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Chomsky on Iraq
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grufty jim
grufty jim
1978 posts

Chomsky on Iraq
Oct 16, 2002, 23:50
from an interview with Noam Chomsky...

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Of the various potential military operations that you mentioned, the one that I think is serious is Iraq. Again, that has nothing to do with international terrorism.

The Iraq policy is also a kind of continuation, but it could change. They may consider this to be an opportunity to reestablish control over Iraq, which is extremely important. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, much of it under-developed or undeveloped. Saudi Arabia is the major one, Iraq is second, and it's substantial. It's estimated to be huge, way beyond the Caspian, East and Central Asian region. You can just be confident that the United States is not going to allow that to stay out of control and certainly not to fall under the influence of its rivals, like, say, France and Russia, which have the inside track now on Iraqi oil. So one way or another, the US will do what it can, and it can do a lot, to regain its control over those resources.

It has nothing to do with terrorism, it has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's atrocities. We know that for certain. The reason we know that is because, you hear Clinton, Tony Blair, Bush and [former Secretary of State] Albright, and the rest of them talking about what a monster Saddam Hussein is, we can't let him survive, he used chemical warfare against his own population and he carried out major massacres and so on.

All of those charges are correct. But they're just missing three words, namely: with our support.

It's true, he carried out all these atrocities, developing weapons of mass destruction -- with our support. The US and Britain supported him, and continued to support him well after the atrocities, continued to provide him with technology to develop weapons of mass destruction, as they knew, at a time when he was really dangerous, much more dangerous in the 1980's when this was going on than today. So the charges are correct, but they're plainly irrelevant. And they're just pure deception. Unless one points out, yeah, he did all these horrible things with our support, then this is just worse than lies. So it's not because of his atrocities, its not because of terrorism, to which he may have connections or not. (they haven't even tried to show anything). It's in order to regain control of, primarily, the oil resources in a very rich area.
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