ask-mark.com

I don’t know much about Noam Chomsky, other than he’s a political theorist at MIT, but there is an interview with him on AlterNet. There are some interesting points that Chomsky makes about the "War on Terror."

For example, Chomsky was asked about defining a victory in a war on terror:

Geov Parrish: In the War on Terror, however, how does one define victory against a tactic? You can’t ever get there.

Noam Chomsky: There are metrics. For example, you can measure the number of terrorist attacks. Well, that’s gone up sharply under the Bush administration, very sharply after the Iraq war. As expected — it was anticipated by intelligence agencies that the Iraq war would increase the likelihood of terror. And the post-invasion estimates by the CIA, National Intelligence Council, and other intelligence agencies are exactly that. Yes, it increased terror. In fact, it even created something which never existed — new training ground for terrorists, much more sophisticated than Afghanistan, where they were training professional terrorists to go out to their own countries. So, yeah, that’s a way to deal with the War on Terror, namely, increase terror. And the obvious metric, the number of terrorist attacks, yeah, they’ve succeeded in increasing terror.

The fact of the matter is that there is no War on Terror. It’s a minor consideration. So invading Iraq and taking control of the world’s energy resources was way more important than the threat of terror. And the same with other things. Take, say, nuclear terror. The American intelligence systems estimate that the likelihood of a “dirty bomb,” a dirty nuclear bomb attack in the United States in the next ten years, is about 50 percent. Well, that’s pretty high. Are they doing anything about it? Yeah. They’re increasing the threat, by increasing nuclear proliferation, by compelling potential adversaries to take very dangerous measures to try to counter rising American threats.

This is even sometimes discussed. You can find it in the strategic analysis literature. Take, say, the invasion of Iraq again. We’re told that they didn’t find weapons of mass destruction. Well, that’s not exactly correct. They did find weapons of mass destruction, namely, the ones that had been sent to Saddam by the United States, Britain, and others through the 1980s. A lot of them were still there. They were under control of U.N. inspectors and were being dismantled. But many were still there. When the U.S. invaded, the inspectors were kicked out, and Rumsfeld and Cheney didn’t tell their troops to guard the sites. So the sites were left unguarded, and they were systematically looted. The U.N. inspectors did continue their work by satellite and they identified over 100 sites that were systematically looted, like, not somebody going in and stealing something, but carefully, systematically looted.

Except for the last part, I don’t think what he said is anything new, as far as his viewpoint on the ongoing war, but it is interesting nonetheless. I did not know anything about the unguarded and systematically looted stockpiles of weapons. I knew that Saddam was backed by the US in the past, only to have him turn the weapons on us. It makes sense that these are the weapons that were to be dismantled, under the supervision of the UN, but I had never made that connection. Take a look at the interview; perhaps you might make a new connection. If nothing else, at least it’s one more bit of information to stuff into your head.