ChomskyHitchenes

By Chris Hedges

Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.” And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.

“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”

“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”

“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”

“I listen to talk radio,” Chomsky said. “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”

Chomsky has, more than any other American intellectual, charted the downward spiral of the American political and economic system, in works such as “On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures,” “Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture,” “A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West,” “Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky,” “Manufacturing Consent” and “Letters From Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda.” He reminds us that genuine intellectual inquiry is always subversive. It challenges cultural and political assumptions. It critiques structures. It is relentlessly self-critical. It implodes the self-indulgent myths and stereotypes we use to elevate ourselves and ignore our complicity in acts of violence and oppression. And it makes the powerful, as well as their liberal apologists, deeply uncomfortable.

Chomsky reserves his fiercest venom for the liberal elite in the press, the universities and the political system who serve as a smoke screen for the cruelty of unchecked capitalism and imperial war. He exposes their moral and intellectual posturing as a fraud. And this is why Chomsky is hated, and perhaps feared, more among liberal elites than among the right wing he also excoriates. When Christopher Hitchens decided to become a windup doll for the Bush administration after the attacks of 9/11, one of the first things he did was write a vicious article attacking Chomsky. Hitchens, unlike most of those he served, knew which intellectual in America mattered. [Editor’s note: To see some of the articles in the 2001 exchanges between Hitchens and Chomsky, click here, here, here and here.]

“I don’t bother writing about Fox News,” Chomsky said. “It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.”

Chomsky, because he steps outside of every group and eschews all ideologies, has been crucial to American discourse for decades, from his work on the Vietnam War to his criticisms of the Obama administration. He stubbornly maintains his position as an iconoclast, one who distrusts power in any form.

“Most intellectuals have a self-understanding of themselves as the conscience of humanity,” said the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein. “They revel in and admire someone like Vaclav Havel. Chomsky is contemptuous of Havel. Chomsky embraces the Julien Benda view of the world. There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice. Benda says that the credo of any true intellectual has to be, as Christ said, ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’ Chomsky exposes the pretenses of those who claim to be the bearers of truth and justice. He shows that in fact these intellectuals are the bearers of power and privilege and all the evil that attends it.”

“Some of Chomsky’s books will consist of things like analyzing the misrepresentations of the Arias plan in Central America, and he will devote 200 pages to it,” Finkelstein said. “And two years later, who will have heard of Oscar Arias? It causes you to wonder would Chomsky have been wiser to write things on a grander scale, things with a more enduring quality so that you read them forty or sixty years later. This is what Russell did in books like ‘Marriage and Morals.’ Can you even read any longer what Chomsky wrote on Vietnam and Central America? The answer has to often be no. This tells you something about him. He is not writing for ego. If he were writing for ego he would have written in a grand style that would have buttressed his legacy. He is writing because he wants to effect political change. He cares about the lives of people and there the details count. He is trying to refute the daily lies spewed out by the establishment media. He could have devoted his time to writing philosophical treatises that would have endured like Kant or Russell. But he invested in the tiny details which make a difference to win a political battle.”

“I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions,” Chomsky said when asked about his goals. “Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. There is plenty of information. You have got to learn how to judge, evaluate and compare it with other things. You have to take some things on trust or you can’t survive. But if there is something significant and important don’t take it on trust. As soon as you read anything that is anonymous you should immediately distrust it. If you read in the newspapers that Iran is defying the international community, ask who is the international community? India is opposed to sanctions. China is opposed to sanctions. Brazil is opposed to sanctions. The Non-Aligned Movement is vigorously opposed to sanctions and has been for years. Who is the international community? It is Washington and anyone who happens to agree with it. You can figure that out, but you have to do work. It is the same on issue after issue.”

Chomsky’s courage to speak on behalf of those, such as the Palestinians, whose suffering is often minimized or ignored in mass culture, holds up the possibility of the moral life. And, perhaps even more than his scholarship, his example of intellectual and moral independence sustains all who defy the cant of the crowd to speak the truth.

“I cannot tell you how many people, myself included, and this is not hyperbole, whose lives were changed by him,” said Finkelstein, who has been driven out of several university posts for his intellectual courage and independence. “Were it not for Chomsky I would have long ago succumbed. I was beaten and battered in my professional life. It was only the knowledge that one of the greatest minds in human history has faith in me that compensates for this constant, relentless and vicious battering. There are many people who are considered nonentities, the so-called little people of this world, who suddenly get an e-mail from Noam Chomsky. It breathes new life into you. Chomsky has stirred many, many people to realize a level of their potential that would forever be lost.”

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Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism

Minority Report

By Christopher Hitchens

September 4, 2001

Not all readers liked my attack on the liberal/left tendency to "rationalize" the aggression of September 11, or my use of the term "fascism with an Islamic face," and I'll select a representative example of the sort of "thinking" that I continue to receive on my screen, even now. This jewel comes from Sam Husseini, who runs the Institute for Public Accuracy in Washington, DC:

You've heard this "thought" expressed in one way or another, dear reader, have you not? I don't think I took enough time in my last column to point out just what is so utterly rotten at the very core of it. So, just to clean up a corner or two: (1) If Husseini knows what was in the minds of the murderers, it is his solemn responsibility to inform us of the source of his information, and also to share it with the authorities. (2) If he does not know what was in their minds--as seems enormously more probable--then why does he rush to appoint himself the ventriloquist's dummy for such a faction? Who volunteers for such a task at such a time?

Not only is it indecent to act as self-appointed interpreter for the killers, but it is rash in the highest degree. The death squads have not favored us with a posthumous manifesto of their grievances, or a statement of claim about Palestine or Iraq, but we are nonetheless able to surmise or deduce or induct a fair amount about the ideological or theological "root" of their act (Husseini doesn't seem to demand "proof" of bin Laden's involvement any more than the Bush Administration is willing to supply it) and if we are correct in this, then we have considerable knowledge of two things: their ideas and their actions.

First the actions. The central plan was to maximize civilian casualties in a very dense area of downtown Manhattan. We know that the killers had studied the physics and ecology of the buildings and the neighborhood, and we know that they were limited only by the flight schedules and bookings of civil aviation. They must therefore have been quite prepared to convert fully loaded planes into missiles, instead of the mercifully unpopulated aircraft that were actually commandeered, and they could have hoped by a combination of luck and tactics to have at least doubled the kill-rate on the ground. They spent some time in the company of the families they had kidnapped for the purpose of mass homicide. It was clearly meant to be much, much worse than it was. And it was designed and incubated long before the mutual-masturbation of the Clinton-Arafat-Barak "process." The Talibanis have in any case not distinguished themselves very much by an interest in the Palestinian plight. They have been busier trying to bring their own societies under the reign of the most inflexible and pitiless declension of shari'a law. This is known to anyone with the least acquaintance with the subject.

The ancillary plan was to hit the Department of Defense and (on the best evidence we have available) either the Capitol Dome or the White House. The Pentagon, for all its symbolism, is actually more the civil-service bit of the American "war-machine," and is set in a crowded Virginia neighborhood. You could certainly call it a military target if you were that way inclined, though the bin Ladenists did not attempt anything against a guarded airbase or a nuclear power station in Pennsylvania (and even if they had, we would now doubtless be reading that the glow from Three Mile Island was a revenge for globalization). The Capitol is where the voters send their elected representatives--poor things, to be sure, but our own. The White House is where the elected President and his family and staff are to be found. It survived the attempt of British imperialism to burn it down, and the attempt of the Confederacy to take Washington DC, and this has hallowed even its most mediocre occupants. I might, from where I am sitting, be a short walk from a gutted Capitol or a shattered White House. I am quite certain that in such a case Husseini and his rabble of sympathizers would still be telling me that my chickens were coming home to roost. (The image of bin Laden's men "stuffing envelopes" is the perfected essence of such brainless verbiage.) Only the stoicism of men like Jeremy Glick and Thomas Burnett prevented some such outcome; only those who chose who die fighting rather than allow such a profanity, and such a further toll in lives, stood between us and the fourth death squad. One iota of such innate fortitude is worth all the writings of Noam Chomsky, who coldly compared the plan of September 11 to a stupid and cruel and cynical raid by Bill Clinton on Khartoum in August 1998.

I speak with some feeling about that latter event, because I wrote three Nation columns about it at the time, pointing out (with evidence that goes unrebutted to this day) that it was a war crime, and a war crime opposed by the majority of the military and intelligence establishment. The crime was directly and sordidly linked to the effort by a crooked President to avoid impeachment (a conclusion sedulously avoided by the Chomskys and Husseinis of the time). The Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant was well-known to be a civilian target, and its "selection" was opposed by most of the Joint Chiefs and many CIA personnel for just this reason. (See, for additional corroboration, Seymour Hersh's New Yorker essay "The Missiles of August"). To mention this banana-republic degradation of the United States in the same breath as a plan, deliberated for months, to inflict maximum horror upon the innocent is to abandon every standard that makes intellectual and moral discrimination possible. To put it at its very lowest, and most elementary, at least the missiles launched by Clinton were not full of passengers. (How are you doing, Sam? Noam, wazzup?)

So much for what the methods and targets tell us about the true anti-human and anti-democratic motivation. By their deeds shall we know them. What about the animating ideas? There were perhaps seven hundred observant followers of the Prophet Muhammed burned alive in New York on September 11. Nobody who had studied the target zone could have been in any doubt that some such figure was at the very least a likely one. And, since Islam makes no discrimination between the color and shade of its adherents, there was good reason to think that any planeload of civilians might include some Muslims as well. I don't myself make this point with any more emphasis than I would give to the several hundred of my fellow Englishmen (some of them doubtless Muslims also) who perished. I stress it only because it makes my point about fascism. To the Wahhabi-indoctrinated sectarians of Al Qaeda, only the purest and most fanatical are worthy of consideration. The teachings and published proclamations of this cult have initiated us to the idea that the tolerant, the open-minded, the apostate or the followers of different branches of The Faith are fit only for slaughter and contempt. And that's before Christians and Jews, let alone atheists and secularists, have even been factored in. As before, the deed announces and exposes its "root cause." The grievance and animosity predate even the Balfour Declaration, let alone the occupation of the West Bank. They predate the creation of Iraq as a state. The gates of Vienna would have had to fall to the Ottoman jihad before any balm could begin to be applied to these psychic wounds. And this is precisely, now, our problem. The Taliban and its surrogates are not content to immiserate their own societies in beggary and serfdom. They are condemned, and they deludedly believe that they are commanded, to spread the contagion and to visit hell upon the unrighteous. The very first step that we must take, therefore, is the acquisition of enough self-respect and self-confidence to say that we have met an enemy and that he is not us, but someone else. Someone with whom coexistence is, fortunately I think, not possible. (I say "fortunately" because I am also convinced that such coexistence is not desirable).

But straight away, we meet people who complain at once that this enemy is us, really. Did we not aid the grisly Taliban to achieve and hold power? Yes indeed "we" did. Well, does this not double or triple our responsibility to remove them from power? A sudden sheep-like silence, broken by a bleat. Would that not be "over-reaction"? All I want to say for now is that the under-reaction to the Taliban by three successive United States administrations is one of the great resounding disgraces of our time. There is good reason to think that a Taliban defeat would fill the streets of Kabul with joy. But for the moment, the Bush Administration seems a hostage to the Pakistani and Saudi clients who are the sponsors and "harborers" the President claims publicly to be looking for! Yet the mainstream left, ever shuffling its feet, fears only the discomfort that might result from repudiating such an indefensible and humiliating posture. Very well then, comrades. Do not pretend that you wish to make up for America's past crimes in the region. Here is one such crime that can be admitted and undone--the sponsorship of the Taliban could be redeemed by the demolition of its regime and the liberation of its victims. But I detect no stomach for any such project. Better, then--more decent and reticent--not to affect such concern for "our" past offenses. This is not an article about grand strategy, but it seems to me to go without saying that a sincere commitment to the secular or reformist elements in the Muslim world would automatically shift the balance of America's up-to-now very questionable engagement. Every day, the wretched Arafat is told by Washington, as a favor to the Israelis, that he must police and repress the forces of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. When did Washington last demand that Saudi Arabia cease its heavy financing of these primitive and unscrupulous organisations? We let the Algerians fight the Islamic-fascist wave without saying a word or lending a hand. And this is an effort in which civic and social organizations can become involved without official permission. We should be building such internationalism whether it serves the short-term needs of the current Administration or not: I signed an anti-Taliban statement several months ago and was appalled by the eerie silence with which the initiative was greeted in Washington. (It ought to go without saying that the demand for Palestinian self-determination is, as before, a good cause in its own right. Not now more than ever, but now as ever. There are millions of Palestinians who do not want the future that the pious of all three monotheisms have in store for them.)

Ultimately, this is another but uniquely toxic version of an old story, whereby former clients like Noriega and Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic and the Taliban cease to be our monsters and become monstrous in their own right. At such a point, a moral and political crisis occurs. Do "our" past crimes and sins make it impossible to expiate the offense by determined action? Those of us who were not consulted about, and are not bound by, the previous covert compromises have a special responsibility to say a decisive "no" to this. The figure of six and a half thousand murders in New York is almost the exact equivalent to the total uncovered in the death-pits of Srebrenica. (Even at Srebrenica, the demented General Ratko Mladic agreed to release all the women, all the children, all the old people and all the males above and below military age before ordering his squads to fall to work.) On that occasion, US satellites flew serenely overhead recording the scene, and Milosevic earned himself an invitation to Dayton, Ohio. But in the end, after appalling false starts and delays, it was found that Mr Milosevic was too much. He wasn't just too nasty. He was also too irrational and dangerous. He didn't even save himself by lyingly claiming, as he several times did, that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Bosnia. It must be said that by this, and by other lies and numberless other atrocities, Milosevic distinguished himself as an enemy of Islam. His national-socialist regime took the line on the towelheads that the Bush Administration is only accused, by fools and knaves, of taking. Yet when a stand was eventually mounted against Milosevic, it was Noam Chomsky and Sam Husseini, among many others, who described the whole business as a bullying persecution of--the Serbs! I have no hesitation in describing this mentality, carefully and without heat, as soft on crime and soft on fascism. No political coalition is possible with such people and, I'm thankful to say, no political coalition with them is now necessary. It no longer matters what they think.

Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism

Minority Report

By Christopher Hitchens

September 4, 2001

Reply to Hitchens

By Noam Chomsky

I have been asked to respond to recent Nation articles by Christopher Hitchens (website, September 24; magazine, Oct. 8), and after refusing several times, will do so, though only partially, and reluctantly. The reason for the reluctance is that Hitchens cannot mean what he is saying. For that reason alone--there are others that should be obvious--this is no proper context for addressing serious issues relating to the September 11 atrocities.

Hitchens is apparently referring to a response I wrote to several journalists on September 15, composite because inquiries were coming too fast for individual response. This was apparently posted several times on the web, as were other much more detailed subsequent responses. In the brief message Hitchens may have seen, I did not elaborate, assuming--correctly, judging by subsequent interchanges with many respondents--that it was unnecessary: The recipients would understand why the comparison is quite appropriate. I also took for granted that they would understand a virtual truism: When we estimate the human toll of a crime, we count not only those who were literally murdered on the spot but those who died as a result, the course we adopt reflexively, and properly, when we consider the crimes of official enemies--Stalin, Hitler and Mao, to mention the most extreme cases. If we are even pretending to be serious, we apply the same standards to ourselves: In the case of Sudan, we count the number who died as a direct consequence of the crime, not just those killed by cruise missiles. Again, a truism.

Since there is one person who does not appear to understand, I will add a few quotes from the mainstream press, to clarify.

A year after the attack, "without the lifesaving medicine [the destroyed facilities] produced, Sudan's death toll from the bombing has continued, quietly, to rise.... Thus, tens of thousands of people--many of them children--have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases.... [The factory] provided affordable medicine for humans and all the locally available veterinary medicine in Sudan. It produced 90 percent of Sudan's major pharmaceutical products.... Sanctions against Sudan make it impossible to import adequate amounts of medicines required to cover the serious gap left by the plant's destruction.... the action taken by Washington on Aug. 20, 1998, continues to deprive the people of Sudan of needed medicine. Millions must wonder how the International Court of Justice in The Hague will celebrate this anniversary" (Jonathan Belke, Boston Globe, August 22, 1999).

"The loss of this factory is a tragedy for the rural communities who need these medicines" (Tom Carnaffin, technical manager with "intimate knowledge" of the destroyed plant, Ed Vulliamy et al., London Observer, August 23, 1998).

The plant "provided 50 percent of Sudan's medicines, and its destruction has left the country with no supplies of choloroquine, the standard treatment for malaria," but months later, the British Labour government refused requests "to resupply chloroquine in emergency relief until such time as the Sudanese can rebuild their pharmaceutical production" (Patrick Wintour, Observer, December 20, 1998).

Proportional to population, this is as if the bin Laden network, in a single attack on the United States, caused "hundreds of thousands of people--many of them children--to suffer and die from easily treatable diseases," though the analogy is unfair because a rich country, not under sanctions and denied aid, can easily replenish its stocks and respond appropriately to such an atrocity--which, I presume, would not have passed so lightly. To regard the comparison to September 11 as outrageous is to express extraordinary racist contempt for African victims of a shocking crime, which, to make it worse, is one for which we are responsible: as taxpayers, for failing to provide massive reparations, for granting refuge and immunity to the perpetrators, and for allowing the terrible facts to be sunk so deep in the memory hole that some, at least, seem unaware of them.

This only scratches the surface. The United States bombing "appears to have shattered the slowly evolving move towards compromise between Sudan's warring sides" and terminated promising steps toward a peace agreement to end the civil war that had left 1.5 million dead since 1981, which might have also led to "peace in Uganda and the entire Nile Basin." The attack apparently "shattered...the expected benefits of a political shift at the heart of Sudan's Islamist government" toward a "pragmatic engagement with the outside world," along with efforts to address Sudan's domestic crises," to end support for terrorism, and to reduce the influence of radical Islamists (Mark Huband, Financial Times, September 8, 1998).

Insofar as these consequences ensued, we may compare the crime in Sudan to the assassination of Lumumba, which helped plunge the Congo into decades of slaughter, still continuing; or the overthrow of the democratic government of Guatemala in 1954, which led to forty years of hideous atrocities; and all too many others like it.

One can scarcely try to estimate the colossal toll of the Sudan bombing, even apart from the probable tens of thousands of immediate Sudanese victims. The complete toll is attributable to the single act of terror--at least, if we have the honesty to adopt the standards we properly apply to official enemies.

Evidently, Hitchens cannot mean what he said about this topic. We can therefore disregard it.

To take another example, Hitchens writes that I referred to the "the whole business [of the 1999 Kosovo war] as a bullying persecution of--the Serbs!" As he knows, this is sheer fabrication. The reasons for the war that I suggested were quoted from the highest-level official US justifications for it, including National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and the final summary presented to Congress by Secretary of Defense William Cohen. We can therefore also disregard what Hitchens has to say about this topic.

As a final illustration, consider Hitchens's fury over the "masochistic e-mail...circulating from the Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter," who joined such radical rags as the Wall Street Journal in what he calls "rationalizing" terror--that is, considering the grievances expressed by people of the Middle East region, rich to poor, secular to Islamist, the course that would be followed by anyone who hopes to reduce the likelihood of further atrocities rather than simply to escalate the cycle of violence, in the familiar dynamics, leading to even greater catastrophes here and elsewhere. This is an outrage, Hitchens explains, because "I know already" about these concerns--a comment that makes sense on precisely one assumption: that the communications were addressed solely to Hitchens. Without further comment, we can disregard his fulminations on these topics.

In one charge, Hitchens is correct. He writes that "the crime [in Sudan] was directly and sordidly linked to the effort by a crooked President to avoid impeachment (a conclusion sedulously avoided by the Chomskys and Husseinis of the time)." It's true that I have sedulously avoided this speculation, and will continue to do so until some meaningful evidence is provided; and have also sedulously avoided the entire obsession with Clinton's sex life.

From the rest, it may be possible to disentangle some intended line of argument, but I'm not going to make the effort, and fail to see why others should. Since Hitchens evidently does not take what he is writing seriously, there is no reason for anyone else to do so. The fair and sensible reaction is to treat all of this as some aberration, and to await the return of the author to the important work that he has often done in the past.

In the background are issues worth addressing. But in some serious context, not this one.

A Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky

Minority Report

By Christopher Hitchens

I have a very clear memory of the destruction of the Al-Shifa chemical plant in Khartoum on August 20 1998, and of the false claim made by the Administration that it had sought out and destroyed a nerve gas facility that was linked to Osama bin Laden's shady business empire. I wrote a series of columns in The Nation, dated October 5, October 19 and November 16, 1998.The first one of these was recirculated on the web by Salon magazine. I then wrote an expanded essay for the January 1999 issue of Vanity Fair. And the chapter in my book No One Left To Lie To, titled "Clinton's War Crimes," is a summary and digest of all the above. I quoted Tom Carnaffin, the British engineer who had helped construct the plant. I quoted the German ambassador, Werner Daum, who had recently toured it. I interviewed one of the world's leading authorities on inorganic chemistry, Professor R.J.P. Williams. I interviewed Milton Bearden, a retired CIA station chief. My conclusions, which were stated earlier and at greater length than by any of the journalists cited by Chomsky, were that the factory was a medical and pharmaceutical facility, unrelated in any way to the holdings of bin Laden, and that this could and should have been known in advance. In any case, I argued, the United States had no right to hit Sudanese territory without at least first requesting an inspection of the plant. In short, as I put it, several times and in several different ways, "only one person was killed in the rocketing of Sudan. But many more have died, and will die, because an impoverished country has lost its chief source of medicines and pesticides." As I also phrased it, the President had "acted with caprice and brutality and with a complete disregard for international law, and perhaps counted on the indifference of the press and public to a negligible society like that of Sudan."

Thus I think I am indeed "unaware," with or without Chomsky's lofty permission, of my propensity for racist contempt. Since Chomsky reads The Nation and seems to have a clip-file on Al-Shifa, he is in a position to know my views if he cares to. I think I can say without immodesty that I wrote more, and earlier, about this scandal than any other person. I also helped the late John Scanlon in preparing the basis for a lawsuit by the owner of the factory, Saleh Idris, seeking compensation from the US government. That suit is still active.

I have to say that I didn't get an unambiguous response from the left at the time, because there were those who were uneasy at the allegation that Clinton had "wagged the dog." (The bombing took place as Miss Lewinsky was returning to the grand jury, and secured him a nauseating "bounce" in the opinion polls.) It was felt in some "progressive" quarters that to make too much of the atrocity was to "give ammunition" to the Republicans. I may be mistaken, but I don't remember Noam Chomsky circulating the news of the war crime when it would have made any difference. Certainly not with the energy he does now--by way of a comparison with the massacres in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania.

How exact is this comparison? Chomsky is obviously right when he says that one must count "collateral" casualties, though it isn't possible to compute the Sudanese ones with any certainty. (And he makes a small mistake: The Sudanese regime demanded at the UN only that there be an on-site inspection of the destroyed factory--a demand that the United States resisted, to its shame.) But must one not also measure intention and motive? The clear intention of the September 11 death squads was to maximize civilian deaths in an area renowned for its cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic character. (The New York Yemeni community alone is "missing" some 200 members, mainly push-cart vendors in the nearby streets.) The malicious premeditation is very evident and manifest: The toll was intended to be very much higher than it was. And I believe I have already pointed out that the cruise missiles fired at Sudan were not crammed with terrified civilian kidnap victims. I do not therefore think it can be argued that the hasty, politicized and wicked decision to hit the Al-Shifa plant can be characterized as directly homicidal in quite the same way. And I don't think anyone will be able to accuse me of euphemizing the matter.

(Incidentally, the New York Times for October 2 carried a report on page B4. The World Bank now estimates that the shock suffered by the international economy as a result of September 11 will have the following effects on poorer societies. "It is estimated that 40,000 children worldwide will likely die from disease and malnutrition and 10 million people will fall below the bank's extreme poverty line of $1 dollar a day or less as a result of slower economic growth." No doubt Chomsky will wish to factor this in. Or will he prefer to say that the World Bank is the problem in the first place? His casuistry appears to be limitless.)

In a brilliant article in The New Yorker for October 12, 1998 ("The Missiles of August"), Seymour Hersh reconstructed the decision-making that led to the Al-Shifa raid. He found that four of the five Joint Chiefs had been kept in the dark about it, as had Louis Freeh of the FBI, who was then in Africa investigating the ghastly bombings of two neighboring US Embassies. I was myself able to find several senior people at the State Department and the CIA who had urged against the strike at the time and who could prove it, and would let their own names be used for quotation. It was as near to a purely presidential decision, replete with Strangelovian opportunism, as could be. Never mind for now whether this strengthens my case for trying Clinton--a case that Chomsky makes without realizing it. How fair is it to say that "the United States" decided in advance on all those Sudanese deaths? It might be fairer than one might like, but it still wouldn't come up to the Al Qaeda standard.

As one who spent several weeks rebutting it, and rebutting it in real time, I can state that the case for considering Al-Shifa as a military target was not an absolutely hollow one. (One of the main Sudanese opposition groups, for example, had identified it as a bin Laden facility engaged in the manufacture of nerve gas.) In one way this makes little difference, because Clinton never demanded an inspection and because a nerve gas plant can't be folded like a tent and moved overnight. So that what was committed was certainly an aggression. However, at least a makeshift claim of military targeting could be advanced: President Clinton and his contemptible Defense Secretary Cohen did not boast of having taught Sudanese civilians a lesson. Furthermore, the Sudanese regime had been sheltering and nurturing Osama bin Laden, had been imposing its own form of Islamic dictatorship and has in other respects a filthy record. And two embassies had just been blown up in Kenya and Dar es Salaam, with the infliction of very many hundreds of African civilian casualties, by men in bin Laden's network. (It's not specially pointful to this argument, but Chomsky's touching belief in the then-imminence of regional peace strikes me as naïve.) I thus hold to my view that there is no facile "moral equivalence" between the two crimes.

But this by no means exhausts my disagreement with Chomsky. Suppose that we agree that the two atrocities can or may be mentioned in the same breath. Why should we do so? I wrote at the time (The Nation, October 5, 1998) that Osama bin Laden "hopes to bring a 'judgmental' monotheism of his own to bear on these United States." Chomsky's recent version of this is "considering the grievances expressed by people of the Middle East region." In my version, then as now, one confronts an enemy who wishes ill to our society, and also to his own (if impermeable religious despotism is considered an "ill"). In Chomsky's reading, one must learn to sift through the inevitable propaganda and emotion resulting from the September 11 attacks, and lend an ear to the suppressed and distorted cry for help that comes, not from the victims, but from the perpetrators. I have already said how distasteful I find this attitude. I wonder if even Chomsky would now like to have some of his own words back? Why else should he take such care to quote himself deploring the atrocity? Nobody accused him of not doing so. It's often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven't been made.

To be against rationalization is not the same as to be opposed to reasoning. By all means we must meet the challenge to our understanding. I think that the forces represented by Al Qaeda and the Taliban are fairly easy to comprehend, but not very easy to coexist with. I also believe that we would do well to take them at their word. I even believe that it is true that September 11 was a hinge event. Chomsky gives me the impression of regarding it as an inconvenience. With some irritation and impatience, he manages to assimilate it to his pre-existing worldview, and then goes on as if nothing much had happened. I think it would be flattering to describe this as an exercise in clarification. And I think it also contains a serious danger of euphemism, in that it purportedly connects the mass murder of our fellows to causes (such as the emancipation of the Palestinians from occupation) which are much better considered in their own right. To propose the connection is inevitably to flatter Al Qaeda, even if only indirectly. If I seem to exaggerate, then pray consider this passage from page 39 of Chomsky's most recent book: A New Generation Draws The Line: Kosovo, East Timor and The Standards of the West (Verso 2000):

Here, the pretense of remorseless logic degenerates into flat-out irrationality. "These conclusions follow straightforwardly"? The accusations against Milosevic are "plausible"? A year ago it would have been possible to notice the same thing that strikes the eye today: Chomsky's already train-wrecked syllogisms seem to entail the weird and sinister assumption that bin Laden is a ventriloquist for thwarted voices of international justice. (For more on this, see an excellent forthcoming essay on Chomsky's work in The American Prospect, authored by Professor Jeffrey Isaac of the University of Indiana, to whom I am indebted.)

If there is now an international intervention, whether intelligent and humane, or brutal and stupid, against the Taliban, some people will take to the streets, or at least mount some "Candle In the Wind" or "Strawberry Fields" peace vigils. They did not take to the streets, or even go moist and musical, when the Administration supported the Taliban. But that was, surely, just as much an intervention? An intervention, moreover, that could not even pretend to be humane or democratic? I had the same concern about those who did not object when the United States safeguarded Milosevic, but did protest when it finally turned against him. Am I supposed not to notice that these two groups of "anti-interventionists" are in fact the same people?

Concluding, then. I have begun to think that Noam Chomsky has lost or is losing the qualities that made him a great moral and political tutor in the years of the Indochina war, and that enabled him to write such monumental essays as his critique of the Kahan Commission on Sabra and Shatila or his analysis of the situation in East Timor. I don't say this out of any "more in sorrow than anger" affectation: I have written several defenses of him and he knows it. But the last time we corresponded, some months ago, I was appalled by the robotic element both of his prose and of his opinions. He sought earnestly to convince me that Vaclav Havel, by addressing a joint session of Congress in the fall of 1989, was complicit in the murder of the Jesuits in El Salvador that had occurred not very long before he landed in Washington. In vain did I point out that the timing of Havel's visit was determined by the November collapse of the Stalinist regime in Prague, and that on his first celebratory visit to the United States he need not necessarily take the opportunity to accuse his hosts of being war criminals. Nothing would do, for Chomsky, but a strict moral equivalence between Havel's conduct and the mentality of the most depraved Stalinist. (He's written this elsewhere, so I break no confidence.) I then took the chance of asking him whether he still considered Ed Herman a political co-thinker. Herman had moved from opposing the bombing of Serbia to representing the Milosevic regime as a victim and as a nationalist peoples' democracy. He has recently said, in a ludicrous attack on me, that the "methods and policies" of the Western forces in Kosovo were "very similar" to the tactics of Al Qaeda, an assertion that will not surprise those who are familiar with his style. Chomsky knew perfectly well what I was asking, and why, but chose to respond by saying that he did not regard anybody in particular as a co-thinker. I thought then that this was a shady answer; I now think that it may also have been an unintentionally prescient one. I don't believe that any of those who have so anxiously sought his opinions in the past three weeks have felt either inspired or educated by them, because these opinions are a recipe for nothingness. And only an old admiration should prevent me from adding, nothingness at the very best.

Noam Chomsky Has ‘Never Seen Anything Like This’

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/noam_chomsky_has_never_seen_anything_like_this_20100419/

Posted on Apr 19, 2010

Truthdig Trek with Chris Hedges

Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism

Minority Report

By Christopher Hitchens

September 4, 2001

Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism

Minority Report

By Christopher Hitchens

September 4, 2001

Reply to Hitchens

By Noam Chomsky

A Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky

Minority Report

By Christopher Hitchens