7 Noam Chomsky Quotes on Strategy

Noam Chomsky quotes on strategy

68. Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence. That's pretty obvious. You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case...

93. ...obviously the Serbs had contingency plans, as every sane person knew. The US has contingency plans to invade Canada. Israel has contingency plans to expel Palestinians, and few sane people doubt that they would carry them out if under attack. That's what military planners do for a living. [...] In that book I reviewed the kind of material selected from the OSCE report by the Irish TV announcer, but also reviewed the material that would have been selected by his exact counterpart in Belgrade, and the full conclusions.

103. Such attacks are morally outrageous and politically imbecilic. They are the best gift one can give to the most hardline and brutal elements -- exactly as happened, exactly as was predictable.

104. ...as a number the specialists have pointed out, Bush is Osama bin Laden's best ally... [9/11] was bitterly condemned by the jihadi movement around the world. The leading figures, the radical clerics and others, were denouncing it. Well, there was an opportunity to make some moves towards the Muslim world, and in fact even the radical Islamic extremist elements of the Muslim world, and undermine support for Al-Qaeda. What Bush did was the opposite: resorted to violence, particularly in Iraq, which simply mobilized support for Osama bin Laden. That's the way to deal with terrorism if you want to escalate it.

112. In September [2002] the government announced the national security strategy. That is not completely without precedent, but it is quite new as a formulation of state policy. What is stated is that we are tearing the entire system of the international law to shreds, the end of UN charter, and that we are going to carry out an aggressive war - which we will call 'preventive' - and at any time we choose, and that we will rule the world by force. In addition, we will assure that there is never any challenge to our domination because we are so overwhelmingly powerful in military force that we will simply crush any potential challenge. That caused shudders around the world, including the foreign policy elite at home which was appalled by this. It is not that things like that haven't been heard in the past. Of course they had, but it had never been formulated as an official national policy. I suspect you will have to go back to Hitler to find an analogy to that. Now, when you propose new norms in the international behavior and new policies you have to illustrate it, you have to get people to understand that you mean it. Also you have to have what a Harvard historian called an 'exemplary war', a war of example, which shows that we really mean what we say. And we have to choose the right target. The target has to have several properties. First it has to be completely defenseless. No one would attack anybody who might be able to defend themselves, that would be not prudent. Iraq meets that perfectly... And secondly, it has to be important. So there will be no point invading Burundi, for example. It has to be a country worthwhile controlling, owning, and Iraq has that property too.

113. I think that the polls taken in Baghdad explain it very well, they seem to understand. The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world's energy, right in the heart of the world's energy producing regions. To create, if they can, a dependent client state. To have permanent military bases. And to gain what's called 'critical leverage' - I'm quoting Zbigniew Brzezinski - to gain critical leverage over rivals, the European and Asian economies. It's been understood since the Second World War, that if you have your hand on that spigot, the main source of the world's energy, you have what early planners called 'veto power' over others. Iraq is also the last part of the world where there are vast, untapped, easily accessible energy resources. And you can be sure that they want the profits from that to go primarily to U.S.-based multinationals and back to the U.S. Treasury, not to rivals. There are plenty of reasons for invading Iraq.

178. Mass non-violent protest is predicated on the humanity of the oppressor. Quite often it doesn't work. Sometimes it does, in unexpected ways. But judgements about that would have to be based on intimate knowledge of the society and its various strands.