% FROM THE NOAM CHOMSKY ARCHIVE
% http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu:/usr/tp0x/chomsky.html
% ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/user/cap/chomsky/
% Filename:    articles/
% Title:       Noam Chomsky On the Middle East and Vietnam
% Author:      Noam Chomsky
% Appeared-in: Folio, KPFA 94.1fm's monthly program guide, April 1991
% Source:      Jonathan Kiparsky 
% Keywords:    
% Synopsis:    
% See-also:    lectures/chomsky.berkeley.16-mar-1991

	   NOAM CHOMSKY ON THE MIDDLE EAST AND VIETNAM


   On February 25, 1991, Kris Welch and Philip Maldari spoke with
   Prof.  Noam Chomsky by phone to discuss his views on the Persian
   Gulf War.  That interview was replayed during the KPFA marathon,
   and a tape of the conversation became the most popular premium
   given with a subscription. The following article consists of
   excerpts from that interview, and many of the concepts herein
   formed the basis for Prof.  Chomsky's speech in Berkeley on March
   16, 1991, which KPFA will air in late May or Early June.

   Early in the interview, he was asked about the real reason we
   went to war. Was it oil, or was it the New Wrold Order?

The first thing one has to do is simply dismiss totally all the
reasons that have been presented, because they're not worth
discussing. If you want to find the reasons, ask yourself what
makes the United States and England different from other
countries? These are the two countries that, from the beginning,
have been insistent that the crisis must be resolved by the use
of force. They are the only ones that have blocked the UN
efforts, that have barred negotiations---there were very
promising negotiations prospects right up the last minute that
were blocked at once by the United States and England.

What makes these two countries different? Historically, the US
and Britain are the two countries that established the imperial
settlement in the region.  Primarily the United States, but
England as a kind of junior partner, made the arrangement. They
are the powers that established a condominium rule over the
oil-producing regions. The goal was to insure that the energy
resources of the region, and also the enormous profits that flow
from those energy resources, must be used for the benefit of the
two powers that established the condominium. That's a factor that
many people don't recognize, although the planners did recognize
it. And if you look at the classified secret record, that's
what's emphasized---that the profits that flow from oil, as well
as the resources themselves, must be used for the benefit of the
two powers that established the condominium.

Now the classified record actually just runs up to about 1960,
and in those years, it was primarily Britain that both powers
were concerned about. It was necessary that Kuwaiti oil, in
particular, and the profits from it and the investments, be
available to prop up the ailing British economy and the whole
Sterling area. Britain and the United States were willing to
grant nominal independence to let the countries rule behind an
``Arab facade,'' as it was called, but they reserved the right to
intervene by force anywhere in the peninsula, if anything got out
of hand.

Now, by the early 1970's, this was beginning to be a problem for
the United States. Its economy was visibly declining relative to
its two major rivals, Germany and Japan. That's part of this
famous New World Order, which is tri-polar economically. And so
the same considerations held for the United States. It was
becoming increasingly necessary for the US economy to be
bolstered by the flow of petrodollars. There is talk about the
United States wanting lower oil prices. That's only partly true.
Sometimes the US and UK want prices to go up, and they, in fact,
benefit from it repeatedly.

But the flow of wealth from the oil-producing countries,
basically family dictatorships established by the US and Britain,
has been a considerable help to both rather troubled economies.
The flow is to financial institutions, to industrial
corporations, to purchases of manufactured goods, or simply, to
treasury securities. Remember the joke about ``Why do the United
States and Kuwit need each other? Because Kuwait is a banking
system without a country and the United States is a country
without a banking system.'' That's one major reason. The United
States and England want to ensure that they continue, as in the
past, to dominate this region and to control the dominant part of
the region's investments and profits, because they need it. And
after the Reagan years, the United States needs it even more.

Remember, there are only three major sources of capital in the
world---one is Germany and its surroundings, the other is Japan
and its system, and the third are the oil-producing regions with
the family dictatorships that run them. Germany and Japan are not
going to go out of their way to prop up the British and American
economies. They're rivals, not friends. So, indirectly, you can
kind of tax them by oil---as long as you control those regions.
And it's also true, as it has been for 50 years, that influence
over oil production and pricing---you can't control it totally,
because there are strong market pressures, but you can influence
within the market limits. As George Kennan once put it, it gives
the United States ``veto power'' over what Japan and other
countries might try to do. That's to some extent still the case.

Now, why the insistence on force rather than diplomacy, which
could very likely have resolved the crisis? Here you have to look
at another fact about the United States and England. Simply ask
yourself what is the comparative advantage in world affairs of
these two countries? Take England. Economically, they can't
compete with Germany and Japan. But militarily, they're pretty
strong, by the standards of a middle-level power. They have a
powerful military, they have a militaristic tradition, an
imperial tradition, and they're there as a kind of enforcer.

Now take the United States. All of that is the same, except on a
much grander scale. Economically, the United States is still the
biggest economy in the world, but it is declining relative to its
rivals, and it's now deep in debt. The Reagan years have harmed
the economy seriously, and costs are yet to be paid, and it has
nothing like the economic dominance it had in the past.  It's
basically one of three, and a declining one of three. However,
militarily, it's totally supreme, stronger than ever.

   On the day the war ended, politicians and mainstream commentators
   spoke about the fact that ``the United States has finally laid
   Vietnam to rest.'' During the interview, Chomsky spoke about
   those ``lessons of Vietnam'' and what they might be.

I think that the United States largely won that war. Here I think
the peace movement and everyone else is quite deluded. I've been
arguing this for years.  If you want to find out which country
won or lost the war, you have to look at its war aims, and ask to
what extent they were attained. And we know a lot about that.
There's a lot of documentation.

In the Vietnam war, the United States had far-reaching goals,
major goals, and minimal goals. It didn't incorporate Indochina
straight within the US imperial system. But that wasn't the major
goal. The US didn't care much about Indochina. Indochina could
disappear and the United States wouldn't notice it.

What they were worried about was what they called ``the domino
effect,'' and what is, in fact, the demonstration effect. They
were afraid a succesful independent development in Indochina
might have a spreading effect on the region. It might influence
indigenous movements in Thailand and Indonesia and throughout the
region. It might finally end up with Japan, which was called the
``workshop of Asia,'' accomodating to an independent
nationalist---what they might call communist because it's just a
cover word---Asian region. That would have meant, in effect, that
the United States would have lost the Second World War, which was
fought in the Pacific to prevent this outcome. This they were not
prepared to do in the early 1950's.

What was achieved? There was a two-pronged attack. The way it was
described is: ``There is a virus of independent nationalism and
it's going to infect the region.'' Well, if there's a virus and
it's going to infect others, what you do is inoculate the others
and destroy the virus---and that's exactly what they did.  They
destroyed Indochina. It will take a century for it to recover,
and the region was inoculated. There were brutal military
dictatorships imposed throughout the region. The worst is
Indonesia, where we slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people,
but it was bad enough in Thailand and the Philippines, where the
Marcos dictatorship came in and so on.

By the early 1970's, the business press already recognized it as
a victory precisely for this reason. You read the Far Eastern
Economic Review, the conservative business press. By the early
'70s, they were crowing. They said, Look, we won, Indochina's no
problem. The region is totally under control. It's all under the
control of brutal regimes that are very responsive to Western
economic interests. They're quite open to exploitation. That's a
victory. And in fact, since 1975, the United States has been
making very sure that victory sticks. That's part of the purpose
of punishing Vietnam. Make sure it doesn't recover, and the
others learn the lesson. You get in our way and you're going to
be wiped out for good. That's why the United States is even
passively supporting Pol Pot.

Late in the interview, Chomsky was asked about the media coverage
of the war. His response:

The media is just ridiculous. The media have virtually one
hundred percent been applauding George Bush for going the last
mile on diplomacy when he has been saying straight loud and clear
that there can be no negotiations. That's a level of
totalitarianism that a fascist state couldn't achieve. Here's a
president who for five months has been saying that there will be
no diplomacy, and the media are applauding him for exploring
every diplomatic option.  Furthermore, they've suppressed the
actual diplomatic opportunities. If you want to find out what the
diplomatic opportunities have been, you've got to read things
like _Newsday_.  Just two weeks before the US and the British
went to war, Iraqi propsals were released by high US officials,
which gave a basis for almost a complete settlement. And they
were simply dismissed by the United States and silenced by the
media.  So sure, the way you control the population is the old
way. You make sure that the ideological system is very tight. I
should say that in Britain and the United States, it's somewhat
different in this respect.  The media are the same in England and
the United States, but in England there's still a kind of residue
of the recollection that it used to be a somewhat more open
society in which there was debate and discussion. I'll tell you
my own personal experience.  I was there for five days, from the
beginning of the bombong up until Tuesday. Every day began at
seven in the morning with a BBC radio car coming out to the
suburb, where I was staying with a friend, for an interview. And
it went on that way until midnight.  If I wasn't giving a talk, I
was on the radio or on television.  In the United States, it's
inconcievable, outside of Pacifica, or community-based radio and
that sort of thing. In this respect, the two countries are very
different, even though the character of media coverage is very
much the same.