This is a touchy topic, and not just because people tend to assume that understanding is a precursor to forgiveness. Whatever the grievances behind the attacks, trying to address them now might seem like a capitulation to terrorism, even if doing so would otherwise have been in the national interest. Given the need to avoid making excuses for terrorists or caving in to their demands, the subject requires a careful touch.
That is not Noam Chomsky's forte. In 9-11, a collection of excerpts from interviews he gave last fall, he assails the United States as "a leading terrorist state." His interlocutors are fans, judging from the softball questions ("Do you think we are using the word 'civilization' properly? Would a really civilized world lead us into a global war like this?"). Consequently, even his most eyebrow-raising assertions (that the U.S. is "one of the most extreme fundamentalist cultures in the world," for example) go unchallenged. The book's eye-glazing repetition (left in "for emphasis," according to the editor) suggests the manuscript, too, was treated reverentially.
Still, Chomsky presumably saw the book before it was published and had a chance to eliminate anything that seemed, in retrospect, ill-considered or unsupported. It's hard to imagine what he took out. "The horrifying atrocities of September 11 are something quite new in world affairs, not in their scale and character, but in the target," he says. "For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way." Chomsky's condemnations of the attacks do not quite erase the suspicion that he is in some sense gratified by this turn of events.
"Nothing can justify crimes such as those of September 11," he says, "but we can think of the United States as an 'innocent victim' only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies."
This formulation enables Chomsky to imply that we had it coming, while denying that he believes any such thing (as he did in his CNN debate with Bennett). The ambiguity arises from thinking of the victim as "the United States," which can refer to the government as well as the people. However iniquitous Chomsky thinks U.S. foreign policy has been, it is clearly beyond the bounds of civilized behavior to hold randomly chosen Americans responsible for it and summarily execute them. Yet Chomsky's rhetoric legitimizes the doctrine of collective guilt that lies at the heart of terrorism.
Unlike Reuters, Chomsky is not reluctant to call people terrorists. He concedes that Osama bin Laden's followers qualify. But so do U.S. officials who supported regimes (such as Turkey's) or armed groups (such as the Contras) accused of human rights abuses. "The U.S. is the only country that was condemned for international terrorism by the World Court," he says. If so, this says more about the World Court than it does about the United States, unless you think the case against the U.S. is stronger than the cases against, say, Iran, Libya, and Syria. But Chomsky is actually referring (once again) to U.S. support for anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua, which he equates with terrorism. Even the World Court did not go that far, instead rebuking the U.S. for "unlawful use of force." If U.S. officials had directed the Contras to kill civilians (as opposed to supporting their fight against the Sandinistas despite such atrocities), Chomsky would have a stronger case.
There is no question that the U.S. has backed many unsavory factions and governments over the years (including the Muslim fanatics it is now fighting). In some cases (for example, Haiti, Panama, Angola, Vietnam, Indonesia), there is a compelling argument to be made that such support was morally wrong, contrary to the national interest, or both. But Chomsky does not stop there; he will not be satisfied until Ronald Reagan is recognized as the moral equivalent of Osama bin Laden. Likewise, so far as Chomsky is concerned, the Clinton administration's bombing of a Sudanese "chemical weapons plant" that turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory was not just criminally negligent; it was an act of terrorism worse than the September 11 attacks. Citing estimates he admits are "largely speculation," Chomsky claims the loss of drug production capacity has killed "tens of thousands."
As that example reflects, Chomsky's rhetorical overkill is of a piece with his readiness to believe the worst about the impact of U.S. actions, a tendency that undermines his arguments even when they're valid. Endorsing the highest available estimates of the deaths caused by sanctions against Iraq, for example, tends to discredit criticism of the embargo. The argument over numbers distracts attention from the basic point that embargoes are morally suspect because they punish people for the crimes of their leaders -- even when the leaders are unelected. (See "The Politics of Dead Children," March.) Yet Chomsky seems irresistibly drawn to wild exaggeration. "An attack against Afghanistan will probably kill a great many innocent civilians, possibly enormous numbers in a country where millions are already on the verge of death from starvation," he predicted in a September 2001 interview. "Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism."
Chomsky insists that intent does not matter: If you (or the people you support) end up killing civilians, you are a terrorist. Yet it is the deliberate targeting of civilians that is the sine qua non of terrorism. Killing them unintentionally is not the same thing, although it may be rightly condemned, depending upon the level of negligence involved. To deny this is to assert that a driver who accidentally kills a pedestrian is morally indistinguishable from one who waits for an enemy to step into the street and runs him down on purpose.
Chomsky believes 9/11 did not justify the war in Afghanistan. (He argues that the U.S. should have tried bringing the matter to court -- an approach that did not work very well when the Sandinistas tried it.) From his point of view, the acceptable number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan was zero. Supporters of the military campaign knew civilian deaths were inevitable but recognized an obligation to keep the number as low as possible. Bennett is quick to exonerate U.S. forces on this score, referring repeatedly to their "extraordinary" efforts to avoid killing noncombatants. It may well be that the U.S. was unusually careful by historical standards. But that does not mean American forces weren't negligent in some cases. The July 1 bombing of a wedding party in Oruzgan -- which killed 50 or so people, mainly women and children -- springs to mind. Horrible as that incident was, however, it is not splitting hairs to point out that the gunship's crew, who mistook celebratory gunshots for anti-aircraft fire, thought they were attacking an armed enemy. The assault was nothing like, say, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo during World War II, operations that arguably could be described as terrorism.
Despite his sweeping definition, Chomsky does not treat all terrorists alike. "Just about every crime -- whether a robbery in the streets or colossal atrocities -- has reasons, and commonly we find that some of them are serious and should be addressed," he says. But he applies this principle selectively. While he believes it's important to understand bin Laden's motivation, he has no interest in exploring why American and Israeli "terrorists" behave the way they do. Thus he does not address the arguments in favor of aiding the Contras, and he simply asserts that Israel's invasion of Lebanon was "not in self-defense." When it comes to the United States and Israel, it seems, there are never any serious reasons or valid grievances.
Chomsky cannot seem to decide whether the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had anything to do with 9/11. "The atrocities of September 11 were a devastating blow for the Palestinians," he says, "as they instantly recognized." That explains the dancing in the streets. Later he says "Osama bin Laden shares the anger felt throughout the region at...support for atrocities against Palestinians." But Chomsky also argues that "the perpetrators surely must have known" their attacks would hurt the Palestinian cause, adding: "Their concerns are different, and bin Laden, at least, has been eloquent enough in expressing them in many interviews: to overthrow the corrupt and repressive regimes of the Arab world and replace them with properly 'Islamic' regimes, to support Muslims in their struggles against 'infidels' in Saudi Arabia (which he regards as under U.S. occupation), Chechnya, Bosnia, western China, North Africa, and Southeast Asia."
Here, at last, is a hint of possible common ground between Chomsky and Bennett. Chomsky presumably would like the U.S. to stop propping up "corrupt and repressive regimes in the Arab world." Bennett, who criticizes the Saudi government's corruption and repression (along with its support for terrorism and promotion of "anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, and anti-Western hatred"), ought to agree. Instead, he seems proud of the way the U.S. came to the defense of Saudi despots in the Persian Gulf War, citing it as a reason Muslims should like us.
Bennett and Chomsky do agree on one thing: that the threat to civil liberties posed by the war on terrorism has been exaggerated. That judgment is not surprising coming from Bennett, who has praised Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus rights and suggested that something similar might be needed in the war on drugs. In Why We Fight, he echoes Attorney General John Ashcroft's attack on "those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty." Bennett says critics of President Bush's order authorizing military tribunals for accused terrorists caused "turmoil," contributing to "the erosion of moral clarity" and "the spread of indifference and confusion."
As for the concerns of American Muslims about being lumped in with the terrorists, Bennett says, in essence, that they should consider themselves lucky they haven't been rounded up and put in prison camps. In one of the book's most chilling passages, he conspicuously avoids condemning the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. He says only that "our government has formally apologized" for the mass detentions, which he calls "a source of controversy to this day."
You might think Chomsky wouldn't pass up an opportunity to attack the Bush administration, but his critical eye is focused abroad. In response to a question about how the war on terrorism might "constrict our freedoms," Chomsky embarks on a three-page rant about America's international crimes. In another interview he says, "I do not think [the war on terrorism] will lead to a long-term restriction of rights internally in any serious sense. The cultural and institutional barriers to that are too firmly rooted, I believe." It surely is not enough to satisfy Bennett, but that sounds dangerously close to acknowledging America's virtues.
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