Chomsky Interview: The United States is a Leading Terrorist State - Monthly Review Page 1 of 10

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Harry Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster

November 2001
The United States is a Leading
Terrorist State
An Interview with Noam Chomsky by David Barsamian

Home Q: There is rage, anger and bewilderment in the U.S. since

Subscribe the September 11 events. There have been murders, attacks
on mosques, and even a Sikh temple. The University of
Notes From Colorado, which is located here in Boulder, a town which
the Editors has a liberal reputation, has graffiti saying, “Go home,
Arabs, Bomb Afghanistan, and Go Home, Sand Niggers.”
After the Attack What’s your perspective on what has evolved since the
… The War on terrorist attacks?
Terrorism
by The Editors
A: It’s mixed. What you’re describing certainly exists. On
the other hand, countercurrents exist. I know they do where I
U.S. Hegemony have direct contacts, and hear the same from others. In this
and the Response
to Terror
morning’s New York Times there’s a report on the mood in
by Samir Amin New York, including places where the memorials are for the
victims of the terrorist attack. It points out that peace signs
Terrorism and and calls for restraint vastly outnumbered calls for retaliation
the War Crisis and that the mood of the people they could see was very
by Fidel Castro mixed and in fact generally opposed to violent action. That’s
another kind of current, also supportive of people who are
Limbs of No being targeted here because they look dark or have a funny
Body: Indifference name. So there are countercurrents. The question is, what can
to the Afghan we do to make the right ones prevail?
Tragedy
by Mohsen Q: The media have been noticeably lacking in providing a
Makhmalbaf context and a background for the attacks on New York and
Washington. What might be some useful information that
On Walking the you could provide?
Walk
by Loretta J.
Williams A: There are two categories of information that are

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particularly useful because there are two distinct, though

related, sources for the attack. Let’s assume that the attack
Also of Interest:
was rooted somehow in the bin Laden network. That sounds
plausible, at least, so letsay it’s right. If that’s right, there are
Imperial two categories of information and of populations that we
Ambition: An
should be concerned with, linked but not identical. One is the
Interview with
Noam Chomsky bin Laden network. That’s a category by itself. Another is
by David Barsamian the population of the region. They’re not the same thing,
although there are links. What ought to be in the forefront is
discussion of both of those. The bin Laden network, I doubt
if anybody knows it better than the CIA, since they were
Books of Related instrumental in helping construct it. This is a network whose
Interest from
Monthly Review Press:
development started in 1979, if you can believe President
Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. He
claimed, maybe he was just bragging, that in mid–1979 he
had instigated secret support for Mujahedin fighting against
the government of Afghanistan in an effort to draw the
Russians into what he called an “Afghan trap,” a phrase
worth remembering. He’s very proud of the fact that they did
fall into the Afghan trap by sending military forces to
support the government six months later, with consequences
that we know. The U.S., along with Egypt, Pakistan, French
intelligence, Saudi Arabian funding, and Israeli involvement,
» Behind the Invasion assembled a major army, a huge mercenary army, maybe
of Iraq by the Research
Unit for Political 100,000 or more, and they drew from the most militant
Economy sectors they could find, which happened to be radical
Islamists, what are called here Islamic fundamentalists, from
all over, most of them not from Afghanistan. They’re called
Afghanis, but like bin Laden, they come from elsewhere.

Bin Laden joined very quickly. He was involved in the

funding networks, which probably are the ones which still
exist. They were trained, armed, organized by the CIA,
Pakistan, Egypt, and others to fight a holy war against the
Russians. And they did. They fought a holy war against the
» Imperialism Without Russians. They carried terror into Russian territory. They
Colonies by Harry may have delayed the Russian withdrawal, a number of
Magdoff analysts believe, but they did win the war and the Russian
invaders withdrew. The war was not their only activity. In
1981, groups based in that same network assassinated
President Sadat of Egypt, who had been instrumental in
setting it up. In 1983, one suicide bomber, maybe with
connections to the same networks, essentially drove the U.S.
military out of Lebanon. And it continued.

By 1989, they had succeeded in their holy war in

Afghanistan. As soon as the U.S. established a permanent
» The New Crusade: military presence in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden and the rest
America’s War on announced that from their point of view this was comparable

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Terrorism to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and they turned

by Rahul Mahajan
their guns on the Americans, as had already happened in
1983 when the U.S. had military forces in Lebanon. Saudi
Arabia is a major enemy of the bin Laden network, just as
Egypt is. That’s what they want to overthrow, what they call
the un–Islamic governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, other
states of the Middle East and North Africa. And it continued.

In 1997, they murdered roughly sixty tourists in Egypt and

destroyed the Egyptian tourist industry. And they’ve been
carrying out activities all over the region, North Africa, East
Africa, the Middle East, for years. That’s one group. And
that is an outgrowth of the U.S. wars of the 1980s and, if you
can believe Brzezinski, even before, when they set the
“Afghan trap.” There’s a lot more to say about them, but
that’s one part.

Another is the people of the region. They’re connected, of

course. The bin Laden network and others like them draw a
lot of their support from the desperation and anger and
resentment of the people of the region, which ranges from
rich to poor, secular to radical Islamist. The Wall Street
Journal, to its credit, has run a couple of articles on attitudes
of wealthy Muslims, the people who most interest them:
businessmen, bankers, professionals, and others through the
Middle East region who are very frank about their
grievances. They put it more politely than the poor people in
the slums and the streets, but it’s clear. Everybody knows
what they are. For one thing, they’re very angry about U.S.
support for undemocratic, repressive regimes in the region
and U.S. insistence on blocking any efforts towards
democratic openings. You just heard on the news, it sounded
like the BBC, a report that the Algerian government is now
interested in getting involved in this war. The announcer said
that there had been plenty of Islamic terrorism in Algeria,
which is true, but he didn’t tell the other part of the story,
which is that a lot of the terrorism is apparently state
terrorism. There’s pretty strong evidence for that. The
government of course is interested in enhancing its
repression, and will welcome U.S. assistance in this.

In fact, that government is in office because it blocked the

democratic election in which it would have lost to mainly
Islamic–based groups. That set off the current fighting.
Similar things go on throughout the region.

The “moneyed Muslims” interviewed by the Journal also

complained that the U.S. has blocked independent economic

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development by “propping up oppressive regimes,” that’s the

phrase they used. But the prime concern stressed in the Wall
Street Journal articles and by everybody who knows
anything about the region, the prime concern of the
“moneyed Muslims”—basically pro–American,
incidentally—is the dual U.S. policies, which contrast very
sharply in their eyes, towards Iraq and Israel. In the case of
Iraq, for the last ten years the U.S. and Britain have been
devastating the civilian society. Madeleine Albright’s
infamous statement about how maybe half a million children
have died, and it’s a high price but we’re willing to pay it,
doesn’t sound too good among people who think that maybe
it matters if a half a million children are killed by the U.S.
and Britain. And meanwhile they’re strengthening Saddam
Hussein. So that’s one aspect of the dual policy. The other
aspect is that the U.S. is the prime supporter of the Israeli
military occupation of Palestinian territory, now in its thirty–
fifth year. It’s been harsh and brutal from the beginning,
extremely repressive. Most of this hasn’t been discussed
here, and the U.S. role has been virtually suppressed. It goes
back twenty–five years of blocking diplomatic initiatives.

Even simple facts are not reported. For example, as soon as

the current fighting began last September 30, Israel
immediately, the next day, began using U.S. helicopters
(they can’t produce helicopters) to attack civilian targets. In
the next couple of days they killed several dozen people in
apartment complexes and elsewhere. The fighting was all in
the occupied territories, and there was no Palestinian fire.
The Palestinians were using stones. So this is people
throwing stones against occupiers in a military occupation,
legitimate resistance by world standards, insofar as the
targets are military.

On October 3, Clinton made the biggest deal in a decade to

send new military helicopters to Israel. That continued the
next couple of months. That wasn’t even reported, still isn’t
reported, as far as I’m aware. But the people there know it,
even if they don’t read the Israeli press (where it was
immediately reported). They look in the sky and see attack
helicopters coming and they know they’re U.S. attack
helicopters sent with the understanding that that is how they
will be used. From the very start U.S. officials made it clear
that there were no conditions on their use, which was by then
already well known. A couple of weeks later Israel started
using them for assassinations. The U.S. issued some
reprimands but sent more helicopters, the most advanced in
the U.S. arsenal. Meanwhile the settlement policies, which
have taken over substantial parts of the territories and are

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designed to make it virtually impossible for a viable

independent state to develop, are supported by the U.S. The
U.S. provides the funding, the diplomatic support. It’s the
only country that’s blocked the overwhelming international
consensus on condemning all this under the Geneva
conventions. The victims, and others in the region, know all
of this. All along this has been an extremely harsh military
occupation.

Q: Is there anything else you want to add?

A: There’s a lot more. There is the fact that the U.S. has
supported oppressive, authoritarian, harsh regimes, and
blocked democratic initiatives. For example, the one I
mentioned in Algeria. Or in Turkey. Or throughout the
Arabian Peninsula. Many of the harsh, brutal, oppressive
regimes are backed by the U.S. That was true of Saddam
Hussein, right through the period of his worst atrocities,
including the gassing of the Kurds. U.S. and British support
for the monster continued. He was treated as a friend and
ally, and people there know it. When bin Laden makes that
charge, as he did again in an interview rebroadcast by the
BBC, people know what he is talking about.

Let’s take a striking example. In March 1991, right after the

Gulf War, with the U.S. in total command of the air, there
was a rebellion in the southern part of Iraq, including Iraqi
generals. They wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein. They
didn’t ask for U.S. support, just access to captured Iraqi
arms, which the U.S. refused. The U.S. tacitly authorized
Saddam Hussein to use air power to crush the rebellion. The
reasons were not hidden. New York Times Middle East
correspondent Alan Cowell described the “strikingly
unanimous view” of the U.S. and its regional coalition
partners: “whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the
West and the region a better hope for stability than did those
who have suffered his repression.” Times diplomatic
correspondent Thomas Friedman observed, not critically,
that for Washington and its allies, an “iron–fisted Iraqi junta”
that would hold Iraq together just as Saddam’s “iron fist”
had done was preferable to a popular rebellion, which was
drowned in blood, probably killing more people than the
U.S. bombing. Maybe people here don’t want to look, but
that was all over the front pages of the newspapers. Well,
again, it is known in the region. That’s just one example.
These are among the reasons why pro-American bankers and
businessmen in the region are condemning the U.S. for
supporting antidemocratic regimes and stopping economic

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development.

Q: Talk about the relationship between ends and means.

Let’s say you have a noble goal. You want to bring
perpetrators of horrendous terrorist crimes to justice. What
about the means to reach those ends?

A: Suppose you want to bring a president of the U.S. to

justice. They’re guilty of horrendous terrorist acts. There’s a
way to do it. In fact, there are precedents. Nicaragua in the
1980s was subjected to violent assault by the U.S. Tens of
thousands of people died. The country was substantially
destroyed, it may never recover. The effects on the country
are much more severe even than the tragedies in New York
the other day. They didn’t respond by setting off bombs in
Washington. They went to the World Court, which issued a
judgment in their favor condemning the U.S. for what it
called “unlawful use of force,” which means international
terrorism, ordering the U.S. to desist and pay substantial
reparations. The U.S. dismissed the court judgment with
contempt, responding with an immediate escalation of the
attack. So Nicaragua then went to the Security Council,
which passed a resolution calling on states to observe
international law. The U.S. vetoed it. They went to the
General Assembly, where they got a similar resolution that
passed near–unanimously, which the U.S. and Israel opposed
two years in a row (joined once by El Salvador). That’s the
way a state should proceed. If Nicaragua had been powerful
enough, it could have set up another criminal court. Those
are the measures the U.S. could pursue, and nobody’s going
to block it. That’s what they’re being asked to do by people
throughout the region, including their allies.

Remember, the governments in the Middle East and North

Africa, like the terrorist Algerian government, which is one
of the most vicious of all, would be happy to join the U.S. in
opposing terrorist networks which are attacking them.
They’re the prime targets. But they have been asking for
some evidence, and they want to do it in a framework of at
least minimal commitment to international law. The
Egyptian position is complex. They’re part of the primary
system that organized the bin Laden network. They were the
first victims of it when Sadat was assassinated. They’ve been
major victims of it since. They’d like to crush it, but they
say, only after some evidence is presented about who’s
involved and within the framework of the UN Charter, under
the aegis of the Security Council. That’s a way to proceed.

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Q: Do you think it’s more than problematic to engage in

alliances with those whom are called “unsavory characters,”
drug traffickers and assassins, in order to achieve what is
said to be a noble end?

A: Remember that among the most unsavory characters are

the governments of the region, our own government and its
allies. If we’re serious, we also have to ask, What is a noble
end? Was it a noble end to drive the Russians into an Afghan
trap in 1979, as Brzezinski claims he did? Supporting
resistance against the Russian invasion is one thing. But
organizing a terrorist army of Islamic fanatics for your own
purposes is a different thing. The question we should be
asking now is: What about the alliance that’s being formed,
that the U.S. is trying to put together? We should not forget
that the U.S. itself is a leading terrorist state. What about the
alliance between the U.S., Russia, China, Indonesia, Egypt,
Algeria, all of whom are delighted to see an international
system develop, sponsored by the U.S., which will authorize
them to carry out their own terrorist atrocities? Russia, for
example, would be very happy to have U.S. backing for its
murderous war in Chechnya. You have the same Afghanis
fighting against Russia, also probably carrying out terrorist
acts within Russia. As would perhaps India, in Kashmir.
Indonesia would be delighted to have support for its
massacres in Aceh. Algeria, as just announced on the
broadcast we heard, would be delighted to have authorization
to extend its own state terrorism. The same with China,
fighting against separatist forces in its Western provinces,
including those “Afghanis” whom China and Iran had
organized to fight the war against the Russians, beginning
maybe as early as 1978, some reports indicate. And that runs
through the world.

Q: Your comment that the U.S. is a “leading terrorist state”

might stun many Americans. Could you elaborate on that?

A: I just gave one example, Nicaragua. The U.S. is the only

country that was condemned for international terrorism by
the World Court and that rejected a Security Council
resolution calling on states to observe international law. It
continues international terrorism. That example’s the least of
it. And there are also what are in comparison, minor
examples. Everybody here was quite properly outraged by
the Oklahoma City bombing, and for a couple of days, the
headlines all read, Oklahoma City looks like Beirut. I didn’t
see anybody point out that Beirut also looks like Beirut, and
part of the reason is that the Reagan Administration had set

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off a terrorist bombing there in 1985 that was very much like
Oklahoma City, a truck bombing outside a mosque timed to
kill the maximum number of people as they left. It killed
eighty and wounded two hundred, aimed at a Muslim cleric
whom they didn’t like and whom they missed. It was not
very secret. I don’t know what name you give to the attack
that’s killed maybe a million civilians in Iraq and maybe a
half a million children, which is the price the Secretary of
State says we’re willing to pay. Is there a name for that?
Supporting Israeli atrocities is another one. Supporting
Turkey’s crushing of its own Kurdish population, for which
the Clinton Administration gave the decisive support, 80
percent of the arms, escalating as atrocities increased, is
another. Or take the bombing of the Sudan, one little
footnote, so small that it is casually mentioned in passing in
reports on the background to the Sept. 11 crimes. How
would the same commentators react if the bin Laden network
blew up half the pharmaceutical supplies in the U.S. and the
facilities for replenishing them? Or Israel? Or any country
where people “matter”? Although that’s not a fair analogy,
because the U.S. target is a poor country which had few
enough drugs and vaccines to begin with and can’t replenish
them. Nobody knows how many thousands or tens of
thousands of deaths resulted from that single atrocity, and
bringing up that death toll is considered scandalous. If
somebody did that to the U.S. or its allies, can you imagine
the reaction? In this case we say, Oh, well, too bad, minor
mistake, let’s go on to the next topic. Other people in the
world don’t react like that. When bin Laden brings up that
bombing, he strikes a resonant chord, even with people who
despise and fear him, and the same, unfortunately, is true of
much of the rest of his rhetoric.

Or to return to “our own little region over here,” as Henry

Stimson called it, take Cuba. After many years of terror
beginning in late 1959, including very serious atrocities,
Cuba should have the right to resort to violence against the
U.S. according to U.S. doctrine that is scarcely questioned. It
is, unfortunately, all too easy to continue, not only with
regard to the U.S. but also other terrorist states.

Q: In your book Culture of Terrorism, you write that “the

cultural scene is illuminated with particular clarity by the
thinking of the liberal doves, who set the limits for
respectable dissent.” How have they been performing since
the events of September 11?

A: Since I don’t like to generalize, let’s take a concrete

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example. On September 16, the New York Times reported

that the U.S. has demanded that Pakistan cut off food aid to
Afghanistan. That had already been hinted before, but here it
was stated flat out. Among other demands Washington
issued to Pakistan, it also “demanded…the elimination of
truck convoys that provide much of the food and other
supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population”—the food that
is keeping probably millions of people just this side of
starvation (John Burns, Islamabad, NYT). What does that
mean? That means that unknown numbers of people, maybe
millions, of starving Afghans will die. Are these Taliban?
No, they’re victims of the Taliban. Many of them are internal
refugees kept from leaving. But here’s a statement saying,
OK, let’s proceed to kill unknown numbers, maybe millions,
of starving Afghans who are victims of the Taliban. What
was the reaction?

I spent almost the entire day afterwards on radio and

television around the world. I kept bringing it up. Nobody in
Europe or the U.S. could think of one word of reaction.
Elsewhere in the world there was plenty of reaction, even
around the periphery of Europe, like Greece. How should we
have reacted to this? Suppose some power was strong
enough to say, Let’s do something that will cause a million
Americans to die of starvation. Would you think it’s a
serious problem? And again, it’s not a fair analogy. In the
case of Afghanistan, left to rot after it had been exploited for
Washington’s war, much of the country is in ruins and its
people are desperate, already one of the worst humanitarian
crises in the world.

Q: National Public Radio, which in the 1980s was

denounced by the Reagan Administration as “Radio
Managua on the Potomac,” is also considered out there on
the liberal end of respectable debate. Noah Adams, the host
of “All Things Considered,” asked these questions on
September 17. Should assassinations be allowed? Should the
CIA be given more operating leeway?

A: The CIA should not be permitted to carry out

assassinations, but that’s the least of it. Should the CIA be
permitted to organize a car bombing in Beirut like the one I
described? Not a secret, incidentally; prominently reported in
the mainstream media, though easily forgotten. That didn’t
violate any laws. And it’s not just the CIA. Should they have
been permitted to organize in Nicaragua a terrorist army
which had the official task, straight out of the mouth of the
State Department, to attack “soft targets,” meaning

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undefended agricultural cooperatives and health clinics?

What’s the name for that? Or to set up something like the bin
Laden network, not him himself, but the background
networks? Should the U.S. be authorized to provide Israel
with attack helicopters to carry out political assassinations
and attacks on civilian targets? That’s not the CIA. That’s
the Clinton Administration, with no noticeable objection, in
fact even reported.

Q: Could you very briefly define the political uses of

terrorism? Where does it fit in the doctrinal system?

A: The U.S. is officially committed to what is called “low–

intensity warfare.” That’s the official doctrine. If you read
the definition of low–intensity conflict in army manuals and
compare it with official definitions of “terrorism” in army
manuals, or the U.S. Code, you find they’re almost the same.
Terrorism is the use of coercive means aimed at civilian
populations in an effort to achieve political, religious, or
other aims. That’s what the World Trade Center bombing
was, a particularly horrifying terrorist crime. And that’s
official doctrine. I mentioned a couple of examples. We
could go on and on. It’s simply part of state action, not just
the U.S. of course. Furthermore, all of these things should be
well known. It’s shameful that they’re not. Anybody who
wants to find out about them can begin by reading a
collection of essays published ten years ago by a major
publisher called Western State Terrorism, edited by Alex
George (Routledge, 1991), which runs through lots and lots
of cases. These are things people need to know if they want
to understand anything about themselves. They are known by
the victims, of course, but the perpetrators prefer to look
elsewhere.

NOAM CHOMSKY, longtime political activist, writer and professor of linguistics at MIT,
is the author of numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign policy, international
affairs, and human rights. Among his many books are World Orders Old and New
(Columbia University Press, 1996), Class Warfare (Common Courage, 1996) and Powers
and Prospects (South End Press, 1997). His latest books are The Common Good
(Odonian Press, 1997) and The New Military Humanism (Common Courage, 1999).

All material © copyright 2001 by Monthly Review

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