BY NORM DIXON
Noam Chomsky, the distinguished US political scientist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, has attended the 25th Assembly of the Latin American Social Science Council. Addressing the conference on October 29, also attended by Cuba's President Fidel Castro, Chomsky condemned the US government's invasion and occupation of Iraq and Washington's vendetta against the Cuban Revolution.
Chomsky noted that the administration of US President George Bush is seeking domination of the planet, not just by asserting its unilateral right of "preemptive" aggression anywhere in the Third World, but also by abandoning the principle of the peaceful use of space, rejecting a treaty to ban biological weapons, failing to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and other endeavours.
Chomsky warned that Bush may "manufacture" another "threat" to win his reelection in 2004 after the failure of the US occupation of Iraq. He said that Iraq posed no threat to the US or any other country. Washington had to blatantly lie about the weapons capabilities of Saddam Hussein's regime to justify its invasion.
Launching a Cuban edition of a book of interviews he gave to the Mexican La Jornada newspaper, Chomsky said Bush may turn his sights on Cuba, which US administration officials have charged with developing a biological weapons research program.
The Bush administration is a continuation of the Ronald Reagan presidency that declared a national emergency over the "threat" posed by Cuba, Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista government and Central American guerrilla movements in the 1980s, Chomsky said. "The same people were able to present Grenada as a threat to survival of the United States the last time they were in office", he said, referring to the 1983 US invasion of the tiny Caribbean island, supposedly to end Cuban "influence" there.
Chomsky condemned the jailing in the US of five Cubans who had attempted to gather information on anti-Cuba terrorists being harboured there. "It is a scandal", Chomsky told Radio Havana on October 29. "Cuba was providing the FBI with information about the terrorist actions taking place in the United States, by terrorists based in the United States ... Instead of arresting the terrorists, they arrested the people that provided the information."
Chomsky praised Cuba's defiance of the almost 45-year-long US economic embargo, but repeated his criticism of Cuba's jailing of opponents of the revolution who are in the pay of the US government. "I think it was a mistake", he told Radio Havana.
From Green Left Weekly, November 12, 2003.
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