The War on Syria and Noam Chomsky

"Chomsky's distortion of reality is based on a deeply-entrenched Zionist belief, that Israel is innocent of any crimes."

Are you deliberately misrepresenting Chomsky or just stupid?

A quick glance at his own website reveals many articles criticising Israel, here are just a few:
 http://chomsky.info/articles/20121104.htm
 http://chomsky.info/articles/20120903.htm

Just in case you need help - these are all statements refering to the past tense in the Chomsky quote:

“First of all, Israel was not opposed to Assad. He has been more or less the kind of dictator they wanted. He has done the kind of things they wanted. The U.S. has no opposition to Assad. He was cooperating on intelligence and they did not like everything, but he was pretty satisfactory.” (Al-akhbar English, 16 June 2013).

First of all...

was not...

has been...

has done...

He was...

did not...

he was...

The meaning of the sole Chomsky quote you included in your "articule" is quite clear - the West and Israel had accepted Assad in the PAST, he understands that today - the PRESENT - things are quite different.

This is just one example of your failed effort to undermine Chomsky, and I'm left wondering why - is it stupidity or a political agenda?

...and as she lay there with a chain around her neck, naked and bloodied from the repeated beatings, being raped by the fascist state, she shouted out one more time... "Not in my back yard! Get orf my land!". "Welcome to Britain", her captor screamed in a moment of ecstacy.

Later the Jeckyl returned to his position of Parliamentary Leader debating the necessity for war, to rid the world of state sponsored terrorism and systemic poisoning by third world revolutionaries. To destroy the very souls who had taken control of the last stockpiles of MOX, the scientifically proven last lifeline of planet Terra.

As the irony of probability and statistics foretold by the soothsayers of the Commons settled in the minds of the great unwashed, there was one last effort, one final push for solidarity in the lands of the elite.

Meanwhile, the Pacific died and so did the forests but all was not lost for there were tins, many many tins. "Hooray for governments" they shouted, "What would we do without".

.

A one-way bombardment called Gulf War

by B. J. Sabri, Uruknet, 31 December 2005



"U.S. Economy: It has always been said that the war is good for the economy,
and in terms of dollars and cents that is usually the case. But much of the
new uncertainty in the outlook stems from the situation in Iraq. The risks
still evident there are one of the factors putting up oil and gasoline prices.
Iraq is also depressing consumer confidence . . . etc." --James C. Cooper &
Kathleen Madigan, War Jitters Won't Wipe Out This Recovery, BusinessWeeK, June
7, 2004, page 33. [Italics added]

Just four months before he obliterated Iraq in a one-way bombardment called
Gulf War (Iraq did not shoot a single bullet on American soil), George H. W.
Bush postulated how the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait provided the opportunity for
the creation of a new world; meaning a unipolar world ruled by the United
States. In his address to a joint session of Congress (September 11, 1990),
Bush senior, described the coming birth of that world with these words: "The
crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity
to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times,
our fifth objective -- a new world order. . . . )

By logic of a system aiming at world domination, the U.S. bombardment of Iraq
meant three things: a demonstration of American power at the "epicenter" and
master of the new order; a celebration in blood and destruction for the birth
of the same; and a message for those who dare to oppose it. It also announced
the new regulations of the "epicenter": (1) the self-arrogation of the right
to interfere in any part of the world to suit its imperialist interests, and
(2) the method with which it would resolve regional disputes inside its
periphery after the expected demise of the USSR: unilateral war.

But, considering the history of a power that has been thriving on pretexts and
wars, it is not difficult to speculate as to why Bush senior called the
invasion of Iraq, "crisis," and then elevated it to, a "rare opportunity" for
new "world order." Although, technically, a crisis is a predicament requiring
a resolution, in the imperialist lexicon it means an opportunity for
intervention.

Since George H. Bush used the term, "crisis" in the context of opportunity,
how did progressives use that term in the context of the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait, and how is this relevant to the occupation of Iraq? To discuss this
topic, I selected Noam Chomsky. Chomsky, an outstanding political thinker and
a lucid critic of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, but equivocal in other
regions, also employed the word "crisis" to describe the aftermath of the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Though, in contrast with Bush, he cogently
demystified it by noting:

The crisis began with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait a year ago. There was some
fighting; leaving hundreds killed according to Human Rights groups. That
hardly qualifies as war. Rather, in terms of crime against peace and humanity,
it falls roughly into the category of the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus,
Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1978, and the U.S. invasion of Panama. In
these terms, it falls well short of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and
cannot remotely be compared to the near-genocidal Indonesian invasion and
annexation of East Timor, to mention only two cases of aggression that are
still in progress with continuing atrocities, and with the crucial support of
those who most passionately professed their outrage over Iraq's aggression.
[1]

As for the notion of a "rare opportunity for a new world order," this needs no
explanation -- a USSR in a dissolution phase was no longer in any material
position to contest U.S. objectives for war and dominance in Iraq. Thus, for
his new order to be born, George H. W. Bush, a stolid war criminal in the
American tradition of extermination, devastated Iraq and murdered a great
number of its military personnel and civilian population with jingoistic
enthusiasm and imperialist vengeance. (I shall discuss Iraq's fatalities in
parts 41 and 42.)

Still, considering that Iraq refused not to withdraw its forces before
negotiation, and considering that the U.S. rejected all of Iraq and Saudi
Arabia's proposals for a settlement, let us assume for a moment that war was
the only means to evict Iraq from Kuwait. The imposing question remains, Why
the massive destruction of Iraq before liberating Kuwait? In other words, if
the purpose of U.S.-U.N. resolutions was to restore the sovereignty of Kuwait,
and since the United States could have easily defeated and dislodged the Iraqi
occupation force stationed there, why then destroy Iraq? What was the
purpose?

You may ask, "Why am I talking about a war that happened 15 years ago, while
new realties -- invasion, occupation, and resistance -- should have priority?"
That may be; but before addressing that, we have to remember one thing:
dialectically, without the Gulf War and subsequent U.S.-U.N. resolutions that
imposed further sanctions on Iraq, and tied their lifting to Iraq's compliance
with an open-end disarmament process totally controlled by the United States,
that invasion would have never occurred despite dramatic changes worldwide.

Conclusively, while the Gulf War was the cornerstone for the future invasion
of Iraq, its aftermath transformed Iraq from a sovereign state into a hostage
in the hands of the United States, and by implication, Israel and U.S.
Zionists. For all practical reasons, the fate of Iraq has passed from the UN,
which authorized war against it, to the United States that made of it an
exclusive American issue.

Moreover, while the war ended with Iraq's surrender, it did not end with a
peace pact but with a ceasefire agreement. Did the UN sign it? No. General
Norman Schwarzkopf signed it on behalf of the United States; i.e., it was an
American-Iraqi agreement. Since then and up to the invasion, the U.S. used the
alibis that Iraq violated the terms of the agreement to launch a war of
attrition lasting 13 years.

Reevaluating the objectives of the Gulf war in relation to the neocon strategy
to conquer Iraq years later is, therefore, a prerequisite to understanding the
multiple purposes of the ongoing occupation, its failure, and, yes, its
"success" in destroying the ageless civilizations of Iraq, the imperialist
deformation of its social fabric, society, economy, culture, and national
character.

The need for reevaluation could never be more important. Take U.S. propaganda
as an example. How many writers disputed Bush and Powell's statements that
Iraq, 13 years after that war was still an aggressive state, despite the fact
that Iraq, besieged by sanctions and deprived of necessities, could not move a
finger against any one in the region? Not only that, but before the invasion
of Iraq in 2003, all propaganda themes that accompanied the pre-Gulf War
period, returned intact, but with new additions: Iraq was cheating on U.N.
resolutions, and the baseless accusation of Iraq's involvement in the
unresolved event of 9/11.

As you can see, the arguments on the Iraqi question from the Gulf War until
present form one logical sequence. To see how this sequence works, let us go
back to Noam Chomsky. In 1991, Chomsky explained the origins of the Gulf War
as follows: "It is plain enough that Washington has little impact on
developments and no idea what to do as the Soviet system lurches from one
crisis to another. The response to Saddam Hussein's aggression, in contrast,
was an operation throughout, with Britain loyally in tow, reflecting the U.S.
insistence upon sole authority in the crucial energy-producing regions of the
Middle East." [1] [Italics added]

Surprisingly, Chomsky's essay was not without inconsistencies. Aside from not
addressing (at least, in passing) the regional conditions that preceded the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, he started from the invasion as an act, but avoided
a crucial argument whose treatment could have persuaded the skeptics on his
firm anti-imperialist stance, and, of course, analytical neutrality in
dissecting U.S. imperialistic decisions.

I am pointedly alluding to the fact that Chomsky's early years as a Zionist
settler living in a kibbutz in occupied Palestine (now Israel), did not allow
him to include Israel, U.S. Zionism, and their role in the war as an important
factor. He just mentioned the "U.S. insistence upon sole authority in the
crucial . . . etc." In essence, he excluded a plethora of irrefutable evidence
that firmly point to the "Gulf War" as Israel's war by its American proxy. It
is reasonable, therefore, to conclude that Chomsky's attitude toward the Iraqi
question is not objective and possibly mired by ulterior motives.

Second, it is not clear why Chomsky patronized the USSR and gave the U.S. the
higher ground as in his phrase, "the U.S. did not know what to do . . . etc.,"
and why did he refer to the Soviet Union as the "Soviet system," but referred
to the American system by calling on its capital -- Washington. As a master
linguist, he should have juxtaposed countries, capitals, or systems. This
raises the question whether Chomsky thinks that the United States is not a
system but a natural order.

Third, he sanctioned the U.S. imperialist hold on the Middle-Eastern Arab
nations by calling them abstractly, "crucial energy-producing regions of the
Middle East." But in writing so, Professor Chomsky reduced the lives of the
Arabs to nothing more than a crucial tool to satisfy American oil consumption
and imperialist whims.

Fourth, it is also not clear why Chomsky call the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait,
"aggression," and why did he qualify it as, "Saddam Hussein's aggression?" In
my reading of Chomsky, and unless I was inattentive, I have never come across
him referring to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, as, "Menachem Begin's
aggression." It was always: the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Did Chomsky imply
there is a distinction between aggression and invasion depending on who is the
felon?

Let us clear the ground. Of course, an invasion is a form of aggression, but
aggression, definitively, is not an invasion. In fact, there is a solid
distinction between aggression and invasion. Aggression presupposes and is
always indicative of the innocence of the invaded party who committed no
provocation to warrant either aggression, or invasion. But aggression denotes
an incursion on an adversary. Examples include the Israeli attack against the
Iraqi nuclear reactor of Osiraq in 1981, and Reagan's attack against Libya in
1987. Protracted aggression could also evolve into an invasion or the
occupation of a whole state or a part of its territory; an example is the
Israeli invasion of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank.

Invasion in the modern use, on the other hand, is a calculated move in
response to disputes mostly among adjacent states. Strength but not size is
the only factor that determines who initiates the invasion. But in no case, is
the size of a country an indication of its innocence or lack of aggression
(Israel is tiny, but it had invaded four adjacent states, and its
aggressiveness is boundless.) Examples of invasion include the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan, the Iraqi invasions of Iran and Kuwait, and the American
invasions of Panama and Iraq -- both countries are not adjacent to the U.S.,
thus indicating the global imperialist nature of both invasions.

Since he chose to write, "Saddam Hussein's aggression," Chomsky insinuated the
perfidy of Saddam Hussein (thus his demonization), as opposed to the innocence
of the Emir of Kuwait. Although I firmly opposed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
as a way to resolve outstanding matters between the two countries, I also
firmly believe that no one has the right to claim the innocence of Kuwait
without knowing historical facts. Kuwait (an Iraqi territory severed by
Britain in 1921), was always aware of Iraq's claim over it, has been
constantly involved in anti-Iraqi activities since the 1960s, that is, even
before the advent of Saddam Hussein coming to power.

By branding Iraq as an aggressor, Chomsky overlooked Kuwait's intransigence
toward Iraq, pre-invasion disputes, Kuwaiti financing of Kurdish militia to
harass the Iraqi central government, and Kuwait's close work with the CIA to
overthrow the Iraqi regime. He only aimed at declaring Iraq as the sole
culpable party for that invasion by calling it "aggressor." This is fine,
except we need to establish culpability after investigating the case. To issue
a judgment solely based on the reputation assigned by the United States to
Saddam Hussein, while dismissing Iraq as a country and people, was a basic
U.S. strategy. The similarity between U.S. policy and Chomsky's conclusion
appears striking . . .

To delve inside the argument of Iraq's devastation, however, and to give you a
wider picture on how imperialist propaganda finds its way (either by choice --
scholars of history should search the archives before putting forward opinions
-- or by limitations imposed by the writer on the breadth of investigation) to
progressive writers, I have to add one more thing. In the same essay, Chomsky
made two more statements: one was right, and the other was pure
disinformation.

You recall that Chomsky stated, "There was some fighting; leaving hundreds
killed according to Human Rights groups." This statement is most likely
correct. According to several sources, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait had
possibly cost the lives of about 380 Kuwaitis and over 120 Iraqis. In
addition, Chomsky correctly qualified the body count with the phrase,
"according to," which, to a certain extent, is an acceptable approximation of
probable statistics in the absence of official data.

Oddly, in the following sentence, Chomsky hastily abandoned his caution and
embraced U.S. and Israeli propaganda on Kuwaiti fatalities without modifying
an iota. In effect, he became a posteriori, an apologist and a voluntary
mouthpiece for U.S. imperialism, as when he stated, "During the subsequent
months, Iraq was responsible for terrible crimes against Kuwait, with several
thousand killed and many tortured. But that is not war, rather state
terrorism, of the kind familiar among U.S. clients." The salient aspect of
this statement is that Chomsky did not specify the nature of these "terrible"
crimes, and his statement of "several thousand" killed and "many" tortured,
sounded, decidedly, unrealistic considering that immediately after the
invasion, there had not been any resistance against the occupation, hence no
reprisals by the occupiers.

To inform the reader, not even a few weeks into the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait,
an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, Alabaman Zionist, named Jean P. Sasson,
published a small propaganda booklet detailing flagrantly false accounts on
Iraq's atrocities in Kuwait and the thousands of Kuwaitis that Iraqis killed.
She called her mound of lies, "The Rape of Kuwait: the True Story of Iraqi
Atrocities against a Civilian Population." Sasson's Zionist propaganda
blitzkrieg baptized under the adjective, "true story," inundated media and
cluttered the mouths of all talking heads of the United States. Of course, I
did not hear that Sasson has ever written any book about the Zionist rape of
Palestine, Sharon's ordered massacres of Sabra and Shatila, the American rape
of Iraq, or Abu Ghraib prison atrocities.)

By force of similar words and concepts, I submit that Chomsky's long phrase,
"Iraq was responsible for terrible crimes against Kuwait," echoes Sasson's
subtitle, "The True Story of Iraqi Atrocities against a Civilian Population."
Consequently, it seems that we have a problem: Chomsky, as Sasson, talked
about the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, but without corroborating or providing the
sources as to where he obtained all the information on those "terrible crimes"
and those "several thousand" killed and "many" tortured.

Further note, in my research of the Gulf War, the only sources that provided
disinformation on Iraqi atrocities, incubators, and the Kuwaitis that Iraq
abducted and took to Iraq were Zionist-controlled U.S. media to increase the
disposition of the American public for war. (Before the invasion of Iraq,
Chomsky wrote another masterpiece of imperialist literature, so convoluted, so
arcane, so insidious, that after publishing it, Znet hurried to reclassify it,
as "a satire." I shall discuss that article in the upcoming parts.)

Did Chomsky report facts or "Necessary Illusions" just to write an essay?
Beyond that, Chomsky, made the matter worse, as when he, to reinforce his
reports of those "several thousands killed . . . etc.," added, "But that is
not war . . . etc."

Implication: Chomsky decided to attribute those "several thousand" killed by
Iraq to state terrorism. Arguably, while state terrorism could be the right
definition to describe aggression, the concept presented by Chomsky is sternly
equivocal: while it provides hearsay as proof that the Iraqi invaders killed
all those Kuwaitis, it decidedly, but obliquely, implied that Iraq is a
terrorist state. A denomination so much cherished and used by U.S. ruling
circles, it made the propaganda war that preceded U.S. wars against Iraq up to
its invasion flow easier, and transformed the bombardment of the Iraqi
population into an inaudible rumble inside American homes.

One may rebut that this is an article about Chomsky, and that I put him
unnecessarily on trial because of drifting semantics. Two points: (1)
semantics is not the shell but the core of thought, and (2) by addressing the
political thought of Chomsky in relation to the Iraqi question, I am
attempting to point out a structural "crisis" within the anti-imperialist
camp.

To sum up, it is unsettling to see countless writers of all progressive
persuasions compete to highlight the excesses of the Saddam's regime without
addressing the historical conditions of Iraq or verifying claims. Inevitably,
this contributes, indirectly or directly, to the amplification of the
ideological wave to invade Iraq and a latent justification for the same. . . .
After the invasion, most of the progressive crowd ran to denounce the empire,
the cloths of the emperor, and the machinations of the coterie . . .

Having established the general debate on the Gulf War, was the bombardment of
Iraq really an inaudible rumble?


Weapons Used

In his outstanding essay, "The Myth of Surgical Bombing in the Gulf War"
(which first appeared in "War Crimes," edited by Ramsey Clark and others),
Paul walker gives an exhaustive account of the weapons the United States used
against the Iraqi people:

Some 88,500 tons of bombs have been dropped in over 109,000 sorties flown by a
total of 2,800 fixed-wing aircraft.

The total number of bombs dropped by allied forces in the war comes to about
250,000, of these only 22,000 were the so-called "smart bombs" or guided
bombs. About 10,000 of these guided bombs were laser-guided and about 10,000
were guided anti-tank bombs. The remaining 2,000 were radiation-guided bombs
directed at communication and radar installations.


2,095 HARM missiles

217 Walleye missiles

5,276 guided anti-tank missiles

44,922 cluster bombs and rockets

136,755 conventional bombs

4,077 guided bombs


Were these all the weapons the U.S. used to destroy Iraq as a nation? What was
the strategy behind the bombing? Was the targeting of Iraq's infrastructures
accidental? Did U.S. military planners predict the aftermath of bombardment?
To answer these and other questions, I shall quote more of Paul Walker's
article, bringing in other authors and sources, and discuss Iraq's casualties,
fatalities, health conditions, and related matters.


_______________________________



Notes

(1) City Lights Books, War After War, 1992; Noam Chomsky/Essay: The Gulf War
in Retrospect, Page 13


_______________________________



* B. J. Sabri is an Iraqi-American antiwar activist.

I started out writing a detailed response to the author about the factual gaps in his essay, but as I re-read the essay in the course of framing my response, it became very clear that the author has not written an academic/political essay, but rather a propaganda pamphlet wherein he hides his fundamentalist Islamic tendencies behind his random accusations of one and all, including the world's greatest mind and one of the most honest public intellectuals of all time- Noam Chomsky, as being guilty of 'propaganda'. The only propaganda here is that of the author's, it fails miserably in hiding his Islamist urges and overtures aimed at hijacking the left intellectual tradition. It is, therefore, unworthy of any serious academic/intellectual consideration, and does not merit 'a response/critique'.