
academic world, and so on.
The whole matrix of doctrinal management,
of which the media are the most obvious.
But I think one of the most
extraordinary achievements
was to be able to continue to proclaim
that we, the United States
is pursuing, maybe badly,
but is pursuing the noble vision
of democratizing the Middle East.
That, for that not to pass the laugh test
is pretty remarkable, because
all of that was going on
in the midst of a display
of hatred and contempt
for democracy, which has
absolutely no historical
precedent that I can think of.
I can't even think of
anything that comes close.
Try and think of it.
Just remember what was
going on this past year.
So take, for example, the
distinction that was drawn
between old Europe and new Europe.
What was the distinction?
It was a criterion, very clear criterion.
Old Europe, the bad
guys, France and Germany.
In old Europe, which was
reviled and denounced,
the governments were
taking the same position
as the overwhelming
majority of the population.
They were the bad guys.
New Europe, the good guys,
like Berlusconi in Italy
and Osnar in Spain, they were
overruling an even larger
majority of the population.
There was more opposition to
the war in Spain and Italy
than there was in France and Germany.
But the people in power were
willing to take their orders
from Crawford, Texas.
So they were the marvelous new Europe,
the wonderful guys, had
real democratic credentials.
The most dramatic case of
this perhaps was Turkey.
And to everybody's surprise, mine too,
the Turkish government
taught the United States
a lesson in democracy,
which caused fury here.
95% of the population opposed the war.
Like everyone else in the region,
they hated Saddam Hussein,
but they didn't fear him.
Didn't see any reason for the war,
and were afraid of its consequence.
So you got 95% opposition,
and to everyone's amazement,
the government went along
with 95% of the population,
despite the fact that they
were under terrific threats
from the United States not to do that.
Well that caused outrage here.
The Turkish government was
denounced as not having
democratic credentials.
And Paul Wolfowitz went so
far as to condemn publicly,
condemn the Turkish military
for failing to intervene,
to force the government
to follow U.S. orders.
And he told them, "You're
going to have to apologize
"to us for that, and make
it clear that you're going
"to help the United States,
"then you'll have democratic credentials."
Particularly interesting
in Wolfowitz's case,
because he comes out of central casting
as the visionary, who's leading the way
to democratize the Middle East.
Now, all of this goes on in
parallel, and nobody laughs.
Nobody comments on it.
I mean, it's as if it's an
intellectual culture of zombies.
I mean it's hard to imagine
how this can take place.
And people looking at it
from the outside are having
trouble imagining it.
But that's us.
Right at the heart of it.
You know, we're not
talking about the people
watching Rush Limbaugh or something.
We're talking about the
educated elites, okay?
Us.
Smart guys.
(laughter, applause)
That's worth some reflection,
a lot of reflection, I think.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and Bloomington, Illinois,
and everywhere else.
But it's not happening.
And that's a high degree of discipline,
very high degree of
discipline and dangers.
- Professor Noam Chomsky, giving a speech
at Illinois State
University on October 7th.
Professor Chomsky is University Professor
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
master linguist, and
author of dozens of books.
His latest is called Hegemony or Survival,
America's Quest for Global Dominance.
And that does it for today's program.
If you'd like to go to our
website, democracynow.org,
you can sign up there
for our daily digest,
get more information.
If you'd like to get a
copy of today's show,
call 1-800-881-2359, 1-800-881-235.
Democracy Now is produced by Mike Burke
and Sharif Abdel Kouddous,
Ana Nogueira, Elizabeth Press,
Jeremy Scahill, and Parvez Sharma.
Special thanks to Sam
Baruso and John Randolph,
Uri Ghaled, Johnny Sender, Chris Zucker.
Our website again, democracynow.org,
Mike DeFilippo and Rich
Kim, our engineers.
I'm Amy Goodman.
♫ To design, build, sell
and store and fire ♫
