11 Noam Chomsky Quotes on Intervention

Noam Chomsky quotes on intervention

28. I should say that when people talk about capitalism it's a bit of a joke. There's no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. That's right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. That's very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World.

66. I would feel no hesitation in saying that it is the responsibility of a decent human being to give assistance to a child who is being attacked by a rabid dog, but I would not intend this to imply that in all imaginable circumstances one must, necessarily, act in accordance with this general responsibility. One can easily concoct imaginary situations in which it would be inadvisable, even immoral to do so [...] the assumption that it is reprehensible for a powerful nation to invade a weak and tiny neighbor in order to impose on it an 'acceptable' government [...] I did not, and will not defend, just as I would not take the trouble to justify my belief that one should assist a child being attacked by a rabid dog.

71. Actually, on humanitarian intervention in general, I guess my view is not unlike the view that was attributed to Gandhi, accurately or not, when he was supposedly asked what he thought about western civilization. He is supposed to have said that he thought it would be a good idea. Similarly, humanitarian intervention would be a good idea, in principle. [...] can we expect that with the existing power structure, distribution of power in the world, there will be humanitarian intervention? There is nothing new about the question, of course. The idea of humanitarian intervention goes back to the days of the Concert of Europe a century ago - in the 19th Century there was lots of talk about civilizing missions and interventions that would do good things. The US intervened in the Philippines to 'uplift and christianize' the backward people, killing a couple of hundred thousand of them and destroying the place. The same thing happened in Haiti, the same thing happened with other countries. We cannot disregard the historical record and talk about an ideal world. It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.

74. [Q: when do you think is it right to intervene in the affairs of another nation?] I think there are conditions under which that would be possible. One basic condition is that nonviolent -- you mean violent intervention? -- that nonviolent means have been exhausted. That's one condition. A second condition is that the people of the country in which you're intervening support the intervention. Under those conditions -- and you can think of others -- intervention would be justified. However, we don't ever apply those conditions.

88. Regarding Operation Provide Relief/Operation Restore Hope/Battle of Mogadishu: [Q: what did the United States have to gain by intervening in Somalia?] In Somalia, we know exactly what they had to gain because they told us. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, described this as the best public relations operation of the Pentagon that he could imagine. His picture, which I think is plausible, is that there was a problem about raising the Pentagon budget, and they needed something that would be, look like a kind of a cakewalk, which would give a lot of prestige to the Pentagon. Somalia looked easy. Let's look back at the background. For years, the United State had supported a really brutal dictator, who had just devastated the country, and was finally kicked out. After he's kicked out, it was 1990, the country sank into total chaos and disaster, with starvation and warfare and all kind of horrible misery. The United States refused to, certainly to pay reparations, but even to look. By the middle of 1992, it was beginning to ease. The fighting was dying down, food supplies were beginning to get in, the Red Cross was getting in, roughly 80% of their supplies they said. There was a harvest on the way. It looked like it was finally sort of settling down. At that point, all of a sudden, George Bush announced that he had been watching these heartbreaking pictures on television, on Thanksgiving, and we had to do something, we had to send in humanitarian aid. The Marines landed, in a landing which was so comical, that even the media couldn't keep a straight face. Take a look at the reports of the landing of the Marines, it must've been the first week of December 1992. They had planned a night, there was nothing that was going on, but they planned a night landing, so you could show off all the fancy new night vision equipment and so on. Of course they had called the television stations, because what's the point of a PR operation for the Pentagon if there's no one to look for it. So the television stations were all there, with their bright lights and that sort of thing, and as the Marines were coming ashore they were blinded by the television light. So they had to send people out to get the cameramen to turn off the lights, so they could land with their fancy new equipment. As I say, even the media could not keep a straight face on this one, and they reported it pretty accurately. Also reported the PR aspect. Well the idea was, you could get some nice shots of Marine colonels handing out peanut butter sandwiches to starving refugees, and that'd all look great. And so it looked for a couple of weeks, until things started to get unpleasant. As things started to get unpleasant, the United States responded with what's called the Powell Doctrine. The United States has an unusual military doctrine, it's one of the reasons why the U.S. is generally disqualified from peace keeping operations that involve civilians, again, this has to do with sovereignty. U.S. military doctrine is that U.S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat. That's not true for other countries. So countries like, say, Canada, the Fiji Islands, Pakistan, Norway, their soldiers are coming under threat all the time. The peace keepers in southern Lebanon for example, are being attacked by Israeli soldiers all the time, and have suffered plenty of casualties, and they don't like it. But U.S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat, so when Somali teenagers started shaking fists at them, and more, they came back with massive fire power, and that led to a massacre. According to the U.S., I don't know the actual numbers, but according to U.S. government, about 7 to 10 thousand Somali civilians were killed before this was over. There's a close analysis of all of this by Alex de Waal, who's one of the world's leading specialists on African famine and relief, altogether academic specialist. His estimate is that the number of people saved by the intervention and the number killed by the intervention was approximately in the same ballpark. That's Somalia. That's what's given as a stellar example of the humanitarian intervention.

89. Let me just put the whole thing in a kind of mundane level. Like, suppose you walk out in the street, this evening, and you see a crime being committed, you know, somebody is robbing someone else. Well, you have three choices. One choice is to try to stop it, maybe you call 911 or something. Another choice is to do nothing. A third choice is to pick up an assault rifle and kill 'em both, and kill a bystander at the same time. Well, suppose you do that, and somebody says, 'Well, you know, why did you do that?' And you say, 'Look, I couldn't stand by and do nothing.' I mean, is that a response? If you can think of nothing that wouldn't do harm, then do nothing. And the same is true, magnified, in international affairs. Apart from the fact that there were things that could have been done.

90. The United States is not going in there to save the oppressed. If we wanted to save the oppressed we could have supported the nonviolent movement instead of selling them out at Dayton. Any kind of turbulence in the Balkans is a threat to the interests of rich, privileged, powerful people. Therefore, any turbulence in the Balkans is called a crisis. The same circumstances would not be a crisis were they to occur in Sierra Leone, or Central America, or even Turkey. But in Europe, the heartland of American economic interests, any threat in the Balkans has the possibility of spilling over.

116. The crucial question for us is not whether they have a theocratic government. I'd personally prefer not, but I can think of a lot of places where I'd prefer not, like here. But, the question is whether the US will agree to let Iraq alone. That means to make it very clean and explicit, both in word and in action, that the US will withdraw, set a timetable for it, will not influence what goes on in Iraq, will not leave military bases, will let the country go off on its own. I think we also ought to pay massive reparations, but I'll stop short of that. Those are the crucial issues. It's not up to Rumsfeld what kind of government they have, it's up to him to get out.

156. There have been times, however, when US officials have described what's going on in relatively frank terms; sometimes quite clearly. One put the matter in these words: 'The Central American area down to and including the Isthmus of Panama constitutes a legitimate sphere of influence for the United States [...] We do control the destinies of Central America and we do so for the simple reason that the national interest absolutely dictates such a course [...] We must decide whether we shall tolerate the interference of any other power in Central American affairs, or insist upon our own dominant position [...] Until now, Central America has always understood that governments that we recognize and support stay in power, while those we do not recognize and support fall [...] Nicaragua has become a test case, it is difficult to see how we can afford to be defeated.' That's fairly familiar. These remarks were made by Under Secretary of State Robert Olds in 1927, and the outside power that he was concerned about was Mexico. [audience laughter] Mexico at that time was a Russian proxy. We were no longer fighting Huns in the Dominican Republic, now we were fighting Russians in Nicaragua, and in particular the Russian proxy Mexico. Mexico was then a proxy of the Bolsheviks, so the Marines had to be sent in, once again, and they established Somoza, and established the National Guard which was the basis for American power throughout the region, and in fact one of the most effective murder-incorporated forces down there for many years. They killed Sandino, he was killed off by stealth couple of years later, the guerilla leader. As President Coolidge sent the Marines in, he made the following declaration: 'Mexico is on trial before the world.' Mexico is on trial before the world as a proxy of the Soviet Union when we send the Marines into Nicaragua. Now things have changed a little bit, now it's Nicaragua that's threatening Mexico as a Russian proxy... But again there's the same conclusion, you know, kill the spics and the niggers and so on. That follows no matter who's the proxy for who. And all of this is repeated at every moment of history with great seriousness and awe and so on as if it had some meaning, as if it wasn't just some black comedy.

232. As I read your remarks about how Kosovo reverses the usual left/right roles on intervention, I found myself wondering what Noam Chomsky--who epitomized the left-wing view that all bad things are the result of Western intervention--is saying now. Well, I couldn't find anything about the current crisis, but thanks to the miracle of search engine technology I did find some remarks about Bosnia, which are pathetic but revealing: First he tries to blame it all on the Western Right, then suddenly gets all judicious and practical. --Paul Krugman, March 29, 1999 [213]

241. I'm not a pacifist. And I am not one of those people, like Noam Chomsky, with whom I have agreed on some points, I don't agree on this point, who believes that all uses of American imperial power are by definition wrong. I suppose in fact I might be called, in a certain stretch, a liberal imperialist. I believe there are times when great powers can intervene to prevent atrocities, and should. --Susan Sontag, March 2, 2003 [222]