The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 11 | Article ID 2590 | Nov 03 2007

1

From Indochina to Iraq At War With Asia

Noam Chomsky K Hewison

From Indochina to Iraq At War With Asia

Noam Chomsky interviewed by KevinHewison

Vietnam and Laos 1970

Kevin Hewison The Journal of ContemporaryAsia (JCA) is now in its thirty-seventh year ofpublication and you have been on the EditorialBoard since Volume 1 No 2 Could you tell ushow it was that you came to be associated withthis new journal and why issue 2 rather thanissue 1

Noam Chomsky This was 1970 which was apretty complicated time in Southeast AsiaIndochina and the United States I had beenvery active in the anti-war movement since theearly 1960s but at that time it was peaking1970 was absolutely the peak with collegesclosed the country was falling apart and therewas tremendous opposition to the war inVietnam This opposition was explicitly elicitedby the Nixon-initiated invasion of Cambodia ata time when there had been enormous pressureto withdraw The reaction in the administrationto this pressure was to escalate - not unlikewhat is happening now in Iraq Also I had justcome back from Southeast Asia where I hadbeen in Laos and North Vietnam and so had apersonal view of the region - which alwaysenriches what you thought you knew I mayhave been invited for the first issue but inthese circumstances I was just extremely busy

Hewison I recall you saying that you were inHanoi at about the time that the first issuecame out

Chomsky I may have been or in Vientiane

Hewison That trip resulted in the book At WarWith Asia Many see the chapter on Laos asbeing the first extended discussion of the so-called secret War in Laos[1]

Chomsky Yes it is It is only partially due tome A lot of it is due to Fred Branfman I spentmost of my week in Laos in late March 1970with him He had been living in Laos for severalyears knew the language fluently and had beentrying desperately to get somebody to payattention to what was going on Thanks to himI was able to spend several days visitingrefugee camps about 30 kilometres or so awayfrom Vientiane and also to meet many people Iwould never have been able to locate on myown All of which I wrote about thoughsometimes protecting the identity of people insevere danger

It was the right time to be there The CIAmercenary army had shortly before cleared outtens of thousands of people from northern Laos- from the Plain of Jars - where many of themhad been living in caves for years subjected towhat was at that time the most intensivebombing in history soon to be surpassed inCambodia I spent a lot of time interviewingthese refugees which was revealing

One of the other interesting things I did on thistrip related to the story of the time that claimedNorth Vietnam had 50000 troops in Laos andthats why the United States had to bomb I wasinterested in the sources and did what seemedto be the obvious thing I went to the AmericanEmbassy and asked to speak to the PoliticalOfficer - typically the CIA representative at the

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

2

Embassy He came down and was very friendlyand I asked him if I could see some of thebackground material on the reported 50000troops He took me up to a room and gave mepiles of documentation He also said that I wasthe first person to ever ask him for backgroundwhich was interesting I read through it and Ifound that there was evidence that there wasone Vietnamese battalion of maybe 2500people somewhere up in northern Laos and therest of the so-called 50000 were eitherinvented or were old men carrying a bag of riceon their back trying to make it through thebombing

Bombing of Laos 1965-1975

This information was astonishing because atthis time the US was already using a forwardbase in northern Laos to guide the bombing ofNorth Vietnam so my guess was that therewould have been a lot more North Vietnamesethan that around This information wascorroborated then by the reports of interviewswith captured prisoners and other material that

I reviewed Some of this material was providedby Fred Branfman and some I was able to findas I saw a bit more of the country - not muchbut some

This v is i t to Laos was a very movingexperience There had been some reporting ofthe so-called secret War Jacques Decornoy hadhad an article in Le Monde[2] and freelancejournalist Tim Allman had written about it[3]So there was scattered material but I was ableto see evidence in some depth that hadntappeared I guess of any of the things Ive everwritten that was the one that was closest to myfeelings I usually try to keep my feelings out ofwhat I write but I probably didnt in that one

Hewison You were in Laos on the way to NorthVietnam in April 1970

Chomsky Yes North Vietnam was interestingbut I didnt see much I was mostly lecturing atthe Polytechnic University - more accurately inthe ruins of the University There was abombing pause so faculty and students couldbe brought back from the countryside Theyhad been out of touch with the world for fiveyears I spent every day lecturing on any topic Icould think of and that I knew anything aboutThere were all kinds of questions and interestfrom international affairs to linguistics andphilosophy to whats Norman Mailer doingthese days and so on[4] I did get around a littlebit but not very far from Hanoi

Hewison Did you see evidence of bombing inand around Hanoi

Chomsky You could see the evidence in HanoiWith my group of visitors - Doug Dowd andDick Fernandes - we travelled a bit beyondHanoi and were able to see the wreckage ofPhu Ly the hospital destroyed in Thanh Hoacity which the US claimed was never hit butwe could see the shell The area around theHam Rong Bridge had been intensively bombed- it was just a kind of moonscape villages

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

3

everything just totally destroyed and the bridgebarely standing But we knew that Hanoi wassomewhat protected - because there wereembassies foreign correspondents The furtheryou got from Hanoi the more intensive thebombing

It is rather interesting looking at the PentagonPapers[5] and other declassified papers thathave since emerged The bombing of NorthVietnam was planned in meticulous detail Justhow far do you go how much money do youexpend when do you stop and so on Thebombing of South Vietnam which was far moreintensive was barely even discussed just do itThe same comes th rough in Rober tMcNamaras memoirs[6] He goes through indetail how they planned considered andthought about the bombing of the Northparticularly the beginning of the bombing inFebruary 1965 His memoirs dont evenmention the fact that right at that time inJanuary 1965 he ordered the bombing of SouthVietnam to be vastly extended In fact at thattime it was at triple the scale of the bombing ofthe North as Bernard Fall reported It is arather striking fact What it tells you is clearthe bombing of South Vietnam had no cost tothe United States The bombing of NorthVietnam was costly For one thing the Northhad some defences and could shoot downbombers For another thing around Hanoi as Imentioned the bombing would have beenaround foreign embassies - not in the southernparts of the North however and that area wasalso devastated Bomb Haiphong and you canhit a Russian ship in the harbour bomb northof Hanoi and you can hit a Chinese railroadthat happens to pass through Vietnam Thatscostly So there was meticulous attention

I have to say in criticism of the anti-warmovement that it took pretty much the sameposition The condemnation of the war right tothe end was mostly of the bombing of theNorth and then Cambodia Not the bombing ofthe South which was far more intensive By

1967 just before his death Bernard Fall wassaying that he doubted that Vietnam wouldsurvive as a historical and cultural entity underthe impact of the most intensive bombing thatan area of that size had ever undergone Fallwas no dove In fact in McNamaras memoirshes the one non-government person who iscited with respect as a military historian ofVietnam Hed been making these points forsome time But it was not the focus of the anti-war movement Its mostly the costly bombingof the North that was the focus and thats not apretty fact

Agent Orange Defoliation South Vietnam

In fact the war on the South is almost unknownin the US Very few people even know that itwas in 1962 that Kennedy launched outrightaggression against South Vietnam The US hadalready imposed a sort of Latin American styleterrorist state which had killed maybe60-70000 people and had elicited resistancewhich it could no longer control So Kennedyjust escalated the war to what we would calldirect aggression if anybody else did it The USAir Force started bombing under SouthVietnamese markings napalm was authorisedchemical warfare to destroy crops and groundcover began and they started rounding people

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

4

up and moved them into what amounted toconcentration camps or urban slums as it wasput to protect them from the indigenousguerrillas who the US government knew theywere willingly supporting

Thats aggression and it went on from thereThere was no protest no interest It wasntuntil the bombing of the North started thatthere finally began to be some substantialprotest that escalated quite extensively

Cambodia 1970

Hewison When you spoke at the JCA receptionrecently you also talked passionately about thebombing of Cambodia

Chomsky Well at the time that I joined JCA inmid-1970 it was the beginning of the direct USinvasion of Cambodia Actually the US hadbeen bombing in Cambodia for years but notextensively In 1969 Prince Sihanouk who wassupposedly our ally put out an official WhitePaper documenting - with pictures testimoniesand other documents - many hundreds ofexamples of US attacks in Cambodia He calleda conference with the international press corpsin Phnom Penh pleading with the internationalpress to report the US bombing and killing ofinnocent Khmer peasants that had all passedwith barely a whisper I doubt that the WhitePaper even got mentioned I dont know if youdeven be ab le to locate i t today Theinternational press corps did virtually nothing -there had been some earlier reports But theinvasion in 1970 really flung Cambodia into themiddle of the war Shortly after that began theintensive bombing of Cambodia and we knewthat it was pretty awful but we didnt knowhow bad it was

In fact only a few months ago there was animportant article by Taylor Owen and BenKiernan specialists on Cambodia - Ben is alsodirector of the Yale Genocide Program whichhas a project focused on Cambodia[7] This is

an extremely important article and I saw nomention of it in the US other than the things Iposted They went through the US governmentdata that had been released - I think it hadbeen released even during the Clinton years -which showed that the bombing - as awful aswe thought it was - was five times as high aswhat was reported This made the bombing ofrural Cambodia heavier than the entirebombing conducted by the Allies in all theatresof World War II All that in rural Cambodia aremarkably small area

Cambodia Bombing Map 1965-1973

What was mentioned in the press but generallyignored was Henry Kissinger transmittingRichard Nixons orders His words weresomething like anything that flies on anythingthat moves in rural Cambodia I cant think ofa case in the archival record of any state that issuch an overt call for large-scale genocide Itwas sort of mentioned in passing in the NewYork Times when the Nixon tapes werereleased and elicited no comment which iskind of shocking[8] The new material on thebombing of Cambodia also passed withoutcomment

Owen and Kiernan also pointed out that duringthose years the Khmer Rouge grew from amarginal force of a couple of thousand peoplewhich no one had ever heard of to a huge

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

5

peasant army an army of enraged peasantsmobilised by the Khmer Rouge through thebombing And then of course we know whathappened afterwards That receives a lot ofattention because somebody else wasrespons ib le When we in the US areresponsible then it doesnt get reported sort ofcharacteristic

Indochina and Iraq

Hewison Of course inevitable comparisons aremade between Indochina and Iraq

Chomsky There is a point of comparison Thisis from the Western point of view where theyare very similar From this perspective the onlyquestion is Can we win at acceptable costThere are no other questions Thats theoverwhelming question and others aremarginal

In both Vietnam and Iraq the question is howwe can win at acceptable cost The mood wascaptured rather well by Arthur Schlesinger theKennedy advisor and leading historian at atime when elite opinion was beginning to beworried about the Vietnam War because it wascosting too much At first he was verysupportive but he was writing in I think it was1966 At that time there were already concernsand he writes something like this we all praythat the hawks will be right and that the newmilitary forces that are being sent will enableus to win victory And if it works we will all bepraising the wisdom and statesmanship of theAmerican government in winning victory in aland they have turned to wreck and ruin But Idont think theyre right

Thats almost a quote It expresses liberal eliteenlightened opinion about the war You cantranslate it almost word for word to criticism ofthe Iraq war today We all pray that the hawksare right and that the surge will succeed butwe dont think it will just like Schlesingerdidnt think it would And if it does succeed we

wi l l a l l be pra i s ing the wisdom andstatesmanship of the American government inleaving Iraq as one of the worst disasters inmilitary history Thats not a caricature of thecritical dovish intellectual elite opinion Inboth cases the wars are described asquagmires We got caught in something thatcost us too much Anthony Lewis who is way atthe left-liberal extreme of what the mediatolerate said in 1975 at the end of the VietnamWar something like the war began withbenign efforts to do good but by 1969 it wasclear that it had become a disaster which wastoo costly for us And then Nixon went on andhe shouldnt have He should have pulled out

Interestingly that was not the position of thepublic The first major polls by the ChicagoCouncil on Foreign Relations on publicattitudes towards international affairs was in1969 and of course there were questions aboutVietnam These were open choice questionsmaybe about ten choices and I think about70 of the public picked fundamentally wrongand immoral not a mistake You couldnt findthat phrase anywhere in the mainstreamcommentary including criticism These figurescontinued up to the latest polls more or less Ithink its the same in Iraq

So from the US point of view in fact from theWestern point of view thats the perspective onthe Iraq War If the military efforts succeedwell be praising the wisdom and statesmanshipof the American government in leaving a landwhere we have created a desert and call itpeace But we dont think its going to work andits costing us too much anyway Thats theWestern point of view However from the pointof view of the victims its completely different

Dominoes and Viruses

Even from the point of view of the planners itstotally different Why did the US invadeVietnam Why not accept the Genevaagreements of 1954 Well there was a reason

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

6

and we read it in the internal record evensometimes in the public record There wasconcern at the time for what was called fallingdominos The domino theory has two versionsOne of them is intended for the public and it istotally absurd and every time it is refuted itssaid Oh well we made a mistake its sillyand so on The public version is Ho Chi Minhsgoing to get into a canoe and land in Californiaand all the rest of it the Nicaraguans are twodays drive from Texas according to RonaldReagan and we have to call a nationalemergency But that is so obviously idiotic thatafter its over people say how silly it was wedidnt understand

But theres a rational version of the dominotheory which has never been abandonedbecause its correct It goes all the way throughfrom Greece in 1947 right up until today Therational version is that if some country in theworld - the smaller the worse its not a matterof its power - whether its Grenada CubaVietnam or somewhere else shows someindication of independent development in amanner that would be meaningful to otherswhove had similar problems thats dangerousIts what Henry Kissinger called the virus thatcan spread contagion He was speaking ofAllendes Chile but you see the same strainright through the planning record The rottenapple that can spoil the barrel Cuba mightspread the Castro idea of taking matters intoyour own hands which has enormous appeal inLatin America where people suffer the samerepression In that sense dominos aredangerous If you had a successful developmentsomewhere it can spread contagion Well howdo you deal with a virus that is spreadingcontagion You destroy the virus You inoculatethose who might be affected

This is exactly what was done in Vietnam Youdestroy Vietnam - its not going to be a modelfor anyone As Bernard Fall said Vietnamwould be lucky if it survives as a cultural andhistoric entity so its not going to be a model of

independent and successful development Youinoculate the region by installing viciousmilitary dictatorships in country after country

The most important was Indonesia Of courseit was the richest In 1965 there was theSuharto coup That coup incidentally wasreported accurately in the West The New YorkTimes for example described it as astaggering mass slaughter which is a gleamof light in Asia[9] The description of the hugemassacres was combined with euphoria -undisguised euphoria The same was true inAustralia Probably Europe as well but it hasntbeen studied there to my knowledge TheSuharto massacre really made sure that thevirus didnt spread to a country that they werereally concerned about

There was also a concern that Japan what JohnDower called the super-domino mightaccommodate to an independent SoutheastAsia essentially reconstructing something likea new order in Asia that it had tried to createby force but the US wasnt about to lose WorldWar II in the Pacific[10] Its not a small issueand its taken care of by destroying the virusand inoculating the region with brutal dictatorsin country after country - Suharto Marcos andso on - around the region Well that was sort ofunderstood by planners National securityAdviser McGeorge Bundy in later yearsretrospectively pointed out that after 1965 ourefforts were excessive Meaning we shouldhave stopped then because wed already wonthe war

My view is that this is a little early but by thetime I was in Indochina in 1970 my feeling wasthat the US had won the war It had achievedits major objectives It was a partial victory asthey didnt achieve their maximal objectivesthey didnt establish a client state and if youare a super-imperialist thats a defeat but youachieved your main objectives So its describedas a defeat but I dont think it was And thebusiness world knew it For example the Far

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

7

Eastern Economic Review was advising in theearly 1970s that the US should get out becauseit had already achieved its main goals

Thats Indochina in a nutshell Iraq is totallydifferent

The Stakes in Iraq

You cant destroy Iraq Its far too valuable Ithas probably the second largest energyreserves in the world They are very easilyaccessible - no permafrost no tar sands - juststick a pipe in the ground It is right at theheart of the worlds major energy producingregion which the US has wanted to controlsince the Second World War much as Britainwanted to control it before that This goes backto the beginning of the oil age Britain back in1920 was saying that if we can control the oil ofthis region we can do whatever we want in theworld or words to that effect By 1945 the USState Department was describing it as astupendous source of strategic power one ofthe greatest material prizes in world historyEisenhower called it strategically the mostimportant area in the world It has theresources

This is not just a matter of access In the 1950sthe US was not accessing Middle East oil itwas the worlds biggest producer itself In factin 1959 the US shifted to straight domesticsources in order to benefit Texas oil companiesand corrupt officials in the Eisenhoweradministration For about fourteen years theyexhausted domestic resources at a serious costto national security but at great enrichmentNevertheless with regard to the Middle Eastwe had the same policies If we were on solarenergy right now wed still have the samepolicies And the reasons are understood Itwas pointed out by George Kennan about sixtyyears ago when he was a top planner if wehave our hands on the spigot we have vetopower over others He happened to be thinkingof Japan but the point generalizes

Zbigniew Brzezinski who was not much infavour of the war in Iraq nevertheless pointedout that if the US wins the war establishes aclient state and can have military bases and soon right in the heart of the oil-producingregion we will have critical leverage over theindustrial powers - Europe Japan Asia

Asians understand this too Thats why they aredeveloping the Shanghai CooperationOrganisation[11] and the Asian energy securitygrid[12] Based primarily in China but bringingin Russia and Central Asian countries andrecently India Pakistan and - significantly -Iran They want some degree of control overtheir own resources They dont want theUnited States to hold the lever In fact DickCheney understands them On his way toKazakhstan about a year ago he had a tiradeover how control over pipelines can be tools ofintimidation and blackmail And thats true Ofcourse he was saying when its in the hands ofothers The same holds for us of course butwere not allowed to see that

The War in Iraq

So this is a really important invasion You haveto control Iraq You cant destroy it and then goaway and theres no concern about spreading avirus This was completely different fromVietnam In fact thats part of the reason whyneither political party in the United States isreally offering a programme of withdrawal

The Democrats seem to be calling for awithdrawal but if you look at the details itrsquosnot really that In fact there was an analysis ofit by General Kevin Ryan at the KennedySchool He went through the Democratic Partyproposals and pointed out first of all that theyleave the option to Bush that he can waive allrequirements in the interest of nationalsecurity End of story Secondly even if youlook at the implementation he said it shouldreally be called re-missioning not withdrawalAmerican troops are going to be left there for

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

8

the protection of US installations and forcesInstallations include the Embassy in theBaghdad Green Zone which is more like a cityTheres no embassy like it in the world Its nota building they intend to leave Its got its ownmilitary forces anti-missile system baseballfields everything Facilities in Iraq probablyalso include permanent military bases whichare quietly being scattered about the desertwhere theyre more or less safe from attack Soyou have to protect those and it takes a lot oftroops

The Green Zone

What does force protection mean If youinstall US forces in Iraqi units theyre in unitswhere the majority of their fellow soldiers maythink its legitimate to kill them Some 60 ofthe total population think that Americansoldiers are legitimate targets So youre goingto have to protect them Another qualificationis you have to leave forces to fight the War onTerror Also open-ended And to train Iraqitroops Open-ended His calculation is that thetotal number of American forces would not bevery much different from what it has been Andhe leaves out a lot He leaves out logisticswhich is the core of a modern army and whichthe US is controlling and intends to continue tocontrol That logistics right now about 80 ofit goes though southern Iraq which is very

vulnerable to guerrilla attack so you are goingto have plenty of US forces to protect that Heleaves out air power Well we know what thatslike Owen and Kiernan have pointed out whathappened when the US began to withdrawtroops from Vietnam And Ryan leaves outmercenaries The US has probably 130000mercenaries called contractors Its sort of likethe French Foreign Legion Its a mercenaryforce and who knows how big that will growits under no supervision So this is notwithdrawal

Theres a good reason for it - which were notallowed to discuss because wed bring up thatunpronounceable word O-I-L and you cantmention that because we have to be benign andso on

But if Iraq was granted sovereignty it wouldntbe like Vietnam Sovereignty in Iraq meansunder majority Shiite influence Undoubtedly aShiite-dominated Iraq would continue toimprove relations with Shiite Iran as its doingalready It would incite the Shiite population ofSaudi Arabia on the border which happens tobe where most of the Saudi oil is and one canimagine a loose Shiite alliance controlling mostof the worlds oil and independent of the UnitedStates Thats like a nightmare And it getsmuch worse Iran already has observer statuswith the Shanghai Co-operation Organisationwhich begins to draw the Middle East - theWest Asian energy resources - towards theAsian system If Shiite-dominated Saudi andIraqi oil systems joined thats the worldsmajor energy resources moving off into theenemy camp - China Russia India

Indias kind of playing a double gameimproving relations with China and they alsohave observer status with the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation and theyve had jointenergy planning with China At the same timeIndia is happy to play games with the UnitedStates if the Bush administration authorisestheir nuclear weapons - as it just did leaving

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

9

the international regime on missile control andnuclear weapons controls shattered They arehappy to keep a foot in both camps

South Korea will presumably sooner or laterjoin From the Asian point of view Siberia isAsian - not European - and it has plenty ofresources making Russia a member The areawe are talking about is the most dynamiceconomic area in the world It has the majorityof the worlds foreign exchange reserves Japanis not part of the Shanghai Co-operationOrganisation and remains a US ally but itstricky as theyre very dependent on economicand other relations with China It s acomplicated relation

This really would be a major shift in worldpower Nothing like that was involved inVietnam The only respect in which they aresimilar is from the point of view of the Westernimperial mentality They both cost us a lot andin that respect they are similar so analogiesare drawn

Vietnam and the China Connection

Hewison On the Iraq-Vietnam comparison oneof the ideas floated recently is the notion thatone of the initiatives that got the US out ofVietnam and was seen as a positive was the linkmade with China through Kissingers visitLooking back at this it is now being said that inorder to achieve something positive out of theIraq shambles - and this was mentioned in arecent editorial in The Economist (7 April 2007US Edition) ndash the US should make overtures toIran and this might ameliorate some of thebroader conflicts in the region In what youvejust been saying this would not seem a viableoption

Chomsky It made sense from a realpolitik pointof view for Nixon and Kissinger to ally withChina against Russia as they tried to patch upsome sort of deacutetente Thats superpowerpolitics and had nothing to do with Vietnam

Thats part of the pretense that the war inVietnam was some kind of proxy war againstthe Russians or the Chinese

Heres another interesting fact about thePentagon Papers In it there are twenty-fiveyears of intelligence records not released bythe government but stolen from it like somecaptured enemy archive and the record isastonishing In the late 1940s the US hadntquite decided whether they were going tosupport Vietnamese independence the way theydid with the Indonesians at the time But about1950 they decided to support the French USintelligence was given orders prove that HoChi Minh is an agent of Russia or Peiping (as itwas called) or the Sino-Soviet axis anythingwill do just prove that he is an agent of thatmassive conspiracy for world control And theyworked hard on it For a couple of years theysearched all over the place and they found acopy of Pravda in the Vietnamese embassy inBangkok or something similar and they didntcome up with anything They came to a verycurious conclusion Hanoi seemed to be theonly part of the region that didnt have anycontact with Russia or China So the wise menin the State Department concluded that thisproved their point Ho Chi Minh is such a loyalslave of [Russia andor China] that he doesnteven need orders

From then on we go on right to 1968 andthere is no discussion in intelligence of eventhe possibility that maybe Hanoi is servingnational interests It has to be serving themaster Now whatever you think about Ho ChiMinh theres just no doubt that he wasfollowing Vietnamese interests There is nodoubt about this When you first arrive in Hanoithey take you to the war museum to show youhow they fought the Chinese centuries ago Itsright in the back of their minds But in the US itcouldnt be thought If I remember correctlythere was one staff paper that raised thepossibility that Hanoi was not a puppet and Idont think it was even submitted This is a

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

10

level of indoctrination which is shocking

Actually it has been studied in a lot more detailby James Peck in his book WashingtonsChina[13] He shows that the paranoia andfanaticism about China just exceeded anyconceivable rationality right through thesixties when the record dries

So yes there was that pretense In order tomaintain the pretense - and maybe theybelieved it I dont say they were lying SoKissinger in his deluded mind may havethought that it was China keeping the wargoing but it wasnt It was the Vietnamese whowere keeping the war going China was givingminimal assistance Russia was giving someanti-aircraft missiles and so on but it was awar with the Vietnamese That could not befaced because that would mean were not nicepeople We dont invade other countries Weliberate other people We dont attack themTherefore this picture emerged

The Economist cant see this as they are muchtoo deeply mired in imperial mentality In thiscase what does it mean to talk to Iran Is Irankeeping the insurgency going Is Iranresponsible for the Sunni insurgency Youdhave to be a lunatic to believe that It is strikingto see how this is being developed I presumeThe Economist is being caught up in a wave ofUS government propaganda

Remember the background The Iraqipopulation is overwhelmingly calling for awithdrawal The US government knows thisfrom its own polls The US population is callingfor a withdrawal The last congressionalelection was about this The responseEscalate As soon as you saw the surge wasannounced you could predict that there wasgoing to be a flow of propaganda about howIran was behind it What happens A flow ofpropaganda about how Iran is behind it Thencomes a debate

This i s the way Western democrat icpropaganda systems operate You dontarticulate the party line - totalitarian states dothat - they announce the party line and ifpeople dont accept it you beat them over thehead Nobody has to believe it In free societiesthat wont work You have to presuppose theparty line - never mention - just presuppose itThen encourage a vigorous debate within theframework of the party line That instills theparty line even more deeply and it gives theimpression of an open free society

The Iran Connection

This is a textbook example The Bushgovernment announces that Irans serialnumbers are on the IEDs Then it starts avigorous debate The hawks say lets bombthem to smithereens The doves say maybe itsnot true or maybe itrsquos just the RevolutionaryGuard and so on The discussion is surreal Youcan only carry it out on the assumption that theUnited States owns the world Otherwise Irancant be interfering in a country that is underUS occupation Its as if Germany in 1943 werecomplaining that the Allies were interfering infree and independent Vichy France You haveto collapse in ridicule But in the West verysober very ser ious We are a deeplyindoctrinated society so it isnt evenquestioned So yes the talk is now that welltalk with Iran and that this will solve theproblem It isnt going to solve the problem Itsan Iraqi problem

If Iran is not involved more in Iraq it isastonishing Were threatening Iran with attackand destruction Iran is almost completelysurrounded by hostile US forces The US isdeploying big naval detachments in the GulfWhat are they there for Defence The US isprobably conducting terror inside Iran tryingto stimulate tribal and secessionist movementsand so on And openly threatening to attackIran which in itself is a violation of the UNCharter

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

11

In fact when the US invaded Iraq that was asignal to Iran to develop nuclear weapons Thatwas understood One of Israels leading militaryhistorians Martin van Creveld wrote in theInternational Herald Tribune that of course hedidnt want Iran to have nuclear weapons butafter the US invasion of Iraq then if theyre notdeveloping them they are crazy[14] This isbecause the invasion was simply a signal wellattack anyone we like as long as they aredefenceless and you know we want to go afteryou because youre defiant Youre not going tobe able to survive So maybe they are doingsomething but the fact that the US is capturingIranian figures in Arbil and apparently goingafter diplomats - according to PatrickCockburns reports[15]- those are realprovocations

The discussion is surreal Take say Tony Blairduring the latest naval incident in which fifteenBritish sailors and marines were captured byIran He claims that the ships were in Iraqiwaters and then we have a debate overwhether they were in Iraqi or Iranian watersIts a debate that doesnt make any sense Whatare British vessels doing in Iraqi waters Howdid they get there Suppose the Iranian Navywas in the Caribbean Would the US be arguingover whose territorial waters they were in Totake this position you have to assume that theUS and its British lackey own the worldOtherwise you cant have the discussion

From Vietnam to the War on Terror

Hewison Right at the beginning of At War withAsia you have a quote from Professor J KFairbank where he is cited as worrying thatthe Vietnam War was not only a war againstthe people of Asia but resulted in a totalitarianmenace in the US itself Is there a comparisonwith the so-called War on Terror

Chomsky First of all with regard to the War onTerror we should bring up something that isconstantly repressed On 11 September 2001

Bush re-declared the War on Terror It hadbeen declared by Ronald Reagan when he cameinto office in 1981 He announced right awaythat the focus of US foreign policy would be onstate-directed international terrorism Hisadministration called it the plague of themodern age a return to barbarism in our timeand so on[16] And then came somethingpeople would prefer to forget This was a majorterrorist war launched by the United Stateswhich devastated Central America killedhundreds of thousands of people hadhorrifying results in southern Africa and theMiddle East and so on extending to SoutheastAsia

That was the first War on Terror So Bush re-declared it Now when you declare warwhatever it is going to be its going to comewith internal constraints Thats what a war isThe population has to be mobilized Therearent a lot of ways of mobilising a populationThe simplest way is fear Fear often has somejustification but we have to remember that theBush administration is increasing the risk notdecreasing it Intelligence agencies anticipatedthat the invasion of Iraq would probablyincrease the threat of terror and proliferationWell i t did but far beyond what wasanticipated The latest studies reveal thatterror increased about seven-fold This is whatthe analysts call the Iraq effect There aremany examples where the Bush administrationis not decreasing the risk of terrorism Mobilisethe population through fear and try to institutecontrols Well they have tried A lot of thingsthey have done are outrageous - the MilitaryCommissions Act which was passed bybipartisan vote last year is one of the mostdisgraceful pieces of legislation in Americanhistory - but we shouldnt exaggerate

With all of this it is nowhere near as bad as ithas been in the past Its a much freer societythan it used to be This is nothing like WoodrowWilsons Red Scare Its nothing like theCOINTELPRO which ran from the Eisenhower

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

12

up to the Nixon administration which was amajor FBI programme aimed at destroyingopposition movements from the Blackmovement to the womens movement and theentire New Left[17] Its nothing like that Badenough but we shouldnt exaggerate a lot offreedom has been won and it is not going to begiven up easily So yes there are efforts torestrict freedom - and thats what states are allabout taking any chance they can get torestrict freedom But the population has won alot of rights and its not going to abandon themeasily

Hewison Thats probably a good place toconclude - optimistic in a sense We reallyappreciate your time today Thank you

Kevin Hewison interviewed Chomsky inCambridge on April 18 2007 This is anabbreviated version of an article that appearedin Journal of Contemporary Asia 37 4 pp297-310 Nov 2007 Posted at Japan Focus onNovmber 26 2007

Hewison is Co-editor Journal of ContemporaryAsia and Director Carolina Asia Center TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Notes

[1] At War With Asia was originally published in1970 by PantheonVintage It was re-releasedin 2004 by AK Press The chapter on Laos wasfirst published as A Visit to Laos in The NewYork Review of Books 23 July 1970[2] These articles in Le Monde from 3 to 8 July1968 reported on Decornoys trip to Pathet Laostrongholds in northeastern Laos Also see JDecornoy (1970) Laos The Forgotten WarBulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 2 April-July pp 21-3[3] See TD Allman (1970) Laos thelabyrinthine war Far Eastern Economic

Review 16 April and his articles in the NewYork Times 25 August 1968 18 September1968 28 September 1968 17 October 1969 26October 1969 and 6 March 1970[4] See Chomskys article In North VietnamThe New York Review of Books 13 August1970 The essay is also included in At War withAsia[5] New York Quadrangle Books 1971[6] Robert S McNamara In Retrospect TheTragedy and Lessons of Vietnam New YorkTimes Books 1995 See Chomskys assessmentof these memoirs in Memories Z MagazineJuly-August 1995[7] The article is Bombs over Cambodia TheWalrus (Canada) October 2006 pp 62-9 TheYale University Genocide Studies Program ishere and the Cambodia project is here[8] On 26 May 2004 the National SecurityArchive released a series of Kissingertelephone conversations including Nixons callto Kissinger ordering the bombing ofCambodia Nixon stated I want a planwhere every goddamn thing that can fly goesinto Cambodia and hits every target that isopen He added I want everything that canfly to go in there and crack the hell out of themThere is no limitation on mileage and nol i m i t a t i o n o n b u d g e t ( M r KissingerPresident December 9 1970 Box29 File 2 See the Archive According toElizabeth Becker (New York Times 27 May2004) Kissinger transmitted this order as Amassive bombing campaign in CambodiaAnything that flies on anything that moves[9] New York Times 22 December 1965 17February 1966 and 19 June 1966[10] See John W Dower Embracing DefeatJapan in the Wake of World War II New YorkWW Norton amp Company 1999[11] See the organisations website[12] For reports on the Asian energy grid seeAsia Times Online 1 December 2005[13] Washingtons China The National SecurityWorld the Cold War and the Origins ofG loba l i sm (Amhers t Un ivers i t y o fMassachusetts Press 2006)

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

2

Embassy He came down and was very friendlyand I asked him if I could see some of thebackground material on the reported 50000troops He took me up to a room and gave mepiles of documentation He also said that I wasthe first person to ever ask him for backgroundwhich was interesting I read through it and Ifound that there was evidence that there wasone Vietnamese battalion of maybe 2500people somewhere up in northern Laos and therest of the so-called 50000 were eitherinvented or were old men carrying a bag of riceon their back trying to make it through thebombing

Bombing of Laos 1965-1975

This information was astonishing because atthis time the US was already using a forwardbase in northern Laos to guide the bombing ofNorth Vietnam so my guess was that therewould have been a lot more North Vietnamesethan that around This information wascorroborated then by the reports of interviewswith captured prisoners and other material that

I reviewed Some of this material was providedby Fred Branfman and some I was able to findas I saw a bit more of the country - not muchbut some

This v is i t to Laos was a very movingexperience There had been some reporting ofthe so-called secret War Jacques Decornoy hadhad an article in Le Monde[2] and freelancejournalist Tim Allman had written about it[3]So there was scattered material but I was ableto see evidence in some depth that hadntappeared I guess of any of the things Ive everwritten that was the one that was closest to myfeelings I usually try to keep my feelings out ofwhat I write but I probably didnt in that one

Hewison You were in Laos on the way to NorthVietnam in April 1970

Chomsky Yes North Vietnam was interestingbut I didnt see much I was mostly lecturing atthe Polytechnic University - more accurately inthe ruins of the University There was abombing pause so faculty and students couldbe brought back from the countryside Theyhad been out of touch with the world for fiveyears I spent every day lecturing on any topic Icould think of and that I knew anything aboutThere were all kinds of questions and interestfrom international affairs to linguistics andphilosophy to whats Norman Mailer doingthese days and so on[4] I did get around a littlebit but not very far from Hanoi

Hewison Did you see evidence of bombing inand around Hanoi

Chomsky You could see the evidence in HanoiWith my group of visitors - Doug Dowd andDick Fernandes - we travelled a bit beyondHanoi and were able to see the wreckage ofPhu Ly the hospital destroyed in Thanh Hoacity which the US claimed was never hit butwe could see the shell The area around theHam Rong Bridge had been intensively bombed- it was just a kind of moonscape villages

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

3

everything just totally destroyed and the bridgebarely standing But we knew that Hanoi wassomewhat protected - because there wereembassies foreign correspondents The furtheryou got from Hanoi the more intensive thebombing

It is rather interesting looking at the PentagonPapers[5] and other declassified papers thathave since emerged The bombing of NorthVietnam was planned in meticulous detail Justhow far do you go how much money do youexpend when do you stop and so on Thebombing of South Vietnam which was far moreintensive was barely even discussed just do itThe same comes th rough in Rober tMcNamaras memoirs[6] He goes through indetail how they planned considered andthought about the bombing of the Northparticularly the beginning of the bombing inFebruary 1965 His memoirs dont evenmention the fact that right at that time inJanuary 1965 he ordered the bombing of SouthVietnam to be vastly extended In fact at thattime it was at triple the scale of the bombing ofthe North as Bernard Fall reported It is arather striking fact What it tells you is clearthe bombing of South Vietnam had no cost tothe United States The bombing of NorthVietnam was costly For one thing the Northhad some defences and could shoot downbombers For another thing around Hanoi as Imentioned the bombing would have beenaround foreign embassies - not in the southernparts of the North however and that area wasalso devastated Bomb Haiphong and you canhit a Russian ship in the harbour bomb northof Hanoi and you can hit a Chinese railroadthat happens to pass through Vietnam Thatscostly So there was meticulous attention

I have to say in criticism of the anti-warmovement that it took pretty much the sameposition The condemnation of the war right tothe end was mostly of the bombing of theNorth and then Cambodia Not the bombing ofthe South which was far more intensive By

1967 just before his death Bernard Fall wassaying that he doubted that Vietnam wouldsurvive as a historical and cultural entity underthe impact of the most intensive bombing thatan area of that size had ever undergone Fallwas no dove In fact in McNamaras memoirshes the one non-government person who iscited with respect as a military historian ofVietnam Hed been making these points forsome time But it was not the focus of the anti-war movement Its mostly the costly bombingof the North that was the focus and thats not apretty fact

Agent Orange Defoliation South Vietnam

In fact the war on the South is almost unknownin the US Very few people even know that itwas in 1962 that Kennedy launched outrightaggression against South Vietnam The US hadalready imposed a sort of Latin American styleterrorist state which had killed maybe60-70000 people and had elicited resistancewhich it could no longer control So Kennedyjust escalated the war to what we would calldirect aggression if anybody else did it The USAir Force started bombing under SouthVietnamese markings napalm was authorisedchemical warfare to destroy crops and groundcover began and they started rounding people

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

4

up and moved them into what amounted toconcentration camps or urban slums as it wasput to protect them from the indigenousguerrillas who the US government knew theywere willingly supporting

Thats aggression and it went on from thereThere was no protest no interest It wasntuntil the bombing of the North started thatthere finally began to be some substantialprotest that escalated quite extensively

Cambodia 1970

Hewison When you spoke at the JCA receptionrecently you also talked passionately about thebombing of Cambodia

Chomsky Well at the time that I joined JCA inmid-1970 it was the beginning of the direct USinvasion of Cambodia Actually the US hadbeen bombing in Cambodia for years but notextensively In 1969 Prince Sihanouk who wassupposedly our ally put out an official WhitePaper documenting - with pictures testimoniesand other documents - many hundreds ofexamples of US attacks in Cambodia He calleda conference with the international press corpsin Phnom Penh pleading with the internationalpress to report the US bombing and killing ofinnocent Khmer peasants that had all passedwith barely a whisper I doubt that the WhitePaper even got mentioned I dont know if youdeven be ab le to locate i t today Theinternational press corps did virtually nothing -there had been some earlier reports But theinvasion in 1970 really flung Cambodia into themiddle of the war Shortly after that began theintensive bombing of Cambodia and we knewthat it was pretty awful but we didnt knowhow bad it was

In fact only a few months ago there was animportant article by Taylor Owen and BenKiernan specialists on Cambodia - Ben is alsodirector of the Yale Genocide Program whichhas a project focused on Cambodia[7] This is

an extremely important article and I saw nomention of it in the US other than the things Iposted They went through the US governmentdata that had been released - I think it hadbeen released even during the Clinton years -which showed that the bombing - as awful aswe thought it was - was five times as high aswhat was reported This made the bombing ofrural Cambodia heavier than the entirebombing conducted by the Allies in all theatresof World War II All that in rural Cambodia aremarkably small area

Cambodia Bombing Map 1965-1973

What was mentioned in the press but generallyignored was Henry Kissinger transmittingRichard Nixons orders His words weresomething like anything that flies on anythingthat moves in rural Cambodia I cant think ofa case in the archival record of any state that issuch an overt call for large-scale genocide Itwas sort of mentioned in passing in the NewYork Times when the Nixon tapes werereleased and elicited no comment which iskind of shocking[8] The new material on thebombing of Cambodia also passed withoutcomment

Owen and Kiernan also pointed out that duringthose years the Khmer Rouge grew from amarginal force of a couple of thousand peoplewhich no one had ever heard of to a huge

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

5

peasant army an army of enraged peasantsmobilised by the Khmer Rouge through thebombing And then of course we know whathappened afterwards That receives a lot ofattention because somebody else wasrespons ib le When we in the US areresponsible then it doesnt get reported sort ofcharacteristic

Indochina and Iraq

Hewison Of course inevitable comparisons aremade between Indochina and Iraq

Chomsky There is a point of comparison Thisis from the Western point of view where theyare very similar From this perspective the onlyquestion is Can we win at acceptable costThere are no other questions Thats theoverwhelming question and others aremarginal

In both Vietnam and Iraq the question is howwe can win at acceptable cost The mood wascaptured rather well by Arthur Schlesinger theKennedy advisor and leading historian at atime when elite opinion was beginning to beworried about the Vietnam War because it wascosting too much At first he was verysupportive but he was writing in I think it was1966 At that time there were already concernsand he writes something like this we all praythat the hawks will be right and that the newmilitary forces that are being sent will enableus to win victory And if it works we will all bepraising the wisdom and statesmanship of theAmerican government in winning victory in aland they have turned to wreck and ruin But Idont think theyre right

Thats almost a quote It expresses liberal eliteenlightened opinion about the war You cantranslate it almost word for word to criticism ofthe Iraq war today We all pray that the hawksare right and that the surge will succeed butwe dont think it will just like Schlesingerdidnt think it would And if it does succeed we

wi l l a l l be pra i s ing the wisdom andstatesmanship of the American government inleaving Iraq as one of the worst disasters inmilitary history Thats not a caricature of thecritical dovish intellectual elite opinion Inboth cases the wars are described asquagmires We got caught in something thatcost us too much Anthony Lewis who is way atthe left-liberal extreme of what the mediatolerate said in 1975 at the end of the VietnamWar something like the war began withbenign efforts to do good but by 1969 it wasclear that it had become a disaster which wastoo costly for us And then Nixon went on andhe shouldnt have He should have pulled out

Interestingly that was not the position of thepublic The first major polls by the ChicagoCouncil on Foreign Relations on publicattitudes towards international affairs was in1969 and of course there were questions aboutVietnam These were open choice questionsmaybe about ten choices and I think about70 of the public picked fundamentally wrongand immoral not a mistake You couldnt findthat phrase anywhere in the mainstreamcommentary including criticism These figurescontinued up to the latest polls more or less Ithink its the same in Iraq

So from the US point of view in fact from theWestern point of view thats the perspective onthe Iraq War If the military efforts succeedwell be praising the wisdom and statesmanshipof the American government in leaving a landwhere we have created a desert and call itpeace But we dont think its going to work andits costing us too much anyway Thats theWestern point of view However from the pointof view of the victims its completely different

Dominoes and Viruses

Even from the point of view of the planners itstotally different Why did the US invadeVietnam Why not accept the Genevaagreements of 1954 Well there was a reason

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

6

and we read it in the internal record evensometimes in the public record There wasconcern at the time for what was called fallingdominos The domino theory has two versionsOne of them is intended for the public and it istotally absurd and every time it is refuted itssaid Oh well we made a mistake its sillyand so on The public version is Ho Chi Minhsgoing to get into a canoe and land in Californiaand all the rest of it the Nicaraguans are twodays drive from Texas according to RonaldReagan and we have to call a nationalemergency But that is so obviously idiotic thatafter its over people say how silly it was wedidnt understand

But theres a rational version of the dominotheory which has never been abandonedbecause its correct It goes all the way throughfrom Greece in 1947 right up until today Therational version is that if some country in theworld - the smaller the worse its not a matterof its power - whether its Grenada CubaVietnam or somewhere else shows someindication of independent development in amanner that would be meaningful to otherswhove had similar problems thats dangerousIts what Henry Kissinger called the virus thatcan spread contagion He was speaking ofAllendes Chile but you see the same strainright through the planning record The rottenapple that can spoil the barrel Cuba mightspread the Castro idea of taking matters intoyour own hands which has enormous appeal inLatin America where people suffer the samerepression In that sense dominos aredangerous If you had a successful developmentsomewhere it can spread contagion Well howdo you deal with a virus that is spreadingcontagion You destroy the virus You inoculatethose who might be affected

This is exactly what was done in Vietnam Youdestroy Vietnam - its not going to be a modelfor anyone As Bernard Fall said Vietnamwould be lucky if it survives as a cultural andhistoric entity so its not going to be a model of

independent and successful development Youinoculate the region by installing viciousmilitary dictatorships in country after country

The most important was Indonesia Of courseit was the richest In 1965 there was theSuharto coup That coup incidentally wasreported accurately in the West The New YorkTimes for example described it as astaggering mass slaughter which is a gleamof light in Asia[9] The description of the hugemassacres was combined with euphoria -undisguised euphoria The same was true inAustralia Probably Europe as well but it hasntbeen studied there to my knowledge TheSuharto massacre really made sure that thevirus didnt spread to a country that they werereally concerned about

There was also a concern that Japan what JohnDower called the super-domino mightaccommodate to an independent SoutheastAsia essentially reconstructing something likea new order in Asia that it had tried to createby force but the US wasnt about to lose WorldWar II in the Pacific[10] Its not a small issueand its taken care of by destroying the virusand inoculating the region with brutal dictatorsin country after country - Suharto Marcos andso on - around the region Well that was sort ofunderstood by planners National securityAdviser McGeorge Bundy in later yearsretrospectively pointed out that after 1965 ourefforts were excessive Meaning we shouldhave stopped then because wed already wonthe war

My view is that this is a little early but by thetime I was in Indochina in 1970 my feeling wasthat the US had won the war It had achievedits major objectives It was a partial victory asthey didnt achieve their maximal objectivesthey didnt establish a client state and if youare a super-imperialist thats a defeat but youachieved your main objectives So its describedas a defeat but I dont think it was And thebusiness world knew it For example the Far

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

7

Eastern Economic Review was advising in theearly 1970s that the US should get out becauseit had already achieved its main goals

Thats Indochina in a nutshell Iraq is totallydifferent

The Stakes in Iraq

You cant destroy Iraq Its far too valuable Ithas probably the second largest energyreserves in the world They are very easilyaccessible - no permafrost no tar sands - juststick a pipe in the ground It is right at theheart of the worlds major energy producingregion which the US has wanted to controlsince the Second World War much as Britainwanted to control it before that This goes backto the beginning of the oil age Britain back in1920 was saying that if we can control the oil ofthis region we can do whatever we want in theworld or words to that effect By 1945 the USState Department was describing it as astupendous source of strategic power one ofthe greatest material prizes in world historyEisenhower called it strategically the mostimportant area in the world It has theresources

This is not just a matter of access In the 1950sthe US was not accessing Middle East oil itwas the worlds biggest producer itself In factin 1959 the US shifted to straight domesticsources in order to benefit Texas oil companiesand corrupt officials in the Eisenhoweradministration For about fourteen years theyexhausted domestic resources at a serious costto national security but at great enrichmentNevertheless with regard to the Middle Eastwe had the same policies If we were on solarenergy right now wed still have the samepolicies And the reasons are understood Itwas pointed out by George Kennan about sixtyyears ago when he was a top planner if wehave our hands on the spigot we have vetopower over others He happened to be thinkingof Japan but the point generalizes

Zbigniew Brzezinski who was not much infavour of the war in Iraq nevertheless pointedout that if the US wins the war establishes aclient state and can have military bases and soon right in the heart of the oil-producingregion we will have critical leverage over theindustrial powers - Europe Japan Asia

Asians understand this too Thats why they aredeveloping the Shanghai CooperationOrganisation[11] and the Asian energy securitygrid[12] Based primarily in China but bringingin Russia and Central Asian countries andrecently India Pakistan and - significantly -Iran They want some degree of control overtheir own resources They dont want theUnited States to hold the lever In fact DickCheney understands them On his way toKazakhstan about a year ago he had a tiradeover how control over pipelines can be tools ofintimidation and blackmail And thats true Ofcourse he was saying when its in the hands ofothers The same holds for us of course butwere not allowed to see that

The War in Iraq

So this is a really important invasion You haveto control Iraq You cant destroy it and then goaway and theres no concern about spreading avirus This was completely different fromVietnam In fact thats part of the reason whyneither political party in the United States isreally offering a programme of withdrawal

The Democrats seem to be calling for awithdrawal but if you look at the details itrsquosnot really that In fact there was an analysis ofit by General Kevin Ryan at the KennedySchool He went through the Democratic Partyproposals and pointed out first of all that theyleave the option to Bush that he can waive allrequirements in the interest of nationalsecurity End of story Secondly even if youlook at the implementation he said it shouldreally be called re-missioning not withdrawalAmerican troops are going to be left there for

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

8

the protection of US installations and forcesInstallations include the Embassy in theBaghdad Green Zone which is more like a cityTheres no embassy like it in the world Its nota building they intend to leave Its got its ownmilitary forces anti-missile system baseballfields everything Facilities in Iraq probablyalso include permanent military bases whichare quietly being scattered about the desertwhere theyre more or less safe from attack Soyou have to protect those and it takes a lot oftroops

The Green Zone

What does force protection mean If youinstall US forces in Iraqi units theyre in unitswhere the majority of their fellow soldiers maythink its legitimate to kill them Some 60 ofthe total population think that Americansoldiers are legitimate targets So youre goingto have to protect them Another qualificationis you have to leave forces to fight the War onTerror Also open-ended And to train Iraqitroops Open-ended His calculation is that thetotal number of American forces would not bevery much different from what it has been Andhe leaves out a lot He leaves out logisticswhich is the core of a modern army and whichthe US is controlling and intends to continue tocontrol That logistics right now about 80 ofit goes though southern Iraq which is very

vulnerable to guerrilla attack so you are goingto have plenty of US forces to protect that Heleaves out air power Well we know what thatslike Owen and Kiernan have pointed out whathappened when the US began to withdrawtroops from Vietnam And Ryan leaves outmercenaries The US has probably 130000mercenaries called contractors Its sort of likethe French Foreign Legion Its a mercenaryforce and who knows how big that will growits under no supervision So this is notwithdrawal

Theres a good reason for it - which were notallowed to discuss because wed bring up thatunpronounceable word O-I-L and you cantmention that because we have to be benign andso on

But if Iraq was granted sovereignty it wouldntbe like Vietnam Sovereignty in Iraq meansunder majority Shiite influence Undoubtedly aShiite-dominated Iraq would continue toimprove relations with Shiite Iran as its doingalready It would incite the Shiite population ofSaudi Arabia on the border which happens tobe where most of the Saudi oil is and one canimagine a loose Shiite alliance controlling mostof the worlds oil and independent of the UnitedStates Thats like a nightmare And it getsmuch worse Iran already has observer statuswith the Shanghai Co-operation Organisationwhich begins to draw the Middle East - theWest Asian energy resources - towards theAsian system If Shiite-dominated Saudi andIraqi oil systems joined thats the worldsmajor energy resources moving off into theenemy camp - China Russia India

Indias kind of playing a double gameimproving relations with China and they alsohave observer status with the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation and theyve had jointenergy planning with China At the same timeIndia is happy to play games with the UnitedStates if the Bush administration authorisestheir nuclear weapons - as it just did leaving

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

9

the international regime on missile control andnuclear weapons controls shattered They arehappy to keep a foot in both camps

South Korea will presumably sooner or laterjoin From the Asian point of view Siberia isAsian - not European - and it has plenty ofresources making Russia a member The areawe are talking about is the most dynamiceconomic area in the world It has the majorityof the worlds foreign exchange reserves Japanis not part of the Shanghai Co-operationOrganisation and remains a US ally but itstricky as theyre very dependent on economicand other relations with China It s acomplicated relation

This really would be a major shift in worldpower Nothing like that was involved inVietnam The only respect in which they aresimilar is from the point of view of the Westernimperial mentality They both cost us a lot andin that respect they are similar so analogiesare drawn

Vietnam and the China Connection

Hewison On the Iraq-Vietnam comparison oneof the ideas floated recently is the notion thatone of the initiatives that got the US out ofVietnam and was seen as a positive was the linkmade with China through Kissingers visitLooking back at this it is now being said that inorder to achieve something positive out of theIraq shambles - and this was mentioned in arecent editorial in The Economist (7 April 2007US Edition) ndash the US should make overtures toIran and this might ameliorate some of thebroader conflicts in the region In what youvejust been saying this would not seem a viableoption

Chomsky It made sense from a realpolitik pointof view for Nixon and Kissinger to ally withChina against Russia as they tried to patch upsome sort of deacutetente Thats superpowerpolitics and had nothing to do with Vietnam

Thats part of the pretense that the war inVietnam was some kind of proxy war againstthe Russians or the Chinese

Heres another interesting fact about thePentagon Papers In it there are twenty-fiveyears of intelligence records not released bythe government but stolen from it like somecaptured enemy archive and the record isastonishing In the late 1940s the US hadntquite decided whether they were going tosupport Vietnamese independence the way theydid with the Indonesians at the time But about1950 they decided to support the French USintelligence was given orders prove that HoChi Minh is an agent of Russia or Peiping (as itwas called) or the Sino-Soviet axis anythingwill do just prove that he is an agent of thatmassive conspiracy for world control And theyworked hard on it For a couple of years theysearched all over the place and they found acopy of Pravda in the Vietnamese embassy inBangkok or something similar and they didntcome up with anything They came to a verycurious conclusion Hanoi seemed to be theonly part of the region that didnt have anycontact with Russia or China So the wise menin the State Department concluded that thisproved their point Ho Chi Minh is such a loyalslave of [Russia andor China] that he doesnteven need orders

From then on we go on right to 1968 andthere is no discussion in intelligence of eventhe possibility that maybe Hanoi is servingnational interests It has to be serving themaster Now whatever you think about Ho ChiMinh theres just no doubt that he wasfollowing Vietnamese interests There is nodoubt about this When you first arrive in Hanoithey take you to the war museum to show youhow they fought the Chinese centuries ago Itsright in the back of their minds But in the US itcouldnt be thought If I remember correctlythere was one staff paper that raised thepossibility that Hanoi was not a puppet and Idont think it was even submitted This is a

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

10

level of indoctrination which is shocking

Actually it has been studied in a lot more detailby James Peck in his book WashingtonsChina[13] He shows that the paranoia andfanaticism about China just exceeded anyconceivable rationality right through thesixties when the record dries

So yes there was that pretense In order tomaintain the pretense - and maybe theybelieved it I dont say they were lying SoKissinger in his deluded mind may havethought that it was China keeping the wargoing but it wasnt It was the Vietnamese whowere keeping the war going China was givingminimal assistance Russia was giving someanti-aircraft missiles and so on but it was awar with the Vietnamese That could not befaced because that would mean were not nicepeople We dont invade other countries Weliberate other people We dont attack themTherefore this picture emerged

The Economist cant see this as they are muchtoo deeply mired in imperial mentality In thiscase what does it mean to talk to Iran Is Irankeeping the insurgency going Is Iranresponsible for the Sunni insurgency Youdhave to be a lunatic to believe that It is strikingto see how this is being developed I presumeThe Economist is being caught up in a wave ofUS government propaganda

Remember the background The Iraqipopulation is overwhelmingly calling for awithdrawal The US government knows thisfrom its own polls The US population is callingfor a withdrawal The last congressionalelection was about this The responseEscalate As soon as you saw the surge wasannounced you could predict that there wasgoing to be a flow of propaganda about howIran was behind it What happens A flow ofpropaganda about how Iran is behind it Thencomes a debate

This i s the way Western democrat icpropaganda systems operate You dontarticulate the party line - totalitarian states dothat - they announce the party line and ifpeople dont accept it you beat them over thehead Nobody has to believe it In free societiesthat wont work You have to presuppose theparty line - never mention - just presuppose itThen encourage a vigorous debate within theframework of the party line That instills theparty line even more deeply and it gives theimpression of an open free society

The Iran Connection

This is a textbook example The Bushgovernment announces that Irans serialnumbers are on the IEDs Then it starts avigorous debate The hawks say lets bombthem to smithereens The doves say maybe itsnot true or maybe itrsquos just the RevolutionaryGuard and so on The discussion is surreal Youcan only carry it out on the assumption that theUnited States owns the world Otherwise Irancant be interfering in a country that is underUS occupation Its as if Germany in 1943 werecomplaining that the Allies were interfering infree and independent Vichy France You haveto collapse in ridicule But in the West verysober very ser ious We are a deeplyindoctrinated society so it isnt evenquestioned So yes the talk is now that welltalk with Iran and that this will solve theproblem It isnt going to solve the problem Itsan Iraqi problem

If Iran is not involved more in Iraq it isastonishing Were threatening Iran with attackand destruction Iran is almost completelysurrounded by hostile US forces The US isdeploying big naval detachments in the GulfWhat are they there for Defence The US isprobably conducting terror inside Iran tryingto stimulate tribal and secessionist movementsand so on And openly threatening to attackIran which in itself is a violation of the UNCharter

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

11

In fact when the US invaded Iraq that was asignal to Iran to develop nuclear weapons Thatwas understood One of Israels leading militaryhistorians Martin van Creveld wrote in theInternational Herald Tribune that of course hedidnt want Iran to have nuclear weapons butafter the US invasion of Iraq then if theyre notdeveloping them they are crazy[14] This isbecause the invasion was simply a signal wellattack anyone we like as long as they aredefenceless and you know we want to go afteryou because youre defiant Youre not going tobe able to survive So maybe they are doingsomething but the fact that the US is capturingIranian figures in Arbil and apparently goingafter diplomats - according to PatrickCockburns reports[15]- those are realprovocations

The discussion is surreal Take say Tony Blairduring the latest naval incident in which fifteenBritish sailors and marines were captured byIran He claims that the ships were in Iraqiwaters and then we have a debate overwhether they were in Iraqi or Iranian watersIts a debate that doesnt make any sense Whatare British vessels doing in Iraqi waters Howdid they get there Suppose the Iranian Navywas in the Caribbean Would the US be arguingover whose territorial waters they were in Totake this position you have to assume that theUS and its British lackey own the worldOtherwise you cant have the discussion

From Vietnam to the War on Terror

Hewison Right at the beginning of At War withAsia you have a quote from Professor J KFairbank where he is cited as worrying thatthe Vietnam War was not only a war againstthe people of Asia but resulted in a totalitarianmenace in the US itself Is there a comparisonwith the so-called War on Terror

Chomsky First of all with regard to the War onTerror we should bring up something that isconstantly repressed On 11 September 2001

Bush re-declared the War on Terror It hadbeen declared by Ronald Reagan when he cameinto office in 1981 He announced right awaythat the focus of US foreign policy would be onstate-directed international terrorism Hisadministration called it the plague of themodern age a return to barbarism in our timeand so on[16] And then came somethingpeople would prefer to forget This was a majorterrorist war launched by the United Stateswhich devastated Central America killedhundreds of thousands of people hadhorrifying results in southern Africa and theMiddle East and so on extending to SoutheastAsia

That was the first War on Terror So Bush re-declared it Now when you declare warwhatever it is going to be its going to comewith internal constraints Thats what a war isThe population has to be mobilized Therearent a lot of ways of mobilising a populationThe simplest way is fear Fear often has somejustification but we have to remember that theBush administration is increasing the risk notdecreasing it Intelligence agencies anticipatedthat the invasion of Iraq would probablyincrease the threat of terror and proliferationWell i t did but far beyond what wasanticipated The latest studies reveal thatterror increased about seven-fold This is whatthe analysts call the Iraq effect There aremany examples where the Bush administrationis not decreasing the risk of terrorism Mobilisethe population through fear and try to institutecontrols Well they have tried A lot of thingsthey have done are outrageous - the MilitaryCommissions Act which was passed bybipartisan vote last year is one of the mostdisgraceful pieces of legislation in Americanhistory - but we shouldnt exaggerate

With all of this it is nowhere near as bad as ithas been in the past Its a much freer societythan it used to be This is nothing like WoodrowWilsons Red Scare Its nothing like theCOINTELPRO which ran from the Eisenhower

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

12

up to the Nixon administration which was amajor FBI programme aimed at destroyingopposition movements from the Blackmovement to the womens movement and theentire New Left[17] Its nothing like that Badenough but we shouldnt exaggerate a lot offreedom has been won and it is not going to begiven up easily So yes there are efforts torestrict freedom - and thats what states are allabout taking any chance they can get torestrict freedom But the population has won alot of rights and its not going to abandon themeasily

Hewison Thats probably a good place toconclude - optimistic in a sense We reallyappreciate your time today Thank you

Kevin Hewison interviewed Chomsky inCambridge on April 18 2007 This is anabbreviated version of an article that appearedin Journal of Contemporary Asia 37 4 pp297-310 Nov 2007 Posted at Japan Focus onNovmber 26 2007

Hewison is Co-editor Journal of ContemporaryAsia and Director Carolina Asia Center TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Notes

[1] At War With Asia was originally published in1970 by PantheonVintage It was re-releasedin 2004 by AK Press The chapter on Laos wasfirst published as A Visit to Laos in The NewYork Review of Books 23 July 1970[2] These articles in Le Monde from 3 to 8 July1968 reported on Decornoys trip to Pathet Laostrongholds in northeastern Laos Also see JDecornoy (1970) Laos The Forgotten WarBulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 2 April-July pp 21-3[3] See TD Allman (1970) Laos thelabyrinthine war Far Eastern Economic

Review 16 April and his articles in the NewYork Times 25 August 1968 18 September1968 28 September 1968 17 October 1969 26October 1969 and 6 March 1970[4] See Chomskys article In North VietnamThe New York Review of Books 13 August1970 The essay is also included in At War withAsia[5] New York Quadrangle Books 1971[6] Robert S McNamara In Retrospect TheTragedy and Lessons of Vietnam New YorkTimes Books 1995 See Chomskys assessmentof these memoirs in Memories Z MagazineJuly-August 1995[7] The article is Bombs over Cambodia TheWalrus (Canada) October 2006 pp 62-9 TheYale University Genocide Studies Program ishere and the Cambodia project is here[8] On 26 May 2004 the National SecurityArchive released a series of Kissingertelephone conversations including Nixons callto Kissinger ordering the bombing ofCambodia Nixon stated I want a planwhere every goddamn thing that can fly goesinto Cambodia and hits every target that isopen He added I want everything that canfly to go in there and crack the hell out of themThere is no limitation on mileage and nol i m i t a t i o n o n b u d g e t ( M r KissingerPresident December 9 1970 Box29 File 2 See the Archive According toElizabeth Becker (New York Times 27 May2004) Kissinger transmitted this order as Amassive bombing campaign in CambodiaAnything that flies on anything that moves[9] New York Times 22 December 1965 17February 1966 and 19 June 1966[10] See John W Dower Embracing DefeatJapan in the Wake of World War II New YorkWW Norton amp Company 1999[11] See the organisations website[12] For reports on the Asian energy grid seeAsia Times Online 1 December 2005[13] Washingtons China The National SecurityWorld the Cold War and the Origins ofG loba l i sm (Amhers t Un ivers i t y o fMassachusetts Press 2006)

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

3

everything just totally destroyed and the bridgebarely standing But we knew that Hanoi wassomewhat protected - because there wereembassies foreign correspondents The furtheryou got from Hanoi the more intensive thebombing

It is rather interesting looking at the PentagonPapers[5] and other declassified papers thathave since emerged The bombing of NorthVietnam was planned in meticulous detail Justhow far do you go how much money do youexpend when do you stop and so on Thebombing of South Vietnam which was far moreintensive was barely even discussed just do itThe same comes th rough in Rober tMcNamaras memoirs[6] He goes through indetail how they planned considered andthought about the bombing of the Northparticularly the beginning of the bombing inFebruary 1965 His memoirs dont evenmention the fact that right at that time inJanuary 1965 he ordered the bombing of SouthVietnam to be vastly extended In fact at thattime it was at triple the scale of the bombing ofthe North as Bernard Fall reported It is arather striking fact What it tells you is clearthe bombing of South Vietnam had no cost tothe United States The bombing of NorthVietnam was costly For one thing the Northhad some defences and could shoot downbombers For another thing around Hanoi as Imentioned the bombing would have beenaround foreign embassies - not in the southernparts of the North however and that area wasalso devastated Bomb Haiphong and you canhit a Russian ship in the harbour bomb northof Hanoi and you can hit a Chinese railroadthat happens to pass through Vietnam Thatscostly So there was meticulous attention

I have to say in criticism of the anti-warmovement that it took pretty much the sameposition The condemnation of the war right tothe end was mostly of the bombing of theNorth and then Cambodia Not the bombing ofthe South which was far more intensive By

1967 just before his death Bernard Fall wassaying that he doubted that Vietnam wouldsurvive as a historical and cultural entity underthe impact of the most intensive bombing thatan area of that size had ever undergone Fallwas no dove In fact in McNamaras memoirshes the one non-government person who iscited with respect as a military historian ofVietnam Hed been making these points forsome time But it was not the focus of the anti-war movement Its mostly the costly bombingof the North that was the focus and thats not apretty fact

Agent Orange Defoliation South Vietnam

In fact the war on the South is almost unknownin the US Very few people even know that itwas in 1962 that Kennedy launched outrightaggression against South Vietnam The US hadalready imposed a sort of Latin American styleterrorist state which had killed maybe60-70000 people and had elicited resistancewhich it could no longer control So Kennedyjust escalated the war to what we would calldirect aggression if anybody else did it The USAir Force started bombing under SouthVietnamese markings napalm was authorisedchemical warfare to destroy crops and groundcover began and they started rounding people

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

4

up and moved them into what amounted toconcentration camps or urban slums as it wasput to protect them from the indigenousguerrillas who the US government knew theywere willingly supporting

Thats aggression and it went on from thereThere was no protest no interest It wasntuntil the bombing of the North started thatthere finally began to be some substantialprotest that escalated quite extensively

Cambodia 1970

Hewison When you spoke at the JCA receptionrecently you also talked passionately about thebombing of Cambodia

Chomsky Well at the time that I joined JCA inmid-1970 it was the beginning of the direct USinvasion of Cambodia Actually the US hadbeen bombing in Cambodia for years but notextensively In 1969 Prince Sihanouk who wassupposedly our ally put out an official WhitePaper documenting - with pictures testimoniesand other documents - many hundreds ofexamples of US attacks in Cambodia He calleda conference with the international press corpsin Phnom Penh pleading with the internationalpress to report the US bombing and killing ofinnocent Khmer peasants that had all passedwith barely a whisper I doubt that the WhitePaper even got mentioned I dont know if youdeven be ab le to locate i t today Theinternational press corps did virtually nothing -there had been some earlier reports But theinvasion in 1970 really flung Cambodia into themiddle of the war Shortly after that began theintensive bombing of Cambodia and we knewthat it was pretty awful but we didnt knowhow bad it was

In fact only a few months ago there was animportant article by Taylor Owen and BenKiernan specialists on Cambodia - Ben is alsodirector of the Yale Genocide Program whichhas a project focused on Cambodia[7] This is

an extremely important article and I saw nomention of it in the US other than the things Iposted They went through the US governmentdata that had been released - I think it hadbeen released even during the Clinton years -which showed that the bombing - as awful aswe thought it was - was five times as high aswhat was reported This made the bombing ofrural Cambodia heavier than the entirebombing conducted by the Allies in all theatresof World War II All that in rural Cambodia aremarkably small area

Cambodia Bombing Map 1965-1973

What was mentioned in the press but generallyignored was Henry Kissinger transmittingRichard Nixons orders His words weresomething like anything that flies on anythingthat moves in rural Cambodia I cant think ofa case in the archival record of any state that issuch an overt call for large-scale genocide Itwas sort of mentioned in passing in the NewYork Times when the Nixon tapes werereleased and elicited no comment which iskind of shocking[8] The new material on thebombing of Cambodia also passed withoutcomment

Owen and Kiernan also pointed out that duringthose years the Khmer Rouge grew from amarginal force of a couple of thousand peoplewhich no one had ever heard of to a huge

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

5

peasant army an army of enraged peasantsmobilised by the Khmer Rouge through thebombing And then of course we know whathappened afterwards That receives a lot ofattention because somebody else wasrespons ib le When we in the US areresponsible then it doesnt get reported sort ofcharacteristic

Indochina and Iraq

Hewison Of course inevitable comparisons aremade between Indochina and Iraq

Chomsky There is a point of comparison Thisis from the Western point of view where theyare very similar From this perspective the onlyquestion is Can we win at acceptable costThere are no other questions Thats theoverwhelming question and others aremarginal

In both Vietnam and Iraq the question is howwe can win at acceptable cost The mood wascaptured rather well by Arthur Schlesinger theKennedy advisor and leading historian at atime when elite opinion was beginning to beworried about the Vietnam War because it wascosting too much At first he was verysupportive but he was writing in I think it was1966 At that time there were already concernsand he writes something like this we all praythat the hawks will be right and that the newmilitary forces that are being sent will enableus to win victory And if it works we will all bepraising the wisdom and statesmanship of theAmerican government in winning victory in aland they have turned to wreck and ruin But Idont think theyre right

Thats almost a quote It expresses liberal eliteenlightened opinion about the war You cantranslate it almost word for word to criticism ofthe Iraq war today We all pray that the hawksare right and that the surge will succeed butwe dont think it will just like Schlesingerdidnt think it would And if it does succeed we

wi l l a l l be pra i s ing the wisdom andstatesmanship of the American government inleaving Iraq as one of the worst disasters inmilitary history Thats not a caricature of thecritical dovish intellectual elite opinion Inboth cases the wars are described asquagmires We got caught in something thatcost us too much Anthony Lewis who is way atthe left-liberal extreme of what the mediatolerate said in 1975 at the end of the VietnamWar something like the war began withbenign efforts to do good but by 1969 it wasclear that it had become a disaster which wastoo costly for us And then Nixon went on andhe shouldnt have He should have pulled out

Interestingly that was not the position of thepublic The first major polls by the ChicagoCouncil on Foreign Relations on publicattitudes towards international affairs was in1969 and of course there were questions aboutVietnam These were open choice questionsmaybe about ten choices and I think about70 of the public picked fundamentally wrongand immoral not a mistake You couldnt findthat phrase anywhere in the mainstreamcommentary including criticism These figurescontinued up to the latest polls more or less Ithink its the same in Iraq

So from the US point of view in fact from theWestern point of view thats the perspective onthe Iraq War If the military efforts succeedwell be praising the wisdom and statesmanshipof the American government in leaving a landwhere we have created a desert and call itpeace But we dont think its going to work andits costing us too much anyway Thats theWestern point of view However from the pointof view of the victims its completely different

Dominoes and Viruses

Even from the point of view of the planners itstotally different Why did the US invadeVietnam Why not accept the Genevaagreements of 1954 Well there was a reason

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

6

and we read it in the internal record evensometimes in the public record There wasconcern at the time for what was called fallingdominos The domino theory has two versionsOne of them is intended for the public and it istotally absurd and every time it is refuted itssaid Oh well we made a mistake its sillyand so on The public version is Ho Chi Minhsgoing to get into a canoe and land in Californiaand all the rest of it the Nicaraguans are twodays drive from Texas according to RonaldReagan and we have to call a nationalemergency But that is so obviously idiotic thatafter its over people say how silly it was wedidnt understand

But theres a rational version of the dominotheory which has never been abandonedbecause its correct It goes all the way throughfrom Greece in 1947 right up until today Therational version is that if some country in theworld - the smaller the worse its not a matterof its power - whether its Grenada CubaVietnam or somewhere else shows someindication of independent development in amanner that would be meaningful to otherswhove had similar problems thats dangerousIts what Henry Kissinger called the virus thatcan spread contagion He was speaking ofAllendes Chile but you see the same strainright through the planning record The rottenapple that can spoil the barrel Cuba mightspread the Castro idea of taking matters intoyour own hands which has enormous appeal inLatin America where people suffer the samerepression In that sense dominos aredangerous If you had a successful developmentsomewhere it can spread contagion Well howdo you deal with a virus that is spreadingcontagion You destroy the virus You inoculatethose who might be affected

This is exactly what was done in Vietnam Youdestroy Vietnam - its not going to be a modelfor anyone As Bernard Fall said Vietnamwould be lucky if it survives as a cultural andhistoric entity so its not going to be a model of

independent and successful development Youinoculate the region by installing viciousmilitary dictatorships in country after country

The most important was Indonesia Of courseit was the richest In 1965 there was theSuharto coup That coup incidentally wasreported accurately in the West The New YorkTimes for example described it as astaggering mass slaughter which is a gleamof light in Asia[9] The description of the hugemassacres was combined with euphoria -undisguised euphoria The same was true inAustralia Probably Europe as well but it hasntbeen studied there to my knowledge TheSuharto massacre really made sure that thevirus didnt spread to a country that they werereally concerned about

There was also a concern that Japan what JohnDower called the super-domino mightaccommodate to an independent SoutheastAsia essentially reconstructing something likea new order in Asia that it had tried to createby force but the US wasnt about to lose WorldWar II in the Pacific[10] Its not a small issueand its taken care of by destroying the virusand inoculating the region with brutal dictatorsin country after country - Suharto Marcos andso on - around the region Well that was sort ofunderstood by planners National securityAdviser McGeorge Bundy in later yearsretrospectively pointed out that after 1965 ourefforts were excessive Meaning we shouldhave stopped then because wed already wonthe war

My view is that this is a little early but by thetime I was in Indochina in 1970 my feeling wasthat the US had won the war It had achievedits major objectives It was a partial victory asthey didnt achieve their maximal objectivesthey didnt establish a client state and if youare a super-imperialist thats a defeat but youachieved your main objectives So its describedas a defeat but I dont think it was And thebusiness world knew it For example the Far

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

7

Eastern Economic Review was advising in theearly 1970s that the US should get out becauseit had already achieved its main goals

Thats Indochina in a nutshell Iraq is totallydifferent

The Stakes in Iraq

You cant destroy Iraq Its far too valuable Ithas probably the second largest energyreserves in the world They are very easilyaccessible - no permafrost no tar sands - juststick a pipe in the ground It is right at theheart of the worlds major energy producingregion which the US has wanted to controlsince the Second World War much as Britainwanted to control it before that This goes backto the beginning of the oil age Britain back in1920 was saying that if we can control the oil ofthis region we can do whatever we want in theworld or words to that effect By 1945 the USState Department was describing it as astupendous source of strategic power one ofthe greatest material prizes in world historyEisenhower called it strategically the mostimportant area in the world It has theresources

This is not just a matter of access In the 1950sthe US was not accessing Middle East oil itwas the worlds biggest producer itself In factin 1959 the US shifted to straight domesticsources in order to benefit Texas oil companiesand corrupt officials in the Eisenhoweradministration For about fourteen years theyexhausted domestic resources at a serious costto national security but at great enrichmentNevertheless with regard to the Middle Eastwe had the same policies If we were on solarenergy right now wed still have the samepolicies And the reasons are understood Itwas pointed out by George Kennan about sixtyyears ago when he was a top planner if wehave our hands on the spigot we have vetopower over others He happened to be thinkingof Japan but the point generalizes

Zbigniew Brzezinski who was not much infavour of the war in Iraq nevertheless pointedout that if the US wins the war establishes aclient state and can have military bases and soon right in the heart of the oil-producingregion we will have critical leverage over theindustrial powers - Europe Japan Asia

Asians understand this too Thats why they aredeveloping the Shanghai CooperationOrganisation[11] and the Asian energy securitygrid[12] Based primarily in China but bringingin Russia and Central Asian countries andrecently India Pakistan and - significantly -Iran They want some degree of control overtheir own resources They dont want theUnited States to hold the lever In fact DickCheney understands them On his way toKazakhstan about a year ago he had a tiradeover how control over pipelines can be tools ofintimidation and blackmail And thats true Ofcourse he was saying when its in the hands ofothers The same holds for us of course butwere not allowed to see that

The War in Iraq

So this is a really important invasion You haveto control Iraq You cant destroy it and then goaway and theres no concern about spreading avirus This was completely different fromVietnam In fact thats part of the reason whyneither political party in the United States isreally offering a programme of withdrawal

The Democrats seem to be calling for awithdrawal but if you look at the details itrsquosnot really that In fact there was an analysis ofit by General Kevin Ryan at the KennedySchool He went through the Democratic Partyproposals and pointed out first of all that theyleave the option to Bush that he can waive allrequirements in the interest of nationalsecurity End of story Secondly even if youlook at the implementation he said it shouldreally be called re-missioning not withdrawalAmerican troops are going to be left there for

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

8

the protection of US installations and forcesInstallations include the Embassy in theBaghdad Green Zone which is more like a cityTheres no embassy like it in the world Its nota building they intend to leave Its got its ownmilitary forces anti-missile system baseballfields everything Facilities in Iraq probablyalso include permanent military bases whichare quietly being scattered about the desertwhere theyre more or less safe from attack Soyou have to protect those and it takes a lot oftroops

The Green Zone

What does force protection mean If youinstall US forces in Iraqi units theyre in unitswhere the majority of their fellow soldiers maythink its legitimate to kill them Some 60 ofthe total population think that Americansoldiers are legitimate targets So youre goingto have to protect them Another qualificationis you have to leave forces to fight the War onTerror Also open-ended And to train Iraqitroops Open-ended His calculation is that thetotal number of American forces would not bevery much different from what it has been Andhe leaves out a lot He leaves out logisticswhich is the core of a modern army and whichthe US is controlling and intends to continue tocontrol That logistics right now about 80 ofit goes though southern Iraq which is very

vulnerable to guerrilla attack so you are goingto have plenty of US forces to protect that Heleaves out air power Well we know what thatslike Owen and Kiernan have pointed out whathappened when the US began to withdrawtroops from Vietnam And Ryan leaves outmercenaries The US has probably 130000mercenaries called contractors Its sort of likethe French Foreign Legion Its a mercenaryforce and who knows how big that will growits under no supervision So this is notwithdrawal

Theres a good reason for it - which were notallowed to discuss because wed bring up thatunpronounceable word O-I-L and you cantmention that because we have to be benign andso on

But if Iraq was granted sovereignty it wouldntbe like Vietnam Sovereignty in Iraq meansunder majority Shiite influence Undoubtedly aShiite-dominated Iraq would continue toimprove relations with Shiite Iran as its doingalready It would incite the Shiite population ofSaudi Arabia on the border which happens tobe where most of the Saudi oil is and one canimagine a loose Shiite alliance controlling mostof the worlds oil and independent of the UnitedStates Thats like a nightmare And it getsmuch worse Iran already has observer statuswith the Shanghai Co-operation Organisationwhich begins to draw the Middle East - theWest Asian energy resources - towards theAsian system If Shiite-dominated Saudi andIraqi oil systems joined thats the worldsmajor energy resources moving off into theenemy camp - China Russia India

Indias kind of playing a double gameimproving relations with China and they alsohave observer status with the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation and theyve had jointenergy planning with China At the same timeIndia is happy to play games with the UnitedStates if the Bush administration authorisestheir nuclear weapons - as it just did leaving

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

9

the international regime on missile control andnuclear weapons controls shattered They arehappy to keep a foot in both camps

South Korea will presumably sooner or laterjoin From the Asian point of view Siberia isAsian - not European - and it has plenty ofresources making Russia a member The areawe are talking about is the most dynamiceconomic area in the world It has the majorityof the worlds foreign exchange reserves Japanis not part of the Shanghai Co-operationOrganisation and remains a US ally but itstricky as theyre very dependent on economicand other relations with China It s acomplicated relation

This really would be a major shift in worldpower Nothing like that was involved inVietnam The only respect in which they aresimilar is from the point of view of the Westernimperial mentality They both cost us a lot andin that respect they are similar so analogiesare drawn

Vietnam and the China Connection

Hewison On the Iraq-Vietnam comparison oneof the ideas floated recently is the notion thatone of the initiatives that got the US out ofVietnam and was seen as a positive was the linkmade with China through Kissingers visitLooking back at this it is now being said that inorder to achieve something positive out of theIraq shambles - and this was mentioned in arecent editorial in The Economist (7 April 2007US Edition) ndash the US should make overtures toIran and this might ameliorate some of thebroader conflicts in the region In what youvejust been saying this would not seem a viableoption

Chomsky It made sense from a realpolitik pointof view for Nixon and Kissinger to ally withChina against Russia as they tried to patch upsome sort of deacutetente Thats superpowerpolitics and had nothing to do with Vietnam

Thats part of the pretense that the war inVietnam was some kind of proxy war againstthe Russians or the Chinese

Heres another interesting fact about thePentagon Papers In it there are twenty-fiveyears of intelligence records not released bythe government but stolen from it like somecaptured enemy archive and the record isastonishing In the late 1940s the US hadntquite decided whether they were going tosupport Vietnamese independence the way theydid with the Indonesians at the time But about1950 they decided to support the French USintelligence was given orders prove that HoChi Minh is an agent of Russia or Peiping (as itwas called) or the Sino-Soviet axis anythingwill do just prove that he is an agent of thatmassive conspiracy for world control And theyworked hard on it For a couple of years theysearched all over the place and they found acopy of Pravda in the Vietnamese embassy inBangkok or something similar and they didntcome up with anything They came to a verycurious conclusion Hanoi seemed to be theonly part of the region that didnt have anycontact with Russia or China So the wise menin the State Department concluded that thisproved their point Ho Chi Minh is such a loyalslave of [Russia andor China] that he doesnteven need orders

From then on we go on right to 1968 andthere is no discussion in intelligence of eventhe possibility that maybe Hanoi is servingnational interests It has to be serving themaster Now whatever you think about Ho ChiMinh theres just no doubt that he wasfollowing Vietnamese interests There is nodoubt about this When you first arrive in Hanoithey take you to the war museum to show youhow they fought the Chinese centuries ago Itsright in the back of their minds But in the US itcouldnt be thought If I remember correctlythere was one staff paper that raised thepossibility that Hanoi was not a puppet and Idont think it was even submitted This is a

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

10

level of indoctrination which is shocking

Actually it has been studied in a lot more detailby James Peck in his book WashingtonsChina[13] He shows that the paranoia andfanaticism about China just exceeded anyconceivable rationality right through thesixties when the record dries

So yes there was that pretense In order tomaintain the pretense - and maybe theybelieved it I dont say they were lying SoKissinger in his deluded mind may havethought that it was China keeping the wargoing but it wasnt It was the Vietnamese whowere keeping the war going China was givingminimal assistance Russia was giving someanti-aircraft missiles and so on but it was awar with the Vietnamese That could not befaced because that would mean were not nicepeople We dont invade other countries Weliberate other people We dont attack themTherefore this picture emerged

The Economist cant see this as they are muchtoo deeply mired in imperial mentality In thiscase what does it mean to talk to Iran Is Irankeeping the insurgency going Is Iranresponsible for the Sunni insurgency Youdhave to be a lunatic to believe that It is strikingto see how this is being developed I presumeThe Economist is being caught up in a wave ofUS government propaganda

Remember the background The Iraqipopulation is overwhelmingly calling for awithdrawal The US government knows thisfrom its own polls The US population is callingfor a withdrawal The last congressionalelection was about this The responseEscalate As soon as you saw the surge wasannounced you could predict that there wasgoing to be a flow of propaganda about howIran was behind it What happens A flow ofpropaganda about how Iran is behind it Thencomes a debate

This i s the way Western democrat icpropaganda systems operate You dontarticulate the party line - totalitarian states dothat - they announce the party line and ifpeople dont accept it you beat them over thehead Nobody has to believe it In free societiesthat wont work You have to presuppose theparty line - never mention - just presuppose itThen encourage a vigorous debate within theframework of the party line That instills theparty line even more deeply and it gives theimpression of an open free society

The Iran Connection

This is a textbook example The Bushgovernment announces that Irans serialnumbers are on the IEDs Then it starts avigorous debate The hawks say lets bombthem to smithereens The doves say maybe itsnot true or maybe itrsquos just the RevolutionaryGuard and so on The discussion is surreal Youcan only carry it out on the assumption that theUnited States owns the world Otherwise Irancant be interfering in a country that is underUS occupation Its as if Germany in 1943 werecomplaining that the Allies were interfering infree and independent Vichy France You haveto collapse in ridicule But in the West verysober very ser ious We are a deeplyindoctrinated society so it isnt evenquestioned So yes the talk is now that welltalk with Iran and that this will solve theproblem It isnt going to solve the problem Itsan Iraqi problem

If Iran is not involved more in Iraq it isastonishing Were threatening Iran with attackand destruction Iran is almost completelysurrounded by hostile US forces The US isdeploying big naval detachments in the GulfWhat are they there for Defence The US isprobably conducting terror inside Iran tryingto stimulate tribal and secessionist movementsand so on And openly threatening to attackIran which in itself is a violation of the UNCharter

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

11

In fact when the US invaded Iraq that was asignal to Iran to develop nuclear weapons Thatwas understood One of Israels leading militaryhistorians Martin van Creveld wrote in theInternational Herald Tribune that of course hedidnt want Iran to have nuclear weapons butafter the US invasion of Iraq then if theyre notdeveloping them they are crazy[14] This isbecause the invasion was simply a signal wellattack anyone we like as long as they aredefenceless and you know we want to go afteryou because youre defiant Youre not going tobe able to survive So maybe they are doingsomething but the fact that the US is capturingIranian figures in Arbil and apparently goingafter diplomats - according to PatrickCockburns reports[15]- those are realprovocations

The discussion is surreal Take say Tony Blairduring the latest naval incident in which fifteenBritish sailors and marines were captured byIran He claims that the ships were in Iraqiwaters and then we have a debate overwhether they were in Iraqi or Iranian watersIts a debate that doesnt make any sense Whatare British vessels doing in Iraqi waters Howdid they get there Suppose the Iranian Navywas in the Caribbean Would the US be arguingover whose territorial waters they were in Totake this position you have to assume that theUS and its British lackey own the worldOtherwise you cant have the discussion

From Vietnam to the War on Terror

Hewison Right at the beginning of At War withAsia you have a quote from Professor J KFairbank where he is cited as worrying thatthe Vietnam War was not only a war againstthe people of Asia but resulted in a totalitarianmenace in the US itself Is there a comparisonwith the so-called War on Terror

Chomsky First of all with regard to the War onTerror we should bring up something that isconstantly repressed On 11 September 2001

Bush re-declared the War on Terror It hadbeen declared by Ronald Reagan when he cameinto office in 1981 He announced right awaythat the focus of US foreign policy would be onstate-directed international terrorism Hisadministration called it the plague of themodern age a return to barbarism in our timeand so on[16] And then came somethingpeople would prefer to forget This was a majorterrorist war launched by the United Stateswhich devastated Central America killedhundreds of thousands of people hadhorrifying results in southern Africa and theMiddle East and so on extending to SoutheastAsia

That was the first War on Terror So Bush re-declared it Now when you declare warwhatever it is going to be its going to comewith internal constraints Thats what a war isThe population has to be mobilized Therearent a lot of ways of mobilising a populationThe simplest way is fear Fear often has somejustification but we have to remember that theBush administration is increasing the risk notdecreasing it Intelligence agencies anticipatedthat the invasion of Iraq would probablyincrease the threat of terror and proliferationWell i t did but far beyond what wasanticipated The latest studies reveal thatterror increased about seven-fold This is whatthe analysts call the Iraq effect There aremany examples where the Bush administrationis not decreasing the risk of terrorism Mobilisethe population through fear and try to institutecontrols Well they have tried A lot of thingsthey have done are outrageous - the MilitaryCommissions Act which was passed bybipartisan vote last year is one of the mostdisgraceful pieces of legislation in Americanhistory - but we shouldnt exaggerate

With all of this it is nowhere near as bad as ithas been in the past Its a much freer societythan it used to be This is nothing like WoodrowWilsons Red Scare Its nothing like theCOINTELPRO which ran from the Eisenhower

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

12

up to the Nixon administration which was amajor FBI programme aimed at destroyingopposition movements from the Blackmovement to the womens movement and theentire New Left[17] Its nothing like that Badenough but we shouldnt exaggerate a lot offreedom has been won and it is not going to begiven up easily So yes there are efforts torestrict freedom - and thats what states are allabout taking any chance they can get torestrict freedom But the population has won alot of rights and its not going to abandon themeasily

Hewison Thats probably a good place toconclude - optimistic in a sense We reallyappreciate your time today Thank you

Kevin Hewison interviewed Chomsky inCambridge on April 18 2007 This is anabbreviated version of an article that appearedin Journal of Contemporary Asia 37 4 pp297-310 Nov 2007 Posted at Japan Focus onNovmber 26 2007

Hewison is Co-editor Journal of ContemporaryAsia and Director Carolina Asia Center TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Notes

[1] At War With Asia was originally published in1970 by PantheonVintage It was re-releasedin 2004 by AK Press The chapter on Laos wasfirst published as A Visit to Laos in The NewYork Review of Books 23 July 1970[2] These articles in Le Monde from 3 to 8 July1968 reported on Decornoys trip to Pathet Laostrongholds in northeastern Laos Also see JDecornoy (1970) Laos The Forgotten WarBulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 2 April-July pp 21-3[3] See TD Allman (1970) Laos thelabyrinthine war Far Eastern Economic

Review 16 April and his articles in the NewYork Times 25 August 1968 18 September1968 28 September 1968 17 October 1969 26October 1969 and 6 March 1970[4] See Chomskys article In North VietnamThe New York Review of Books 13 August1970 The essay is also included in At War withAsia[5] New York Quadrangle Books 1971[6] Robert S McNamara In Retrospect TheTragedy and Lessons of Vietnam New YorkTimes Books 1995 See Chomskys assessmentof these memoirs in Memories Z MagazineJuly-August 1995[7] The article is Bombs over Cambodia TheWalrus (Canada) October 2006 pp 62-9 TheYale University Genocide Studies Program ishere and the Cambodia project is here[8] On 26 May 2004 the National SecurityArchive released a series of Kissingertelephone conversations including Nixons callto Kissinger ordering the bombing ofCambodia Nixon stated I want a planwhere every goddamn thing that can fly goesinto Cambodia and hits every target that isopen He added I want everything that canfly to go in there and crack the hell out of themThere is no limitation on mileage and nol i m i t a t i o n o n b u d g e t ( M r KissingerPresident December 9 1970 Box29 File 2 See the Archive According toElizabeth Becker (New York Times 27 May2004) Kissinger transmitted this order as Amassive bombing campaign in CambodiaAnything that flies on anything that moves[9] New York Times 22 December 1965 17February 1966 and 19 June 1966[10] See John W Dower Embracing DefeatJapan in the Wake of World War II New YorkWW Norton amp Company 1999[11] See the organisations website[12] For reports on the Asian energy grid seeAsia Times Online 1 December 2005[13] Washingtons China The National SecurityWorld the Cold War and the Origins ofG loba l i sm (Amhers t Un ivers i t y o fMassachusetts Press 2006)

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

4

up and moved them into what amounted toconcentration camps or urban slums as it wasput to protect them from the indigenousguerrillas who the US government knew theywere willingly supporting

Thats aggression and it went on from thereThere was no protest no interest It wasntuntil the bombing of the North started thatthere finally began to be some substantialprotest that escalated quite extensively

Cambodia 1970

Hewison When you spoke at the JCA receptionrecently you also talked passionately about thebombing of Cambodia

Chomsky Well at the time that I joined JCA inmid-1970 it was the beginning of the direct USinvasion of Cambodia Actually the US hadbeen bombing in Cambodia for years but notextensively In 1969 Prince Sihanouk who wassupposedly our ally put out an official WhitePaper documenting - with pictures testimoniesand other documents - many hundreds ofexamples of US attacks in Cambodia He calleda conference with the international press corpsin Phnom Penh pleading with the internationalpress to report the US bombing and killing ofinnocent Khmer peasants that had all passedwith barely a whisper I doubt that the WhitePaper even got mentioned I dont know if youdeven be ab le to locate i t today Theinternational press corps did virtually nothing -there had been some earlier reports But theinvasion in 1970 really flung Cambodia into themiddle of the war Shortly after that began theintensive bombing of Cambodia and we knewthat it was pretty awful but we didnt knowhow bad it was

In fact only a few months ago there was animportant article by Taylor Owen and BenKiernan specialists on Cambodia - Ben is alsodirector of the Yale Genocide Program whichhas a project focused on Cambodia[7] This is

an extremely important article and I saw nomention of it in the US other than the things Iposted They went through the US governmentdata that had been released - I think it hadbeen released even during the Clinton years -which showed that the bombing - as awful aswe thought it was - was five times as high aswhat was reported This made the bombing ofrural Cambodia heavier than the entirebombing conducted by the Allies in all theatresof World War II All that in rural Cambodia aremarkably small area

Cambodia Bombing Map 1965-1973

What was mentioned in the press but generallyignored was Henry Kissinger transmittingRichard Nixons orders His words weresomething like anything that flies on anythingthat moves in rural Cambodia I cant think ofa case in the archival record of any state that issuch an overt call for large-scale genocide Itwas sort of mentioned in passing in the NewYork Times when the Nixon tapes werereleased and elicited no comment which iskind of shocking[8] The new material on thebombing of Cambodia also passed withoutcomment

Owen and Kiernan also pointed out that duringthose years the Khmer Rouge grew from amarginal force of a couple of thousand peoplewhich no one had ever heard of to a huge

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

5

peasant army an army of enraged peasantsmobilised by the Khmer Rouge through thebombing And then of course we know whathappened afterwards That receives a lot ofattention because somebody else wasrespons ib le When we in the US areresponsible then it doesnt get reported sort ofcharacteristic

Indochina and Iraq

Hewison Of course inevitable comparisons aremade between Indochina and Iraq

Chomsky There is a point of comparison Thisis from the Western point of view where theyare very similar From this perspective the onlyquestion is Can we win at acceptable costThere are no other questions Thats theoverwhelming question and others aremarginal

In both Vietnam and Iraq the question is howwe can win at acceptable cost The mood wascaptured rather well by Arthur Schlesinger theKennedy advisor and leading historian at atime when elite opinion was beginning to beworried about the Vietnam War because it wascosting too much At first he was verysupportive but he was writing in I think it was1966 At that time there were already concernsand he writes something like this we all praythat the hawks will be right and that the newmilitary forces that are being sent will enableus to win victory And if it works we will all bepraising the wisdom and statesmanship of theAmerican government in winning victory in aland they have turned to wreck and ruin But Idont think theyre right

Thats almost a quote It expresses liberal eliteenlightened opinion about the war You cantranslate it almost word for word to criticism ofthe Iraq war today We all pray that the hawksare right and that the surge will succeed butwe dont think it will just like Schlesingerdidnt think it would And if it does succeed we

wi l l a l l be pra i s ing the wisdom andstatesmanship of the American government inleaving Iraq as one of the worst disasters inmilitary history Thats not a caricature of thecritical dovish intellectual elite opinion Inboth cases the wars are described asquagmires We got caught in something thatcost us too much Anthony Lewis who is way atthe left-liberal extreme of what the mediatolerate said in 1975 at the end of the VietnamWar something like the war began withbenign efforts to do good but by 1969 it wasclear that it had become a disaster which wastoo costly for us And then Nixon went on andhe shouldnt have He should have pulled out

Interestingly that was not the position of thepublic The first major polls by the ChicagoCouncil on Foreign Relations on publicattitudes towards international affairs was in1969 and of course there were questions aboutVietnam These were open choice questionsmaybe about ten choices and I think about70 of the public picked fundamentally wrongand immoral not a mistake You couldnt findthat phrase anywhere in the mainstreamcommentary including criticism These figurescontinued up to the latest polls more or less Ithink its the same in Iraq

So from the US point of view in fact from theWestern point of view thats the perspective onthe Iraq War If the military efforts succeedwell be praising the wisdom and statesmanshipof the American government in leaving a landwhere we have created a desert and call itpeace But we dont think its going to work andits costing us too much anyway Thats theWestern point of view However from the pointof view of the victims its completely different

Dominoes and Viruses

Even from the point of view of the planners itstotally different Why did the US invadeVietnam Why not accept the Genevaagreements of 1954 Well there was a reason

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

6

and we read it in the internal record evensometimes in the public record There wasconcern at the time for what was called fallingdominos The domino theory has two versionsOne of them is intended for the public and it istotally absurd and every time it is refuted itssaid Oh well we made a mistake its sillyand so on The public version is Ho Chi Minhsgoing to get into a canoe and land in Californiaand all the rest of it the Nicaraguans are twodays drive from Texas according to RonaldReagan and we have to call a nationalemergency But that is so obviously idiotic thatafter its over people say how silly it was wedidnt understand

But theres a rational version of the dominotheory which has never been abandonedbecause its correct It goes all the way throughfrom Greece in 1947 right up until today Therational version is that if some country in theworld - the smaller the worse its not a matterof its power - whether its Grenada CubaVietnam or somewhere else shows someindication of independent development in amanner that would be meaningful to otherswhove had similar problems thats dangerousIts what Henry Kissinger called the virus thatcan spread contagion He was speaking ofAllendes Chile but you see the same strainright through the planning record The rottenapple that can spoil the barrel Cuba mightspread the Castro idea of taking matters intoyour own hands which has enormous appeal inLatin America where people suffer the samerepression In that sense dominos aredangerous If you had a successful developmentsomewhere it can spread contagion Well howdo you deal with a virus that is spreadingcontagion You destroy the virus You inoculatethose who might be affected

This is exactly what was done in Vietnam Youdestroy Vietnam - its not going to be a modelfor anyone As Bernard Fall said Vietnamwould be lucky if it survives as a cultural andhistoric entity so its not going to be a model of

independent and successful development Youinoculate the region by installing viciousmilitary dictatorships in country after country

The most important was Indonesia Of courseit was the richest In 1965 there was theSuharto coup That coup incidentally wasreported accurately in the West The New YorkTimes for example described it as astaggering mass slaughter which is a gleamof light in Asia[9] The description of the hugemassacres was combined with euphoria -undisguised euphoria The same was true inAustralia Probably Europe as well but it hasntbeen studied there to my knowledge TheSuharto massacre really made sure that thevirus didnt spread to a country that they werereally concerned about

There was also a concern that Japan what JohnDower called the super-domino mightaccommodate to an independent SoutheastAsia essentially reconstructing something likea new order in Asia that it had tried to createby force but the US wasnt about to lose WorldWar II in the Pacific[10] Its not a small issueand its taken care of by destroying the virusand inoculating the region with brutal dictatorsin country after country - Suharto Marcos andso on - around the region Well that was sort ofunderstood by planners National securityAdviser McGeorge Bundy in later yearsretrospectively pointed out that after 1965 ourefforts were excessive Meaning we shouldhave stopped then because wed already wonthe war

My view is that this is a little early but by thetime I was in Indochina in 1970 my feeling wasthat the US had won the war It had achievedits major objectives It was a partial victory asthey didnt achieve their maximal objectivesthey didnt establish a client state and if youare a super-imperialist thats a defeat but youachieved your main objectives So its describedas a defeat but I dont think it was And thebusiness world knew it For example the Far

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

7

Eastern Economic Review was advising in theearly 1970s that the US should get out becauseit had already achieved its main goals

Thats Indochina in a nutshell Iraq is totallydifferent

The Stakes in Iraq

You cant destroy Iraq Its far too valuable Ithas probably the second largest energyreserves in the world They are very easilyaccessible - no permafrost no tar sands - juststick a pipe in the ground It is right at theheart of the worlds major energy producingregion which the US has wanted to controlsince the Second World War much as Britainwanted to control it before that This goes backto the beginning of the oil age Britain back in1920 was saying that if we can control the oil ofthis region we can do whatever we want in theworld or words to that effect By 1945 the USState Department was describing it as astupendous source of strategic power one ofthe greatest material prizes in world historyEisenhower called it strategically the mostimportant area in the world It has theresources

This is not just a matter of access In the 1950sthe US was not accessing Middle East oil itwas the worlds biggest producer itself In factin 1959 the US shifted to straight domesticsources in order to benefit Texas oil companiesand corrupt officials in the Eisenhoweradministration For about fourteen years theyexhausted domestic resources at a serious costto national security but at great enrichmentNevertheless with regard to the Middle Eastwe had the same policies If we were on solarenergy right now wed still have the samepolicies And the reasons are understood Itwas pointed out by George Kennan about sixtyyears ago when he was a top planner if wehave our hands on the spigot we have vetopower over others He happened to be thinkingof Japan but the point generalizes

Zbigniew Brzezinski who was not much infavour of the war in Iraq nevertheless pointedout that if the US wins the war establishes aclient state and can have military bases and soon right in the heart of the oil-producingregion we will have critical leverage over theindustrial powers - Europe Japan Asia

Asians understand this too Thats why they aredeveloping the Shanghai CooperationOrganisation[11] and the Asian energy securitygrid[12] Based primarily in China but bringingin Russia and Central Asian countries andrecently India Pakistan and - significantly -Iran They want some degree of control overtheir own resources They dont want theUnited States to hold the lever In fact DickCheney understands them On his way toKazakhstan about a year ago he had a tiradeover how control over pipelines can be tools ofintimidation and blackmail And thats true Ofcourse he was saying when its in the hands ofothers The same holds for us of course butwere not allowed to see that

The War in Iraq

So this is a really important invasion You haveto control Iraq You cant destroy it and then goaway and theres no concern about spreading avirus This was completely different fromVietnam In fact thats part of the reason whyneither political party in the United States isreally offering a programme of withdrawal

The Democrats seem to be calling for awithdrawal but if you look at the details itrsquosnot really that In fact there was an analysis ofit by General Kevin Ryan at the KennedySchool He went through the Democratic Partyproposals and pointed out first of all that theyleave the option to Bush that he can waive allrequirements in the interest of nationalsecurity End of story Secondly even if youlook at the implementation he said it shouldreally be called re-missioning not withdrawalAmerican troops are going to be left there for

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

8

the protection of US installations and forcesInstallations include the Embassy in theBaghdad Green Zone which is more like a cityTheres no embassy like it in the world Its nota building they intend to leave Its got its ownmilitary forces anti-missile system baseballfields everything Facilities in Iraq probablyalso include permanent military bases whichare quietly being scattered about the desertwhere theyre more or less safe from attack Soyou have to protect those and it takes a lot oftroops

The Green Zone

What does force protection mean If youinstall US forces in Iraqi units theyre in unitswhere the majority of their fellow soldiers maythink its legitimate to kill them Some 60 ofthe total population think that Americansoldiers are legitimate targets So youre goingto have to protect them Another qualificationis you have to leave forces to fight the War onTerror Also open-ended And to train Iraqitroops Open-ended His calculation is that thetotal number of American forces would not bevery much different from what it has been Andhe leaves out a lot He leaves out logisticswhich is the core of a modern army and whichthe US is controlling and intends to continue tocontrol That logistics right now about 80 ofit goes though southern Iraq which is very

vulnerable to guerrilla attack so you are goingto have plenty of US forces to protect that Heleaves out air power Well we know what thatslike Owen and Kiernan have pointed out whathappened when the US began to withdrawtroops from Vietnam And Ryan leaves outmercenaries The US has probably 130000mercenaries called contractors Its sort of likethe French Foreign Legion Its a mercenaryforce and who knows how big that will growits under no supervision So this is notwithdrawal

Theres a good reason for it - which were notallowed to discuss because wed bring up thatunpronounceable word O-I-L and you cantmention that because we have to be benign andso on

But if Iraq was granted sovereignty it wouldntbe like Vietnam Sovereignty in Iraq meansunder majority Shiite influence Undoubtedly aShiite-dominated Iraq would continue toimprove relations with Shiite Iran as its doingalready It would incite the Shiite population ofSaudi Arabia on the border which happens tobe where most of the Saudi oil is and one canimagine a loose Shiite alliance controlling mostof the worlds oil and independent of the UnitedStates Thats like a nightmare And it getsmuch worse Iran already has observer statuswith the Shanghai Co-operation Organisationwhich begins to draw the Middle East - theWest Asian energy resources - towards theAsian system If Shiite-dominated Saudi andIraqi oil systems joined thats the worldsmajor energy resources moving off into theenemy camp - China Russia India

Indias kind of playing a double gameimproving relations with China and they alsohave observer status with the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation and theyve had jointenergy planning with China At the same timeIndia is happy to play games with the UnitedStates if the Bush administration authorisestheir nuclear weapons - as it just did leaving

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

9

the international regime on missile control andnuclear weapons controls shattered They arehappy to keep a foot in both camps

South Korea will presumably sooner or laterjoin From the Asian point of view Siberia isAsian - not European - and it has plenty ofresources making Russia a member The areawe are talking about is the most dynamiceconomic area in the world It has the majorityof the worlds foreign exchange reserves Japanis not part of the Shanghai Co-operationOrganisation and remains a US ally but itstricky as theyre very dependent on economicand other relations with China It s acomplicated relation

This really would be a major shift in worldpower Nothing like that was involved inVietnam The only respect in which they aresimilar is from the point of view of the Westernimperial mentality They both cost us a lot andin that respect they are similar so analogiesare drawn

Vietnam and the China Connection

Hewison On the Iraq-Vietnam comparison oneof the ideas floated recently is the notion thatone of the initiatives that got the US out ofVietnam and was seen as a positive was the linkmade with China through Kissingers visitLooking back at this it is now being said that inorder to achieve something positive out of theIraq shambles - and this was mentioned in arecent editorial in The Economist (7 April 2007US Edition) ndash the US should make overtures toIran and this might ameliorate some of thebroader conflicts in the region In what youvejust been saying this would not seem a viableoption

Chomsky It made sense from a realpolitik pointof view for Nixon and Kissinger to ally withChina against Russia as they tried to patch upsome sort of deacutetente Thats superpowerpolitics and had nothing to do with Vietnam

Thats part of the pretense that the war inVietnam was some kind of proxy war againstthe Russians or the Chinese

Heres another interesting fact about thePentagon Papers In it there are twenty-fiveyears of intelligence records not released bythe government but stolen from it like somecaptured enemy archive and the record isastonishing In the late 1940s the US hadntquite decided whether they were going tosupport Vietnamese independence the way theydid with the Indonesians at the time But about1950 they decided to support the French USintelligence was given orders prove that HoChi Minh is an agent of Russia or Peiping (as itwas called) or the Sino-Soviet axis anythingwill do just prove that he is an agent of thatmassive conspiracy for world control And theyworked hard on it For a couple of years theysearched all over the place and they found acopy of Pravda in the Vietnamese embassy inBangkok or something similar and they didntcome up with anything They came to a verycurious conclusion Hanoi seemed to be theonly part of the region that didnt have anycontact with Russia or China So the wise menin the State Department concluded that thisproved their point Ho Chi Minh is such a loyalslave of [Russia andor China] that he doesnteven need orders

From then on we go on right to 1968 andthere is no discussion in intelligence of eventhe possibility that maybe Hanoi is servingnational interests It has to be serving themaster Now whatever you think about Ho ChiMinh theres just no doubt that he wasfollowing Vietnamese interests There is nodoubt about this When you first arrive in Hanoithey take you to the war museum to show youhow they fought the Chinese centuries ago Itsright in the back of their minds But in the US itcouldnt be thought If I remember correctlythere was one staff paper that raised thepossibility that Hanoi was not a puppet and Idont think it was even submitted This is a

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

10

level of indoctrination which is shocking

Actually it has been studied in a lot more detailby James Peck in his book WashingtonsChina[13] He shows that the paranoia andfanaticism about China just exceeded anyconceivable rationality right through thesixties when the record dries

So yes there was that pretense In order tomaintain the pretense - and maybe theybelieved it I dont say they were lying SoKissinger in his deluded mind may havethought that it was China keeping the wargoing but it wasnt It was the Vietnamese whowere keeping the war going China was givingminimal assistance Russia was giving someanti-aircraft missiles and so on but it was awar with the Vietnamese That could not befaced because that would mean were not nicepeople We dont invade other countries Weliberate other people We dont attack themTherefore this picture emerged

The Economist cant see this as they are muchtoo deeply mired in imperial mentality In thiscase what does it mean to talk to Iran Is Irankeeping the insurgency going Is Iranresponsible for the Sunni insurgency Youdhave to be a lunatic to believe that It is strikingto see how this is being developed I presumeThe Economist is being caught up in a wave ofUS government propaganda

Remember the background The Iraqipopulation is overwhelmingly calling for awithdrawal The US government knows thisfrom its own polls The US population is callingfor a withdrawal The last congressionalelection was about this The responseEscalate As soon as you saw the surge wasannounced you could predict that there wasgoing to be a flow of propaganda about howIran was behind it What happens A flow ofpropaganda about how Iran is behind it Thencomes a debate

This i s the way Western democrat icpropaganda systems operate You dontarticulate the party line - totalitarian states dothat - they announce the party line and ifpeople dont accept it you beat them over thehead Nobody has to believe it In free societiesthat wont work You have to presuppose theparty line - never mention - just presuppose itThen encourage a vigorous debate within theframework of the party line That instills theparty line even more deeply and it gives theimpression of an open free society

The Iran Connection

This is a textbook example The Bushgovernment announces that Irans serialnumbers are on the IEDs Then it starts avigorous debate The hawks say lets bombthem to smithereens The doves say maybe itsnot true or maybe itrsquos just the RevolutionaryGuard and so on The discussion is surreal Youcan only carry it out on the assumption that theUnited States owns the world Otherwise Irancant be interfering in a country that is underUS occupation Its as if Germany in 1943 werecomplaining that the Allies were interfering infree and independent Vichy France You haveto collapse in ridicule But in the West verysober very ser ious We are a deeplyindoctrinated society so it isnt evenquestioned So yes the talk is now that welltalk with Iran and that this will solve theproblem It isnt going to solve the problem Itsan Iraqi problem

If Iran is not involved more in Iraq it isastonishing Were threatening Iran with attackand destruction Iran is almost completelysurrounded by hostile US forces The US isdeploying big naval detachments in the GulfWhat are they there for Defence The US isprobably conducting terror inside Iran tryingto stimulate tribal and secessionist movementsand so on And openly threatening to attackIran which in itself is a violation of the UNCharter

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

11

In fact when the US invaded Iraq that was asignal to Iran to develop nuclear weapons Thatwas understood One of Israels leading militaryhistorians Martin van Creveld wrote in theInternational Herald Tribune that of course hedidnt want Iran to have nuclear weapons butafter the US invasion of Iraq then if theyre notdeveloping them they are crazy[14] This isbecause the invasion was simply a signal wellattack anyone we like as long as they aredefenceless and you know we want to go afteryou because youre defiant Youre not going tobe able to survive So maybe they are doingsomething but the fact that the US is capturingIranian figures in Arbil and apparently goingafter diplomats - according to PatrickCockburns reports[15]- those are realprovocations

The discussion is surreal Take say Tony Blairduring the latest naval incident in which fifteenBritish sailors and marines were captured byIran He claims that the ships were in Iraqiwaters and then we have a debate overwhether they were in Iraqi or Iranian watersIts a debate that doesnt make any sense Whatare British vessels doing in Iraqi waters Howdid they get there Suppose the Iranian Navywas in the Caribbean Would the US be arguingover whose territorial waters they were in Totake this position you have to assume that theUS and its British lackey own the worldOtherwise you cant have the discussion

From Vietnam to the War on Terror

Hewison Right at the beginning of At War withAsia you have a quote from Professor J KFairbank where he is cited as worrying thatthe Vietnam War was not only a war againstthe people of Asia but resulted in a totalitarianmenace in the US itself Is there a comparisonwith the so-called War on Terror

Chomsky First of all with regard to the War onTerror we should bring up something that isconstantly repressed On 11 September 2001

Bush re-declared the War on Terror It hadbeen declared by Ronald Reagan when he cameinto office in 1981 He announced right awaythat the focus of US foreign policy would be onstate-directed international terrorism Hisadministration called it the plague of themodern age a return to barbarism in our timeand so on[16] And then came somethingpeople would prefer to forget This was a majorterrorist war launched by the United Stateswhich devastated Central America killedhundreds of thousands of people hadhorrifying results in southern Africa and theMiddle East and so on extending to SoutheastAsia

That was the first War on Terror So Bush re-declared it Now when you declare warwhatever it is going to be its going to comewith internal constraints Thats what a war isThe population has to be mobilized Therearent a lot of ways of mobilising a populationThe simplest way is fear Fear often has somejustification but we have to remember that theBush administration is increasing the risk notdecreasing it Intelligence agencies anticipatedthat the invasion of Iraq would probablyincrease the threat of terror and proliferationWell i t did but far beyond what wasanticipated The latest studies reveal thatterror increased about seven-fold This is whatthe analysts call the Iraq effect There aremany examples where the Bush administrationis not decreasing the risk of terrorism Mobilisethe population through fear and try to institutecontrols Well they have tried A lot of thingsthey have done are outrageous - the MilitaryCommissions Act which was passed bybipartisan vote last year is one of the mostdisgraceful pieces of legislation in Americanhistory - but we shouldnt exaggerate

With all of this it is nowhere near as bad as ithas been in the past Its a much freer societythan it used to be This is nothing like WoodrowWilsons Red Scare Its nothing like theCOINTELPRO which ran from the Eisenhower

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

12

up to the Nixon administration which was amajor FBI programme aimed at destroyingopposition movements from the Blackmovement to the womens movement and theentire New Left[17] Its nothing like that Badenough but we shouldnt exaggerate a lot offreedom has been won and it is not going to begiven up easily So yes there are efforts torestrict freedom - and thats what states are allabout taking any chance they can get torestrict freedom But the population has won alot of rights and its not going to abandon themeasily

Hewison Thats probably a good place toconclude - optimistic in a sense We reallyappreciate your time today Thank you

Kevin Hewison interviewed Chomsky inCambridge on April 18 2007 This is anabbreviated version of an article that appearedin Journal of Contemporary Asia 37 4 pp297-310 Nov 2007 Posted at Japan Focus onNovmber 26 2007

Hewison is Co-editor Journal of ContemporaryAsia and Director Carolina Asia Center TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Notes

[1] At War With Asia was originally published in1970 by PantheonVintage It was re-releasedin 2004 by AK Press The chapter on Laos wasfirst published as A Visit to Laos in The NewYork Review of Books 23 July 1970[2] These articles in Le Monde from 3 to 8 July1968 reported on Decornoys trip to Pathet Laostrongholds in northeastern Laos Also see JDecornoy (1970) Laos The Forgotten WarBulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 2 April-July pp 21-3[3] See TD Allman (1970) Laos thelabyrinthine war Far Eastern Economic

Review 16 April and his articles in the NewYork Times 25 August 1968 18 September1968 28 September 1968 17 October 1969 26October 1969 and 6 March 1970[4] See Chomskys article In North VietnamThe New York Review of Books 13 August1970 The essay is also included in At War withAsia[5] New York Quadrangle Books 1971[6] Robert S McNamara In Retrospect TheTragedy and Lessons of Vietnam New YorkTimes Books 1995 See Chomskys assessmentof these memoirs in Memories Z MagazineJuly-August 1995[7] The article is Bombs over Cambodia TheWalrus (Canada) October 2006 pp 62-9 TheYale University Genocide Studies Program ishere and the Cambodia project is here[8] On 26 May 2004 the National SecurityArchive released a series of Kissingertelephone conversations including Nixons callto Kissinger ordering the bombing ofCambodia Nixon stated I want a planwhere every goddamn thing that can fly goesinto Cambodia and hits every target that isopen He added I want everything that canfly to go in there and crack the hell out of themThere is no limitation on mileage and nol i m i t a t i o n o n b u d g e t ( M r KissingerPresident December 9 1970 Box29 File 2 See the Archive According toElizabeth Becker (New York Times 27 May2004) Kissinger transmitted this order as Amassive bombing campaign in CambodiaAnything that flies on anything that moves[9] New York Times 22 December 1965 17February 1966 and 19 June 1966[10] See John W Dower Embracing DefeatJapan in the Wake of World War II New YorkWW Norton amp Company 1999[11] See the organisations website[12] For reports on the Asian energy grid seeAsia Times Online 1 December 2005[13] Washingtons China The National SecurityWorld the Cold War and the Origins ofG loba l i sm (Amhers t Un ivers i t y o fMassachusetts Press 2006)

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

5

peasant army an army of enraged peasantsmobilised by the Khmer Rouge through thebombing And then of course we know whathappened afterwards That receives a lot ofattention because somebody else wasrespons ib le When we in the US areresponsible then it doesnt get reported sort ofcharacteristic

Indochina and Iraq

Hewison Of course inevitable comparisons aremade between Indochina and Iraq

Chomsky There is a point of comparison Thisis from the Western point of view where theyare very similar From this perspective the onlyquestion is Can we win at acceptable costThere are no other questions Thats theoverwhelming question and others aremarginal

In both Vietnam and Iraq the question is howwe can win at acceptable cost The mood wascaptured rather well by Arthur Schlesinger theKennedy advisor and leading historian at atime when elite opinion was beginning to beworried about the Vietnam War because it wascosting too much At first he was verysupportive but he was writing in I think it was1966 At that time there were already concernsand he writes something like this we all praythat the hawks will be right and that the newmilitary forces that are being sent will enableus to win victory And if it works we will all bepraising the wisdom and statesmanship of theAmerican government in winning victory in aland they have turned to wreck and ruin But Idont think theyre right

Thats almost a quote It expresses liberal eliteenlightened opinion about the war You cantranslate it almost word for word to criticism ofthe Iraq war today We all pray that the hawksare right and that the surge will succeed butwe dont think it will just like Schlesingerdidnt think it would And if it does succeed we

wi l l a l l be pra i s ing the wisdom andstatesmanship of the American government inleaving Iraq as one of the worst disasters inmilitary history Thats not a caricature of thecritical dovish intellectual elite opinion Inboth cases the wars are described asquagmires We got caught in something thatcost us too much Anthony Lewis who is way atthe left-liberal extreme of what the mediatolerate said in 1975 at the end of the VietnamWar something like the war began withbenign efforts to do good but by 1969 it wasclear that it had become a disaster which wastoo costly for us And then Nixon went on andhe shouldnt have He should have pulled out

Interestingly that was not the position of thepublic The first major polls by the ChicagoCouncil on Foreign Relations on publicattitudes towards international affairs was in1969 and of course there were questions aboutVietnam These were open choice questionsmaybe about ten choices and I think about70 of the public picked fundamentally wrongand immoral not a mistake You couldnt findthat phrase anywhere in the mainstreamcommentary including criticism These figurescontinued up to the latest polls more or less Ithink its the same in Iraq

So from the US point of view in fact from theWestern point of view thats the perspective onthe Iraq War If the military efforts succeedwell be praising the wisdom and statesmanshipof the American government in leaving a landwhere we have created a desert and call itpeace But we dont think its going to work andits costing us too much anyway Thats theWestern point of view However from the pointof view of the victims its completely different

Dominoes and Viruses

Even from the point of view of the planners itstotally different Why did the US invadeVietnam Why not accept the Genevaagreements of 1954 Well there was a reason

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

6

and we read it in the internal record evensometimes in the public record There wasconcern at the time for what was called fallingdominos The domino theory has two versionsOne of them is intended for the public and it istotally absurd and every time it is refuted itssaid Oh well we made a mistake its sillyand so on The public version is Ho Chi Minhsgoing to get into a canoe and land in Californiaand all the rest of it the Nicaraguans are twodays drive from Texas according to RonaldReagan and we have to call a nationalemergency But that is so obviously idiotic thatafter its over people say how silly it was wedidnt understand

But theres a rational version of the dominotheory which has never been abandonedbecause its correct It goes all the way throughfrom Greece in 1947 right up until today Therational version is that if some country in theworld - the smaller the worse its not a matterof its power - whether its Grenada CubaVietnam or somewhere else shows someindication of independent development in amanner that would be meaningful to otherswhove had similar problems thats dangerousIts what Henry Kissinger called the virus thatcan spread contagion He was speaking ofAllendes Chile but you see the same strainright through the planning record The rottenapple that can spoil the barrel Cuba mightspread the Castro idea of taking matters intoyour own hands which has enormous appeal inLatin America where people suffer the samerepression In that sense dominos aredangerous If you had a successful developmentsomewhere it can spread contagion Well howdo you deal with a virus that is spreadingcontagion You destroy the virus You inoculatethose who might be affected

This is exactly what was done in Vietnam Youdestroy Vietnam - its not going to be a modelfor anyone As Bernard Fall said Vietnamwould be lucky if it survives as a cultural andhistoric entity so its not going to be a model of

independent and successful development Youinoculate the region by installing viciousmilitary dictatorships in country after country

The most important was Indonesia Of courseit was the richest In 1965 there was theSuharto coup That coup incidentally wasreported accurately in the West The New YorkTimes for example described it as astaggering mass slaughter which is a gleamof light in Asia[9] The description of the hugemassacres was combined with euphoria -undisguised euphoria The same was true inAustralia Probably Europe as well but it hasntbeen studied there to my knowledge TheSuharto massacre really made sure that thevirus didnt spread to a country that they werereally concerned about

There was also a concern that Japan what JohnDower called the super-domino mightaccommodate to an independent SoutheastAsia essentially reconstructing something likea new order in Asia that it had tried to createby force but the US wasnt about to lose WorldWar II in the Pacific[10] Its not a small issueand its taken care of by destroying the virusand inoculating the region with brutal dictatorsin country after country - Suharto Marcos andso on - around the region Well that was sort ofunderstood by planners National securityAdviser McGeorge Bundy in later yearsretrospectively pointed out that after 1965 ourefforts were excessive Meaning we shouldhave stopped then because wed already wonthe war

My view is that this is a little early but by thetime I was in Indochina in 1970 my feeling wasthat the US had won the war It had achievedits major objectives It was a partial victory asthey didnt achieve their maximal objectivesthey didnt establish a client state and if youare a super-imperialist thats a defeat but youachieved your main objectives So its describedas a defeat but I dont think it was And thebusiness world knew it For example the Far

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

7

Eastern Economic Review was advising in theearly 1970s that the US should get out becauseit had already achieved its main goals

Thats Indochina in a nutshell Iraq is totallydifferent

The Stakes in Iraq

You cant destroy Iraq Its far too valuable Ithas probably the second largest energyreserves in the world They are very easilyaccessible - no permafrost no tar sands - juststick a pipe in the ground It is right at theheart of the worlds major energy producingregion which the US has wanted to controlsince the Second World War much as Britainwanted to control it before that This goes backto the beginning of the oil age Britain back in1920 was saying that if we can control the oil ofthis region we can do whatever we want in theworld or words to that effect By 1945 the USState Department was describing it as astupendous source of strategic power one ofthe greatest material prizes in world historyEisenhower called it strategically the mostimportant area in the world It has theresources

This is not just a matter of access In the 1950sthe US was not accessing Middle East oil itwas the worlds biggest producer itself In factin 1959 the US shifted to straight domesticsources in order to benefit Texas oil companiesand corrupt officials in the Eisenhoweradministration For about fourteen years theyexhausted domestic resources at a serious costto national security but at great enrichmentNevertheless with regard to the Middle Eastwe had the same policies If we were on solarenergy right now wed still have the samepolicies And the reasons are understood Itwas pointed out by George Kennan about sixtyyears ago when he was a top planner if wehave our hands on the spigot we have vetopower over others He happened to be thinkingof Japan but the point generalizes

Zbigniew Brzezinski who was not much infavour of the war in Iraq nevertheless pointedout that if the US wins the war establishes aclient state and can have military bases and soon right in the heart of the oil-producingregion we will have critical leverage over theindustrial powers - Europe Japan Asia

Asians understand this too Thats why they aredeveloping the Shanghai CooperationOrganisation[11] and the Asian energy securitygrid[12] Based primarily in China but bringingin Russia and Central Asian countries andrecently India Pakistan and - significantly -Iran They want some degree of control overtheir own resources They dont want theUnited States to hold the lever In fact DickCheney understands them On his way toKazakhstan about a year ago he had a tiradeover how control over pipelines can be tools ofintimidation and blackmail And thats true Ofcourse he was saying when its in the hands ofothers The same holds for us of course butwere not allowed to see that

The War in Iraq

So this is a really important invasion You haveto control Iraq You cant destroy it and then goaway and theres no concern about spreading avirus This was completely different fromVietnam In fact thats part of the reason whyneither political party in the United States isreally offering a programme of withdrawal

The Democrats seem to be calling for awithdrawal but if you look at the details itrsquosnot really that In fact there was an analysis ofit by General Kevin Ryan at the KennedySchool He went through the Democratic Partyproposals and pointed out first of all that theyleave the option to Bush that he can waive allrequirements in the interest of nationalsecurity End of story Secondly even if youlook at the implementation he said it shouldreally be called re-missioning not withdrawalAmerican troops are going to be left there for

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

8

the protection of US installations and forcesInstallations include the Embassy in theBaghdad Green Zone which is more like a cityTheres no embassy like it in the world Its nota building they intend to leave Its got its ownmilitary forces anti-missile system baseballfields everything Facilities in Iraq probablyalso include permanent military bases whichare quietly being scattered about the desertwhere theyre more or less safe from attack Soyou have to protect those and it takes a lot oftroops

The Green Zone

What does force protection mean If youinstall US forces in Iraqi units theyre in unitswhere the majority of their fellow soldiers maythink its legitimate to kill them Some 60 ofthe total population think that Americansoldiers are legitimate targets So youre goingto have to protect them Another qualificationis you have to leave forces to fight the War onTerror Also open-ended And to train Iraqitroops Open-ended His calculation is that thetotal number of American forces would not bevery much different from what it has been Andhe leaves out a lot He leaves out logisticswhich is the core of a modern army and whichthe US is controlling and intends to continue tocontrol That logistics right now about 80 ofit goes though southern Iraq which is very

vulnerable to guerrilla attack so you are goingto have plenty of US forces to protect that Heleaves out air power Well we know what thatslike Owen and Kiernan have pointed out whathappened when the US began to withdrawtroops from Vietnam And Ryan leaves outmercenaries The US has probably 130000mercenaries called contractors Its sort of likethe French Foreign Legion Its a mercenaryforce and who knows how big that will growits under no supervision So this is notwithdrawal

Theres a good reason for it - which were notallowed to discuss because wed bring up thatunpronounceable word O-I-L and you cantmention that because we have to be benign andso on

But if Iraq was granted sovereignty it wouldntbe like Vietnam Sovereignty in Iraq meansunder majority Shiite influence Undoubtedly aShiite-dominated Iraq would continue toimprove relations with Shiite Iran as its doingalready It would incite the Shiite population ofSaudi Arabia on the border which happens tobe where most of the Saudi oil is and one canimagine a loose Shiite alliance controlling mostof the worlds oil and independent of the UnitedStates Thats like a nightmare And it getsmuch worse Iran already has observer statuswith the Shanghai Co-operation Organisationwhich begins to draw the Middle East - theWest Asian energy resources - towards theAsian system If Shiite-dominated Saudi andIraqi oil systems joined thats the worldsmajor energy resources moving off into theenemy camp - China Russia India

Indias kind of playing a double gameimproving relations with China and they alsohave observer status with the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation and theyve had jointenergy planning with China At the same timeIndia is happy to play games with the UnitedStates if the Bush administration authorisestheir nuclear weapons - as it just did leaving

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

9

the international regime on missile control andnuclear weapons controls shattered They arehappy to keep a foot in both camps

South Korea will presumably sooner or laterjoin From the Asian point of view Siberia isAsian - not European - and it has plenty ofresources making Russia a member The areawe are talking about is the most dynamiceconomic area in the world It has the majorityof the worlds foreign exchange reserves Japanis not part of the Shanghai Co-operationOrganisation and remains a US ally but itstricky as theyre very dependent on economicand other relations with China It s acomplicated relation

This really would be a major shift in worldpower Nothing like that was involved inVietnam The only respect in which they aresimilar is from the point of view of the Westernimperial mentality They both cost us a lot andin that respect they are similar so analogiesare drawn

Vietnam and the China Connection

Hewison On the Iraq-Vietnam comparison oneof the ideas floated recently is the notion thatone of the initiatives that got the US out ofVietnam and was seen as a positive was the linkmade with China through Kissingers visitLooking back at this it is now being said that inorder to achieve something positive out of theIraq shambles - and this was mentioned in arecent editorial in The Economist (7 April 2007US Edition) ndash the US should make overtures toIran and this might ameliorate some of thebroader conflicts in the region In what youvejust been saying this would not seem a viableoption

Chomsky It made sense from a realpolitik pointof view for Nixon and Kissinger to ally withChina against Russia as they tried to patch upsome sort of deacutetente Thats superpowerpolitics and had nothing to do with Vietnam

Thats part of the pretense that the war inVietnam was some kind of proxy war againstthe Russians or the Chinese

Heres another interesting fact about thePentagon Papers In it there are twenty-fiveyears of intelligence records not released bythe government but stolen from it like somecaptured enemy archive and the record isastonishing In the late 1940s the US hadntquite decided whether they were going tosupport Vietnamese independence the way theydid with the Indonesians at the time But about1950 they decided to support the French USintelligence was given orders prove that HoChi Minh is an agent of Russia or Peiping (as itwas called) or the Sino-Soviet axis anythingwill do just prove that he is an agent of thatmassive conspiracy for world control And theyworked hard on it For a couple of years theysearched all over the place and they found acopy of Pravda in the Vietnamese embassy inBangkok or something similar and they didntcome up with anything They came to a verycurious conclusion Hanoi seemed to be theonly part of the region that didnt have anycontact with Russia or China So the wise menin the State Department concluded that thisproved their point Ho Chi Minh is such a loyalslave of [Russia andor China] that he doesnteven need orders

From then on we go on right to 1968 andthere is no discussion in intelligence of eventhe possibility that maybe Hanoi is servingnational interests It has to be serving themaster Now whatever you think about Ho ChiMinh theres just no doubt that he wasfollowing Vietnamese interests There is nodoubt about this When you first arrive in Hanoithey take you to the war museum to show youhow they fought the Chinese centuries ago Itsright in the back of their minds But in the US itcouldnt be thought If I remember correctlythere was one staff paper that raised thepossibility that Hanoi was not a puppet and Idont think it was even submitted This is a

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

10

level of indoctrination which is shocking

Actually it has been studied in a lot more detailby James Peck in his book WashingtonsChina[13] He shows that the paranoia andfanaticism about China just exceeded anyconceivable rationality right through thesixties when the record dries

So yes there was that pretense In order tomaintain the pretense - and maybe theybelieved it I dont say they were lying SoKissinger in his deluded mind may havethought that it was China keeping the wargoing but it wasnt It was the Vietnamese whowere keeping the war going China was givingminimal assistance Russia was giving someanti-aircraft missiles and so on but it was awar with the Vietnamese That could not befaced because that would mean were not nicepeople We dont invade other countries Weliberate other people We dont attack themTherefore this picture emerged

The Economist cant see this as they are muchtoo deeply mired in imperial mentality In thiscase what does it mean to talk to Iran Is Irankeeping the insurgency going Is Iranresponsible for the Sunni insurgency Youdhave to be a lunatic to believe that It is strikingto see how this is being developed I presumeThe Economist is being caught up in a wave ofUS government propaganda

Remember the background The Iraqipopulation is overwhelmingly calling for awithdrawal The US government knows thisfrom its own polls The US population is callingfor a withdrawal The last congressionalelection was about this The responseEscalate As soon as you saw the surge wasannounced you could predict that there wasgoing to be a flow of propaganda about howIran was behind it What happens A flow ofpropaganda about how Iran is behind it Thencomes a debate

This i s the way Western democrat icpropaganda systems operate You dontarticulate the party line - totalitarian states dothat - they announce the party line and ifpeople dont accept it you beat them over thehead Nobody has to believe it In free societiesthat wont work You have to presuppose theparty line - never mention - just presuppose itThen encourage a vigorous debate within theframework of the party line That instills theparty line even more deeply and it gives theimpression of an open free society

The Iran Connection

This is a textbook example The Bushgovernment announces that Irans serialnumbers are on the IEDs Then it starts avigorous debate The hawks say lets bombthem to smithereens The doves say maybe itsnot true or maybe itrsquos just the RevolutionaryGuard and so on The discussion is surreal Youcan only carry it out on the assumption that theUnited States owns the world Otherwise Irancant be interfering in a country that is underUS occupation Its as if Germany in 1943 werecomplaining that the Allies were interfering infree and independent Vichy France You haveto collapse in ridicule But in the West verysober very ser ious We are a deeplyindoctrinated society so it isnt evenquestioned So yes the talk is now that welltalk with Iran and that this will solve theproblem It isnt going to solve the problem Itsan Iraqi problem

If Iran is not involved more in Iraq it isastonishing Were threatening Iran with attackand destruction Iran is almost completelysurrounded by hostile US forces The US isdeploying big naval detachments in the GulfWhat are they there for Defence The US isprobably conducting terror inside Iran tryingto stimulate tribal and secessionist movementsand so on And openly threatening to attackIran which in itself is a violation of the UNCharter

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

11

In fact when the US invaded Iraq that was asignal to Iran to develop nuclear weapons Thatwas understood One of Israels leading militaryhistorians Martin van Creveld wrote in theInternational Herald Tribune that of course hedidnt want Iran to have nuclear weapons butafter the US invasion of Iraq then if theyre notdeveloping them they are crazy[14] This isbecause the invasion was simply a signal wellattack anyone we like as long as they aredefenceless and you know we want to go afteryou because youre defiant Youre not going tobe able to survive So maybe they are doingsomething but the fact that the US is capturingIranian figures in Arbil and apparently goingafter diplomats - according to PatrickCockburns reports[15]- those are realprovocations

The discussion is surreal Take say Tony Blairduring the latest naval incident in which fifteenBritish sailors and marines were captured byIran He claims that the ships were in Iraqiwaters and then we have a debate overwhether they were in Iraqi or Iranian watersIts a debate that doesnt make any sense Whatare British vessels doing in Iraqi waters Howdid they get there Suppose the Iranian Navywas in the Caribbean Would the US be arguingover whose territorial waters they were in Totake this position you have to assume that theUS and its British lackey own the worldOtherwise you cant have the discussion

From Vietnam to the War on Terror

Hewison Right at the beginning of At War withAsia you have a quote from Professor J KFairbank where he is cited as worrying thatthe Vietnam War was not only a war againstthe people of Asia but resulted in a totalitarianmenace in the US itself Is there a comparisonwith the so-called War on Terror

Chomsky First of all with regard to the War onTerror we should bring up something that isconstantly repressed On 11 September 2001

Bush re-declared the War on Terror It hadbeen declared by Ronald Reagan when he cameinto office in 1981 He announced right awaythat the focus of US foreign policy would be onstate-directed international terrorism Hisadministration called it the plague of themodern age a return to barbarism in our timeand so on[16] And then came somethingpeople would prefer to forget This was a majorterrorist war launched by the United Stateswhich devastated Central America killedhundreds of thousands of people hadhorrifying results in southern Africa and theMiddle East and so on extending to SoutheastAsia

That was the first War on Terror So Bush re-declared it Now when you declare warwhatever it is going to be its going to comewith internal constraints Thats what a war isThe population has to be mobilized Therearent a lot of ways of mobilising a populationThe simplest way is fear Fear often has somejustification but we have to remember that theBush administration is increasing the risk notdecreasing it Intelligence agencies anticipatedthat the invasion of Iraq would probablyincrease the threat of terror and proliferationWell i t did but far beyond what wasanticipated The latest studies reveal thatterror increased about seven-fold This is whatthe analysts call the Iraq effect There aremany examples where the Bush administrationis not decreasing the risk of terrorism Mobilisethe population through fear and try to institutecontrols Well they have tried A lot of thingsthey have done are outrageous - the MilitaryCommissions Act which was passed bybipartisan vote last year is one of the mostdisgraceful pieces of legislation in Americanhistory - but we shouldnt exaggerate

With all of this it is nowhere near as bad as ithas been in the past Its a much freer societythan it used to be This is nothing like WoodrowWilsons Red Scare Its nothing like theCOINTELPRO which ran from the Eisenhower

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

12

up to the Nixon administration which was amajor FBI programme aimed at destroyingopposition movements from the Blackmovement to the womens movement and theentire New Left[17] Its nothing like that Badenough but we shouldnt exaggerate a lot offreedom has been won and it is not going to begiven up easily So yes there are efforts torestrict freedom - and thats what states are allabout taking any chance they can get torestrict freedom But the population has won alot of rights and its not going to abandon themeasily

Hewison Thats probably a good place toconclude - optimistic in a sense We reallyappreciate your time today Thank you

Kevin Hewison interviewed Chomsky inCambridge on April 18 2007 This is anabbreviated version of an article that appearedin Journal of Contemporary Asia 37 4 pp297-310 Nov 2007 Posted at Japan Focus onNovmber 26 2007

Hewison is Co-editor Journal of ContemporaryAsia and Director Carolina Asia Center TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Notes

[1] At War With Asia was originally published in1970 by PantheonVintage It was re-releasedin 2004 by AK Press The chapter on Laos wasfirst published as A Visit to Laos in The NewYork Review of Books 23 July 1970[2] These articles in Le Monde from 3 to 8 July1968 reported on Decornoys trip to Pathet Laostrongholds in northeastern Laos Also see JDecornoy (1970) Laos The Forgotten WarBulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 2 April-July pp 21-3[3] See TD Allman (1970) Laos thelabyrinthine war Far Eastern Economic

Review 16 April and his articles in the NewYork Times 25 August 1968 18 September1968 28 September 1968 17 October 1969 26October 1969 and 6 March 1970[4] See Chomskys article In North VietnamThe New York Review of Books 13 August1970 The essay is also included in At War withAsia[5] New York Quadrangle Books 1971[6] Robert S McNamara In Retrospect TheTragedy and Lessons of Vietnam New YorkTimes Books 1995 See Chomskys assessmentof these memoirs in Memories Z MagazineJuly-August 1995[7] The article is Bombs over Cambodia TheWalrus (Canada) October 2006 pp 62-9 TheYale University Genocide Studies Program ishere and the Cambodia project is here[8] On 26 May 2004 the National SecurityArchive released a series of Kissingertelephone conversations including Nixons callto Kissinger ordering the bombing ofCambodia Nixon stated I want a planwhere every goddamn thing that can fly goesinto Cambodia and hits every target that isopen He added I want everything that canfly to go in there and crack the hell out of themThere is no limitation on mileage and nol i m i t a t i o n o n b u d g e t ( M r KissingerPresident December 9 1970 Box29 File 2 See the Archive According toElizabeth Becker (New York Times 27 May2004) Kissinger transmitted this order as Amassive bombing campaign in CambodiaAnything that flies on anything that moves[9] New York Times 22 December 1965 17February 1966 and 19 June 1966[10] See John W Dower Embracing DefeatJapan in the Wake of World War II New YorkWW Norton amp Company 1999[11] See the organisations website[12] For reports on the Asian energy grid seeAsia Times Online 1 December 2005[13] Washingtons China The National SecurityWorld the Cold War and the Origins ofG loba l i sm (Amhers t Un ivers i t y o fMassachusetts Press 2006)

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

6

and we read it in the internal record evensometimes in the public record There wasconcern at the time for what was called fallingdominos The domino theory has two versionsOne of them is intended for the public and it istotally absurd and every time it is refuted itssaid Oh well we made a mistake its sillyand so on The public version is Ho Chi Minhsgoing to get into a canoe and land in Californiaand all the rest of it the Nicaraguans are twodays drive from Texas according to RonaldReagan and we have to call a nationalemergency But that is so obviously idiotic thatafter its over people say how silly it was wedidnt understand

But theres a rational version of the dominotheory which has never been abandonedbecause its correct It goes all the way throughfrom Greece in 1947 right up until today Therational version is that if some country in theworld - the smaller the worse its not a matterof its power - whether its Grenada CubaVietnam or somewhere else shows someindication of independent development in amanner that would be meaningful to otherswhove had similar problems thats dangerousIts what Henry Kissinger called the virus thatcan spread contagion He was speaking ofAllendes Chile but you see the same strainright through the planning record The rottenapple that can spoil the barrel Cuba mightspread the Castro idea of taking matters intoyour own hands which has enormous appeal inLatin America where people suffer the samerepression In that sense dominos aredangerous If you had a successful developmentsomewhere it can spread contagion Well howdo you deal with a virus that is spreadingcontagion You destroy the virus You inoculatethose who might be affected

This is exactly what was done in Vietnam Youdestroy Vietnam - its not going to be a modelfor anyone As Bernard Fall said Vietnamwould be lucky if it survives as a cultural andhistoric entity so its not going to be a model of

independent and successful development Youinoculate the region by installing viciousmilitary dictatorships in country after country

The most important was Indonesia Of courseit was the richest In 1965 there was theSuharto coup That coup incidentally wasreported accurately in the West The New YorkTimes for example described it as astaggering mass slaughter which is a gleamof light in Asia[9] The description of the hugemassacres was combined with euphoria -undisguised euphoria The same was true inAustralia Probably Europe as well but it hasntbeen studied there to my knowledge TheSuharto massacre really made sure that thevirus didnt spread to a country that they werereally concerned about

There was also a concern that Japan what JohnDower called the super-domino mightaccommodate to an independent SoutheastAsia essentially reconstructing something likea new order in Asia that it had tried to createby force but the US wasnt about to lose WorldWar II in the Pacific[10] Its not a small issueand its taken care of by destroying the virusand inoculating the region with brutal dictatorsin country after country - Suharto Marcos andso on - around the region Well that was sort ofunderstood by planners National securityAdviser McGeorge Bundy in later yearsretrospectively pointed out that after 1965 ourefforts were excessive Meaning we shouldhave stopped then because wed already wonthe war

My view is that this is a little early but by thetime I was in Indochina in 1970 my feeling wasthat the US had won the war It had achievedits major objectives It was a partial victory asthey didnt achieve their maximal objectivesthey didnt establish a client state and if youare a super-imperialist thats a defeat but youachieved your main objectives So its describedas a defeat but I dont think it was And thebusiness world knew it For example the Far

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

7

Eastern Economic Review was advising in theearly 1970s that the US should get out becauseit had already achieved its main goals

Thats Indochina in a nutshell Iraq is totallydifferent

The Stakes in Iraq

You cant destroy Iraq Its far too valuable Ithas probably the second largest energyreserves in the world They are very easilyaccessible - no permafrost no tar sands - juststick a pipe in the ground It is right at theheart of the worlds major energy producingregion which the US has wanted to controlsince the Second World War much as Britainwanted to control it before that This goes backto the beginning of the oil age Britain back in1920 was saying that if we can control the oil ofthis region we can do whatever we want in theworld or words to that effect By 1945 the USState Department was describing it as astupendous source of strategic power one ofthe greatest material prizes in world historyEisenhower called it strategically the mostimportant area in the world It has theresources

This is not just a matter of access In the 1950sthe US was not accessing Middle East oil itwas the worlds biggest producer itself In factin 1959 the US shifted to straight domesticsources in order to benefit Texas oil companiesand corrupt officials in the Eisenhoweradministration For about fourteen years theyexhausted domestic resources at a serious costto national security but at great enrichmentNevertheless with regard to the Middle Eastwe had the same policies If we were on solarenergy right now wed still have the samepolicies And the reasons are understood Itwas pointed out by George Kennan about sixtyyears ago when he was a top planner if wehave our hands on the spigot we have vetopower over others He happened to be thinkingof Japan but the point generalizes

Zbigniew Brzezinski who was not much infavour of the war in Iraq nevertheless pointedout that if the US wins the war establishes aclient state and can have military bases and soon right in the heart of the oil-producingregion we will have critical leverage over theindustrial powers - Europe Japan Asia

Asians understand this too Thats why they aredeveloping the Shanghai CooperationOrganisation[11] and the Asian energy securitygrid[12] Based primarily in China but bringingin Russia and Central Asian countries andrecently India Pakistan and - significantly -Iran They want some degree of control overtheir own resources They dont want theUnited States to hold the lever In fact DickCheney understands them On his way toKazakhstan about a year ago he had a tiradeover how control over pipelines can be tools ofintimidation and blackmail And thats true Ofcourse he was saying when its in the hands ofothers The same holds for us of course butwere not allowed to see that

The War in Iraq

So this is a really important invasion You haveto control Iraq You cant destroy it and then goaway and theres no concern about spreading avirus This was completely different fromVietnam In fact thats part of the reason whyneither political party in the United States isreally offering a programme of withdrawal

The Democrats seem to be calling for awithdrawal but if you look at the details itrsquosnot really that In fact there was an analysis ofit by General Kevin Ryan at the KennedySchool He went through the Democratic Partyproposals and pointed out first of all that theyleave the option to Bush that he can waive allrequirements in the interest of nationalsecurity End of story Secondly even if youlook at the implementation he said it shouldreally be called re-missioning not withdrawalAmerican troops are going to be left there for

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

8

the protection of US installations and forcesInstallations include the Embassy in theBaghdad Green Zone which is more like a cityTheres no embassy like it in the world Its nota building they intend to leave Its got its ownmilitary forces anti-missile system baseballfields everything Facilities in Iraq probablyalso include permanent military bases whichare quietly being scattered about the desertwhere theyre more or less safe from attack Soyou have to protect those and it takes a lot oftroops

The Green Zone

What does force protection mean If youinstall US forces in Iraqi units theyre in unitswhere the majority of their fellow soldiers maythink its legitimate to kill them Some 60 ofthe total population think that Americansoldiers are legitimate targets So youre goingto have to protect them Another qualificationis you have to leave forces to fight the War onTerror Also open-ended And to train Iraqitroops Open-ended His calculation is that thetotal number of American forces would not bevery much different from what it has been Andhe leaves out a lot He leaves out logisticswhich is the core of a modern army and whichthe US is controlling and intends to continue tocontrol That logistics right now about 80 ofit goes though southern Iraq which is very

vulnerable to guerrilla attack so you are goingto have plenty of US forces to protect that Heleaves out air power Well we know what thatslike Owen and Kiernan have pointed out whathappened when the US began to withdrawtroops from Vietnam And Ryan leaves outmercenaries The US has probably 130000mercenaries called contractors Its sort of likethe French Foreign Legion Its a mercenaryforce and who knows how big that will growits under no supervision So this is notwithdrawal

Theres a good reason for it - which were notallowed to discuss because wed bring up thatunpronounceable word O-I-L and you cantmention that because we have to be benign andso on

But if Iraq was granted sovereignty it wouldntbe like Vietnam Sovereignty in Iraq meansunder majority Shiite influence Undoubtedly aShiite-dominated Iraq would continue toimprove relations with Shiite Iran as its doingalready It would incite the Shiite population ofSaudi Arabia on the border which happens tobe where most of the Saudi oil is and one canimagine a loose Shiite alliance controlling mostof the worlds oil and independent of the UnitedStates Thats like a nightmare And it getsmuch worse Iran already has observer statuswith the Shanghai Co-operation Organisationwhich begins to draw the Middle East - theWest Asian energy resources - towards theAsian system If Shiite-dominated Saudi andIraqi oil systems joined thats the worldsmajor energy resources moving off into theenemy camp - China Russia India

Indias kind of playing a double gameimproving relations with China and they alsohave observer status with the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation and theyve had jointenergy planning with China At the same timeIndia is happy to play games with the UnitedStates if the Bush administration authorisestheir nuclear weapons - as it just did leaving

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

9

the international regime on missile control andnuclear weapons controls shattered They arehappy to keep a foot in both camps

South Korea will presumably sooner or laterjoin From the Asian point of view Siberia isAsian - not European - and it has plenty ofresources making Russia a member The areawe are talking about is the most dynamiceconomic area in the world It has the majorityof the worlds foreign exchange reserves Japanis not part of the Shanghai Co-operationOrganisation and remains a US ally but itstricky as theyre very dependent on economicand other relations with China It s acomplicated relation

This really would be a major shift in worldpower Nothing like that was involved inVietnam The only respect in which they aresimilar is from the point of view of the Westernimperial mentality They both cost us a lot andin that respect they are similar so analogiesare drawn

Vietnam and the China Connection

Hewison On the Iraq-Vietnam comparison oneof the ideas floated recently is the notion thatone of the initiatives that got the US out ofVietnam and was seen as a positive was the linkmade with China through Kissingers visitLooking back at this it is now being said that inorder to achieve something positive out of theIraq shambles - and this was mentioned in arecent editorial in The Economist (7 April 2007US Edition) ndash the US should make overtures toIran and this might ameliorate some of thebroader conflicts in the region In what youvejust been saying this would not seem a viableoption

Chomsky It made sense from a realpolitik pointof view for Nixon and Kissinger to ally withChina against Russia as they tried to patch upsome sort of deacutetente Thats superpowerpolitics and had nothing to do with Vietnam

Thats part of the pretense that the war inVietnam was some kind of proxy war againstthe Russians or the Chinese

Heres another interesting fact about thePentagon Papers In it there are twenty-fiveyears of intelligence records not released bythe government but stolen from it like somecaptured enemy archive and the record isastonishing In the late 1940s the US hadntquite decided whether they were going tosupport Vietnamese independence the way theydid with the Indonesians at the time But about1950 they decided to support the French USintelligence was given orders prove that HoChi Minh is an agent of Russia or Peiping (as itwas called) or the Sino-Soviet axis anythingwill do just prove that he is an agent of thatmassive conspiracy for world control And theyworked hard on it For a couple of years theysearched all over the place and they found acopy of Pravda in the Vietnamese embassy inBangkok or something similar and they didntcome up with anything They came to a verycurious conclusion Hanoi seemed to be theonly part of the region that didnt have anycontact with Russia or China So the wise menin the State Department concluded that thisproved their point Ho Chi Minh is such a loyalslave of [Russia andor China] that he doesnteven need orders

From then on we go on right to 1968 andthere is no discussion in intelligence of eventhe possibility that maybe Hanoi is servingnational interests It has to be serving themaster Now whatever you think about Ho ChiMinh theres just no doubt that he wasfollowing Vietnamese interests There is nodoubt about this When you first arrive in Hanoithey take you to the war museum to show youhow they fought the Chinese centuries ago Itsright in the back of their minds But in the US itcouldnt be thought If I remember correctlythere was one staff paper that raised thepossibility that Hanoi was not a puppet and Idont think it was even submitted This is a

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

10

level of indoctrination which is shocking

Actually it has been studied in a lot more detailby James Peck in his book WashingtonsChina[13] He shows that the paranoia andfanaticism about China just exceeded anyconceivable rationality right through thesixties when the record dries

So yes there was that pretense In order tomaintain the pretense - and maybe theybelieved it I dont say they were lying SoKissinger in his deluded mind may havethought that it was China keeping the wargoing but it wasnt It was the Vietnamese whowere keeping the war going China was givingminimal assistance Russia was giving someanti-aircraft missiles and so on but it was awar with the Vietnamese That could not befaced because that would mean were not nicepeople We dont invade other countries Weliberate other people We dont attack themTherefore this picture emerged

The Economist cant see this as they are muchtoo deeply mired in imperial mentality In thiscase what does it mean to talk to Iran Is Irankeeping the insurgency going Is Iranresponsible for the Sunni insurgency Youdhave to be a lunatic to believe that It is strikingto see how this is being developed I presumeThe Economist is being caught up in a wave ofUS government propaganda

Remember the background The Iraqipopulation is overwhelmingly calling for awithdrawal The US government knows thisfrom its own polls The US population is callingfor a withdrawal The last congressionalelection was about this The responseEscalate As soon as you saw the surge wasannounced you could predict that there wasgoing to be a flow of propaganda about howIran was behind it What happens A flow ofpropaganda about how Iran is behind it Thencomes a debate

This i s the way Western democrat icpropaganda systems operate You dontarticulate the party line - totalitarian states dothat - they announce the party line and ifpeople dont accept it you beat them over thehead Nobody has to believe it In free societiesthat wont work You have to presuppose theparty line - never mention - just presuppose itThen encourage a vigorous debate within theframework of the party line That instills theparty line even more deeply and it gives theimpression of an open free society

The Iran Connection

This is a textbook example The Bushgovernment announces that Irans serialnumbers are on the IEDs Then it starts avigorous debate The hawks say lets bombthem to smithereens The doves say maybe itsnot true or maybe itrsquos just the RevolutionaryGuard and so on The discussion is surreal Youcan only carry it out on the assumption that theUnited States owns the world Otherwise Irancant be interfering in a country that is underUS occupation Its as if Germany in 1943 werecomplaining that the Allies were interfering infree and independent Vichy France You haveto collapse in ridicule But in the West verysober very ser ious We are a deeplyindoctrinated society so it isnt evenquestioned So yes the talk is now that welltalk with Iran and that this will solve theproblem It isnt going to solve the problem Itsan Iraqi problem

If Iran is not involved more in Iraq it isastonishing Were threatening Iran with attackand destruction Iran is almost completelysurrounded by hostile US forces The US isdeploying big naval detachments in the GulfWhat are they there for Defence The US isprobably conducting terror inside Iran tryingto stimulate tribal and secessionist movementsand so on And openly threatening to attackIran which in itself is a violation of the UNCharter

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

11

In fact when the US invaded Iraq that was asignal to Iran to develop nuclear weapons Thatwas understood One of Israels leading militaryhistorians Martin van Creveld wrote in theInternational Herald Tribune that of course hedidnt want Iran to have nuclear weapons butafter the US invasion of Iraq then if theyre notdeveloping them they are crazy[14] This isbecause the invasion was simply a signal wellattack anyone we like as long as they aredefenceless and you know we want to go afteryou because youre defiant Youre not going tobe able to survive So maybe they are doingsomething but the fact that the US is capturingIranian figures in Arbil and apparently goingafter diplomats - according to PatrickCockburns reports[15]- those are realprovocations

The discussion is surreal Take say Tony Blairduring the latest naval incident in which fifteenBritish sailors and marines were captured byIran He claims that the ships were in Iraqiwaters and then we have a debate overwhether they were in Iraqi or Iranian watersIts a debate that doesnt make any sense Whatare British vessels doing in Iraqi waters Howdid they get there Suppose the Iranian Navywas in the Caribbean Would the US be arguingover whose territorial waters they were in Totake this position you have to assume that theUS and its British lackey own the worldOtherwise you cant have the discussion

From Vietnam to the War on Terror

Hewison Right at the beginning of At War withAsia you have a quote from Professor J KFairbank where he is cited as worrying thatthe Vietnam War was not only a war againstthe people of Asia but resulted in a totalitarianmenace in the US itself Is there a comparisonwith the so-called War on Terror

Chomsky First of all with regard to the War onTerror we should bring up something that isconstantly repressed On 11 September 2001

Bush re-declared the War on Terror It hadbeen declared by Ronald Reagan when he cameinto office in 1981 He announced right awaythat the focus of US foreign policy would be onstate-directed international terrorism Hisadministration called it the plague of themodern age a return to barbarism in our timeand so on[16] And then came somethingpeople would prefer to forget This was a majorterrorist war launched by the United Stateswhich devastated Central America killedhundreds of thousands of people hadhorrifying results in southern Africa and theMiddle East and so on extending to SoutheastAsia

That was the first War on Terror So Bush re-declared it Now when you declare warwhatever it is going to be its going to comewith internal constraints Thats what a war isThe population has to be mobilized Therearent a lot of ways of mobilising a populationThe simplest way is fear Fear often has somejustification but we have to remember that theBush administration is increasing the risk notdecreasing it Intelligence agencies anticipatedthat the invasion of Iraq would probablyincrease the threat of terror and proliferationWell i t did but far beyond what wasanticipated The latest studies reveal thatterror increased about seven-fold This is whatthe analysts call the Iraq effect There aremany examples where the Bush administrationis not decreasing the risk of terrorism Mobilisethe population through fear and try to institutecontrols Well they have tried A lot of thingsthey have done are outrageous - the MilitaryCommissions Act which was passed bybipartisan vote last year is one of the mostdisgraceful pieces of legislation in Americanhistory - but we shouldnt exaggerate

With all of this it is nowhere near as bad as ithas been in the past Its a much freer societythan it used to be This is nothing like WoodrowWilsons Red Scare Its nothing like theCOINTELPRO which ran from the Eisenhower

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

12

up to the Nixon administration which was amajor FBI programme aimed at destroyingopposition movements from the Blackmovement to the womens movement and theentire New Left[17] Its nothing like that Badenough but we shouldnt exaggerate a lot offreedom has been won and it is not going to begiven up easily So yes there are efforts torestrict freedom - and thats what states are allabout taking any chance they can get torestrict freedom But the population has won alot of rights and its not going to abandon themeasily

Hewison Thats probably a good place toconclude - optimistic in a sense We reallyappreciate your time today Thank you

Kevin Hewison interviewed Chomsky inCambridge on April 18 2007 This is anabbreviated version of an article that appearedin Journal of Contemporary Asia 37 4 pp297-310 Nov 2007 Posted at Japan Focus onNovmber 26 2007

Hewison is Co-editor Journal of ContemporaryAsia and Director Carolina Asia Center TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Notes

[1] At War With Asia was originally published in1970 by PantheonVintage It was re-releasedin 2004 by AK Press The chapter on Laos wasfirst published as A Visit to Laos in The NewYork Review of Books 23 July 1970[2] These articles in Le Monde from 3 to 8 July1968 reported on Decornoys trip to Pathet Laostrongholds in northeastern Laos Also see JDecornoy (1970) Laos The Forgotten WarBulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 2 April-July pp 21-3[3] See TD Allman (1970) Laos thelabyrinthine war Far Eastern Economic

Review 16 April and his articles in the NewYork Times 25 August 1968 18 September1968 28 September 1968 17 October 1969 26October 1969 and 6 March 1970[4] See Chomskys article In North VietnamThe New York Review of Books 13 August1970 The essay is also included in At War withAsia[5] New York Quadrangle Books 1971[6] Robert S McNamara In Retrospect TheTragedy and Lessons of Vietnam New YorkTimes Books 1995 See Chomskys assessmentof these memoirs in Memories Z MagazineJuly-August 1995[7] The article is Bombs over Cambodia TheWalrus (Canada) October 2006 pp 62-9 TheYale University Genocide Studies Program ishere and the Cambodia project is here[8] On 26 May 2004 the National SecurityArchive released a series of Kissingertelephone conversations including Nixons callto Kissinger ordering the bombing ofCambodia Nixon stated I want a planwhere every goddamn thing that can fly goesinto Cambodia and hits every target that isopen He added I want everything that canfly to go in there and crack the hell out of themThere is no limitation on mileage and nol i m i t a t i o n o n b u d g e t ( M r KissingerPresident December 9 1970 Box29 File 2 See the Archive According toElizabeth Becker (New York Times 27 May2004) Kissinger transmitted this order as Amassive bombing campaign in CambodiaAnything that flies on anything that moves[9] New York Times 22 December 1965 17February 1966 and 19 June 1966[10] See John W Dower Embracing DefeatJapan in the Wake of World War II New YorkWW Norton amp Company 1999[11] See the organisations website[12] For reports on the Asian energy grid seeAsia Times Online 1 December 2005[13] Washingtons China The National SecurityWorld the Cold War and the Origins ofG loba l i sm (Amhers t Un ivers i t y o fMassachusetts Press 2006)

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

7

Eastern Economic Review was advising in theearly 1970s that the US should get out becauseit had already achieved its main goals

Thats Indochina in a nutshell Iraq is totallydifferent

The Stakes in Iraq

You cant destroy Iraq Its far too valuable Ithas probably the second largest energyreserves in the world They are very easilyaccessible - no permafrost no tar sands - juststick a pipe in the ground It is right at theheart of the worlds major energy producingregion which the US has wanted to controlsince the Second World War much as Britainwanted to control it before that This goes backto the beginning of the oil age Britain back in1920 was saying that if we can control the oil ofthis region we can do whatever we want in theworld or words to that effect By 1945 the USState Department was describing it as astupendous source of strategic power one ofthe greatest material prizes in world historyEisenhower called it strategically the mostimportant area in the world It has theresources

This is not just a matter of access In the 1950sthe US was not accessing Middle East oil itwas the worlds biggest producer itself In factin 1959 the US shifted to straight domesticsources in order to benefit Texas oil companiesand corrupt officials in the Eisenhoweradministration For about fourteen years theyexhausted domestic resources at a serious costto national security but at great enrichmentNevertheless with regard to the Middle Eastwe had the same policies If we were on solarenergy right now wed still have the samepolicies And the reasons are understood Itwas pointed out by George Kennan about sixtyyears ago when he was a top planner if wehave our hands on the spigot we have vetopower over others He happened to be thinkingof Japan but the point generalizes

Zbigniew Brzezinski who was not much infavour of the war in Iraq nevertheless pointedout that if the US wins the war establishes aclient state and can have military bases and soon right in the heart of the oil-producingregion we will have critical leverage over theindustrial powers - Europe Japan Asia

Asians understand this too Thats why they aredeveloping the Shanghai CooperationOrganisation[11] and the Asian energy securitygrid[12] Based primarily in China but bringingin Russia and Central Asian countries andrecently India Pakistan and - significantly -Iran They want some degree of control overtheir own resources They dont want theUnited States to hold the lever In fact DickCheney understands them On his way toKazakhstan about a year ago he had a tiradeover how control over pipelines can be tools ofintimidation and blackmail And thats true Ofcourse he was saying when its in the hands ofothers The same holds for us of course butwere not allowed to see that

The War in Iraq

So this is a really important invasion You haveto control Iraq You cant destroy it and then goaway and theres no concern about spreading avirus This was completely different fromVietnam In fact thats part of the reason whyneither political party in the United States isreally offering a programme of withdrawal

The Democrats seem to be calling for awithdrawal but if you look at the details itrsquosnot really that In fact there was an analysis ofit by General Kevin Ryan at the KennedySchool He went through the Democratic Partyproposals and pointed out first of all that theyleave the option to Bush that he can waive allrequirements in the interest of nationalsecurity End of story Secondly even if youlook at the implementation he said it shouldreally be called re-missioning not withdrawalAmerican troops are going to be left there for

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

8

the protection of US installations and forcesInstallations include the Embassy in theBaghdad Green Zone which is more like a cityTheres no embassy like it in the world Its nota building they intend to leave Its got its ownmilitary forces anti-missile system baseballfields everything Facilities in Iraq probablyalso include permanent military bases whichare quietly being scattered about the desertwhere theyre more or less safe from attack Soyou have to protect those and it takes a lot oftroops

The Green Zone

What does force protection mean If youinstall US forces in Iraqi units theyre in unitswhere the majority of their fellow soldiers maythink its legitimate to kill them Some 60 ofthe total population think that Americansoldiers are legitimate targets So youre goingto have to protect them Another qualificationis you have to leave forces to fight the War onTerror Also open-ended And to train Iraqitroops Open-ended His calculation is that thetotal number of American forces would not bevery much different from what it has been Andhe leaves out a lot He leaves out logisticswhich is the core of a modern army and whichthe US is controlling and intends to continue tocontrol That logistics right now about 80 ofit goes though southern Iraq which is very

vulnerable to guerrilla attack so you are goingto have plenty of US forces to protect that Heleaves out air power Well we know what thatslike Owen and Kiernan have pointed out whathappened when the US began to withdrawtroops from Vietnam And Ryan leaves outmercenaries The US has probably 130000mercenaries called contractors Its sort of likethe French Foreign Legion Its a mercenaryforce and who knows how big that will growits under no supervision So this is notwithdrawal

Theres a good reason for it - which were notallowed to discuss because wed bring up thatunpronounceable word O-I-L and you cantmention that because we have to be benign andso on

But if Iraq was granted sovereignty it wouldntbe like Vietnam Sovereignty in Iraq meansunder majority Shiite influence Undoubtedly aShiite-dominated Iraq would continue toimprove relations with Shiite Iran as its doingalready It would incite the Shiite population ofSaudi Arabia on the border which happens tobe where most of the Saudi oil is and one canimagine a loose Shiite alliance controlling mostof the worlds oil and independent of the UnitedStates Thats like a nightmare And it getsmuch worse Iran already has observer statuswith the Shanghai Co-operation Organisationwhich begins to draw the Middle East - theWest Asian energy resources - towards theAsian system If Shiite-dominated Saudi andIraqi oil systems joined thats the worldsmajor energy resources moving off into theenemy camp - China Russia India

Indias kind of playing a double gameimproving relations with China and they alsohave observer status with the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation and theyve had jointenergy planning with China At the same timeIndia is happy to play games with the UnitedStates if the Bush administration authorisestheir nuclear weapons - as it just did leaving

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

9

the international regime on missile control andnuclear weapons controls shattered They arehappy to keep a foot in both camps

South Korea will presumably sooner or laterjoin From the Asian point of view Siberia isAsian - not European - and it has plenty ofresources making Russia a member The areawe are talking about is the most dynamiceconomic area in the world It has the majorityof the worlds foreign exchange reserves Japanis not part of the Shanghai Co-operationOrganisation and remains a US ally but itstricky as theyre very dependent on economicand other relations with China It s acomplicated relation

This really would be a major shift in worldpower Nothing like that was involved inVietnam The only respect in which they aresimilar is from the point of view of the Westernimperial mentality They both cost us a lot andin that respect they are similar so analogiesare drawn

Vietnam and the China Connection

Hewison On the Iraq-Vietnam comparison oneof the ideas floated recently is the notion thatone of the initiatives that got the US out ofVietnam and was seen as a positive was the linkmade with China through Kissingers visitLooking back at this it is now being said that inorder to achieve something positive out of theIraq shambles - and this was mentioned in arecent editorial in The Economist (7 April 2007US Edition) ndash the US should make overtures toIran and this might ameliorate some of thebroader conflicts in the region In what youvejust been saying this would not seem a viableoption

Chomsky It made sense from a realpolitik pointof view for Nixon and Kissinger to ally withChina against Russia as they tried to patch upsome sort of deacutetente Thats superpowerpolitics and had nothing to do with Vietnam

Thats part of the pretense that the war inVietnam was some kind of proxy war againstthe Russians or the Chinese

Heres another interesting fact about thePentagon Papers In it there are twenty-fiveyears of intelligence records not released bythe government but stolen from it like somecaptured enemy archive and the record isastonishing In the late 1940s the US hadntquite decided whether they were going tosupport Vietnamese independence the way theydid with the Indonesians at the time But about1950 they decided to support the French USintelligence was given orders prove that HoChi Minh is an agent of Russia or Peiping (as itwas called) or the Sino-Soviet axis anythingwill do just prove that he is an agent of thatmassive conspiracy for world control And theyworked hard on it For a couple of years theysearched all over the place and they found acopy of Pravda in the Vietnamese embassy inBangkok or something similar and they didntcome up with anything They came to a verycurious conclusion Hanoi seemed to be theonly part of the region that didnt have anycontact with Russia or China So the wise menin the State Department concluded that thisproved their point Ho Chi Minh is such a loyalslave of [Russia andor China] that he doesnteven need orders

From then on we go on right to 1968 andthere is no discussion in intelligence of eventhe possibility that maybe Hanoi is servingnational interests It has to be serving themaster Now whatever you think about Ho ChiMinh theres just no doubt that he wasfollowing Vietnamese interests There is nodoubt about this When you first arrive in Hanoithey take you to the war museum to show youhow they fought the Chinese centuries ago Itsright in the back of their minds But in the US itcouldnt be thought If I remember correctlythere was one staff paper that raised thepossibility that Hanoi was not a puppet and Idont think it was even submitted This is a

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

10

level of indoctrination which is shocking

Actually it has been studied in a lot more detailby James Peck in his book WashingtonsChina[13] He shows that the paranoia andfanaticism about China just exceeded anyconceivable rationality right through thesixties when the record dries

So yes there was that pretense In order tomaintain the pretense - and maybe theybelieved it I dont say they were lying SoKissinger in his deluded mind may havethought that it was China keeping the wargoing but it wasnt It was the Vietnamese whowere keeping the war going China was givingminimal assistance Russia was giving someanti-aircraft missiles and so on but it was awar with the Vietnamese That could not befaced because that would mean were not nicepeople We dont invade other countries Weliberate other people We dont attack themTherefore this picture emerged

The Economist cant see this as they are muchtoo deeply mired in imperial mentality In thiscase what does it mean to talk to Iran Is Irankeeping the insurgency going Is Iranresponsible for the Sunni insurgency Youdhave to be a lunatic to believe that It is strikingto see how this is being developed I presumeThe Economist is being caught up in a wave ofUS government propaganda

Remember the background The Iraqipopulation is overwhelmingly calling for awithdrawal The US government knows thisfrom its own polls The US population is callingfor a withdrawal The last congressionalelection was about this The responseEscalate As soon as you saw the surge wasannounced you could predict that there wasgoing to be a flow of propaganda about howIran was behind it What happens A flow ofpropaganda about how Iran is behind it Thencomes a debate

This i s the way Western democrat icpropaganda systems operate You dontarticulate the party line - totalitarian states dothat - they announce the party line and ifpeople dont accept it you beat them over thehead Nobody has to believe it In free societiesthat wont work You have to presuppose theparty line - never mention - just presuppose itThen encourage a vigorous debate within theframework of the party line That instills theparty line even more deeply and it gives theimpression of an open free society

The Iran Connection

This is a textbook example The Bushgovernment announces that Irans serialnumbers are on the IEDs Then it starts avigorous debate The hawks say lets bombthem to smithereens The doves say maybe itsnot true or maybe itrsquos just the RevolutionaryGuard and so on The discussion is surreal Youcan only carry it out on the assumption that theUnited States owns the world Otherwise Irancant be interfering in a country that is underUS occupation Its as if Germany in 1943 werecomplaining that the Allies were interfering infree and independent Vichy France You haveto collapse in ridicule But in the West verysober very ser ious We are a deeplyindoctrinated society so it isnt evenquestioned So yes the talk is now that welltalk with Iran and that this will solve theproblem It isnt going to solve the problem Itsan Iraqi problem

If Iran is not involved more in Iraq it isastonishing Were threatening Iran with attackand destruction Iran is almost completelysurrounded by hostile US forces The US isdeploying big naval detachments in the GulfWhat are they there for Defence The US isprobably conducting terror inside Iran tryingto stimulate tribal and secessionist movementsand so on And openly threatening to attackIran which in itself is a violation of the UNCharter

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

11

In fact when the US invaded Iraq that was asignal to Iran to develop nuclear weapons Thatwas understood One of Israels leading militaryhistorians Martin van Creveld wrote in theInternational Herald Tribune that of course hedidnt want Iran to have nuclear weapons butafter the US invasion of Iraq then if theyre notdeveloping them they are crazy[14] This isbecause the invasion was simply a signal wellattack anyone we like as long as they aredefenceless and you know we want to go afteryou because youre defiant Youre not going tobe able to survive So maybe they are doingsomething but the fact that the US is capturingIranian figures in Arbil and apparently goingafter diplomats - according to PatrickCockburns reports[15]- those are realprovocations

The discussion is surreal Take say Tony Blairduring the latest naval incident in which fifteenBritish sailors and marines were captured byIran He claims that the ships were in Iraqiwaters and then we have a debate overwhether they were in Iraqi or Iranian watersIts a debate that doesnt make any sense Whatare British vessels doing in Iraqi waters Howdid they get there Suppose the Iranian Navywas in the Caribbean Would the US be arguingover whose territorial waters they were in Totake this position you have to assume that theUS and its British lackey own the worldOtherwise you cant have the discussion

From Vietnam to the War on Terror

Hewison Right at the beginning of At War withAsia you have a quote from Professor J KFairbank where he is cited as worrying thatthe Vietnam War was not only a war againstthe people of Asia but resulted in a totalitarianmenace in the US itself Is there a comparisonwith the so-called War on Terror

Chomsky First of all with regard to the War onTerror we should bring up something that isconstantly repressed On 11 September 2001

Bush re-declared the War on Terror It hadbeen declared by Ronald Reagan when he cameinto office in 1981 He announced right awaythat the focus of US foreign policy would be onstate-directed international terrorism Hisadministration called it the plague of themodern age a return to barbarism in our timeand so on[16] And then came somethingpeople would prefer to forget This was a majorterrorist war launched by the United Stateswhich devastated Central America killedhundreds of thousands of people hadhorrifying results in southern Africa and theMiddle East and so on extending to SoutheastAsia

That was the first War on Terror So Bush re-declared it Now when you declare warwhatever it is going to be its going to comewith internal constraints Thats what a war isThe population has to be mobilized Therearent a lot of ways of mobilising a populationThe simplest way is fear Fear often has somejustification but we have to remember that theBush administration is increasing the risk notdecreasing it Intelligence agencies anticipatedthat the invasion of Iraq would probablyincrease the threat of terror and proliferationWell i t did but far beyond what wasanticipated The latest studies reveal thatterror increased about seven-fold This is whatthe analysts call the Iraq effect There aremany examples where the Bush administrationis not decreasing the risk of terrorism Mobilisethe population through fear and try to institutecontrols Well they have tried A lot of thingsthey have done are outrageous - the MilitaryCommissions Act which was passed bybipartisan vote last year is one of the mostdisgraceful pieces of legislation in Americanhistory - but we shouldnt exaggerate

With all of this it is nowhere near as bad as ithas been in the past Its a much freer societythan it used to be This is nothing like WoodrowWilsons Red Scare Its nothing like theCOINTELPRO which ran from the Eisenhower

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

12

up to the Nixon administration which was amajor FBI programme aimed at destroyingopposition movements from the Blackmovement to the womens movement and theentire New Left[17] Its nothing like that Badenough but we shouldnt exaggerate a lot offreedom has been won and it is not going to begiven up easily So yes there are efforts torestrict freedom - and thats what states are allabout taking any chance they can get torestrict freedom But the population has won alot of rights and its not going to abandon themeasily

Hewison Thats probably a good place toconclude - optimistic in a sense We reallyappreciate your time today Thank you

Kevin Hewison interviewed Chomsky inCambridge on April 18 2007 This is anabbreviated version of an article that appearedin Journal of Contemporary Asia 37 4 pp297-310 Nov 2007 Posted at Japan Focus onNovmber 26 2007

Hewison is Co-editor Journal of ContemporaryAsia and Director Carolina Asia Center TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Notes

[1] At War With Asia was originally published in1970 by PantheonVintage It was re-releasedin 2004 by AK Press The chapter on Laos wasfirst published as A Visit to Laos in The NewYork Review of Books 23 July 1970[2] These articles in Le Monde from 3 to 8 July1968 reported on Decornoys trip to Pathet Laostrongholds in northeastern Laos Also see JDecornoy (1970) Laos The Forgotten WarBulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 2 April-July pp 21-3[3] See TD Allman (1970) Laos thelabyrinthine war Far Eastern Economic

Review 16 April and his articles in the NewYork Times 25 August 1968 18 September1968 28 September 1968 17 October 1969 26October 1969 and 6 March 1970[4] See Chomskys article In North VietnamThe New York Review of Books 13 August1970 The essay is also included in At War withAsia[5] New York Quadrangle Books 1971[6] Robert S McNamara In Retrospect TheTragedy and Lessons of Vietnam New YorkTimes Books 1995 See Chomskys assessmentof these memoirs in Memories Z MagazineJuly-August 1995[7] The article is Bombs over Cambodia TheWalrus (Canada) October 2006 pp 62-9 TheYale University Genocide Studies Program ishere and the Cambodia project is here[8] On 26 May 2004 the National SecurityArchive released a series of Kissingertelephone conversations including Nixons callto Kissinger ordering the bombing ofCambodia Nixon stated I want a planwhere every goddamn thing that can fly goesinto Cambodia and hits every target that isopen He added I want everything that canfly to go in there and crack the hell out of themThere is no limitation on mileage and nol i m i t a t i o n o n b u d g e t ( M r KissingerPresident December 9 1970 Box29 File 2 See the Archive According toElizabeth Becker (New York Times 27 May2004) Kissinger transmitted this order as Amassive bombing campaign in CambodiaAnything that flies on anything that moves[9] New York Times 22 December 1965 17February 1966 and 19 June 1966[10] See John W Dower Embracing DefeatJapan in the Wake of World War II New YorkWW Norton amp Company 1999[11] See the organisations website[12] For reports on the Asian energy grid seeAsia Times Online 1 December 2005[13] Washingtons China The National SecurityWorld the Cold War and the Origins ofG loba l i sm (Amhers t Un ivers i t y o fMassachusetts Press 2006)

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

8

the protection of US installations and forcesInstallations include the Embassy in theBaghdad Green Zone which is more like a cityTheres no embassy like it in the world Its nota building they intend to leave Its got its ownmilitary forces anti-missile system baseballfields everything Facilities in Iraq probablyalso include permanent military bases whichare quietly being scattered about the desertwhere theyre more or less safe from attack Soyou have to protect those and it takes a lot oftroops

The Green Zone

What does force protection mean If youinstall US forces in Iraqi units theyre in unitswhere the majority of their fellow soldiers maythink its legitimate to kill them Some 60 ofthe total population think that Americansoldiers are legitimate targets So youre goingto have to protect them Another qualificationis you have to leave forces to fight the War onTerror Also open-ended And to train Iraqitroops Open-ended His calculation is that thetotal number of American forces would not bevery much different from what it has been Andhe leaves out a lot He leaves out logisticswhich is the core of a modern army and whichthe US is controlling and intends to continue tocontrol That logistics right now about 80 ofit goes though southern Iraq which is very

vulnerable to guerrilla attack so you are goingto have plenty of US forces to protect that Heleaves out air power Well we know what thatslike Owen and Kiernan have pointed out whathappened when the US began to withdrawtroops from Vietnam And Ryan leaves outmercenaries The US has probably 130000mercenaries called contractors Its sort of likethe French Foreign Legion Its a mercenaryforce and who knows how big that will growits under no supervision So this is notwithdrawal

Theres a good reason for it - which were notallowed to discuss because wed bring up thatunpronounceable word O-I-L and you cantmention that because we have to be benign andso on

But if Iraq was granted sovereignty it wouldntbe like Vietnam Sovereignty in Iraq meansunder majority Shiite influence Undoubtedly aShiite-dominated Iraq would continue toimprove relations with Shiite Iran as its doingalready It would incite the Shiite population ofSaudi Arabia on the border which happens tobe where most of the Saudi oil is and one canimagine a loose Shiite alliance controlling mostof the worlds oil and independent of the UnitedStates Thats like a nightmare And it getsmuch worse Iran already has observer statuswith the Shanghai Co-operation Organisationwhich begins to draw the Middle East - theWest Asian energy resources - towards theAsian system If Shiite-dominated Saudi andIraqi oil systems joined thats the worldsmajor energy resources moving off into theenemy camp - China Russia India

Indias kind of playing a double gameimproving relations with China and they alsohave observer status with the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation and theyve had jointenergy planning with China At the same timeIndia is happy to play games with the UnitedStates if the Bush administration authorisestheir nuclear weapons - as it just did leaving

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

9

the international regime on missile control andnuclear weapons controls shattered They arehappy to keep a foot in both camps

South Korea will presumably sooner or laterjoin From the Asian point of view Siberia isAsian - not European - and it has plenty ofresources making Russia a member The areawe are talking about is the most dynamiceconomic area in the world It has the majorityof the worlds foreign exchange reserves Japanis not part of the Shanghai Co-operationOrganisation and remains a US ally but itstricky as theyre very dependent on economicand other relations with China It s acomplicated relation

This really would be a major shift in worldpower Nothing like that was involved inVietnam The only respect in which they aresimilar is from the point of view of the Westernimperial mentality They both cost us a lot andin that respect they are similar so analogiesare drawn

Vietnam and the China Connection

Hewison On the Iraq-Vietnam comparison oneof the ideas floated recently is the notion thatone of the initiatives that got the US out ofVietnam and was seen as a positive was the linkmade with China through Kissingers visitLooking back at this it is now being said that inorder to achieve something positive out of theIraq shambles - and this was mentioned in arecent editorial in The Economist (7 April 2007US Edition) ndash the US should make overtures toIran and this might ameliorate some of thebroader conflicts in the region In what youvejust been saying this would not seem a viableoption

Chomsky It made sense from a realpolitik pointof view for Nixon and Kissinger to ally withChina against Russia as they tried to patch upsome sort of deacutetente Thats superpowerpolitics and had nothing to do with Vietnam

Thats part of the pretense that the war inVietnam was some kind of proxy war againstthe Russians or the Chinese

Heres another interesting fact about thePentagon Papers In it there are twenty-fiveyears of intelligence records not released bythe government but stolen from it like somecaptured enemy archive and the record isastonishing In the late 1940s the US hadntquite decided whether they were going tosupport Vietnamese independence the way theydid with the Indonesians at the time But about1950 they decided to support the French USintelligence was given orders prove that HoChi Minh is an agent of Russia or Peiping (as itwas called) or the Sino-Soviet axis anythingwill do just prove that he is an agent of thatmassive conspiracy for world control And theyworked hard on it For a couple of years theysearched all over the place and they found acopy of Pravda in the Vietnamese embassy inBangkok or something similar and they didntcome up with anything They came to a verycurious conclusion Hanoi seemed to be theonly part of the region that didnt have anycontact with Russia or China So the wise menin the State Department concluded that thisproved their point Ho Chi Minh is such a loyalslave of [Russia andor China] that he doesnteven need orders

From then on we go on right to 1968 andthere is no discussion in intelligence of eventhe possibility that maybe Hanoi is servingnational interests It has to be serving themaster Now whatever you think about Ho ChiMinh theres just no doubt that he wasfollowing Vietnamese interests There is nodoubt about this When you first arrive in Hanoithey take you to the war museum to show youhow they fought the Chinese centuries ago Itsright in the back of their minds But in the US itcouldnt be thought If I remember correctlythere was one staff paper that raised thepossibility that Hanoi was not a puppet and Idont think it was even submitted This is a

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

10

level of indoctrination which is shocking

Actually it has been studied in a lot more detailby James Peck in his book WashingtonsChina[13] He shows that the paranoia andfanaticism about China just exceeded anyconceivable rationality right through thesixties when the record dries

So yes there was that pretense In order tomaintain the pretense - and maybe theybelieved it I dont say they were lying SoKissinger in his deluded mind may havethought that it was China keeping the wargoing but it wasnt It was the Vietnamese whowere keeping the war going China was givingminimal assistance Russia was giving someanti-aircraft missiles and so on but it was awar with the Vietnamese That could not befaced because that would mean were not nicepeople We dont invade other countries Weliberate other people We dont attack themTherefore this picture emerged

The Economist cant see this as they are muchtoo deeply mired in imperial mentality In thiscase what does it mean to talk to Iran Is Irankeeping the insurgency going Is Iranresponsible for the Sunni insurgency Youdhave to be a lunatic to believe that It is strikingto see how this is being developed I presumeThe Economist is being caught up in a wave ofUS government propaganda

Remember the background The Iraqipopulation is overwhelmingly calling for awithdrawal The US government knows thisfrom its own polls The US population is callingfor a withdrawal The last congressionalelection was about this The responseEscalate As soon as you saw the surge wasannounced you could predict that there wasgoing to be a flow of propaganda about howIran was behind it What happens A flow ofpropaganda about how Iran is behind it Thencomes a debate

This i s the way Western democrat icpropaganda systems operate You dontarticulate the party line - totalitarian states dothat - they announce the party line and ifpeople dont accept it you beat them over thehead Nobody has to believe it In free societiesthat wont work You have to presuppose theparty line - never mention - just presuppose itThen encourage a vigorous debate within theframework of the party line That instills theparty line even more deeply and it gives theimpression of an open free society

The Iran Connection

This is a textbook example The Bushgovernment announces that Irans serialnumbers are on the IEDs Then it starts avigorous debate The hawks say lets bombthem to smithereens The doves say maybe itsnot true or maybe itrsquos just the RevolutionaryGuard and so on The discussion is surreal Youcan only carry it out on the assumption that theUnited States owns the world Otherwise Irancant be interfering in a country that is underUS occupation Its as if Germany in 1943 werecomplaining that the Allies were interfering infree and independent Vichy France You haveto collapse in ridicule But in the West verysober very ser ious We are a deeplyindoctrinated society so it isnt evenquestioned So yes the talk is now that welltalk with Iran and that this will solve theproblem It isnt going to solve the problem Itsan Iraqi problem

If Iran is not involved more in Iraq it isastonishing Were threatening Iran with attackand destruction Iran is almost completelysurrounded by hostile US forces The US isdeploying big naval detachments in the GulfWhat are they there for Defence The US isprobably conducting terror inside Iran tryingto stimulate tribal and secessionist movementsand so on And openly threatening to attackIran which in itself is a violation of the UNCharter

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

11

In fact when the US invaded Iraq that was asignal to Iran to develop nuclear weapons Thatwas understood One of Israels leading militaryhistorians Martin van Creveld wrote in theInternational Herald Tribune that of course hedidnt want Iran to have nuclear weapons butafter the US invasion of Iraq then if theyre notdeveloping them they are crazy[14] This isbecause the invasion was simply a signal wellattack anyone we like as long as they aredefenceless and you know we want to go afteryou because youre defiant Youre not going tobe able to survive So maybe they are doingsomething but the fact that the US is capturingIranian figures in Arbil and apparently goingafter diplomats - according to PatrickCockburns reports[15]- those are realprovocations

The discussion is surreal Take say Tony Blairduring the latest naval incident in which fifteenBritish sailors and marines were captured byIran He claims that the ships were in Iraqiwaters and then we have a debate overwhether they were in Iraqi or Iranian watersIts a debate that doesnt make any sense Whatare British vessels doing in Iraqi waters Howdid they get there Suppose the Iranian Navywas in the Caribbean Would the US be arguingover whose territorial waters they were in Totake this position you have to assume that theUS and its British lackey own the worldOtherwise you cant have the discussion

From Vietnam to the War on Terror

Hewison Right at the beginning of At War withAsia you have a quote from Professor J KFairbank where he is cited as worrying thatthe Vietnam War was not only a war againstthe people of Asia but resulted in a totalitarianmenace in the US itself Is there a comparisonwith the so-called War on Terror

Chomsky First of all with regard to the War onTerror we should bring up something that isconstantly repressed On 11 September 2001

Bush re-declared the War on Terror It hadbeen declared by Ronald Reagan when he cameinto office in 1981 He announced right awaythat the focus of US foreign policy would be onstate-directed international terrorism Hisadministration called it the plague of themodern age a return to barbarism in our timeand so on[16] And then came somethingpeople would prefer to forget This was a majorterrorist war launched by the United Stateswhich devastated Central America killedhundreds of thousands of people hadhorrifying results in southern Africa and theMiddle East and so on extending to SoutheastAsia

That was the first War on Terror So Bush re-declared it Now when you declare warwhatever it is going to be its going to comewith internal constraints Thats what a war isThe population has to be mobilized Therearent a lot of ways of mobilising a populationThe simplest way is fear Fear often has somejustification but we have to remember that theBush administration is increasing the risk notdecreasing it Intelligence agencies anticipatedthat the invasion of Iraq would probablyincrease the threat of terror and proliferationWell i t did but far beyond what wasanticipated The latest studies reveal thatterror increased about seven-fold This is whatthe analysts call the Iraq effect There aremany examples where the Bush administrationis not decreasing the risk of terrorism Mobilisethe population through fear and try to institutecontrols Well they have tried A lot of thingsthey have done are outrageous - the MilitaryCommissions Act which was passed bybipartisan vote last year is one of the mostdisgraceful pieces of legislation in Americanhistory - but we shouldnt exaggerate

With all of this it is nowhere near as bad as ithas been in the past Its a much freer societythan it used to be This is nothing like WoodrowWilsons Red Scare Its nothing like theCOINTELPRO which ran from the Eisenhower

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

12

up to the Nixon administration which was amajor FBI programme aimed at destroyingopposition movements from the Blackmovement to the womens movement and theentire New Left[17] Its nothing like that Badenough but we shouldnt exaggerate a lot offreedom has been won and it is not going to begiven up easily So yes there are efforts torestrict freedom - and thats what states are allabout taking any chance they can get torestrict freedom But the population has won alot of rights and its not going to abandon themeasily

Hewison Thats probably a good place toconclude - optimistic in a sense We reallyappreciate your time today Thank you

Kevin Hewison interviewed Chomsky inCambridge on April 18 2007 This is anabbreviated version of an article that appearedin Journal of Contemporary Asia 37 4 pp297-310 Nov 2007 Posted at Japan Focus onNovmber 26 2007

Hewison is Co-editor Journal of ContemporaryAsia and Director Carolina Asia Center TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Notes

[1] At War With Asia was originally published in1970 by PantheonVintage It was re-releasedin 2004 by AK Press The chapter on Laos wasfirst published as A Visit to Laos in The NewYork Review of Books 23 July 1970[2] These articles in Le Monde from 3 to 8 July1968 reported on Decornoys trip to Pathet Laostrongholds in northeastern Laos Also see JDecornoy (1970) Laos The Forgotten WarBulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 2 April-July pp 21-3[3] See TD Allman (1970) Laos thelabyrinthine war Far Eastern Economic

Review 16 April and his articles in the NewYork Times 25 August 1968 18 September1968 28 September 1968 17 October 1969 26October 1969 and 6 March 1970[4] See Chomskys article In North VietnamThe New York Review of Books 13 August1970 The essay is also included in At War withAsia[5] New York Quadrangle Books 1971[6] Robert S McNamara In Retrospect TheTragedy and Lessons of Vietnam New YorkTimes Books 1995 See Chomskys assessmentof these memoirs in Memories Z MagazineJuly-August 1995[7] The article is Bombs over Cambodia TheWalrus (Canada) October 2006 pp 62-9 TheYale University Genocide Studies Program ishere and the Cambodia project is here[8] On 26 May 2004 the National SecurityArchive released a series of Kissingertelephone conversations including Nixons callto Kissinger ordering the bombing ofCambodia Nixon stated I want a planwhere every goddamn thing that can fly goesinto Cambodia and hits every target that isopen He added I want everything that canfly to go in there and crack the hell out of themThere is no limitation on mileage and nol i m i t a t i o n o n b u d g e t ( M r KissingerPresident December 9 1970 Box29 File 2 See the Archive According toElizabeth Becker (New York Times 27 May2004) Kissinger transmitted this order as Amassive bombing campaign in CambodiaAnything that flies on anything that moves[9] New York Times 22 December 1965 17February 1966 and 19 June 1966[10] See John W Dower Embracing DefeatJapan in the Wake of World War II New YorkWW Norton amp Company 1999[11] See the organisations website[12] For reports on the Asian energy grid seeAsia Times Online 1 December 2005[13] Washingtons China The National SecurityWorld the Cold War and the Origins ofG loba l i sm (Amhers t Un ivers i t y o fMassachusetts Press 2006)

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

9

the international regime on missile control andnuclear weapons controls shattered They arehappy to keep a foot in both camps

South Korea will presumably sooner or laterjoin From the Asian point of view Siberia isAsian - not European - and it has plenty ofresources making Russia a member The areawe are talking about is the most dynamiceconomic area in the world It has the majorityof the worlds foreign exchange reserves Japanis not part of the Shanghai Co-operationOrganisation and remains a US ally but itstricky as theyre very dependent on economicand other relations with China It s acomplicated relation

This really would be a major shift in worldpower Nothing like that was involved inVietnam The only respect in which they aresimilar is from the point of view of the Westernimperial mentality They both cost us a lot andin that respect they are similar so analogiesare drawn

Vietnam and the China Connection

Hewison On the Iraq-Vietnam comparison oneof the ideas floated recently is the notion thatone of the initiatives that got the US out ofVietnam and was seen as a positive was the linkmade with China through Kissingers visitLooking back at this it is now being said that inorder to achieve something positive out of theIraq shambles - and this was mentioned in arecent editorial in The Economist (7 April 2007US Edition) ndash the US should make overtures toIran and this might ameliorate some of thebroader conflicts in the region In what youvejust been saying this would not seem a viableoption

Chomsky It made sense from a realpolitik pointof view for Nixon and Kissinger to ally withChina against Russia as they tried to patch upsome sort of deacutetente Thats superpowerpolitics and had nothing to do with Vietnam

Thats part of the pretense that the war inVietnam was some kind of proxy war againstthe Russians or the Chinese

Heres another interesting fact about thePentagon Papers In it there are twenty-fiveyears of intelligence records not released bythe government but stolen from it like somecaptured enemy archive and the record isastonishing In the late 1940s the US hadntquite decided whether they were going tosupport Vietnamese independence the way theydid with the Indonesians at the time But about1950 they decided to support the French USintelligence was given orders prove that HoChi Minh is an agent of Russia or Peiping (as itwas called) or the Sino-Soviet axis anythingwill do just prove that he is an agent of thatmassive conspiracy for world control And theyworked hard on it For a couple of years theysearched all over the place and they found acopy of Pravda in the Vietnamese embassy inBangkok or something similar and they didntcome up with anything They came to a verycurious conclusion Hanoi seemed to be theonly part of the region that didnt have anycontact with Russia or China So the wise menin the State Department concluded that thisproved their point Ho Chi Minh is such a loyalslave of [Russia andor China] that he doesnteven need orders

From then on we go on right to 1968 andthere is no discussion in intelligence of eventhe possibility that maybe Hanoi is servingnational interests It has to be serving themaster Now whatever you think about Ho ChiMinh theres just no doubt that he wasfollowing Vietnamese interests There is nodoubt about this When you first arrive in Hanoithey take you to the war museum to show youhow they fought the Chinese centuries ago Itsright in the back of their minds But in the US itcouldnt be thought If I remember correctlythere was one staff paper that raised thepossibility that Hanoi was not a puppet and Idont think it was even submitted This is a

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

10

level of indoctrination which is shocking

Actually it has been studied in a lot more detailby James Peck in his book WashingtonsChina[13] He shows that the paranoia andfanaticism about China just exceeded anyconceivable rationality right through thesixties when the record dries

So yes there was that pretense In order tomaintain the pretense - and maybe theybelieved it I dont say they were lying SoKissinger in his deluded mind may havethought that it was China keeping the wargoing but it wasnt It was the Vietnamese whowere keeping the war going China was givingminimal assistance Russia was giving someanti-aircraft missiles and so on but it was awar with the Vietnamese That could not befaced because that would mean were not nicepeople We dont invade other countries Weliberate other people We dont attack themTherefore this picture emerged

The Economist cant see this as they are muchtoo deeply mired in imperial mentality In thiscase what does it mean to talk to Iran Is Irankeeping the insurgency going Is Iranresponsible for the Sunni insurgency Youdhave to be a lunatic to believe that It is strikingto see how this is being developed I presumeThe Economist is being caught up in a wave ofUS government propaganda

Remember the background The Iraqipopulation is overwhelmingly calling for awithdrawal The US government knows thisfrom its own polls The US population is callingfor a withdrawal The last congressionalelection was about this The responseEscalate As soon as you saw the surge wasannounced you could predict that there wasgoing to be a flow of propaganda about howIran was behind it What happens A flow ofpropaganda about how Iran is behind it Thencomes a debate

This i s the way Western democrat icpropaganda systems operate You dontarticulate the party line - totalitarian states dothat - they announce the party line and ifpeople dont accept it you beat them over thehead Nobody has to believe it In free societiesthat wont work You have to presuppose theparty line - never mention - just presuppose itThen encourage a vigorous debate within theframework of the party line That instills theparty line even more deeply and it gives theimpression of an open free society

The Iran Connection

This is a textbook example The Bushgovernment announces that Irans serialnumbers are on the IEDs Then it starts avigorous debate The hawks say lets bombthem to smithereens The doves say maybe itsnot true or maybe itrsquos just the RevolutionaryGuard and so on The discussion is surreal Youcan only carry it out on the assumption that theUnited States owns the world Otherwise Irancant be interfering in a country that is underUS occupation Its as if Germany in 1943 werecomplaining that the Allies were interfering infree and independent Vichy France You haveto collapse in ridicule But in the West verysober very ser ious We are a deeplyindoctrinated society so it isnt evenquestioned So yes the talk is now that welltalk with Iran and that this will solve theproblem It isnt going to solve the problem Itsan Iraqi problem

If Iran is not involved more in Iraq it isastonishing Were threatening Iran with attackand destruction Iran is almost completelysurrounded by hostile US forces The US isdeploying big naval detachments in the GulfWhat are they there for Defence The US isprobably conducting terror inside Iran tryingto stimulate tribal and secessionist movementsand so on And openly threatening to attackIran which in itself is a violation of the UNCharter

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

11

In fact when the US invaded Iraq that was asignal to Iran to develop nuclear weapons Thatwas understood One of Israels leading militaryhistorians Martin van Creveld wrote in theInternational Herald Tribune that of course hedidnt want Iran to have nuclear weapons butafter the US invasion of Iraq then if theyre notdeveloping them they are crazy[14] This isbecause the invasion was simply a signal wellattack anyone we like as long as they aredefenceless and you know we want to go afteryou because youre defiant Youre not going tobe able to survive So maybe they are doingsomething but the fact that the US is capturingIranian figures in Arbil and apparently goingafter diplomats - according to PatrickCockburns reports[15]- those are realprovocations

The discussion is surreal Take say Tony Blairduring the latest naval incident in which fifteenBritish sailors and marines were captured byIran He claims that the ships were in Iraqiwaters and then we have a debate overwhether they were in Iraqi or Iranian watersIts a debate that doesnt make any sense Whatare British vessels doing in Iraqi waters Howdid they get there Suppose the Iranian Navywas in the Caribbean Would the US be arguingover whose territorial waters they were in Totake this position you have to assume that theUS and its British lackey own the worldOtherwise you cant have the discussion

From Vietnam to the War on Terror

Hewison Right at the beginning of At War withAsia you have a quote from Professor J KFairbank where he is cited as worrying thatthe Vietnam War was not only a war againstthe people of Asia but resulted in a totalitarianmenace in the US itself Is there a comparisonwith the so-called War on Terror

Chomsky First of all with regard to the War onTerror we should bring up something that isconstantly repressed On 11 September 2001

Bush re-declared the War on Terror It hadbeen declared by Ronald Reagan when he cameinto office in 1981 He announced right awaythat the focus of US foreign policy would be onstate-directed international terrorism Hisadministration called it the plague of themodern age a return to barbarism in our timeand so on[16] And then came somethingpeople would prefer to forget This was a majorterrorist war launched by the United Stateswhich devastated Central America killedhundreds of thousands of people hadhorrifying results in southern Africa and theMiddle East and so on extending to SoutheastAsia

That was the first War on Terror So Bush re-declared it Now when you declare warwhatever it is going to be its going to comewith internal constraints Thats what a war isThe population has to be mobilized Therearent a lot of ways of mobilising a populationThe simplest way is fear Fear often has somejustification but we have to remember that theBush administration is increasing the risk notdecreasing it Intelligence agencies anticipatedthat the invasion of Iraq would probablyincrease the threat of terror and proliferationWell i t did but far beyond what wasanticipated The latest studies reveal thatterror increased about seven-fold This is whatthe analysts call the Iraq effect There aremany examples where the Bush administrationis not decreasing the risk of terrorism Mobilisethe population through fear and try to institutecontrols Well they have tried A lot of thingsthey have done are outrageous - the MilitaryCommissions Act which was passed bybipartisan vote last year is one of the mostdisgraceful pieces of legislation in Americanhistory - but we shouldnt exaggerate

With all of this it is nowhere near as bad as ithas been in the past Its a much freer societythan it used to be This is nothing like WoodrowWilsons Red Scare Its nothing like theCOINTELPRO which ran from the Eisenhower

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

12

up to the Nixon administration which was amajor FBI programme aimed at destroyingopposition movements from the Blackmovement to the womens movement and theentire New Left[17] Its nothing like that Badenough but we shouldnt exaggerate a lot offreedom has been won and it is not going to begiven up easily So yes there are efforts torestrict freedom - and thats what states are allabout taking any chance they can get torestrict freedom But the population has won alot of rights and its not going to abandon themeasily

Hewison Thats probably a good place toconclude - optimistic in a sense We reallyappreciate your time today Thank you

Kevin Hewison interviewed Chomsky inCambridge on April 18 2007 This is anabbreviated version of an article that appearedin Journal of Contemporary Asia 37 4 pp297-310 Nov 2007 Posted at Japan Focus onNovmber 26 2007

Hewison is Co-editor Journal of ContemporaryAsia and Director Carolina Asia Center TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Notes

[1] At War With Asia was originally published in1970 by PantheonVintage It was re-releasedin 2004 by AK Press The chapter on Laos wasfirst published as A Visit to Laos in The NewYork Review of Books 23 July 1970[2] These articles in Le Monde from 3 to 8 July1968 reported on Decornoys trip to Pathet Laostrongholds in northeastern Laos Also see JDecornoy (1970) Laos The Forgotten WarBulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 2 April-July pp 21-3[3] See TD Allman (1970) Laos thelabyrinthine war Far Eastern Economic

Review 16 April and his articles in the NewYork Times 25 August 1968 18 September1968 28 September 1968 17 October 1969 26October 1969 and 6 March 1970[4] See Chomskys article In North VietnamThe New York Review of Books 13 August1970 The essay is also included in At War withAsia[5] New York Quadrangle Books 1971[6] Robert S McNamara In Retrospect TheTragedy and Lessons of Vietnam New YorkTimes Books 1995 See Chomskys assessmentof these memoirs in Memories Z MagazineJuly-August 1995[7] The article is Bombs over Cambodia TheWalrus (Canada) October 2006 pp 62-9 TheYale University Genocide Studies Program ishere and the Cambodia project is here[8] On 26 May 2004 the National SecurityArchive released a series of Kissingertelephone conversations including Nixons callto Kissinger ordering the bombing ofCambodia Nixon stated I want a planwhere every goddamn thing that can fly goesinto Cambodia and hits every target that isopen He added I want everything that canfly to go in there and crack the hell out of themThere is no limitation on mileage and nol i m i t a t i o n o n b u d g e t ( M r KissingerPresident December 9 1970 Box29 File 2 See the Archive According toElizabeth Becker (New York Times 27 May2004) Kissinger transmitted this order as Amassive bombing campaign in CambodiaAnything that flies on anything that moves[9] New York Times 22 December 1965 17February 1966 and 19 June 1966[10] See John W Dower Embracing DefeatJapan in the Wake of World War II New YorkWW Norton amp Company 1999[11] See the organisations website[12] For reports on the Asian energy grid seeAsia Times Online 1 December 2005[13] Washingtons China The National SecurityWorld the Cold War and the Origins ofG loba l i sm (Amhers t Un ivers i t y o fMassachusetts Press 2006)

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

10

level of indoctrination which is shocking

Actually it has been studied in a lot more detailby James Peck in his book WashingtonsChina[13] He shows that the paranoia andfanaticism about China just exceeded anyconceivable rationality right through thesixties when the record dries

So yes there was that pretense In order tomaintain the pretense - and maybe theybelieved it I dont say they were lying SoKissinger in his deluded mind may havethought that it was China keeping the wargoing but it wasnt It was the Vietnamese whowere keeping the war going China was givingminimal assistance Russia was giving someanti-aircraft missiles and so on but it was awar with the Vietnamese That could not befaced because that would mean were not nicepeople We dont invade other countries Weliberate other people We dont attack themTherefore this picture emerged

The Economist cant see this as they are muchtoo deeply mired in imperial mentality In thiscase what does it mean to talk to Iran Is Irankeeping the insurgency going Is Iranresponsible for the Sunni insurgency Youdhave to be a lunatic to believe that It is strikingto see how this is being developed I presumeThe Economist is being caught up in a wave ofUS government propaganda

Remember the background The Iraqipopulation is overwhelmingly calling for awithdrawal The US government knows thisfrom its own polls The US population is callingfor a withdrawal The last congressionalelection was about this The responseEscalate As soon as you saw the surge wasannounced you could predict that there wasgoing to be a flow of propaganda about howIran was behind it What happens A flow ofpropaganda about how Iran is behind it Thencomes a debate

This i s the way Western democrat icpropaganda systems operate You dontarticulate the party line - totalitarian states dothat - they announce the party line and ifpeople dont accept it you beat them over thehead Nobody has to believe it In free societiesthat wont work You have to presuppose theparty line - never mention - just presuppose itThen encourage a vigorous debate within theframework of the party line That instills theparty line even more deeply and it gives theimpression of an open free society

The Iran Connection

This is a textbook example The Bushgovernment announces that Irans serialnumbers are on the IEDs Then it starts avigorous debate The hawks say lets bombthem to smithereens The doves say maybe itsnot true or maybe itrsquos just the RevolutionaryGuard and so on The discussion is surreal Youcan only carry it out on the assumption that theUnited States owns the world Otherwise Irancant be interfering in a country that is underUS occupation Its as if Germany in 1943 werecomplaining that the Allies were interfering infree and independent Vichy France You haveto collapse in ridicule But in the West verysober very ser ious We are a deeplyindoctrinated society so it isnt evenquestioned So yes the talk is now that welltalk with Iran and that this will solve theproblem It isnt going to solve the problem Itsan Iraqi problem

If Iran is not involved more in Iraq it isastonishing Were threatening Iran with attackand destruction Iran is almost completelysurrounded by hostile US forces The US isdeploying big naval detachments in the GulfWhat are they there for Defence The US isprobably conducting terror inside Iran tryingto stimulate tribal and secessionist movementsand so on And openly threatening to attackIran which in itself is a violation of the UNCharter

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

11

In fact when the US invaded Iraq that was asignal to Iran to develop nuclear weapons Thatwas understood One of Israels leading militaryhistorians Martin van Creveld wrote in theInternational Herald Tribune that of course hedidnt want Iran to have nuclear weapons butafter the US invasion of Iraq then if theyre notdeveloping them they are crazy[14] This isbecause the invasion was simply a signal wellattack anyone we like as long as they aredefenceless and you know we want to go afteryou because youre defiant Youre not going tobe able to survive So maybe they are doingsomething but the fact that the US is capturingIranian figures in Arbil and apparently goingafter diplomats - according to PatrickCockburns reports[15]- those are realprovocations

The discussion is surreal Take say Tony Blairduring the latest naval incident in which fifteenBritish sailors and marines were captured byIran He claims that the ships were in Iraqiwaters and then we have a debate overwhether they were in Iraqi or Iranian watersIts a debate that doesnt make any sense Whatare British vessels doing in Iraqi waters Howdid they get there Suppose the Iranian Navywas in the Caribbean Would the US be arguingover whose territorial waters they were in Totake this position you have to assume that theUS and its British lackey own the worldOtherwise you cant have the discussion

From Vietnam to the War on Terror

Hewison Right at the beginning of At War withAsia you have a quote from Professor J KFairbank where he is cited as worrying thatthe Vietnam War was not only a war againstthe people of Asia but resulted in a totalitarianmenace in the US itself Is there a comparisonwith the so-called War on Terror

Chomsky First of all with regard to the War onTerror we should bring up something that isconstantly repressed On 11 September 2001

Bush re-declared the War on Terror It hadbeen declared by Ronald Reagan when he cameinto office in 1981 He announced right awaythat the focus of US foreign policy would be onstate-directed international terrorism Hisadministration called it the plague of themodern age a return to barbarism in our timeand so on[16] And then came somethingpeople would prefer to forget This was a majorterrorist war launched by the United Stateswhich devastated Central America killedhundreds of thousands of people hadhorrifying results in southern Africa and theMiddle East and so on extending to SoutheastAsia

That was the first War on Terror So Bush re-declared it Now when you declare warwhatever it is going to be its going to comewith internal constraints Thats what a war isThe population has to be mobilized Therearent a lot of ways of mobilising a populationThe simplest way is fear Fear often has somejustification but we have to remember that theBush administration is increasing the risk notdecreasing it Intelligence agencies anticipatedthat the invasion of Iraq would probablyincrease the threat of terror and proliferationWell i t did but far beyond what wasanticipated The latest studies reveal thatterror increased about seven-fold This is whatthe analysts call the Iraq effect There aremany examples where the Bush administrationis not decreasing the risk of terrorism Mobilisethe population through fear and try to institutecontrols Well they have tried A lot of thingsthey have done are outrageous - the MilitaryCommissions Act which was passed bybipartisan vote last year is one of the mostdisgraceful pieces of legislation in Americanhistory - but we shouldnt exaggerate

With all of this it is nowhere near as bad as ithas been in the past Its a much freer societythan it used to be This is nothing like WoodrowWilsons Red Scare Its nothing like theCOINTELPRO which ran from the Eisenhower

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

12

up to the Nixon administration which was amajor FBI programme aimed at destroyingopposition movements from the Blackmovement to the womens movement and theentire New Left[17] Its nothing like that Badenough but we shouldnt exaggerate a lot offreedom has been won and it is not going to begiven up easily So yes there are efforts torestrict freedom - and thats what states are allabout taking any chance they can get torestrict freedom But the population has won alot of rights and its not going to abandon themeasily

Hewison Thats probably a good place toconclude - optimistic in a sense We reallyappreciate your time today Thank you

Kevin Hewison interviewed Chomsky inCambridge on April 18 2007 This is anabbreviated version of an article that appearedin Journal of Contemporary Asia 37 4 pp297-310 Nov 2007 Posted at Japan Focus onNovmber 26 2007

Hewison is Co-editor Journal of ContemporaryAsia and Director Carolina Asia Center TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Notes

[1] At War With Asia was originally published in1970 by PantheonVintage It was re-releasedin 2004 by AK Press The chapter on Laos wasfirst published as A Visit to Laos in The NewYork Review of Books 23 July 1970[2] These articles in Le Monde from 3 to 8 July1968 reported on Decornoys trip to Pathet Laostrongholds in northeastern Laos Also see JDecornoy (1970) Laos The Forgotten WarBulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 2 April-July pp 21-3[3] See TD Allman (1970) Laos thelabyrinthine war Far Eastern Economic

Review 16 April and his articles in the NewYork Times 25 August 1968 18 September1968 28 September 1968 17 October 1969 26October 1969 and 6 March 1970[4] See Chomskys article In North VietnamThe New York Review of Books 13 August1970 The essay is also included in At War withAsia[5] New York Quadrangle Books 1971[6] Robert S McNamara In Retrospect TheTragedy and Lessons of Vietnam New YorkTimes Books 1995 See Chomskys assessmentof these memoirs in Memories Z MagazineJuly-August 1995[7] The article is Bombs over Cambodia TheWalrus (Canada) October 2006 pp 62-9 TheYale University Genocide Studies Program ishere and the Cambodia project is here[8] On 26 May 2004 the National SecurityArchive released a series of Kissingertelephone conversations including Nixons callto Kissinger ordering the bombing ofCambodia Nixon stated I want a planwhere every goddamn thing that can fly goesinto Cambodia and hits every target that isopen He added I want everything that canfly to go in there and crack the hell out of themThere is no limitation on mileage and nol i m i t a t i o n o n b u d g e t ( M r KissingerPresident December 9 1970 Box29 File 2 See the Archive According toElizabeth Becker (New York Times 27 May2004) Kissinger transmitted this order as Amassive bombing campaign in CambodiaAnything that flies on anything that moves[9] New York Times 22 December 1965 17February 1966 and 19 June 1966[10] See John W Dower Embracing DefeatJapan in the Wake of World War II New YorkWW Norton amp Company 1999[11] See the organisations website[12] For reports on the Asian energy grid seeAsia Times Online 1 December 2005[13] Washingtons China The National SecurityWorld the Cold War and the Origins ofG loba l i sm (Amhers t Un ivers i t y o fMassachusetts Press 2006)

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

11

In fact when the US invaded Iraq that was asignal to Iran to develop nuclear weapons Thatwas understood One of Israels leading militaryhistorians Martin van Creveld wrote in theInternational Herald Tribune that of course hedidnt want Iran to have nuclear weapons butafter the US invasion of Iraq then if theyre notdeveloping them they are crazy[14] This isbecause the invasion was simply a signal wellattack anyone we like as long as they aredefenceless and you know we want to go afteryou because youre defiant Youre not going tobe able to survive So maybe they are doingsomething but the fact that the US is capturingIranian figures in Arbil and apparently goingafter diplomats - according to PatrickCockburns reports[15]- those are realprovocations

The discussion is surreal Take say Tony Blairduring the latest naval incident in which fifteenBritish sailors and marines were captured byIran He claims that the ships were in Iraqiwaters and then we have a debate overwhether they were in Iraqi or Iranian watersIts a debate that doesnt make any sense Whatare British vessels doing in Iraqi waters Howdid they get there Suppose the Iranian Navywas in the Caribbean Would the US be arguingover whose territorial waters they were in Totake this position you have to assume that theUS and its British lackey own the worldOtherwise you cant have the discussion

From Vietnam to the War on Terror

Hewison Right at the beginning of At War withAsia you have a quote from Professor J KFairbank where he is cited as worrying thatthe Vietnam War was not only a war againstthe people of Asia but resulted in a totalitarianmenace in the US itself Is there a comparisonwith the so-called War on Terror

Chomsky First of all with regard to the War onTerror we should bring up something that isconstantly repressed On 11 September 2001

Bush re-declared the War on Terror It hadbeen declared by Ronald Reagan when he cameinto office in 1981 He announced right awaythat the focus of US foreign policy would be onstate-directed international terrorism Hisadministration called it the plague of themodern age a return to barbarism in our timeand so on[16] And then came somethingpeople would prefer to forget This was a majorterrorist war launched by the United Stateswhich devastated Central America killedhundreds of thousands of people hadhorrifying results in southern Africa and theMiddle East and so on extending to SoutheastAsia

That was the first War on Terror So Bush re-declared it Now when you declare warwhatever it is going to be its going to comewith internal constraints Thats what a war isThe population has to be mobilized Therearent a lot of ways of mobilising a populationThe simplest way is fear Fear often has somejustification but we have to remember that theBush administration is increasing the risk notdecreasing it Intelligence agencies anticipatedthat the invasion of Iraq would probablyincrease the threat of terror and proliferationWell i t did but far beyond what wasanticipated The latest studies reveal thatterror increased about seven-fold This is whatthe analysts call the Iraq effect There aremany examples where the Bush administrationis not decreasing the risk of terrorism Mobilisethe population through fear and try to institutecontrols Well they have tried A lot of thingsthey have done are outrageous - the MilitaryCommissions Act which was passed bybipartisan vote last year is one of the mostdisgraceful pieces of legislation in Americanhistory - but we shouldnt exaggerate

With all of this it is nowhere near as bad as ithas been in the past Its a much freer societythan it used to be This is nothing like WoodrowWilsons Red Scare Its nothing like theCOINTELPRO which ran from the Eisenhower

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

12

up to the Nixon administration which was amajor FBI programme aimed at destroyingopposition movements from the Blackmovement to the womens movement and theentire New Left[17] Its nothing like that Badenough but we shouldnt exaggerate a lot offreedom has been won and it is not going to begiven up easily So yes there are efforts torestrict freedom - and thats what states are allabout taking any chance they can get torestrict freedom But the population has won alot of rights and its not going to abandon themeasily

Hewison Thats probably a good place toconclude - optimistic in a sense We reallyappreciate your time today Thank you

Kevin Hewison interviewed Chomsky inCambridge on April 18 2007 This is anabbreviated version of an article that appearedin Journal of Contemporary Asia 37 4 pp297-310 Nov 2007 Posted at Japan Focus onNovmber 26 2007

Hewison is Co-editor Journal of ContemporaryAsia and Director Carolina Asia Center TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Notes

[1] At War With Asia was originally published in1970 by PantheonVintage It was re-releasedin 2004 by AK Press The chapter on Laos wasfirst published as A Visit to Laos in The NewYork Review of Books 23 July 1970[2] These articles in Le Monde from 3 to 8 July1968 reported on Decornoys trip to Pathet Laostrongholds in northeastern Laos Also see JDecornoy (1970) Laos The Forgotten WarBulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 2 April-July pp 21-3[3] See TD Allman (1970) Laos thelabyrinthine war Far Eastern Economic

Review 16 April and his articles in the NewYork Times 25 August 1968 18 September1968 28 September 1968 17 October 1969 26October 1969 and 6 March 1970[4] See Chomskys article In North VietnamThe New York Review of Books 13 August1970 The essay is also included in At War withAsia[5] New York Quadrangle Books 1971[6] Robert S McNamara In Retrospect TheTragedy and Lessons of Vietnam New YorkTimes Books 1995 See Chomskys assessmentof these memoirs in Memories Z MagazineJuly-August 1995[7] The article is Bombs over Cambodia TheWalrus (Canada) October 2006 pp 62-9 TheYale University Genocide Studies Program ishere and the Cambodia project is here[8] On 26 May 2004 the National SecurityArchive released a series of Kissingertelephone conversations including Nixons callto Kissinger ordering the bombing ofCambodia Nixon stated I want a planwhere every goddamn thing that can fly goesinto Cambodia and hits every target that isopen He added I want everything that canfly to go in there and crack the hell out of themThere is no limitation on mileage and nol i m i t a t i o n o n b u d g e t ( M r KissingerPresident December 9 1970 Box29 File 2 See the Archive According toElizabeth Becker (New York Times 27 May2004) Kissinger transmitted this order as Amassive bombing campaign in CambodiaAnything that flies on anything that moves[9] New York Times 22 December 1965 17February 1966 and 19 June 1966[10] See John W Dower Embracing DefeatJapan in the Wake of World War II New YorkWW Norton amp Company 1999[11] See the organisations website[12] For reports on the Asian energy grid seeAsia Times Online 1 December 2005[13] Washingtons China The National SecurityWorld the Cold War and the Origins ofG loba l i sm (Amhers t Un ivers i t y o fMassachusetts Press 2006)

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

12

up to the Nixon administration which was amajor FBI programme aimed at destroyingopposition movements from the Blackmovement to the womens movement and theentire New Left[17] Its nothing like that Badenough but we shouldnt exaggerate a lot offreedom has been won and it is not going to begiven up easily So yes there are efforts torestrict freedom - and thats what states are allabout taking any chance they can get torestrict freedom But the population has won alot of rights and its not going to abandon themeasily

Hewison Thats probably a good place toconclude - optimistic in a sense We reallyappreciate your time today Thank you

Kevin Hewison interviewed Chomsky inCambridge on April 18 2007 This is anabbreviated version of an article that appearedin Journal of Contemporary Asia 37 4 pp297-310 Nov 2007 Posted at Japan Focus onNovmber 26 2007

Hewison is Co-editor Journal of ContemporaryAsia and Director Carolina Asia Center TheUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Notes

[1] At War With Asia was originally published in1970 by PantheonVintage It was re-releasedin 2004 by AK Press The chapter on Laos wasfirst published as A Visit to Laos in The NewYork Review of Books 23 July 1970[2] These articles in Le Monde from 3 to 8 July1968 reported on Decornoys trip to Pathet Laostrongholds in northeastern Laos Also see JDecornoy (1970) Laos The Forgotten WarBulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 2 April-July pp 21-3[3] See TD Allman (1970) Laos thelabyrinthine war Far Eastern Economic

Review 16 April and his articles in the NewYork Times 25 August 1968 18 September1968 28 September 1968 17 October 1969 26October 1969 and 6 March 1970[4] See Chomskys article In North VietnamThe New York Review of Books 13 August1970 The essay is also included in At War withAsia[5] New York Quadrangle Books 1971[6] Robert S McNamara In Retrospect TheTragedy and Lessons of Vietnam New YorkTimes Books 1995 See Chomskys assessmentof these memoirs in Memories Z MagazineJuly-August 1995[7] The article is Bombs over Cambodia TheWalrus (Canada) October 2006 pp 62-9 TheYale University Genocide Studies Program ishere and the Cambodia project is here[8] On 26 May 2004 the National SecurityArchive released a series of Kissingertelephone conversations including Nixons callto Kissinger ordering the bombing ofCambodia Nixon stated I want a planwhere every goddamn thing that can fly goesinto Cambodia and hits every target that isopen He added I want everything that canfly to go in there and crack the hell out of themThere is no limitation on mileage and nol i m i t a t i o n o n b u d g e t ( M r KissingerPresident December 9 1970 Box29 File 2 See the Archive According toElizabeth Becker (New York Times 27 May2004) Kissinger transmitted this order as Amassive bombing campaign in CambodiaAnything that flies on anything that moves[9] New York Times 22 December 1965 17February 1966 and 19 June 1966[10] See John W Dower Embracing DefeatJapan in the Wake of World War II New YorkWW Norton amp Company 1999[11] See the organisations website[12] For reports on the Asian energy grid seeAsia Times Online 1 December 2005[13] Washingtons China The National SecurityWorld the Cold War and the Origins ofG loba l i sm (Amhers t Un ivers i t y o fMassachusetts Press 2006)

APJ | JF 5 | 11 | 0

13

[14] See Martin van Creveld Iraq a lostpeace When the Amer icans leave International Herald Tribune 19 November2003[15] See Cockburns How a bid to kidnapIranian security officials sparked a diplomaticcrisis The Independent (UK) 3 April 2007 and

his reporting at Counterpunch for exampleBehind the Denials A De Facto HostageExchange 5 April 2007[16] See Noam Chomsky War on TerrorAmnesty International Annual Lecture TrinityCollege Dublin 18 January 2006 [17] See here