Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (36 page)

But the point is, by refusing to allow the discussion and debate—and even the information—that would be the basis for sane decision-making about the need for war in a democratic society, the media set the stage for what turned out to be, predictably, a very destructive and murderous conflict. People don’t want a war unless you absolutely have to have one, but the media would not present the possibility that there were alternatives—so therefore we went to war very much in the manner of a totalitarian society.
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That’s really the main point about the media and the Gulf War, in my view.

Of course, it didn’t stop there—there were also plenty of the things that you referred to as well. So before and during the war, the Bush administration had to build up an image in people’s minds of Iraq as a monstrous military superpower, in order to mobilize enough popular hysteria so that people here would go along with their policies. And again, the media did their job 100 percent. So I don’t know how well you remember what was going on around the country back then, but people were literally quaking in their boots about the extraordinary might of Iraq—it was a superpower with artillery we’d never dreamt of, all this kind of stuff.
  ⁹³
I mean, this was a defenseless Third World country that was so weak it had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran in eight years of warfare [from 1980 to ’88]—and that was with the support of the United States, the Soviet Union, all of Europe, the Arab oil countries: not an inconsiderable segment of world power. Yet with all those allies, Iraq had been unable to defeat post-revolutionary Iran, which had killed off its own officers’ corps and barely had an army left: all of a sudden this was the superpower that was going to conquer the world? You really had to be a deeply brainwashed Western intellectual even to look at this image—a defenseless Third World country threatening the two most advanced military forces in the world, the United States and Britain—and not completely collapse in ridicule. But as you recall, that’s what all of them were saying—and people here really believed it.

In fact, during the Gulf War I dropped my scheduled speaking engagements and accepted invitations to talk in the most reactionary parts of the country I could find—just because I was curious what I’d see. So I went to some place in Georgia which is surrounded by military bases; I went to Lehigh, Pennsylvania, a jingoist working-class town; to some conservative towns in Massachusetts, to Appalachia, places like that. And everywhere I went, people were terrified out of their wits. Sometimes it was pretty amazing.

For instance, there’s a college in northern California called Chico State, which is where guys like Reagan and Shultz [Reagan’s Secretary of State] send their kids so they won’t be infected by “lefties” at Berkeley. The place is right in the middle of four hundred miles of cornfields, or whatever it is they grow out there, a million miles from nowhere, and when you fly in you land at an airport that’s about half the size of a house. Well, when I landed there, a student and a faculty member who were like the two local radicals at the school came out to meet me. And as we were walking to the car, I noticed we had to go a pretty long distance, because the airport was all surrounded with yellow police tape. So I asked these guys, “What’s going on, are they rebuilding the landing strip or something?” You know what they said? “No, that’s to protect the airport from Arab terrorists.” I said, “Arab terrorists in northern California?” But they thought so. And when I got into the town, everybody was walking around in army fatigues and wearing yellow ribbons, saying “If Saddam comes, we’re going to fight to the death,” and so on.

And in a sense, people really believed it. I should say, though, that in every one of these towns I went to, the propaganda line was so thin that as soon as you started discussing the situation and you made a few jokes about what the reality was, the whole thing just totally collapsed, and by the end of the talk you’d get a huge standing ovation. Friends of mine who spoke around the country at the time found exactly the same thing, incidentally—Alexander Cockburn, for instance. But that was the image of Iraq that the media presented right on cue—and with the help of that propaganda cover, Bush was able to carry out his bombardment for six weeks, and kill a few hundred thousand people, and leave Iraq in total ruins, and put on a huge show of force and violence.
  ⁹⁴

And notice that contrary to the line that’s constantly presented about what the Gulf War was fought for, in reality it had nothing to do with not liking Saddam Hussein—as can very easily be demonstrated. So just take a look at what happened right after the U.S. bombardment ended. A week after the war, Saddam Hussein turned to crushing the Shiite population in the south of Iraq and the Kurdish population in the north: what did the United States do? It watched. In fact, rebelling Iraqi generals pleaded with the United States to let them use captured Iraqi equipment to try to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The U.S. refused. Saudi Arabia, our leading ally in the region, approached the United States with a plan to support the rebel generals in their attempt to overthrow Saddam after the war; the Bush administration blocked the plan, and it was immediately dropped.
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Furthermore, there was no secret about the American decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power after the Gulf War—and there was even a reason given for it. The reason was explained by a spokesman for the State Department at the
New York Times
, Thomas Friedman. What he said was, it is necessary that Saddam Hussein remain in control of Iraq for what’s called “stability.” He said: “The best of all worlds” would be “an iron-fisted Iraqi junta” that would rule Iraq the way Saddam Hussein did—much to the approval of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and of course the boss in Washington. But since they couldn’t get the “best of all worlds” right then, they were going to have to settle for second best—namely, Saddam Hussein himself, so he could rule Iraq, as Friedman put it, with an “iron fist.”
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Therefore the United States did nothing to prevent Saddam from massacring the Shiite rebels as U.S. troops were stationed all over the region—and that’s been going on ever since, with his attack on the marsh dwellers and others. And the only reason why any barriers were ever put up to his attack on the Kurds in the north was that a huge international outcry developed in the West, as people here watched Iraqi forces massacring people who this time happened to have blue eyes and Western features—it was just pure racism that no similar public response ever developed to his assault on the Shiites.

But sure, Saddam Hussein stayed in power after the war—and he was supported by George Bush again, just like before the war. Meanwhile, the real victim of the bombing and the U.S.-imposed embargo has been the general population of Iraq. In fact, literally hundreds of thousands of children have died in Iraq since the end of the war, just as a result of American insistence on maintaining sanctions—and by now the United States and England are alone at the U.N. Security Council in insisting that the sanctions against Iraq still remain in effect, even though the formal U.N. conditions for them have by this point been satisfied.
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But again, that’s another story you won’t see pursued very far in the U.S. press.

Also, it’s widely agreed that Saddam Hussein’s hold on power has not been
weakened
by all of this—it’s actually been
strengthened
. For instance, there was an article not too long ago in
Foreign Affairs
, the main foreign policy journal, which pointed out that Saddam Hussein now can at least appeal to nationalism in the Iraqi population to tighten his rule—while the sanctions have turned what was previously a relatively wealthy country into a deeply impoverished one, with literally more than a million people dying of malnutrition and disease.
  ⁹⁸

And this is all being done by the United States for its own reasons. It has nothing much to do with disliking Saddam Hussein—as you can see from the fact that he was George Bush’s great friend and trading partner right up until the moment of the Kuwait invasion.” Or as you can see from the fact that the Bush White House intervened repeatedly well into 1990 to prevent the Treasury Department and others who thought Iraq wasn’t creditworthy from cutting back on U.S. loan guarantees to their dear friend Saddam Hussein.
  ¹⁰⁰
Or as you can see from the fact that we supported him again immediately after the war ended, as he was decimating internal resistance to his rule with “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf [the U.S. general] sitting nearby and refusing even to lift a finger.
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W
OMAN
: So you think in the end the U.S. just wanted to regain control of the Kuwaiti oil fields that Saddam had captured—it was just a war fought for oil?

Well, a good place to start if you want to know what something was about is to look to see what changes it introduced. And particularly in the case of a war planned in advance where the outcome was never in any doubt, I think you have solid reason to believe the result was what the thing was really for in the first place. Well, what changes did the Gulf War introduce? The one big thing that happened right as soon as the war ended was that the U.S. arranged the Madrid Conference on the Middle East [in October 1991], which set off what was called the “peace process” that culminated in Israel and the P.L.O. signing the Oslo Agreement in 1994—and with that, the U.S. and Israel won their twenty-year campaign of rejecting the possibility of Palestinian national rights, flat out.
  ¹⁰²
The Palestinians were basically destroyed. [Editors’ Note: The Oslo Agreement is discussed in more detail at the end of this chapter and in chapter 8.]

In fact, you didn’t even need hindsight to figure this out, it was perfectly obvious right at the time of the Gulf War that this was going to happen—like, I had an article in
Z Magazine
saying, okay, now that the Gulf War is over, the U.S. will try to ram through its rejectionist program for a settlement of the Palestinian question.
  ¹⁰³
And that’s exactly what happened.

So look at what took place. The last of the annual U.N. votes on the Palestinians was held in December 1990, and the result was the same as always: 144 to 2, the U.S. and Israel standing alone against the rest of the world in rejecting any sort of recognition of Palestinian national rights.
  ¹⁰⁴
Then came the U.S. bombardment of Iraq in January 1991. After the war, the U.S. set up the Madrid Conference and the U.N. didn’t hold any more votes on the Palestinian question after that. The Madrid Conference was run completely by the U.S.—it was based totally on American programs, there was nothing for the Palestinians at all. The agenda was, Israel takes what it wants from the Occupied Territories; the relationships between Israel and the U.S.-client oil monarchies in the region, like Saudi Arabia and Oman and Qatar and so on (which have always existed, even though they were officially at war), now kind of rise above the surface and become more overt—and the Palestinians get it in the neck, they’re offered nothing. And that was the big effect of the Gulf War: it sort of intimidated everyone, it was a big show of American power that demonstrated that the U.S. will use force to get its way wherever it feels like it, now that the Soviet Union is out of the game. So the Soviet Union was gone—there was no longer that space left for Third World countries to be independent and “non-aligned.” And also, the entire Third World just had been devastated by the huge crisis of capitalism that swept the world in the 1980s. Arab nationalism had been dealt yet another blow by Saddam’s aggression and P.L.O. tactics of more than the usual ineptitude; so the rulers of the Arab states had less need than before to respond to popular pressures and make pro-Palestinian gestures. Well, after all that, it really was no longer necessary for the U.S. to undermine all diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East, as we’d been doing for the past twenty years. Now we could just use force. The Gulf War was the first demonstration of that.

So everybody was scared shitless by it, and Europe finally backed off on the question of Palestinian national rights: they don’t even make any proposals about that anymore. In fact, it was kind of interesting that even Norway agreed to be the intermediary in 1993, and to help implement U.S. and Israeli rejectionism in the Oslo Agreement—they wouldn’t have done that a couple years earlier.

And that’s primarily what the Gulf War was about, I think. It wasn’t about fear of losing oil. It wasn’t about international law, or principled opposition to aggression or anything like that. It wasn’t that they didn’t like Saddam Hussein—they didn’t care about Saddam Hussein one way or the other. It was that after the Gulf War was over, the U.S. was in a perfect position to ram through its rejectionist program and fully extend the Monroe Doctrine to the Middle East [the Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed by the U.S. in 1823 and stated that Latin America was the exclusive domain of the United States, not the European colonial powers]. It was our way of saying: “Look, this is our turf, we’ll do what we feel like here.” As George Bush in fact put it: “What we say goes.”
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Now the world understands that; the Gulf War helped them understand it.

Bosnia: Intervention Questions

M
AN
: Noam, do you recall any major issues on which your views have totally flip-flopped at some point, perhaps by thinking them out more or something like that? It strikes me that your positions have remained extremely consistent over the years. Or are there issues that you wish you’d written and talked about, but haven’t yet?