NP Chomsky interview

[Doug Millison]

at www.zmag.org

excerpt:

"[...] On Sept. 16, the
New York Times reported that "Washington has also
demanded [from
Pakistan] a cutoff of fuel supplies,...and the
elimination of truck
convoys that provide much of the food and other
supplies to
Afghanistan's civilian population." Astonishingly,
that report elicited
no detectable reaction in the West, a grim reminder of
the nature of the
Western civilization that leaders and elite
commentators claim to
uphold, yet another lesson that is not lost among
those who have been at
the wrong end of the guns and whips for centuries. In
the following
days, those demands were implemented. On Sept. 27, the
same NYT
correspondent reported that officials in Pakistan
"said today that they
would not relent in their decision to seal off the
country's 1,400- mile
border with Afghanistan, a move requested by the Bush
administration
because, the officials said, they wanted to be sure
that none of Mr. bin
Laden's men were hiding among the huge tide of
refugees" (John Burns,
Islamabad). According to the world's leading
newspaper, then, Washington
demanded that Pakistan slaughter massive numbers of
Afghans, millions of
them already on the brink of starvation, by cutting
off the limited
sustenance that was keeping them alive. Almost all aid
missions withdrew
or were expelled under the threat of bombing. Huge
numbers of miserable
people have been fleeing to the borders in terror,
after Washington's
threat to bomb the shreds of existence remaining in
Afghanistan, and to
convert the Northern Alliance into a heavily armed
military force that
will, perhaps, be unleashed to renew the atrocities
that tore the
country apart and led much of the population to
welcome the Taliban when
they drove out the murderous warring factions that
Washington and Moscow
now hope to exploit for their own purposes. When they
reach the sealed
borders, refugees are trapped to die in silence. Only
a trickle can
escape through remote mountain passes. How many have
already succumbed
we cannot guess, and few seem to care. Apart from the
relief agencies, I
have seen no attempt even to guess. Within a few weeks
the harsh winter
will arrive. There are some reporters and aid workers
in the refugee
camps across the borders. What they describe is
horrifying enough, but
they know, and we know, that they are seeing the lucky
ones, the few who
were able to escape -- and who express their hopes
that ''even the cruel
Americans must feel some pity for our ruined
country,'' and relent in
this savage silent genocide (Boston Globe, Sept. 27,
p. 1).
Perhaps the most apt description was given by the
wonderful and
courageous Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy,
referring to
Operation Infinite Justice proclaimed by the Bush
Administration:
"Witness the infinite justice of the new century.
Civilians starving to
death while they're waiting to be killed" (Guardian,
Sept. 29). [...]  The Reagan administration came into
office 20 years ago declaring that its leading concern
would be to eradicate the plague of international
terrorism, a cancer that is destroying civilization.
They cured the plague by establishing an international
terrorist network of extraordinary scale, with
consequences that are -- or should be -- well-known in
Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast
Asia, and elsewhere -- while using the pretexts, as
you say, to carry out programs that were of
considerable harm to the domestic population, and that
even threaten human survival. Did they carry out a
"shooting war"? The number of corpses they left in
their wake around the world is impressive, but
technically, they did not usually fire the guns, apart
from transparent PR exercises like the bombing of
Libya, the first crime of war in history that was
timed precisely for prime time TV, no small trick
considering the complexity of the operation and the
refusal of continental European countries to
collaborate. The torture, mutilation, rape, and
massacre were carried out through intermediaries.
 
Even if we exclude the huge but unmentionable
component of terrorism that traces back to terrorist
states, our own surely included, the terrorist plague
is very real, very dangerous, and truly terrifying.
There are ways to react that are likely to escalate
the threats to ourselves and others; there are ample
precedents for more sane and honorable methods, which
we've discussed before, and are not in the least
obscure, but are scarcely discussed. Those are the
basic choices. [...]

 


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