Chomsky talk

http://www.zmag.org/content/Mideast/chomskymecatalk.cfm

NOAM CHOMSKY: Unfortunately, I can't see
anybody out there but I assume there are people there. I'm going to be talking--I'll be
talking primarily about West Asia, which overlaps pretty closely with what we call,
here, the Middle East or the Near East. Some of these remarks are going to be
highly critical of the practices of states in the region, including the currently most
powerful states, Israel and Turkey. Supporters of their criminal practices often
charge that these criticisms are unfair, they overlook the conflicts and the threats
that the states face, the states and the societies face. And I think those charges
are, in part, correct. The criticism has an element of unfairness, but for a different
reason. The conflicts and the threats are certainly real and serious, but they in no
way justify the continuing barbarous practices and actions that have gone on over
many years and are in large measure responsible for the threats that now exist.

But these vicious practices are only to be expected. In a situation of conflict and
threat, the state authorities will resort to any means that they can get away with;
that includes serious war crimes, crimes against humanity, and they will do so, as
long as their crimes are tolerated and supported and sometimes encouraged by the
overlord. If the master says that's enough, they stop. Therefore, it follows that our
criticisms should be directed primarily to ourselves. Indignation about the crimes of
others is easy and cheap and not particularly attractive, sometimes even shameful.
Looking in the mirror is far more important, much more difficult. And in these, and
many other cases, our participation in crimes is quite real, and it proceeds at several
different levels.

In the first place, it's a matter of government policy, decisive military, economic,
diplomatic support for crimes, all with full awareness, over many decades. At the
second level, it goes on at the level of doctrinal institutions--media, schools,
universities, intellectual journals, often scholarship. That includes evasion or
suppression of crucial facts, plenty of outright falsification, sometimes even
unconstrained enthusiasm for atrocities.

And at the third, and most important, level, it's a matter of our own choices. None of
this is graven in stone. There are many examples rather similar to this, where things
have been changed by public action. We may remember that this month, March,
2002, happens to be the 40th anniversary of the first public announcement of the
U.S. attack against South Vietnam. In March, 1962, the Kennedy administration
announced that the U.S. Air Force would be flying missions against the South
Vietnamese. Use of chemical warfare was instituted to destroy food crops.
Hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions of people were driven into concentration
camps, urban slums. Napalm was authorized.

All of this proceeded with no protest. That's why there's no commemoration, today,
of the 40th anniversary. Nobody even remembers. There was no protest, virtually
none, here in Berkeley or in anyplace, for a long time. It took years before
substantial public opposition developed. It did finally develop, as somebody,
Barbara, somebody pointed out, and it made a big differences.

One of the differences it made is that it contributed, along with the civil rights
movement and other activism of the time, to making this a much more civilized
country, in many ways. I'm not talking about the leadership, I'm not talking about
the intellectual classes, but the general population has changed. No American
president could dream of anything remotely like that today. And the same is true in
many other areas. And it didn't happen by magic or "gifts from angels" or anything
like that. It came from committed, dedicated public activism on the part of millions
and millions of people. And it did make a much better country. There's plenty
wrong, but, as compared with 40 years ago, the improvement is enormous.

And there are many specific cases just like this one. Again, I couldn't hear clearly
from the back, but somebody mentioned South Africa, which is a rather similar
case. We may remember that, as late as 1988 the U.S. government condemned
Nelson Mandela's African National Congress as a terrorist organization-- in fact, in
their words, one of the world's "more notorious" terrorist organizations, and
supported, accepted South Africa, in its worst days of apartheid, accepted it as a
welcome ally. That was, after just during the Reagan/Bush years alone, South
Africa, with U.S. and British support, had killed about a million and a half people in
the surrounding countries, forgetting what happened inside, and caused about $60
billion of damage in the surrounding countries. But it was a welcome ally and its
opponents that were struggling for liberation were one of the more notorious terrorist
organizations in the world.

Within a few years, Washington was compelled to abandon and reverse that
stance. It was compelled by an aroused and activist public, if you trace the revision
to its roots, and that's far from the only case. In fact, there really are choices, in
these and in other cases. If we don't make the choices, we are participants in the
crimes, knowing participants.

Well, let me turn to West Asia with that in the background. Policy makers want us
to focus on what they call the "axis of evil", which I think is worth doing, I think we
should laugh at it, and I want to return to that. But they understand that, to pursue
their goals, they're going to have to make some gestures, at least, about what's
called, here, the Israel-Palestine conflict, a phrase which suggests a certain
symmetry, although the actual coverage regards Israel as the victims of mindless
and insane Palestinian terrorism.

Well, since some gestures are necessary to pursue the other goals, the U.S.
government ordered the Israeli government to withdraw its tanks and armed forces
from Palestinian towns and refugee camps, and they instantly obeyed, as always.
Cut a few corners, but they followed orders quickly. That demonstrates once again,
not the first time, where power lies and where responsibility lies. For the rest of the
world it underscored again what they already knew: that it's not a symmetrical
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's a military occupation now in its 35th year--harsh,
brutal and oppressive. Continues because of the decisive unilateral support by the
United States at all the levels I described. It's in gross violation of international law
and has been from the outset.

And that much, at least, is fully recognized, even by the United States, which has
overwhelming and, as I said, unilateral responsibility for these crimes. So George
Bush No. 1, when he was the U.N. ambassador, back in 1971, he officially reiterated
Washington's condemnation of Israel's actions in the occupied territories. He
happened to be referring specifically to occupied Jerusalem. In his words, actions in
violation of the provisions of international law governing the obligations of an
occupying power, namely Israel. He criticized Israel's failure "to acknowledge its
obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as its actions which are
contrary to the letter and spirit of this Convention."

That Convention is no minor affair. It's one of the core principles of international law.
It was established in 1949, to formally criminalize the actions, the practices, of the
Nazis in occupied Europe. Well, George Bush's condemnation of Israeli practices in
violation of international law, as the occupying power, that expressed official US
policy at that time. However, by that time, late 1971, a divergence was developing,
between official policy and practice. The fact of the matter is that by then, by late
1971, the United States was already providing the means to implement the violations
that Ambassador Bush deplored. It was backing what had happened in that year.

To recall to you, those who may not know or have forgotten, in February, 1971,
Egypt offered a full peace treaty to Israel, exactly in terms of official U.S. policy. It
didn't even mention the Palestinians, wasn't an issue at the time, didn't mention the
West Bank. It just mentioned Egyptian territory. Israel recognized it as a genuine
peace offer, considered accepting it, decided not to--remember, this is the dovish
labor party, this is Golda Meir's government, not Ariel Sharon, although Sharon in
fact was, under their orders, implementing some of his worst atrocities at that time.
These were bipartisan programs.

So, no mention of the Palestinians, full peace treaty. Israel decided not to accept
the full peace treaty that was offered by its major adversary, Egypt, on the
assumption, openly discussed internally, in Hebrew, that they thought if they held
out they could do better in gaining more territory. The United States had to make a
decision. Should it continue to support the official policy, the one Bush reiterated at
the U.N. a couple of months later, and go along with Egypt, call for a full peace
treaty? Or should it follow Henry Kissinger's preference of what he called
"stalemate," meaning no negotiations, just delaying tactics, slow integration of the
territories within under Israeli control, of course funded and backed and supported by
the United States, while the U.S. continued to block diplomatic settlement.

Well, Kissinger won the internal conflict, and from that point on U.S. official policy
and U.S. actual policy have diverged and continue to diverge. It wasn't until Clinton
that the official policy was formally abandoned, including the concern for international
law and U.N. resolutions, which were effectively rescinded by Clinton. But until that
time, the policy officially remained as Bush had described it, though the practice
was as Kissinger had laid it out.

This program of blocking diplomatic settlement, a diplomatic settlement that has
almost universal international support, that program has a name, it's called the
peace process in standard rhetoric. So you read about the U.S. implementing the
peace process and calls for the U.S. to intervene more directly to advance the peace
process. What the peace process is, not only in this case--this is common--the
peace process refers to anything the United States happens to be doing, maybe
blocking peace, as in this case.

That's one of the levels of participation in atrocities. Well, during these, by now, over
30 years of extreme rejectionism and obstruction of diplomacy, United States policy
has continued a dual track, up till Clinton. It's officially kept the position that Bush
had enunciated, in practice kept to Kissinger's preference for stalemate, slow
integration of the territories, delaying tactics, consolidation within Israel, meaning
U.S. and Israel.

What about the Palestinians. Well, the plans for the Palestinians were enunciated
at the same time. This happens to have been internally, in secret cabinet meetings,
but the records have been released, in Israel. Moshe Dayan advised the cabinet,
this is the dovish cabinet, that, with regard to the Palestinians, we should tell them
that they will live like dogs and whoever will leave will leave, and we'll see where that
goes, while we quietly proceed to establish what he called "permanent rule" over the
territories. Notice, I'm not quoting an extremist, except an extreme dove. Within the
spectrum, Moysha Dyan was one of the leaders who was most sympathetic to and
understanding of the position of the Palestinians and their needs and what was
happening to them.

Well, those policies continue. They go on right to today. They go on through the
Oslo phase of what's called the peace process. Internally in Israel, in Hebrew again,
which is a secret language, trusting the Western commentators not to report it, at
the dovish end the official negotiator for Barak, Shlomo ben Ami who's sort of on the
dovish side of the spectrum, he, just as he entered the government, in 1998, he
wrote a book in Hebrew in which he discussed the Oslo process. And he pointed
out that the goal of the Oslo process is to establish what he called a permanent
neo-colonial dependency for the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Which is
accurate, that was the goal of the Oslo process. It was perfectly transparent, in the
original documents, the declaration of principles that was signed with great fanfare in
September, 1993. The Palestinians, unwisely, chose to disregard the evident facts
and to believe otherwise.

The perpetrators of crimes can choose to delude themselves, if they like, but the
victims would be well-advised to pay close attention, not just in this case. What that
meant is, and what ben Ami repeated in 1998, is that the goal of the Oslo process,
the long-term goal, was to establish something like what South Africa established in
1962, when Transkei, the first of the Bantustans, was formerly established, I think
that was the year, as a state, black state, run by black people. In fact, more viable
than what's intended for the neo-colonial dependency in Palestine. They actually
even put resources into it, contrary to what the U.S. and Israel do, not because
they're nice guys but because they were hoping to get international recognition.

If the "master of the world" had recognized it, we would be celebrating the
independence of Transkei today, if they could have gotten away with it. Fortunately,
they couldn't. Well, Ehud Barak, while he and Clinton were being praised for their
magnanimous offers at Camp David in mid-2000, he was going ahead with the
standard project, establishing illegal settlements. In fact, the last year of his term in
office, the settlement program reached its highest level since 1992, the year before
the Oslo process began. The goal was to ensure that whatever came out would be a
permanent neo-colonial dependency, exactly as they said. It's a secret only if we
choose not to hear what's being said.

At the time of the Camp David agreements, the Israeli government--when I say Israel,
I always mean U.S.-Israel. They can't do it without U.S. support and
encouragement. So the government had established, according to Amnesty
International, 227 Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank, all separated from
Jerusalem and from Gaza, also, which was also cantonized -- a lot of them, most of
them in fact, a couple of square kilometers, little dungeons. And in fact, the
magnanimous offer at Camp David that we were all supposed to applaud, was an
improvement. It assembled these 227 enclaves into four distinct, separate cantons
in the West Bank, northern,central and southern, separated by salients that broke
the area, virtually bisected it up, in the north and again in the south, all separated
from Jerusalem, small area of Jerusalem, which is traditionally the center of
Palestinian life.

With regard to Gaza it was kind or vague, but probably more or less the same. If
you recall the period of celebration of Clinton and Camp David--well, you can check
this yourself. I don't read the California newspapers, but I looked pretty hard and I
could not find, in the United States, any maps. I mean, we're all applauding the
settlement that Clinton and Barak proposed, but it was impossible to find a map
describing them, in the United States. It was easy if you looked anywhere else. So
the Israeli press published the maps, the British press published them, but, as far as
I'm aware, no maps were published in the United States, at least not in the national
press.

And I think there's a reason for that. If you looked at the maps, you immediately
saw that you can't possibly be praising this as a magnanimous and forthcoming
offer. In fact, it didn't even approach what South Africa had done, 40 years earlier.
All of this continues thanks to U.S. support and encouragement at all three of the
levels that I mentioned--at the level of policy, at the level of the press, doctrinal
institutions. In the press, I guess the most extreme example of sort of fanaticism or
whatever the right word is, is Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. He wrote,
at the time, that President Clinton has spoken and now we know, as he said, what
the outcome must be. Of course, we have the words of the master. You have to go
back to the darkest days of Stalinism to find anything comparable to that. When the
Palestinians refused, that shows how terrible they are.

The third level of support for this is, of course, ourselves. There were protests, but
not enough. Well, let me come forward right to the present moment. Just last week
the two major human rights groups in the world, Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch, issued very eloquent pleas to allow international monitors to be sent
to the territories. Amnesty International, to save Palestinian and Israeli lives, and,
Human Rights Watch, once again, "to end Israel's excessive and indiscriminate
force" against civilians.

Amnesty International's appeal begins by saying that Palestinian and Israeli children
are slaughtered; ambulances carrying wounded Palestinians are shot at; Palestinian
homes are demolished, their towns and villages sealed off. Remaining silent
amounts to condoning the escalation of killings, violence, and retaliation. Here, the
Jewish Voices against Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories, which was
mentioned earlier. They'll have an ad in the New York Times, I think this Sunday,
saying pretty much the same things. And in fact, as you heard, calling for
suspension of military aid to Israel, which is used to maintain the occupation, until
Israel withdraws from the territories and reduction of economic aid, by the amount
that's spent on maintaining the illegal settlements.

And there are other such voices. These pleas, all of them, are addressed to the
United States, which has refused to allow international monitors and is blocking
them. And everyone knows that that's the easiest short-term way to lessen and
reduce the level of violence. The most recent case, explicit case, was on December
14th, the Security Council of the U.N. debated a resolution calling for implementation
of the U.S. Mitchell Plan, reduction of violence and dispatch of international monitors
to monitor, to observe, and facilitate the reduction of violence. It was vetoed by the
United States. A U.S. veto means, of course, it's finished. It also means silence
here, so it's scarcely reported, and out of history, like the February, 1971 affair that I
mentioned earlier.

It went to the General Assembly immediately and there was the usual outcome, an
overwhelming vote in support of the resolution, essentially unanimous. U.S. and
Israel opposed, joined by Micronesia and another Pacific island, one of the small
Pacific islands, I forget which one, Nauru, I think, so it wasn't universal. And that of
course wasn't reported, it's not the "right" story.

All of this was at a very important moment. It was in the midst of a long, three-week
cease fire. During that cease fire one Israeli solider was killed, 21 Palestinians were
killed, 11 children, according to journalist Graham Usher. That's technically called a
period of quiet, which lasted for three weeks, broken a couple of weeks later. This
was right in the middle of it. Right before that, on December 5th, there had been an
important international conference, called in Switzerland, on the 4th Geneva
Convention. Switzerland is the state that's responsible for monitoring and controlling
the implementation of them. The European Union all attended, even Britain, which is
virtually a U.S. attack dog these days. They attended. A hundred and fourteen
countries all together, the parties to the Geneva Convention.

They had an official declaration, which condemned the settlements in the occupied
territories as illegal, urged Israel to end its breaches of the Geneva Convention,
some "grave breaches," including willful killing, torture, unlawful deportation, unlawful
depriving of the rights of fair and regular trial, extensive destruction and appropriation
of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and
wantonly. Grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, that's a serious term, that
means serious war crimes.

The United States is one of the high contracting parties to the Geneva Convention,
therefore it is obligated, by its domestic law and highest commitments, to prosecute
the perpetrators of grave breaches of the conventions. That includes its own
leaders. Until the United States prosecutes its own leaders, it is guilty of grave
breaches of the Geneva Convention, that means war crimes.

And it's worth remembering the context. It is not any old convention. These are the
conventions established to criminalize the practices of the Nazis, right after the
Second World War. What was the U.S. reaction to the meeting in Geneva? The
U.S. boycotted the meeting, along with Israel and Australia. Australia was a
surprise. According to the Australian press, that was done under very heavy U.S.
pressure. They were the three countries that boycotted, and that has the usual
consequence, it means the meeting is null and void, silence in the media. As for
ourselves, that's for each person to decide.

Even the Clinton administration, which broke all records in supporting Israeli
government policies, was unwilling to publicly oppose the applicability of the Geneva
Conventions, particularly in the light of the circumstances in which they were
established. On October 7th, 2000, that's a week after the intifada broke out, the
Security Council adopted a resolution deploring Ariel Sharon's provocation at the
mosque, the Haram al-Sharif, on September 28th, and the violence there the next
day, which was under the command of Ehud Barak and his minister of security,
Shlomo ben Ami, when a massive police presence was sent to the mosque, as
people left the mosque after Friday prayers, the presence of the police predictably
led to stone throwing and shooting into the crowd and elsewhere, with deaths and
many wounded. And that set off the current intifada.

The resolution condemned all that. It also called upon Israel, the occupying power,
to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations under the 4th Geneva Convention. The
vote was 14 to 0, one abstention. A U.S. abstention means a veto, in effect. A veto,
also, from reporting, because it wasn't reported as far as I noticed, and it's out of
history. But it stands as international law, adopted without dissent, and in fact it
simply reiterates what George Bush said in September, 1971.

Well, there were other events at the same time, in September of 2000. The intifada
began right after the September 28th and 29th provocations. On October 1st what
are called Israeli helicopters--when you hear Israeli helicopters, that means U.S.
helicopters flown by Israeli pilots. Israel doesn't produce helicopters, it doesn't
produce F-16s, so Israeli jets and helicopters means our jets and helicopters. They,
on October 1st, began attacking civilian targets, apartment complexes and others,
killing and wounding dozens of people. That went on October 1st and October 2nd.

There was a U.S. reaction, at all the levels. At the level of government, the Clinton
administration reacted, on October 3rd, by finalizing the biggest deal in a decade to
send military helicopters to Israel, Black Hawk helicopters, others, also spare parts
for Apache attack helicopters that had just been delivered. Biggest deal in a
decade. The press collaborated by refusing to publish it. A friend of mine did a
database search and found one reference in the country, in a letter written to a
Raleigh, North Carolina, newspaper. There were efforts to persuade editors to at
least allow publication of the facts that they knew--this is no secret, it was perfectly
public information. They knew it, but they wouldn't report it. So it's not failure to
publish, it's refusal to publish.

There were efforts to reach the public in other ways. Limited effects. To this day, it
is scarcely known that the U.S. reaction to what I just described, the dispatch of the
biggest shipment in a decade of helicopters, immediately after those helicopters had
been used to attack civilian targets and kill and wound dozens of people. The
reaction was what I described and the press, silence.

Shortly after, Israel began using U.S. helicopters for targeted assassinations, began
a few weeks later. By now there are about 50 of them. These are just straight
murder. I mean, there's no evidence presented, and none is needed. Also about 25
cases of the famous collateral damage--wives, children, bystanders, figures vary a
little but they're in that neighborhood.

A petition was brought to the High Court, essentially Supreme Court, in Israel, to call
on the High Court to ban the murder of people by U.S. helicopters. The court denied
the appeal, saying that it saw no reason, were its words, to ban this. The U.S.
reaction: send more helicopters, and jets and armaments, a huge flow. All with the
goal, it's got to be the goal because it's conscious, of enhancing terror, to borrow
George Bush's words, referring to the official "bad guys."

What about diplomacy. Well, it continues. Last week there was a U.N. resolution,
the first one the United States has proposed in 25 years. A lot of fanfare about that.
Why did the United States propose a Security Council resolution on Israel and
Palestine? Well the answer was given by the more serious part of the press, the
Wall Street Journal, which, actually, it often does do the best reporting. The point
was, they said, to block a resolution that called for an end to violence--that was
coming along--but also referred to Israel as an occupying power, and was therefore,
in their words, an anti-Israeli resolution. And clearly the U.S. must block these
anti-Semitic moves, so the U.S. blocked the anti-Israeli resolution that referred to
Israel as an occupying power, by advancing its own resolution.

Out of history is the fact that Israel, of course, is the occupying power. It's
recognized as such, officially, by the United States, going back to George Bush No.
1, and even Clinton, who, as I mentioned, his support for the Israeli government was
extreme, only abstained when the Security Council unanimously reiterated the
position that Israel is the occupying power, bound by the requirements of the Geneva
Conventions, but, for the Wall Street Journal, that's an anti-Israel position. It's not
surprising that's the standard rhetoric on the issue.

What about the U.S. resolution? Well, it's totally vacuous. What it says is we have
a vision, somewhere in the future, of two states. Notice that that doesn't even
approach South African racists, 40 years ago. They didn't have a vision of black
states, they established them. But we don't go as far as South African racists in the
deepest days of apartheid, and we praise ourselves for this progressive stance.

Well, again, the question is, do we tolerate it? I mean, you can tolerate it, it
continues. There's also much discussion of a Saudi Arabian plan that was
introduced by Thomas Friedman as a real breakthrough, with a lot of
self-congratulation. He's rather stuck on himself, as those who subject themselves
to reading his column are aware, but he's very proud of having made a real
breakthrough in the peace process. The press reported that maybe the Arabs have
at last, I'm quoting, come to drop their "implausible notion" that Israel is just
somehow going to go away," and they will finally grant Israel the simple gift for which
it is always yearned, namely, recognition of its right to exist-- Wall Street Journal
and other national newspapers.

Again, more serious journals, like the Wall Street Journal, recalled, I'm quoting, that
the idea of the Saudi Arabian resolution proposal is not new. Saudi Arabia first
presented it in 1981, but the "hard line Arab states" shot the plan down. But now,
two decades later, they seemed to have softened. The plan at that time was
blocked by Syria, Iraq, and Arafat's PLO. Although, possibly, Israel wouldn't have
accepted it anyway. We can't be sure. That's quoting the Boston Globe.

Well, let's return to the real world. The PLO approved the resolution, didn't shoot it
down. It did officially approve it, with qualifications however. The qualification was
that the 1981 Saudi plan did not mention the PLO. As for Syria, it objected to one
thing, namely, the fact that the Saudi Arabian proposal did not refer to the conquered
Syrian Golan Heights.

The other Arab states, their reaction was ambivalent. They didn't reject it, but they
awaited some sign that the United States and Israel would show some interest.

What about Israel's reaction? It's not mentioned in the reporting but it was there.
Shimon Peres condemned the Saudi proposal, this is '81, because it threatened
Israel's very existence. The official Labor Party newspaper, Davar, reported that the
Israeli air force had carried out military flights, with U.S. planes, over the Saudi
Arabian oil fields. This was, they interpreted, as a warning to the United States not
to take the proposal seriously, or else. If it did, Israel would use its U.S. supplied
military capacity to blow up the oil fields. The Labor Party newspaper described this
as so irrational as to cause foreign intelligence services to be concerned over Israeli
bombing of the Saudi oil fields.

One of the leading Israeli intellectuals, well-known in the United States, Amos Elon,
described the Israeli reaction as shocking, frightening, if not downright despair
producing. Over toward the center right, correspondent Yoel Marcus condemned
what he called the frightened, almost hysterical response to the Saudi plan, which
he regarded as a grave mistake.

The most interesting reaction was that of Israel's president, Haim Herzog, also
something of dove. He wrote that the real author, his words, the "real author"of the
Saudi plan was the PLO. And he went onto say that the plan that the PLO had
written was even more extreme than the Security Council resolution of January,
1976, "prepared by" the PLO, he claimed, proposed by the Arab confrontation
states, Syria, Egypt and Jordan. Supported literally by the entire world but
fortunately vetoed by the United States, as usual vetoing it from history. That
resolution called for full implementation of UN 242, those of you who follow this know
that that's the core resolution guaranteeing the rights of all states in the region to live
in peace and security within recognized borders. It included all that wording. But it
added to it the Palestinian state in the occupied territories.

So the U.S. vetoed it, as it continued to veto or block others in subsequent years, up
to the 1981 plan that caused such hysteria, and in fact beyond and right up to the
president. Herzog had been the U.N. Ambassador of Israel, in 1976, when the
terrible resolution came up. He was actually wrong in what he said. The Saudi
Arabian plan in '81 was virtually the same as the Security Council resolution that the
U.S. had vetoed. And of course the idea that the PLO had prepared either of them is
absurd, but they did support them.

But it does reflect the hysteria, among Israeli doves, over the Saudi peace
proposals, backed by--the United States made it very clear, in 1981, that it would
not consider the Saudi plan. That's what in fact happened. The coverage today is a
little bit different.

Something else was happening at the time of the Saudi plan in 1981. Israel was at
that time just beginning the preparations for the invasion of Lebanon, which took
place a couple of months later. At that point, they began the provocations in
Lebanon to try to elicit some PLO action which could be used as a pretext for the
invasion. There were bombings, killings, sinking fishing boats, all sorts of other
things. They were unable to elicit a pretext, so they just invaded anyway, with U.S.
support, killing about 20,000 people. A couple of U.S. vetoes of Security Council
resolutions let it continue.

What was the point? Well, at last I can quote the New York Times saying
something accurate. The goal of the invasion, I'm quoting the New York Times, this
January--the Israeli government's goal in invading Lebanon was to "install a friendly
regime and destroy Mr. Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization. That, the
theory went, would help persuade Palestinians to accept Israeli rule in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip." So that was the point of the invasion of Lebanon.

That report is quite correct, and, as far as I'm aware, it's the first time in the United
States that any public, any media or often even scholarship or anything else, has
recognized what was completely transparent, open and obvious all throughout the
Israeli press and commentary, 20 years earlier. That was announced right away. If
you read dissident literature, you knew it. But finally, on January 24th, 2002, the
New York Times permitted itself to publish a line, hidden in a column on something
else, which told the truth, that they had all known for 20 years, namely that the
U.S.-Israeli attack on Lebanon--not small, 20,000 killed, approximately--that that
was a textbook illustration of international terrorism, as defined in the U.S. code and
by U.S. army manuals, the use of extreme violence, in this case, to obtain political
ends, by intimidation, coercion and imposing fear.

Maybe it's not international terrorism, maybe it's the more serious war crime of
aggression, in which case we should have Nuremberg trials instead of just an
international tribunal, but at least that. That's what was going on in 1981 at the time
of the Saudi Arabian peace plan.

Well, that's diplomacy today. The U.S. rejectionism, the--

END SIDE A


NC: However--and in fact, the person who was most influential in preventing people
here from knowing anything about this was good old Thomas Friedman, the man
who's now taking credit for the breakthrough of reintroducing the Saudi plan of 20
years ago that the U.S. and Israel shot down, contrary to reporting. So, right
through the 1980s, when he was the New York Times' correspondent in Jerusalem,
he was denying explicitly what he knew to be a fact. You could read a headline in
the mainstream Israeli press, which he reads, which would say "PLO Arafat offers
negotiations, Peres says no." A couple of days later you read a column in the New
York Times by Thomas Friedman saying that Shimon Peres and Israeli doves
lament the fact that there's no Arab peace partner. All the Palestinians want to do is
kill. Arafat refuses to negotiate. That's within a few days.

This continued through the 1980s. Friedman's own position, which he reported in
interviews in the Israeli press in April, 1988, at the time when he won the Pulitzer
prize. His own advice to Israel was that they should run the occupied territories the
way they run Southern Lebanon, that is, with a military occupation, a mercenary
terrorist army, to keep people under control, major torture chamber in Khiam, in
case anybody gets out of line--all common knowledge. And that's what he advised
for the occupied territories, but, being a liberal he said, you should allow the Arabs
to have something, I'm quoting, because "if you give Ahmed a seat in the bus he
may lessen his demands."

Now you can imagine, back on the darkest days of apartheid, that someone might
have suggested that "if you give Sambo a seat in the bus he may lessen his
demands," but the chances that that person would then get a Pulitzer prize and be
appointed to chief diplomatic corespondent on the New York Times are perhaps less
than 100%

Anyhow, he's improved. You got to give credit where credit is due. He's improved a
lot since then. It might be helpful if he told us what he was doing in the 1980s and
the press told us what they were doing, but you can't have everything. The U.S.
stand at the time, the official U.S. stand, in December, 1989, was the Bush-Baker
plan. That called for--here's the wording. It opposed the establishment of "an
additional Palestinian state" between Israel and Jordan. The word "additional"
means that there already is a Palestinian state, namely Jordan, so there's no moral
issues. And they didn't want that there to be an additional Palestinian state,
additional to Jordan.

Furthermore, the affairs of the occupied territories, the West Bank and Gaza Strip,
will be resolved in accord with the policies of the government of Israel. The third
position was that there would be a free election in the occupied territories held under
Israeli military occupation, with most of the Palestinian intelligentsia in jail, under
administrative detention, under torture. That was, of all of that, the only part that
made it to the public was the forthcoming gesture in support of a free election--no
conditions mentioned. That's the U.S. plan of December 1989. Shortly after that
came the Gulf War. The world backed off, knew the U.S. is going to run this region
by force. That's the end of international diplomacy. On the issue of the pressures
that the U.S. had resisted, the U.S. was at that point able to institute its own
unilateral rejectionist program, leading to the permanent colonial dependency and
the 227 "little dungeons" of December 1999, to be united into four cantons in the
West Bank under Israeli control, while we all applaud Clinton's magnanimity.

Well, I'm going to skip the disgusting record of how the United States and Israel
have implemented Dayan's prescription for 35 years, and let's turn to other parts of
West Asia, the last couple of minutes. Back to the axis of evil. Why an axis of
evil? Well, what's in the mind of George Bush's speech writers when they give him
that phrase to read? I mean, we don't have internal documents so I'm speculating
now. But a reasonable speculation, I think, is that all of this stuff, it's really aimed at
a domestic audience, primarily.

September 11th did have an effect around the world, same effect everywhere,
perfectly predicable. The effect was that harsh and repressive elements around the
world recognize that they have a window of opportunity. They can pursue their own
agenda relentlessly, while the population is frightened, obedient, silenced by a
one-sided appeal to patriotism, meaning you shut up and I'll pursue my own plans
even more aggressively and more relentlessly than before. Exactly how that's
implemented, well, it varies country to country. In Russia, China, Turkey, Israel,
other countries, Algeria, it means increasing the repression. We got our chance,
we're going to increase violence and repression.

In the more democratic countries, like the United States, it means doing whatever
you can to impose, to strength state power, subdue the population, protect the
powerful state from scrutiny, and here, particularly, to escalate an attack against the
domestic population and future generations, which is quite severe and which I don't
have to review, you're familiar with it. That's what's been going on since September
11th, and it's crucially important to keep people from paying attention to it.

Well, how do you keep people silence and submissive? Everybody understands
this. The best way to control people is by fear, and the easiest way to do it is to
just pull a couple of lines out of standard children's stories or ancient epics about
how an evil monster is coming to destroy you and the incarnation of --

It happened that while this stuff was going on, I was in India, and to sort of try to get
to sleep at night, I was reading Indian epics, which are kind of fun. The main epic,
the Ramayana, is about exactly this. I think Bush's speech writers must have
plagiarized it. The incarnation of Vishnu comes down to earth, is the perfect man,
he's going to drive evil from the world. And it becomes the story of how he does it.
That had some literary value, as compared with the plagiarism, but its picture is
about the same. So that's where the evil is, and the hero, and you huddle under the
shadow of the hero, and so on. Namely, don't look at what the hero's doing to you,
which is not pretty.

Why axis? Well, I doubt that Bush knows what the word refers to, but the
population is supposed to recognize the connotations. You're supposed to think of
the Nazis, and Italy, and Japan, so on. Well, going back to the real world again, the
three countries that are the axis of evil, Iraq and Iran have been at war for the past 20
years. North Korea has less to do with either of them than France does. North
Korea is tossed in presumably for two reasons. For one thing, it's totally
defenseless, therefore it's isolated, perfect target to attack, easy, cheap, nobody will
object. Of course, bringing it into the axis of evil does severely increase threats in
the region. South Koreans don't like it at all, or the Japanese or others, but that's a
marginal issue.

Furthermore, North Korea's not Muslim, so therefore it may deflect the belief that
U.S. policies are targeting the Muslim world.

What about Iran? Well, Iran's plenty of evil, undoubtedly. There's an internal conflict
in Iran, between the reformist elements, which have an overwhelming popular support
and are trying to improve the situation, and a reactionary and dangerous clerical
element, serious. And they got a real shot in the arm from this. For Iran to be
called part of the axis of evil is a tremendous boon to the most dangerous and
reactionary sectors of the society and very harmful to the reformists.

The history of Iran, in the last 50 years, explains the notion evil very clearly. Again,
it takes kind of discipline for the press and intellectual community not to point out
what's pretty obvious. In 1953, Iran was evil. What had happened was that a
conservative nationalist government was elected and was making moves to try to
take control of Iran's own resources, which had been run by the British. So that was
evil, and it had to be overthrown by a U.S.-British military coup, which installed the
Shah, a brutal,harsh ruler, who went on, for 26 years, to compile one of the worst
human rights records in the world. He was always ranked right at the top by
Amnesty International and others, serving U.S. interests, major military power.

So Iran was good. If you look at the coverage in that period, there's little discussion
of Iranian crimes. Actually, some interesting reviews of this. Then, in 1979 they
became evil again, namely, the overthrew the Shah and turned toward independence,
and since then they've been evil, meaning out of control. Actually, exactly why they
remain evil is an interesting question. Usually U.S. policy in that region is influenced
heavily by the energy corporations. And they've been trying for some years to join
the rest of the world in supporting Iranian reformers and bring them back into the
international system. But the U.S. government is opposed to that. It insists on
isolating and attacking Iran and supporting the harshest elements, and that leads us
to ask why.

My suspicion is that it's once again a factor, which is indeed a guiding factor in world
affairs, it even has a name, in the international affairs literature. It's called
"establishing credibility." That was the primary public reason given, official reason
given, by Britain and the United States for bombing Serbia. We had to establish our
credibility. What does that mean? Well, if you want to know, then go to your
favorite Mafia don and he'll explain it to you. If some storekeeper doesn't pay
protection money, you don't go get the money, you make an example of him. You
beat him to a pulp. Then people get to understand that you do not defy the orders of
the master. That's called credibility. And if anyone gets out of line, you have to
make an example.

Iran did get out of line, and even if there would be economic interests and so on in
restoring them, there's an overriding need, understandable, on the part of the
"masters", to make sure that no one else gets the wrong idea. I suspect that's the
guiding reason, once again, as it often is, even publicly announced to be.

What about Iraq? Well, Bush and Tony Blair, who the London Financial Times
recently described as the U.S. Ambassador to the world. The other press describes
him in a little less complimentary terms--America's poodle and things like that.
Bush and Blair have recently, just a couple of days ago, have repeated the standard
line, of Clinton and others, that we've got to get rid of Saddam Hussein. He's such a
criminal that he has even used chemical weapons against his own people. You
heard that in Bush's presidential news conference a couple of days ago. And that's
perfectly true, he did use chemical weapons against his own people, an ultimate
crime. All that's missing is that he did it with the full approval of Daddy Bush, who
continued to support him right through that period and beyond, as did Britain. They
thought it was just fine for him to use gas against his own people, to develop
weapons of mass destruction, which he was doing with the support of the United
States and Britain, which continued, irrespective of his atrocities, because he was
useful at that time.

Until those words are mentioned, we know that you can't even use the term
hypocrisy, it's unfair to the term hypocrisy to talk about the coverage of this with the
omission of the fact that the crimes are very real and we supported them, and
continue to support them afterwards. Bush's support was particularly fulsome. In
early 1990, well after that, he actually sent a high level senatorial delegation to Iraq,
just a couple of months before the invasion of Kuwait. It was headed by Bob Dole,
soon to be presidential candidate. The purpose of the delegation was to convey to
Bush's friend Saddam his greetings and good wishes, and to assure him that he
shouldn't pay attention to the occasional criticisms he hears in the United States.
It's just that some of the American reporters are kind of out of control and we've got
this free press thing and don't have a way to shut him up. But in fact, we think
you're a fine guy.

Until some of that is brought in, we know that all the talk about those reasons are
just--don't even rise to the level of nonsense. So we put that aside. I mean, it's true
that he's a monster. He was much more of a monster then. It's probably true that
he's developing weapons of mass destruction. Then, he was certainly doing it with
our support, and he was far more dangerous, way more powerful and much more
dangerous. He's a threat to anybody within his reach, but the reach is smaller now.
He's evil, all right, but his crimes can't possibly be the reason for the planned attack.

So what is the reason? Well, I don't think it's very obscure. Iraq has the second
largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia. It's been clear all along that the
United States, one way or another, will find a way to regain control over those
enormous resources, and it will certainly not permit privileged access to them on the
part of its adversaries. France and Russia have the inside track now, and that's not
tolerable. Maybe close behind them is Dick Cheney, according to what I
understand, who seems to be getting Iraqi oil into the country, but I don't know about
that.

Anyway, France and Russia can't have privileged access. The U.S. has to take
control over them. And, sooner or later, will do so, try to do so. They may regard
this as a window of opportunity. However, it's not going to be easy. There's a lot of
talk about the technical difficulty, but there's a much more fundamental one. Any
regime change in Iraq has to be carried out in a way which ensures that it is not
even marginally democratic, and there's a good reason for that. The majority of the
population of Iraq is Shi'ite, and if they have any voice in a new regime, they might
draw Iraq closer to Iran, which is the last thing the United States wants. The Kurds
are going to press for some kind of autonomy, so that can't be allowed. It will drive
Turkey berserk.

And therefore the new regime, whatever it is, has to be ruled by Sunni generals,
military force. That's why the C.I.A. and State Department are now convening
meetings of generals who are defectors from the Iraqi army in the 1990s.
Unfortunately, their favorite according to the press, General Khazraji, can't come,
he's being detained in Denmark where he's under investigation for participation in the
Halabja massacre, the chemical attack on the Kurds, so he can't come, even though
he's the guy we really want.

But that's the kind of regime that they'll kind of somehow impose. Again, none of
this is secret, and we can thank Thomas Friedman once again for having explained it
all. You may recall, in March 1991, right at the end of the Gulf War when the U.S., of
course, had total control over the whole area, there was a rebellion, in the south, a
major rebellion, a Shi'ite rebellion, which could well have overthrown the monster,
probably would have, except for the fact that the U.S. authorized Saddam to use his
air force helicopters, planes, military helicopters to devastate the resistance. In fact,
there were probably more people killed then, more civilians, than during the war.

This is all while General Stormin' Norman Schwartzkopf was sitting there, watching
it. He later said that the Iraqis had fooled him, when they asked him for
authorization to use helicopters, he didn't really understand that they were going to
use them. As he put it, he was "suckered by the Iraqis", these deceptive creatures,
and therefore he didn't realize, and they sort of destroyed the resistance while he
was looking the other way.

At that point, it was so obvious, you just couldn't refuse to report it. And it was
reported. Thomas Friedman who was chief diplomatic correspondent for the New
York Times, then. Chief diplomatic correspondent means State Department
spokesperson at the New York Times. You have lunch with somebody in the State
Department, he tells you what to write, that sort of thing. He had a column, a good
column, in which he explained the US position. He said, we just had to allow
Saddam to smash the opposition, and then he explained, and it still holds, that "the
best of all worlds" for the United States would be "an iron-fisted military junta" that
would rule Iraq the same way Saddam did, and with the support of Saudi Arabia and
Turkey and of course the United States. That's the best of all worlds, and we'll try to
achieve it somehow. It's best if the name of the head is not Saddam Hussein, that's
a little embarrassing, but some clone will do. That's what we have to aim at. And
that's not easy to achieve.

So, quite apart from all the technical problems, that has to go on. Well, the phrase
axis of evil is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. There are others who see an
axis of evil but a different one. I'll finish with that. The semi-official Egyptian
newspaper, al-Ahram, had a long column a couple of days ago, called The Axis of
Evil, in which they referred to the evil axis of the United States, Turkey and Israel.
That's a realistic axis. [applause]. For one thing, there's a close alliance, and the
alliance is not secret, it's overt, it's strong. These are the three. The U.S., obviously
world rule, Israel and Turkey the two major military powers in the region, both of
them more or less U.S. offshore military bases. They have been aligned, for a long
time, as part of a system aimed at the Arab world, at the oil-producing regions. It's
what Nixon's administration called "local cops on the beat", with headquarters in
Washington, to make sure that people don't get out of control in the oil-producing
regions.

At that time, the Shah, Iran at that time, remember, was still good, it wasn't evil yet,
so it was part of the system, too. There was an alliance between Israel, Iran,
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, U.S. in the background, Britain helping out, as part of the way
of controlling the region. And that axis of evil, the membership has shifted slightly
with Iran having become evil again, like in 1953, but it's still there. And that's the
axis that they see. And it's active.

Just the last couple of days, again today, the United States is trying to convince,
and apparently has convinced, Turkey to become the military force which will fight
the war on terror in Afghanistan. Well, maybe that passes here, but everyone in the
region, including Turkey--I just returned from there--including the regions most
devastated by Turkish atrocities in the last decade. Everyone knows that Turkey's a
leading terrorist state, maybe one of the worst in the world. And again, when I say
Turkey, I mean the U.S. and Turkey. In the 1990s, in the area that I just visited,
southeastern Turkey, the Kurdish areas, this is the site of some of the worst
atrocities and "ethnic cleansing" of the 1990s. It was bad enough in the '80s, got
much worse under Clinton. The U.S. supplied 80% of the arms. They peaked in
1997--1997 alone, more arms were sent to Turkey than the whole cold war period put
together, up to 1984, when the counter-insurgency campaign began. A couple of
million refugees, country devastated, tens of thousands of people killed. Far worse
than anything attributed to Milosevic, in Kosovo before the NATO bombing.

Right through the late nineties Turkey became the leading recipient of U.S. arms in
the world, after Israel and Egypt. And the atrocities included every imaginable form
of barbarity and torture and terror you can think of. But none of it happened. None
of it happened for the usual reason: we did it. Therefore, silence, out of history, and
in this case, applause. So Turkey is lauded by the state department and the New
York Times, front page stories by their terrorism expert, Judith Miller, and others, as
providing a model for how to deal with terrorism.

Here's one of the major, the perpetrator of some of the major terrorist atrocities of the
1990s, and, remember, international terrorism, because you and I are doing it, which
is lauded as a model for how to put down terror. Well, that's pretty normal, and
again, same three levels that I mentioned before are worth thinking about.

Well, West Asia is going to face very difficult days. The stakes for the world are
enormous. This is the location of the world's major energy resources. There are a
lot of factors involved in this. However, the most important of them happen to be
right here, which is a good thing, at least for those who hope to stave off the worst
outcomes and to offer some hope to the victims. Thanks.


---


NC: If I can add one notice, I can't give the details and it's from memory, but one of
the really important things going on in Israel, as you heard, is the refusal of reserve
officers, a couple of hundred of them now, to serve in the occupied territory. It's
having a big impact, it's very brave and honorable thing to do. And there are support
groups from them, some here. I'm pretty sure that Tikkun magazine, which is
located here, is organizing a support program for them, and I think you ought to pay
careful attention to it.

What can young people do to begin rebuilding this world? Well, you know, same
thing young people have been doing for years. I mentioned before that this country's
a lot more civilized than it was 40 years ago. A good part of the reason is what
young people then were doing, here in Berkeley and many other places, and it had
an effect. I mentioned one effect, namely, barriers against the use of state violence.
It's not insignificant for much of the world. But that's not the only one. Forty years
ago there was no feminist movement, there was no environmental movement, there
were no third world solidarity movements, there was no significant mass-based
anti-nuclear movement, no anti-apartheid movement, and on and on.

These are all things that developed through the active--to a large extent, through the
active participation of people who were then young people, continued when they
became older people, more young people came along in the 1990s. There's new
initiatives, like, say, the anti-sweatshop movement throughout the world is mostly
people your age. The movements opposed to what is ludicrously called
globalization, meaning what the Wall Street Journal, my favorite paper, calls free
investment agreement, called for us free trade agreements. The people who are
opposing that are mostly young people, many of them here. Actually, the major
movements against that are in the south, in Brazil and India and places like that.
But we've joined in, the north has joined in, with plenty of initiative from young
people. There's no limit to the things that can be done. And there's plenty of
models, right in front of you, last few years.


Q: At your talk Tuesday at U.C. Berkeley, you were not very enthusiastic about the
movement to divest from --that says Palestine but I think it means Israel. Could you
explain why?

Well, I just expressed my reservations, the same ones I expressed here already. I
don't say it's the wrong thing to do. I never trust my own judgment on issues of
tactics, which is not very good, my judgment. But there are some problems that I
see. The problem is that the protest should be directed here. It's easy to criticize
others, but when those others are doing it because we allow them to and arm them
to do it and support them to do it and encourage them to do it, there are some
questions about directing our actions to them. And that would be true if it's Israel or
Turkey or other agents of U.S. atrocities. So that's my reservation. How you figure
out a way around that you have to think through yourselves.


Q: You've said that we as citizens should not speak truth to power but, instead, to
people. Shouldn't we do both, speak more on this subject?

This is the reference to about the only thing on which I find I disagree with my
Quaker friends. On every practical activity I usually agree with them, but I do
disagree with them about their slogan, speaking truth to power. First of all, power
already knows the truth. They don't have to hear it from us, so it's largely a waste of
time. Furthermore, it's the wrong audience. You have to speak truth to the people
who will dismantle and overthrow and constrain power. Furthermore, I don't like the
phrase "speak truth to." We don't know the truth, at least I don't.

We should join with the kind of people who are willing to commit themselves to
overthrow power, and listen to them. They often know a lot more than we do. And
join with them to carry out the right kinds of activities. Should you also speak truth
to power? If you feel like it, but I don't see a lot of point. I'm not interested in telling
the people around Bush what they already know.


Q: My friend is a young Afghan American woman who is still in high-school and has
chosen not to live her life her; instead she's chosen to earn a degree in teaching and
move to Afghanistan, to reach and help Afghan children. What advice would you
offer her? Specifically, what can she do to be most effective and protect herself as a
woman?


I mean, she knows, without knowing