Noam Chomsky, a longtime political activist, writer, and professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of numerous books and articles on US foreign policy, international affairs, and human rights. He was interviewed by David Barsamian, the producer of Alternative Radio, based in Boulder, Colorado, on September 20. The complete version of this interview appeared in the November issue of Monthly Review. It appears here abridged.
The media have been noticeably lacking in providing a context and a background for the attacks on New York and Washington. What might be some useful information that you could provide?
There are two distinct, though related, sources for the attack. Let's assume that the attack was rooted somehow in the [Osama] bin Laden network. That sounds plausible, at least, so let's say it's right.
If that's right, there are two categories of information and of populations that we should be concerned with, linked but not identical. One is the bin Laden network. That's a category by itself. Another is the population of the region. They're not the same thing, although there are links.
What ought to be in the forefront is discussion of both of those. The bin Laden network — I doubt if anybody knows it better than the CIA, since they were instrumental in helping construct it.
This is a network whose development started in 1979, if you can believe President Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. He claimed, maybe he was just bragging, that in mid-1979 he had instigated secret support for mujaheddin fighting against the government of Afghanistan in an effort to draw the Russians into what he called an "Afghan trap", a phrase worth remembering.
He's very proud of the fact that they did fall into the Afghan trap by sending military forces to support the government six months later, with consequences that we know.
The US, along with Egypt, Pakistan, French intelligence, Saudi Arabian funding — Israel was involved — assembled a major army, a huge mercenary army, maybe 100,000 or more, and they drew from the most militant sectors they could find, which happened to be radical Islamists — what are called here "Islamic fundamentalists" — from all over, most of them not from Afghanistan. They're called "Afghanis", but like bin Laden, they come from elsewhere.
Bin Laden joined very quickly. He was involved in the funding networks, which probably are the ones which still exist. They were trained, armed, organised by the CIA, Pakistan, Egypt and others to fight a holy war against the Russians.
And they did.
They fought a holy war against the Russians. They carried terror into Russian territory. They may have delayed the Russian withdrawal, a number of analysts believe, but they did win the war and the Russian invaders withdrew.
By 1989, they had succeeded in their holy war in Afghanistan. As soon as the US established a permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia [in 1990], bin Laden and the rest announced that from their point of view, that was comparable to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and they turned their guns on the Americans, as had already happened in 1983 when the US had military forces in Lebanon.
Saudi Arabia is a major enemy of the bin Laden network, just as Egypt is. That's what they want to overthrow, what they call the un-Islamic governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, other states of the Middle East and North Africa. And it continued.
In 1997, they murdered roughly 60 tourists in Egypt and destroyed the Egyptian tourist industry. And they've been carrying out activities all over the region, North Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, for years.
That's one group. And that is an outgrowth of the US wars of the 1980s and, if you can believe Brzezinski, even before, when they set the Afghan trap. There's a lot more to say about them, but that's one part.
Another is the people of the region. They're connected, of course. The bin Laden network and others like them draw a lot of their support from the desperation and anger and resentment of the people of the region, which ranges from rich to poor, secular to radical Islamist.
The Wall Street Journal, to its credit, has run a couple of articles on attitudes of wealthy Muslims, the people who most interest them: businessmen, bankers, professionals, and others throughout the Middle East region who are very frank about their grievances. They put it more politely than the poor people in the slums and the streets, but it's clear. Everybody knows what [their grievances] are.
The "moneyed Muslims" interviewed by the Journal also complained that the US has blocked independent economic development by "propping up oppressive regimes". That's the phrase they used.
But the prime concern stressed in the Wall Street Journal articles and by everybody who knows anything about the region — the prime concern of the "moneyed Muslims", basically pro-American incidentally — is the dual US policies, which contrast very sharply in their eyes, toward Iraq and Israel.
In the case of Iraq, for the last 10 years the US and Britain have been devastating the civilian society. Madeleine Albright's famous statement about how maybe half a million children have died, and it's a high price but we're willing to pay it, that doesn't sound too good among people who think that maybe it matters if half a million children are killed by the US and Britain. And meanwhile [the sanctions are] strengthening Saddam Hussein.
The other aspect is that the US is the prime supporter of the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territory, now in its 35th year. It's been harsh and brutal from the beginning, extremely repressive. Most of this hasn't been discussed here, and the US role has been virtually suppressed. Even simple facts are not reported.
For example, as soon as the current fighting began last September 30, Israel immediately, the next day, began using US helicopters (they can't produce helicopters) to attack civilian targets. In the next couple of days they killed several dozen people in apartment complexes and elsewhere. The fighting was all in the occupied territories, and there was no Palestinian fire. The Palestinians were using stones.
So this is people throwing stones against occupiers in a military occupation, legitimate resistance by world standards, insofar as the targets are military.
Your comment that the US is a "leading terrorist state" might stun many Americans. Could you elaborate on that?
The US is the only country that was condemned for international terrorism by the World Court [for its actions in Nicaragua] and that rejected a [UN] Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law. It continues international terrorism.
That example's the least of it. And there are also what in comparison are minor examples. Everybody here was quite properly outraged by the Oklahoma City bombing, and for a couple of days, the headlines all read, "Oklahoma city looks like Beirut".
I didn't see anybody point out that Beirut also looks like Beirut, and part of the reason is that the Reagan administration had set off a terrorist bombing there in 1985 that was very much like Oklahoma City, a truck bombing outside a mosque timed to kill the maximum number of people as they left. It killed 80 and wounded 200, aimed at a Muslim cleric who they didn't like and who they missed. It was not very secret.
I don't know what name you give to the attack that's killed maybe a million civilians in Iraq and maybe a half a million children — which is a price the secretary of state says we're willing to pay. Is there a name for that?
Supporting Israeli atrocities is another one. Supporting Turkey's crushing of its own Kurdish population, for which the Clinton administration gave the decisive support — 80% of the arms, escalating as atrocities increased — is another.
Or take the bombing of the Sudan, one little footnote, so small that it is casually mentioned in passing in reports on the background to the September 11 crimes.
How would the same commentators react if the bin Laden network blew up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the US and the facilities for replenishing them? Or Israel? Or any country where people matter? Although that's not a fair analogy, because the US target is a poor country which had few enough drugs and vaccines to begin with and can't replenish them.
Nobody knows how many thousands or tens of thousands of deaths resulted from that single atrocity, and to bring up that death toll is considered scandalous. If somebody did that to the US or its allies, can you imagine the reaction?
Or to return to "our own little region over here", as Henry Stimson called it, take Cuba. After many years of terror beginning in late 1959, including very serious atrocities, Cuba should have the right to resort to violence against the US according to US doctrine that is scarcely questioned. It is, unfortunately, all too easy to continue, not only with regard to the US but also other terrorist states.
The US is officially committed to what is called "low-intensity warfare". That's the official doctrine. If you read the definition of low-intensity conflict in army manuals and compare it with official definitions of "terrorism" in army manuals, or the US Code, you find they're almost the same.
Terrorism is the use of coercive means aimed at civilian populations in an effort to achieve political, religious, or other aims. That's what the World Trade Center bombing was, a particularly horrifying terrorist crime. And that's official [US government] doctrine. I mentioned a couple of examples. We could go on and on.
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From Green Left Weekly, November 14, 2001.
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