Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (35 page)

Well, as you say, the same thing also happened elsewhere at the time—and in other countries it was much more violent, actually. So to destroy the anti-Nazi resistance in Greece and restore the Nazi collaborators to power there, it took a war in which maybe 160,000 people were killed and 800,000 became refugees—the country still hasn’t recovered from it.
  ⁷²
In Korea, it meant killing 100,000 people in the late 1940s, before what we call the “Korean War” even started.
  ⁷³
But in Italy it was enough just to carry out subversion—and the United States took that very seriously. So we funded ultra-right Masonic Lodges and terrorist paramilitary groups in Italy, the Fascist police and strikebreakers were brought back, we withheld food, we made sure their economy couldn’t function.
  ⁷⁴
In fact, the first National Security Council Memorandum, N.S.C. 1, is about Italy and the Italian elections. And what it says is that if the Communists come to power in the election through legitimate democratic means, the United States must declare a national emergency: the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean should be put on alert, the United States should start subversive activities in Italy to overthrow the Italian government, and we should begin contingency planning for direct military intervention—that’s if the resistance wins a legitimate democratic election.
  ⁷⁵

And this was not taken as a joke, not at all—in fact, there were people at the top levels of the U.S. government who took even more extreme positions than that. For instance, George Kennan again, who’s considered a great humanist, thought that we ought to invade Italy even
before
the election and not allow anything like that to happen in the first place—but he was kind of held down by other people who said, look, we can probably buy off the election by the threat of starvation and extensive terrorism and subversion, which in the end turned out to be correct.
  ⁷⁶

And these sorts of policies were still being followed by the United States right into the 1970s, when the declassified records dry up. The end of the documentation that we have at this point is around 1975—that’s when the House Pike Committee Report released a lot of information about U.S. subversive activities—and who knows whether it went on after that.
  ⁷⁷
Most of the literature about this is in Italian, but there’s some in English—for example, Ed Herman and Frank Brodhead have a good book on the so-called “plot to kill the Pope” disinformation story, which includes an interesting discussion of some of the more recent material on Italy—and there are others.
  ⁷⁸
And as I say, the same sorts of policies also were carried out in France, Germany, Japan, and so on.

Actually, the U.S. also reconstructed the Mafia as part of this whole effort to split the European labor movement after the war. I mean, the Mafia had mostly been wiped out by the Fascists—Fascists tend to run a pretty tight ship, they don’t like competition. So Hitler and Mussolini had essentially wiped out the Mafia, and as the American liberating armies moved into Sicily and then through Southern Italy and into France, they reconstituted it as a tool to break strikes. See, the U.S. needed goons to break strikers’ knees on the waterfront and that kind of thing, and where are you going to find guys like that? Well, the answer was, in the Mafia. So in France, the C.I.A.—working together with the leadership of the American labor movement, incidentally—resurrected the Corsican Mafia. And the Mafia don’t just do it for fun, you know—I mean, maybe they also enjoy it, but they want a payoff. And as kind of a quid pro quo for smashing up the French labor movement, they were allowed to reconstitute the heroin trade, which had been reduced to virtually zero under the Fascists—that’s the origin of the famous “French Connection,” the main source of the post-war heroin racket.
  ⁷⁹

And there were also covert activities in this period involving the Vatican, the U.S. State Department, and British and American intelligence to save and employ many of the worst Nazi war criminals, and use them in exactly the same sorts of operations the Nazis used them for, against the popular resistance forces in the West and then in Eastern Europe. For example, the guy who invented the gas chambers, Walter Rauff, was secreted off to work on counterinsurgency in Chile. The head of Nazi intelligence on the Eastern Front, Reinhard Gehlen, joined American intelligence doing the same kind of work for us in Eastern Europe. The “Butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie, worked for the Americans spying on the French until finally they had to move him out through the Vatican-run “ratline” to Latin America, where then he finished out his career.
  ⁸⁰
That was another part of the whole postwar effort of the United States to destroy the prospects for independent democracy—and certainly it’s something which took place.

P.R. in Somalia

M
AN
: Professor Chomsky, in light of all this I’m wondering, do you think there has ever been such a thing as a humanitarian intervention by the U.S.? Take what we were supposed to have been doing in Somalia, for example: that was framed as a humanitarian action here—do you think that was all image, or was there also some reality to it too?

Well, states are not moral agents; they are vehicles of power, which operate in the interests of the particular internal power structures of their societies. So anybody who intervenes in another country, except maybe Luxembourg or something, is going to be intervening for their own purposes—that’s always been true in history. And the Somalia operation, to take the case you mention, certainly was not humanitarian.

I mean, the U.S. waited very carefully until the famine there was pretty much over and the major international aid organizations, like the Red Cross and Save the Children and so on, were getting about eighty percent of their aid into the country (using Somalis to do most of the work, it turns out) before it decided to move in.
  ⁸¹
So if the U.S. government had had any humanitarian feelings with regard to Somalia, it had plenty of time to show it—in fact, it could have shown it from 1978 through 1990, when the U.S. was the chief supporter of Siad Barre, the Somali warlord who destroyed the country and killed maybe fifty or sixty thousand people with U.S. assistance, long before the famine.
  ⁸²
But when our favorite tyrant collapsed, the U.S. pulled out, a civil war then erupted, there was mass starvation—and the U.S. did nothing. When the famine and fighting were at their peak, in the first half of 1992, the U.S. still did nothing.

By around the time of the November 1992 Presidential election here, it was clear that Somalia could provide some good photo op’s—if we send thirty thousand Marines in when the famine is declining and the fighting is calming down, we’ll get really nice shots of Marine colonels handing out cookies to starving children; that’ll look good, it’ll be a real shot in the arm for the Pentagon budget. And in fact, it was even described that way by people like Colin Powell [then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and others—they were saying, well, you know, it’ll look good for the Pentagon.
  ⁸³

Of course, it should have been obvious to them that pretty soon it was going to turn into a nightmare: when you put a foreign military force into a country, it won’t be long before they’re fighting the local population. That’s almost automatic, even if the population had welcomed them. Take Northern Ireland, for example: the British were
called in
by the Catholic population [in August 1969]; a couple months later, they were
murdering
the Catholic population.
  ⁸⁴
That’s what foreign armies are like, the dynamics are clear—and in the case of Somalia, it was only a question of time before the shooting started.
  ⁸⁵

M
AN
: Then you were opposed to the whole U.S. operation?

By that point I was sort of, like, neutral. I mean, you couldn’t really tell whether it would cause more good than harm, though it was certainly not a humanitarian intervention. But the more important point is, there was always a much better alternative.

Look: the U.S. should have given aid right away, and the U.N. should have remained there throughout the famine. But by the time you got to mid-1992, things were already beginning to improve—and they were beginning to improve partly under the leadership of a U.N. negotiator, an Algerian named Mohammed Sahnoun, who was doing extremely well by all accounts: he was starting to bring local groups together, he had a lot of respect from all sides in the conflict, he was working with traditional elders and women’s groups and so on. And they were starting to rehabilitate Somalian society, and to address some of its problems—he was just extremely effective by the testimony of all the international aid agencies, and a lot of others. But he was thrown out, because he publicly opposed the incompetence and corruption of the U.N. operation. They simply got rid of him—and that means the U.S. supported it.
  ⁸⁶

So you see, you really didn’t
need
an intervention at that time: the best thing would have been just to continue giving support to Sahnoun and others like him, who were trying to bring together the various parts of Somalian civil society. I mean,
that’s
the way you’ve got to do it, or else there isn’t really going to be any lasting progress—you have to help the civil society reconstruct itself, because
they’re
the only ones who can ultimately solve their own problems. And Sahnoun and others were doing that, so it would have been very efficient just to help them continue doing it. But of course, that was never a thought here: you don’t get any P.R. for the Pentagon that way.

So you can ask whether in the end the Somalis benefited or were harmed by what we did, and I’m not certain what the answer is. But whatever happened,
they
were secondary: they were just props for photo opportunities. Maybe they were helped by it—I hope so—but if so it was purely incidental.

The Gulf War

M
AN
: Probably the major U.S. foreign policy event of recent years was the Gulf War. What would you say was the media’s contribution to that? As I remember it, the coverage in the United States was all “rah-rah” support as we bombed Iraq
.

It’s true there was a lot of that—but in my view, the much more significant period for reviewing the media on the Gulf War is not what people usually concentrate on, and what the media themselves are willing to talk about: that is, the six weeks of the actual bombing [January 16 to February 27, 1991], when the constraints on reporting were naturally pretty tight and there was the predictable patriotic jingoism. The most important period was between August 1990 and January 1991—the period when a decision had to be made about how to respond to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait [on August 2, 1990].

The decision to use violence is always a very serious one. In a functioning democratic society—I don’t mean one with democratic forms, but I stress “functioning”—that decision would only be taken after a lot of public discussion of the issues, and consideration of the alternatives, and weighing of the consequences. Then, after appropriate public debate, maybe a decision would be made to resort to violence. Well, that never happened in the case of the Gulf War—and it was the fault of the American media that it never happened.

Look: the fundamental question throughout the pre-war period was whether the U.S. would pursue the peaceful means that were available—and which are in fact
required
to be pursued by international law—for a diplomatic settlement and negotiated Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, or whether on the other hand we would
undercut
any possibility for a diplomatic settlement, and move straight to the arena of violence.
  ⁸⁷
Well, we don’t know whether diplomatic means actually
were
available in this case, but we don’t know that for a very simple reason: Iraq put them on the table, but they were rejected, and they were rejected
at once
by the Bush administration starting in mid-August 1990, and running right through to the start of the bombing in mid-January.
  ⁸⁸

What was the media’s role in this? Well, they suppressed the story, basically. I mean, you’d have to be a real media addict to know that Iraq had made proposals in mid-August 1990 that frightened the State Department enough so that they were worried they would have to try to—as the
New York Times
correspondent put it in a moment of carelessness—“reject the diplomatic track.”
  ⁸⁹
And that suppression continued right up until the bombing started in January 1991: there were diplomatic offers on the table, whether serious or not we don’t know, for Iraqi withdrawal in the context of a conference on regional issues, and other things which certainly sounded negotiable—and indeed were
regarded
by U.S. Middle East specialists in the government as, as they put it, “serious” and “negotiable” proposals.
  ⁹⁰
But barely anybody knew about this. In Europe, I think virtually no one knew. In the United States, you could have known it if you read the one newspaper in the country that actually followed the story, namely
Newsday
in Long Island. And
Newsday
followed it in part I suspect—although I can’t prove this—because they were being leaked material from somebody in the government who was trying to smoke out the
New York Times
, which had failed to publish it. See,
Newsday
is a very funny publication to see information being leaked to—it’s good, but it’s a small suburban newspaper. However, it does happen to be on sale at every newsstand in New York, so when their whole front page has a big headline saying “Iraq Sent Pullout Deal to U.S.,” the
New York Times
can’t pretend not to see it, and they’ll have to publish some sort of back-page acknowledgment and dismissal the next day—which is indeed what happened.
  ⁹¹