Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (64 page)

In 1993, the World Health Organization voted to request that the World Court consider the legality of the use of nuclear weapons, and issue an opinion on it. Well, obviously the United States and Britain went totally berserk when they heard about this: just the fact that the World Court might
hear
a case on the legality of nuclear weapons is already a contribution to nuclear non-proliferation. And of course, we benefit from proliferation, since we’re the main producer, seller, and possessor of nuclear weapons. I mean, it’s not as if anybody would
listen
to the World Court if it said that the use of nuclear weapons is illegal (which means by implication that
possession
of them is illegal too)—but it would certainly be a big publicity coup for the disarmament movement if it did. So for the big nuclear powers, this was a major issue. Actually, it’s of particular significance for Britain, because one of Britain’s last claims to being a country, instead of like a county of the United States, is that they have nuclear weapons—so for them it’s important on a symbolic level. And nuclear weapons are important to the United States because they’re part of the way we intimidate everyone—we intervene around the world under what’s called a “nuclear umbrella,” which serves as kind of a cover to back up our conventional intervention forces.

Well, that year Indonesia was serving as the head of the Non-Aligned Movement at the U.N. [a coalition of Third World nations in the General Assembly], and the 110 countries of the Non-Aligned Movement decided to introduce a resolution endorsing this request for an opinion—that’s all that was up, endorsement of a request for an opinion from the World Court. The U.S., Britain and France immediately threatened trade and aid sanctions against Indonesia if, in their role as head of the Non-Aligned Movement for that year, they submitted this resolution at the General Assembly. So Indonesia instantly withdrew it, of course—when they get orders from the boss, they stop. And they stop fast.
  ⁶¹

Well, that just shows that there are some atrocities that go too far for the Western powers: genocide in East Timor we can support, but endorsement of a request for an opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons is an atrocity we simply cannot tolerate. But it also shows you what we can do to Indonesia if we feel like it.

Nuclear Proliferation and North Korea

M
AN
: Just on the subject of nuclear proliferation—what’s the real problem we’ve had with North Korea supposedly wanting to build their own nuclear weapons? The media and the Clinton administration say they’re all horrified by that prospect—is that what you really think is bothering them?

That’s very interesting in connection with this World Court story, isn’t it—because part of what we claim is the problem with North Korea is that their getting nuclear weapons would threaten the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But if we’re so concerned with non-proliferation, obviously nothing would be more of a shot in the arm for it than this World Court decision we tried so desperately to block. Okay, that tells you something about our motives in all of this. But actually, I think the problem with North Korea is in fact what they’re saying: the wrong guys are getting possible power, nuclear weapons.

Look, nobody in their right mind would want North Korea to have nuclear weapons. But on the other hand, there’s nothing much that they would
do
with nuclear weapons if they had them, except maybe defend themselves from attack. They’re certainly not going to
invade
anybody, that’s not even imaginable: if they ever made a move, the country gets destroyed tomorrow. So the only role that nuclear weapons could play for them is as a deterrent to attack—and that’s not totally unrealistic.

I mean, it’s a pretty crazy country, and there’s not very much good—there’s nothing good—you can say about the government. But no matter who they were, if they were Mahatma Gandhi, they would be worried about a possible attack. I mean, the United States was threatening North Korea with nuclear weapons at least as late as the 1960s.
  ⁶²
And after all, just remember what we
did
to that country—it was absolutely flattened. Here people may not be aware of what we did to them, but
they
certainly know it well enough.

Towards the end of what we call the “Korean War”—which was really just one phase in a much longer struggle [beginning when the U.S. destroyed the indigenous nationalist movement in Korea in the late 1940s]—the United States ran out of good bombing targets. We had total command of the air of course, but there was nothing good left to bomb—because everything had already been flattened. So we started going after things like dikes. Okay, that’s just a major war crime.
  ⁶³
In fact, if you take a look at the official U.S. Air Force history of the Korean War, it’s absolutely mind-boggling, it’s like something straight out of the Nazi archives, I mean, these guys don’t conceal their glee at all, it’s just this account of all their terrific feelings: we bombed these dikes, and a huge flow of water went through the valleys and carved out huge paths of destruction and slaughtered people! And they say, laughingly: we don’t realize how important rice is for the Asians, so naturally they were screaming with rage! I really can’t duplicate, you have to read it in the original.
  ⁶⁴
And the Koreans lived on the other end of that.

Our treatment of North Korean prisoners of war also was absolutely grotesque—again, it was kind of like the Nazis. This is all documented in the West by now, and of course
they
certainly know about it.
  ⁶⁵
So there are plenty of things for the North Koreans to remember, and plenty of things for them to be afraid of—which is not to justify their getting nuclear weapons, but it’s part of the background we should keep in mind.

The other thing is, North Korea is in a desperate situation right now: they’re hemmed in politically, and they’re struggling very hard to break out of their total isolation—they’re setting up free-trade zones, and trying to integrate themselves into the international economic system, other things like that. Well, this is apparently one of their ways of attempting to do it. It’s neither intelligent nor justifiable, but that’s a part of what’s motivating them, and we should at least try to understand that.

As far as Western concern about nuclear weapons goes, obviously it’s highly selective—like, nobody cares that the
United States
has nuclear weapons, nobody cares that Israel has nuclear weapons, they just don’t want them in the hands of people we don’t control, like North Korea. And I think that’s really the main issue behind the controversy these days.

W
OMAN
: Could you say a few words more about the origins of the Korean War? I take it you don’t accept the standard picture that it began when the U.S. moved to block a Communist expansionist invasion
.

Well, the fact of the matter is that the Korean War is much more complex than the way it’s presented in mainstream circles. In this case, incidentally, the scholarship is considerably better than is usual, and if you look at the serious monograph literature on the Korean War, you’ll see that a different position is presented than the one we always hear.
  ⁶⁶

The 1950 North Korean attack on the southern part of the country was really the tail end of a long war. In fact, before North Korea attacked the South in 1950, already about 100,000 Koreans had been killed—that’s something we forget. What happened in Korea is essentially this. When the American forces landed in 1945 at the end of World War II, they found that an already functioning local government had been set up. There had been an anti-Japanese resistance, and it had established local administrations and Peoples’ Committees and so on, all over North and South Korea. Well, when the United States moved into the South, we dismantled all of that, destroyed it by force—we used the Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese, and in fact even reinstituted the Japanese police to destroy it all [Japan had occupied Korea for 35 years until its defeat in the Second World War]. And that led to serious conflict in the South, a rather bitter conflict which went on for four or five years with a lot of people killed, and also there was a lot of cross-border fighting at the time (going both ways, incidentally). Then there was sort of a lull, and
then
came the North Korean attack going south. So there was definitely a North Korean attack, but it was an intervention by the North into the South after the United States had suppressed the anti-Japanese resistance movement in a civil war.
  ⁶⁷

Now, that puts a slightly different color on it than the standard line we hear. For example, if some country were—let’s say—to conquer the western part of the United States, and there was resistance against that conquest, and then the resistance was suppressed with say a hundred thousand people killed, and then the Eastern part of the United States “invaded” the Western part, that wouldn’t be just an invasion: that would be a little too simple. And something like that happened in Korea.

The Samson Option

W
OMAN
: You mentioned Israel having nuclear weapons—would you expand on the significance of that? I remember you used the title “The Road to Armageddon” for the last chapter of your book on the Middle East
, The Fateful Triangle.

Yeah, that’s something I think is quite important, actually. I mean, that book was written back in 1982, and what I was discussing at the end of it is what in Israel for the last forty years or so has been called the “Samson Complex”; later Sy Hersh wrote a book about it called
The Samson Option
, but it’s an old story that goes back to the 1950s.
  ⁶⁸

You know the story of Samson in the Bible? At the end, Samson gets captured by the Philistines, he’s blinded, he’s standing in the temple between two pillars, and he pulls down the temple walls and crushes all the people inside: the Bible says, “He killed more Philistines as he died than in all of his life.”
  ⁶⁹
Well, that’s the Samson Complex. What it means, translated into straight politics—and they’re pretty straight about it—is: if anybody pushes us too far, we’ll bring down the universe.

Now, in order to do that, Israel needed nuclear weapons—and they got them, with our help.
  ⁷⁰
In the 1950s, when all of this stuff started, the threats were kind of empty—they couldn’t bring down the temple walls. But since the early 1960s, it’s been imaginable, and it’s in fact something that’s discussed quite openly in Israel: the idea is, push us too hard and we’ll do something wild, we’ll go crazy—and you’ll all suffer.
  ⁷¹

So for example, according to the Israeli Labor Party press, when the Arab League proposed a Saudi Arabian-initiated peace plan for the region in August 1981, Israel sent U.S.-supplied F-14 fighters over the Saudi Arabian oil fields as a warning to Western intelligence agencies—meaning, if you take this peace plan seriously, you’re all going to be in trouble, we’ll destroy those oil fields.
  ⁷²
Also back in the early 1980s, Israeli strategic analysts were publicly saying—even in English, so everybody would hear it—that Israel was developing nuclear-tipped missiles that could reach the Soviet Union. It may have been false, but that’s at least what they were saying.
  ⁷³
Well, why would they need nuclear-tipped missiles that could reach the Soviet Union? They’re not going to attack Russia; they’re not going to deter a Russian attack—that’s outlandish. But the idea was, and everybody understood it at the time, that if U.S. policy ever changes course and we decide to stop supporting Israel, they’ll attack Russia and draw Russia into the Middle East—which would then probably destroy the world in a nuclear war.

Well, now it seems Russia’s out of the game—maybe only temporarily, I might say. But none of the underlying considerations have changed, and there are obviously a lot of other similar scenarios like that around. So the fact of the matter is, this is just going to remain an extremely dangerous area.

Incidentally, one of the nice things about the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union is that top-level American planners are finally becoming a bit more honest about some things. So for example, every year the White House puts out a big glossy document explaining to Congress why we need a huge military establishment—and for a long time it was always the same story: the Russians are coming, this-that-and-the-other-thing. Well, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, they had to change the computer disk for the first time. The bottom line had to remain the same: we need a big military, a big so-called “defense” infrastructure (read: support for electronics)—but now the justification had to change. So in 1990, the reason they gave was no longer “the Russians are coming,” it was what they called “the technological sophistication of Third World powers”—especially ones in the Middle East, where they said, our problems “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door.”

Okay, first true statement: for the preceding fifty years, our problems always had been “laid at the Kremlin’s door,” but now that the Kremlin’s gone, we’d might as well tell the truth about it—because we still need the same policies.
  ⁷⁴
And in fact, just to make sure that there always
is
a real danger, we also have to
sell
all these Third World powers high-tech weaponry—the U.S. in fact very quickly became the biggest arms dealer to the Third World after the Cold War ended.
  ⁷⁵
And the arms contractors of course
know
it: like, if you read Lockheed-Martin corporate propaganda, they say, look, we’ve got to build the F-22 because we’re selling advanced upgraded F-16s to these Third World regimes, and we’re selling them all kinds of complicated air defense systems, and who knows, they’re just a bunch of dictators, maybe they’ll turn against us—so we’ve got to build the F-22 to defend ourselves from all the high-tech weapons we’re selling them.
  ⁷⁶
And of course, that’s all at the cost of the U.S. taxpayer, as usual.