Rogue States and Diplomacy: a Conversation With Noam Chomsky

[Zenaan Harkness]

Rogue States and Diplomacy: a Conversation With Noam Chomsky
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/17/rogue-states-and-diplomacy-a-conversation-with-noam-chomsky/

The interview is quite long, focusing on the USA Republican reaction
to the Iran sanction-lifting deal, amongst other things. Noam seems to
be a Professor, so I guess his arguments might be too intellectual for
the unwashed masses. Here is one question and answer:

Professor Chomsky, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power,
has said that the problem is the “instability that Iran fuels beyond
its nuclear programme”. She echoed U.S. Defence Secretary Ashton
Carter, who went to Israel’s northern border and said, “We will
continue to help Israel counter Iran’s malign influence” by supporting
Hizbollah. The U.S., he intimated, reserved the right to use military
force against Iran. Could you comment on this?

NC: Power’s usage is standard: she defines “stabilisation” according
to a peculiar logic. For instance, U.S. policy in Iraq is defined as
stabilisation. What does that stabilisation look like? The U.S.
invades a country, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions
becoming refugees, along with barbarous torture and destruction that
Iraqis compare to the Mongol invasions, leaving Iraq the unhappiest
country in the world according to WIN/Gallup polls. It also ignited
sectarian conflict that is tearing the region to shreds and laying the
basis for the ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] monstrosity along
with its Saudi ally. That is stabilisation. The standard usage
sometimes reaches levels that are almost surreal, as when liberal
commentator James Chace, former editor of Foreign Affairs, explains
that the U.S. sought to “destabilise a freely elected Marxist
government in Chile” because “we were determined to seek stability”
[under the Pinochet dictatorship].

Let us consider the case of Hizbollah and Hamas. Both emerged in
resistance to U.S.-backed Israeli violence and aggression, which
vastly exceeds anything attributed to these organisations. Whatever
one thinks about them, or other beneficiaries of Iranian support, Iran
hardly ranks high in support for terror worldwide, even within the
Muslim world. Among Islamic states, Saudi Arabia is far in the lead as
a sponsor of Islamic terror, not only by direct funding by wealthy
Saudis and others in the Gulf but even more by the missionary zeal
with which the Saudis promulgate their extremist Wahhabi-Salafi
version of Islam through Quranic schools, mosques, clerics, and other
means available to a religious dictatorship with enormous oil wealth.
The ISIS is an extremist offshoot of Saudi religious extremism and its
fanning of jehadi flames.

In generation of Islamic terror, however, nothing can compare with the
U.S. “war on terror”, which has helped to spread the plague from a
small tribal area in Afghanistan-Pakistan to a vast region from West
Africa to South-East Asia. The invasion of Iraq alone escalated terror
attacks by a factor of seven in the first year, well beyond even what
had been predicted by intelligence agencies. Drone warfare against
marginalised and oppressed tribal societies also elicits demands for
revenge, as ample evidence indicates.

The two Iranian clients [Hizbollah and Hamas] also share the crime of
winning the popular vote in the only free elections held in the Arab
world. Hizbollah is guilty of the even more heinous crime of
compelling Israel to withdraw from its occupation of southern Lebanon
in violation of [U.N.] Security Council orders dating back decades, an
illegal regime of terror punctuated with episodes of extreme violence,
murder and destruction.

Iran’s “fuelling instability” is particularly dramatic in Iraq, where,
among other crimes, it alone came at once to the aid of Kurds
defending themselves from the ISIS invasion and it is building a $2.5
billion power plant to try to bring electrical power back to the level
before the U.S. invasion.