Writer and historian Noam Chomsky: Attack on Syria calls for US to pull back despite the odds | Democracy, elections, and voting at Democracy Chronicles
Noam Chomsky: U.S. strike against Syria would be a ‘war crime’
MIT professor Noam Chomsky has warned that an attack on Syria without United Nations support would be a war crime. “As international support for Obama’s decision to attack Syria has collapsed, along with the credibility of government claims.
Carl Garey says
I thank Professor Chomsky for pointing out that an attack on Syria would a war crime. (Even if maybe not Obama’s first :-)
But he seems to be accepting the premise that we need to, in one way or another, do a regime-change in Syria. He speaks of the desirability of “forcing ‘the regime’ to accept a truce”. (Doesn’t it seem as if every government that we want to overthrow is “the regime”?)
Ok now, get ready for an amazing new suggestion for immediately ending the fighting in Syria: We could achieve that by merely ceasing to fund, supply, arm, sponsor and support the army that is trying to take over Syria. Would that army even exist without our sponsorship? Forgive my skepticism, but, based on past experience, one could even ask if maybe the Obama administration initiated the “rebels” as a proxy army, like the Nicaraguan Contras.
The premise seems to be that, though a direct attack would be a war-crime, funding and arming a proxy army, for a bloody regime-change, is ok. Forgive me, but are we sure that we have a right to forcibly and brutally overthrow governments in other countries, even if by proxy-armies?
As for whether Syria’s governement is really undesirable, can we accept that that isn’t for us to decide?
In fact, what do we know about the merits of Syria’s present government, other than what our corporate mass media have told us? When our media start villainizing, villifying and demonizing the leader of a small non-European country, experience tells us that that means that the powers-that-be, here, want that country.
You know, for those small countries, independence is the great no-no. The worst crime that the government of a small non-European country can commit is to use that country’s resources for the betterment of living conditions for its own population, instead of stealing them and giving us a piece of the action.
Just for a few examples:
Did you know that Libya and Iraq, before our attacks and regime-changes, had the highest lliving-standards for ordinary people, in the Arab world? People throughout the Arab world were coming those two countries for the region’s best medical care and education. Their secular societies had the region’s best equality for women. But a high living standard for ordinary people means that resourses are being expended for that purpose–and that’s the big no-no.
The examples are many. Cuba, after throwing out our dictator, Batista, had begun to remedy the harm that he’d been imposing. Cuba began winning all sorts of international awards for elimination of starvation, and providing good medical care and education for all. Though dictator Batista, with his ravages, was apparently ok with our leaders, the new Cuba had committed the big no-no. Same in Nicaragua, when they, too, ejected our dictator, Somoza, and began improving conditions there.
The list goes on and on, and so I won’t use more space here for it, or ask you to take my word on these matters. I’ll, instead, just refer you to a book:
_Killing Hope: CIA and Military Interventions since WWII_. The author is Blum. Search google for “Killing Hope, Blum”. The website for his book gives a table-of-contents for the book, and many of the entries in that table of contents can be clicked on, linking to online-readable text.
Also, check out, at google, the confessions of General Smedley Butler, who, feeling guilty about what he’d done in his military career, admited that, in many countries around the world, he’d been acting as “the corporations’ gangster”.
To return to the matter of Syria. I spoke of our corporate mass-media’s role to villify every government (“regime”) whose country our corporate-owned leaders want to take. Given tbat role, I suggest that information from our media about those countries isn’t exactly the most reliable.
In other words, we can’t know, from our media, whether a foreign government is really bad. And if a media-villified governement really were bad, how would we know it? The situation then would be reminiscent of “The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf”.
In other words, we don’t know if the Assad government is really bad. Is Assad bad, or is he just another small-country leader who committed the worst crime–independence, the crime of using his country’s resources to benefit that country’s population? I don’t claim to know. We certainly can’t know from our media. But the villainization, and call for an attack, are suspiciously familiar, aren’t they.
Our leaders have had a history of overthrowing population-benefitting governments, and installing population-harmful/corporate-benefitting governments. So might it be a fairly safe general rule that any small non-European government villified by our media is probably a good government, at least in regards to its population’s economic well-being–at least in comparison to what our media and its owners want to replace it with?
And no, these comments are NOT anti-American. Professor Blum is not anti-American.
I’m an American too, even though I don’t like us to hurt people. Don’t let our corrupt leaders identify themselves and their corruption with America. That’s the biggest insult to America.
There is nothing un-American about the Christian wish to not hurt people.
We hear that we’re a Christian country. Suppose we start acting like it.
Christ said, “What you do the least of them, you do to me.”
And I’ll add one more quote:
The Book of Ezekiel says:
“What profit it a man, to gain the world, and lose his own soul?”
Carl Garey
Carl Garey says
According to the news, the relevant Senate committee has now voted in support of Obama’s attack on Syria.
So let me point something else out:
Obama and other Republicans and Democrats keep repeating that they have evidene that Assad perpetrated the gas-attack.
But, though they’ve frequently been asked to, they’ve never shared what their “evidence” is.
It’s a good bet that that’s because they don’t have any evidence to support their claim that it was Assad who did the chemical-attack.
Sometimes, maybe usually, what we hear from the Obama administration, and verious others in Congresss, is an _assumption_ that it was Assad. The assumption that it was Assad is taken as a premise for what is said. The little detail of whether the assumption is correct is forgotten, ignored. …except that, as I mentioned, we sometimes hear the claim that there’s evidence against Assad (evidence that is never specified).
Surely we all agree that unspecified evidence is quite worthless, and is, effectively, no evidence at all (because that’s probably exactly what it is).
What evidence is there?
Here are two things that I’ve heard:
1. The attack happened when an international inspection team was in Syria. In fact, the attack occurred quite near to where the inspetion-team was. It has been pointed out that it would be decidedly to Assad’s disadvantage to perpretrate that anti-civilian terrorist attack, killing many civilians with chemical weapons, literally right under the nose of the international inspection team.
Who would benefit from such an attack? Assad? What do you think. The “rebels”, our regime-change proxy-army would beneft from it–if Obama can successfully blame it on Assad, and use it as an excuse for attacks on Syria’s defenses.
And why is it necessary for Obama to do that? It’s because his proxy army isn’t winning. That might be party due to Assad’s popularity in Syria. It’s more difficult to overthrow a leader who is liked and supported by his population.
So that’s why Obama needs to destroy Syria’s defenses, by aerial attacks, because that’s the only way that his terrorist army is going to win.
2. Our politicians here, or their advisors, have admitted that Assad is popular in Syria. It seems to me that one of them said that, if there were an election, Assad would win. Given that Assad is popular with the Syrians, then who would be massacring Syrian civilians–Assad, or the terrorists?
3. I heard that the investigators’ analysis of the gas’s residue indicated that it isn’t the grade of gas that would be expected to be in the possession of a national government’s military.
4. I heard that (contrary to what some of our politicians have claimed, it isn’t know if Assad has chemical weapons, but it is known that the “rebels” have them and have used them.
5. I’ve heard that people at the U.N. have expressed skepticism about the assumption that it was Assad who used chemical weapons.
You don’t attack a country and kill a lot of people because of a hunch, or an unsupported assumption…unless maybe you’re Obama.
And, by the way, of course the same goes for all the other attrocities and anti-civilian massacres in that war of conquest in Syria. When it’s insurgents vs a national military, and the insurgents aren’t winning, then the insurgents are the ones who are more likely to attack civilians. Especially when the government is popular with the population. There’s no reason to believe that Assad committed the massacres and anti-civilian attrocities of that war.
I’m not claiming that I know for sure. I’m just mentioning some of the evidence. I don’t claim that the evidence that I’ve spoken of _proves_ anything. But it does, when considered together, strongly suggest something.
I’m not saying that anything is known for sure about that situation (at least not by me). But there is one thing for sure: There isn’t conclusive evidence to justify the claimed basis for the aerial attack on Syria that Obama wants to do. The U.N., and the British Parliament, don’t want to support the killing of lots of people based on an unsupported assumption.