From: David Robjant (David.Robjant@irismurdoch.plus.com)
Date: Sat Jun 05 2004 - 23:53:40 BST
Mark Steven Heyman:
>
> I would say to David Robjant and others who are annoyed by the
> Chomsky thread distracting them from serious discussion of the MOQ,
> that all they need do is stop posting unsupported attacks against the
> man. Then, those of us who know better, will not feel obligated to
> respond, and you'll be able to get back to the important stuff, like
> tintinitus.
Hm. Mark, I certainly did not say that I was "annoyed by the Chomsky thread
distracting them from serious discussion of the MOQ", and I have not thought
of it as a distraction, or I would not have posted anything on the subject.
Perhaps you will graciously take back the remark.
I don't know who you mean by the "others". Marsha posted a considered post
which used the choice word "bickering" to decribe the level of some of the
debate, but I don't think she was objecting to talking about Chomsky per se,
but rather about the way in which this might seem to be being conducted (eg:
'The war is an imperialist plot' - 'I don't agree' - 'You are ignorant and
haven't read all of Chomsky').
I have not posted "unsupported attacks against the man". I have responded
with reasoned argument to posted *arguments and accounts* which seem to me
lacking either in factual accuracy or coherence. And while I have indeed
read some popularised Chomsky (articles by him), I freely admit that most of
the association between the name "Chomsky" and the particular claims and
arguments that I object to here is got going in the posts of Chomsky fans.
If there is a personalisation of the argument about Iraq, if there is an
ad-hominem twist in the argument, much of this comes from Chomsky fans
wanting to restrict the argument to 'Chomsky: is he a prophet, yes or no'.
For myself, it matters not what name is attached to the disscussion of the
important moral matter, ie Iraq. Perhaps if we got out of the "chomsky: for
or against" discussion we could address the matter at hand.
Tinnitus is important to *me*, that's all. Just now it seems the worst
thing that has ever happened to me, and you may conclude that I have lead a
priveledged life heretofore. If you don't happen to care about it you don't
have to talk on it, and you don't have to patronise someone who does want to
talk about it.
> David Robjant wrote:
> But the trouble with discovering malice and conspiracy is that once
> you've made a career out of it, it becomes addictive, and common
> sense goes on holiday.
>
> msh says:
> Ah, yes. The conspiracy, and common sense out the window attack..
> Chomsky has written a lot about the "conspiracy" attack, but pretty
> much ignores them now. The thrust is that the activity he criticises
> are anything but conspiratorial in nature. They are the natural
> result of unaccountable institutions of power projecting and
> protecting their power. Don't have the references at my fingertips,
> but will supply them for anyone interested enough to email me.
OK. Fair enough, on the vocabulary Chomsky favours I'll take your word for
it. But actually what I said was something about Pilger. Maybe Pilger will
in future take Chomsky's advice (your advice?) and substitute "unaccountable
institutions" for "conspiracy". As far as I can see, the substitution don't
make much odds. What's the difference between an "unaccountable
institution" and a "conspiracy" again? BTW, what this "conspiracy attack"
I'm supposed to be launching? What attack is that? Finding out
conspiracies, like the one that involved the USA in bombing Cambodia, is a
highly worthwhile exercise. Did I doubt that? What I was claiming was that
finding conspiracies is *addictive*, not that it is in itself bad. I note
your failure to comment on what I actually did claim.
> David Robjant wrote:
> Saddam was clearly a threat to the US and the West as a whole in a
> way that Vietnam never was: what was known of his weaponry and
> incomplete disposal of it, his violation of very necessary
> international verification proceedures, his goals evinced in Kuwait,
> and yes, his osition where the world economy gets most of its oil
> from etc etc etc -
>
> msh says:
> Seen as a threat by whom? The NY Times?
By the UN. By France. By Russia. By the Kurds. By his own people in
Basra and the south. By the arab nations adjacent him. By the Pope. By
everyone. What you forget in your rewriting of very recent history is that
information had at the time by the entire world pictured him to be a threat
- what was argued about at the UN was not how threatening he was but how to
deal with the threat. That infomation on threat concerned past actions,
intentions, active programmes, and current capablity. It turns out that of
this information contributing to the threat assessment was well wide of the
mark on capability - partly because of the reliance on Iraqi sources whose
political motivations included hastening the toppling of Saddam, partly
because Saddam *wanted* to be seen as a threat: in this there was a failure
of analysis on the part of governments and newspapers all around the globe -
not just the NY Times, but the Guardian in the UK, Le Monde in France,
everyone had lots of reasons to think that Saddam had the capability and no
good reasons for thinking that he didn't have the capablity, principally
because Saddam saw to it that those good reasons never saw the light of day.
Now, since a "threat" by definition is something you have reason to fear, it
follows from this list of contemporary reasons that Saddam was a threat - as
the entire world agreed at that time. Recall that Saddam could, at any
stage, have taken away our reason to fear, and made himself entirely
untreatening, through full co-operation with the the UN inspection teams.
We spent 10 years waiting for that co-operation.
> David Robjant continued:
> to say nothing of the threat he posed to his own people.
>
> msh says:
> Yes, the threat he posed to his own people, which was fine evidently,
> till he got a little too uppity and invaded Kuwait. (See above.)
What are you arguing here? That if western policy is mistaken it should
atleast have the decency to please you by being *consistently* mistaken?
> msh says:
> It's stunning, really, given the nearly endless list of brutal
> dictatorships installed and/or supported by the US, (Armas, Pahlavi,
> Somoza, Suarto, Marcos, Duvalier, Pinochet on and on), many of them
> replacing democratically elected governments, that anyone still
> seriously suggests that US interventions are basically "humanitarian"
> in nature.
I made no such claim.
Firstly, I did not alledge 'for any intervention x, if x is carried out by
the US then it is humanitarian' - no I specifically addressed Iraq,
mentioning, by the by, that I condemned Kissenger's war crimes in Chile etc.
Secondly, in specifically addressing Iraq, I did not claim that the entirety
of the reasons for war were Humanitarian. I beleive the war to have been
fully warranted on UK national security grounds alone. WMD's are
sufficiently dangerous to all that we cannot afford to have UN inspection
regimes disregarded - we need to know who's got this stuff and where - and
the seriousness with which the WMD issue is now being taken in Libya and
Iran is a testament to a genuine security gain here. Nor can we, either,
afford to have armistice terms routinely ignored by an aggressor nation, as
did Iraq for the full decade following the Kuwait war.
> msh says:
> But again, this isn't just the US. As Chomsky says,
> states are not moral agents, they, all of them, will act in ways that
> will project and protect their power, unless their citizens, the real
> moral agents, do something about it. This BTW would cover my
> response to your ideas about guilt being the motivating factor, as
> well.
Er, how? Do you mean that states can't have moral obligations? Well that's
a very interesting point. How about I rephrase my claim and say that
peoples have moral obligations which states have a duty to embody, and that
the American and British people have a moral obligation to the millions of
Iraqi civilians who were murdered by their dictator, and the the millions
more Iraqi civillians that this carnage cowed into a despairing survival,
praying all the while for an army, any army, to get rid of Saddam. That
suit you any better?
BTW, all opinion polling carried out *in Iraq* shows overwhelming public
support for the UK/US intervention - even if the other 30 percent have guns.
It's in the US and the UK that the polls go the other way.
> David Robjant wrote:
> When you say that "plenty more", Adam, I recommend you tackle my
> observation that throughout the twentieth century US foreign policy
> far more consitently shows the influence of a succession of
> electorally significant minorities than it shows the influence of the
> interests of 'Big Business', whatever these may be thought to be (and
> it's usually possible to offer contradictory accounts here).
>
> msh says:
> I've invited just such contradictory accounts. As for my view of the
> intertwining of business and government, see my previous post to you.
That is not an answer.
> David Robjant wrote:
> By the by, your analysis in which spending lives and dollars on the
> liberation of Europe was simply a bid to improve corporate profits is
> creative, not to say bizarre. Do you really beleive this?
>
> msh says:
> Can't speak for Adam, but I believe nothing even remotely so
> simplified. If you would like to engage me over the idea that
> governments, when they are the shadows cast by Big Business, have
> fascist tendencies, then please do.
Maybe I'll grant that governments, when they are the shadows cast by Big
Business, may have fascist tendencies - even if I remain a little unclear
about exactly what is being said here... What is being said here? If you
are talking about the anti-democratic effects of reliance on political TV
advertisments and the fundraising that has to go along with this, I heartily
agree. How did you lot manage to let that happen? Every other democracy I
know of has an upper limit on election spending, and the candidate's
proposals on this is the most important question that should be asked of
every candidate come your next presidential/senate election. But once
again, I'm not sure if 'facism' fits the case, untill I see exactly what you
mean by it. I'm guessing you mean 'evil project for world domination' - and
there I find myself head-scratching.
BTW - this "full spectum dominance" aim of the pentagon, the one that get's
complained about as a conclusive sign of US facism, isn't that *by
definition* the objective, resources allowing, of every military on the face
of the earth? After all, you have a military to win wars, and you don't win
wars by being kinda OK only slightly less good than the other guy, now do
you?
One might take the view that the very idea of a nation state free to to
dispose of it's own national military is a facist one, and there's something
reasonable you might mean here: a world on nation states is in effect a
world anarchy, as contrasted with a democracy. Lets have your constructive
suggestions about how the preferred democratic arrangement is to be brought
about. Remember, you're not allowed to include US military might here, that
you say is imperialism.
> David Robjant wrote:
> I recall, from having been myself a leftie in my youth, that much of
> the attraction is in the way it offers you a systematic understanding
> of the world. Well, surprise surprise, the world ain't that
> systematic. ... Take note Bush,
> take note Chomsky.
>
> msh says:
> As noted above, Chomsky offers no such all-encompassing system of
> understanding, and has often said that he doesn't see how such a
> system can ever exist. He offers a framework for analysis of very
> real events, causing very real misery for very real people, in the
> hopes that such analysis will lead to some understanding of the
> world, and, more important, some hope for making things better.
Hm. If it looks like a duck, flys like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a
duck. If it treats all military involment abroad as automatically the
expression of the devious interests of capital and greed, it quacks like a
marxist-leninist. Maybe it flies differently - I don't know.
And I'm not absolutely sure that we *need* "a framework for analysis of very
real events". I don't need a framework to get up off the stove. I don't
think I need a framework to see that when someone is crying they need
comforting. I don't think I need a framework to see that when large numbers
of people suffer in a situation that is partly our fault and which we alone
can change then we should try to help them.
I guess I could reprase my earlier challenge: I recall, from having been
myself a leftie in my youth, that much of the attraction is in the way it
offers you a framework for understanding the world. Well, surprise
surprise, the world ain't framed.
-------
Ah, I've just noticed that MSH has sent *another* email in rresponse to my
last. I'd better address that, but as an intermission, I liked the
contribution from SWZwick@aol.com:
"My problem with [Chomsky] is that he focuses almost exclusively on the
evils of one actor -- the US. He mentions no other evil actors except to
show that they work in cahoots with the US. Although his critiques of the
US are valid, his tendency to view the US in this vacuum brings us nothing
we don't already know. "
- but I'd want to insert a judicous "some of" to include Chile and Vietnam
so that we would then get "Although some of his critiques of the US are
valid, his tendency to view the US in this vacuum brings us nothing we don't
already know."
------------------
> msh says:
> As for the Republican guard, they were murderous, you're right.
> What's interesting is that you know all about them, but not,
> apparently, about some other activity of the misnamed Gulf War,
> (misnamed if your concept of war involves two more or less equally
> powerful enemies in combat).
>
> Since "Deterring Democracy" is on the table, here's a quote from the
> Afterward of the fifth printing, 1993: [talking about the Kuwait war]
>
> "The second component of the attack was the slaughter of Iraqi
> soldiers in the desert, largely unwilling Shi'ite and Kurdish
> conscripts it appears, hiding in holes in the sand or fleeing for
> their lives -- a picture remote from the disinformation relayed by
> the press about colossal fortifications, artillery powerful beyond
> our imagining,
You're wrong. Contrary to the claim about "misinformation" I do know about
it. Their charred bodies, at the wheel of a vehicle, lying contorted on the
ground, were pictured in the national press in the UK at the time when the
armistice was being signed and the press had wider access - I saw these
images in the Guardian. Possibly the most pitiful images of war to receive
such public exposure. Most pitiful of all, I think, was the rag-tag
collection of vehicles in which they were evidently fleeing. Busses,
delivery trucks, private vehicles, a bicycle.
What do I think about this? What do I think of your argument here that the
US military were as barbourous as the Republican Guard? And what do I think
about your [chomsky's] citing of it as conclusive proof of the evils of
American agression?
I is certainly proof, if proof were needed, that war is evil. It is right
up there with the many "freindly fire" incidents in which American pilots,
their own lives at risk and making decisions under stress and at great
speed, killed many tens of US and UK servicemen. It is hard to beleive that
this rag-tag convoy in retreat posed any military threat, just as, to state
the obvious, soldiers on one's own side do not pose any military threat.
Such unmitigated horrors recur thoughout military history. They are one of
the very many kinds of reason why we should struggle to avoid war wherever
possible. My view is that this struggle requires us to deploy cool calm
reflection at all junctures before engaging in a situation where pauses for
reflection may become impossible. But, sometimes, this calm reflection may
lead us to choose one set of evils over another set, much worse. I am not
sure how this deep reflection about the future that we owe both to the
living and the dead is assisted by the kind of treatment Chomsky offers.
What is Chomsky's positive proposal about how we should deal with tyrants
and aggressors, if not, on warranted occasions, by military force, with all,
all the known horror, that this involves?
What distinguishes the horror you remind us of (on the Basra road) from the
horror that I remind you of (what then happened in Basra) is that the
atrocity committed by the United States was committed during a war between
armies. Civillian casualities, however many there were, were not then the
target or objective of the US military (unlike in WWII). The Republican
guard, however, was routinely deployed under saddam's regime with the
*objective* of murdering large numbers of Iraqi civillians. I feel this
difference is material.
It is the difference between a) someone who drives a truck so as to get some
load to his destination knowing full well that trucks kill thousands of
pedestrians every year, and b) someone who drives his truck specifically
*at* the pedestrian.
One might imagine the further possibilities where c) the truck driver drives
directly at the pedestrian and calls out as he goes 'you other truck drivers
are really all murders to, so this is nothing special', and d) the truck
driver refuses to mount the cab on the grounds that trucking is murder.
I think that in effect the position on war outlined by some on this list
collapses the distinction between (a) and (b) in order to end up with (d).
What they forget is that in so doing they also justify (c), gladdening the
hearts of terrorist truckdrivers everywhere.
The truck driving analogy may seem inappropriately light, given the gravity
of the topic. But I beleive it expresses a sound point.
My deeper worry would be that the road to a fantastically all encompassing
hell might very easily be paved with the good intention of avoiding US
involvement in foreign wars. That, after all, has already happened on a
previous occasion.
Regards to all,
David
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