Noam Chomsky: "It's official: The U.S. is the world's leading terrorist state, and proud of it."

[kpete]

Washington has also emerged as the world champion in generating terror. Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar warns of the "resentment-generating impact of the U.S. strikes" in Syria, which may further induce the jihadi organizations Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State toward "repairing their breach from last year and campaigning in tandem against the U.S. intervention by portraying it as a war against Islam."

That is by now a familiar consequence of U.S. operations that have helped to spread jihadism from a corner of Afghanistan to a large part of the world.

Jihadism's most fearsome current manifestation is the Islamic State, or ISIS, which has established its murderous caliphate in large areas of Iraq and Syria.

"I think the United States is one of the key creators of this organization," reports former CIA analyst Graham Fuller, a prominent commentator on the region. "The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS," he adds, "but its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the War in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS."

.....................



MORE:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27201-the-leading-terrorist-state

[baldguy]

1. Why is Chomsky parroting Rick Santorum?

Santorum: Religious persecution in U.S. could escalate as high as it did under Nazi Germany

[Comrade Grumpy]

2. What are you going on about? This looks like a sleazy diversion.

[enough]

5. Sleazy? Or stupid? I'd say the poster has read neither Chomsky nor

Santorum.

[baldguy]

7. You don't see the similarities in these comments?

Generally, people who regularly engage in unwarranted hyperbole either aren't interested in finding solutions to the problems raised, or a simply bent on grossly misrepresenting the situation.

I don't believe Barack Obama is a terrorist, as Chomsky asserts. Nor is he a Nazi, as Santorum does. Both of them a pretty sleazy.

[Comrade Grumpy]

17. Here's what Chomsky wrote:

Washington has also emerged as the world champion in generating terror. Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar warns of the "resentment-generating impact of the U.S. strikes" in Syria, which may further induce the jihadi organizations Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State toward "repairing their breach from last year and campaigning in tandem against the U.S. intervention by portraying it as a war against Islam."

That is by now a familiar consequence of U.S. operations that have helped to spread jihadism from a corner of Afghanistan to a large part of the world.

Jihadism's most fearsome current manifestation is the Islamic State, or ISIS, which has established its murderous caliphate in large areas of Iraq and Syria.

"I think the United States is one of the key creators of this organization," reports former CIA analyst Graham Fuller, a prominent commentator on the region. "The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS," he adds, "but its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the War in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS."

-------

I don't see any equivalence with Santorum's deluded ramblings. It's bizarre to even attempt to assert it.

[malaise]

37. +1,000

Still shaking head.

[hifiguy]

48. As usual, Chomsky cuts through the bullshit

and straight to the truth. With a chainsaw.

[ZombieHorde]

27. Maybe people are using different definition of the word "terrorist."

Maybe that is why some arguments seem absurd to some people.

[RoccoR5955]

9. I see absolutely no similarity to Chomsky and Santorum

Please elaborate your point or just keep it to yourself.

[baldguy]

10. Will you be voting for Obama's Terrorist Party tomorrow? Is this the Terrorist Underground?

Chomsky seems to think so.

Sarah Palin thinks so too

[RoccoR5955]

12. Obama's Terrorist party?!?!

No, I believe that Caribou Barbie's Party is the terrorist party.
And I believe that you, sir, are being a troll on this topic!

[baldguy]

13. Chomsky certainly believes Obama is a terrorist. I'm just pointing out that Palin does too.

And that's nearly identical in spirit to Santorum's comments.

And I'm also saying they're all wrong

There's really only one reason to post shit like this the day before an election: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025753671

[TRoN33]

15. Oh please Santorum isn't leaning fascist. He is full blown fascist.

And he is very proud of it. He intend to use our military might to make an example that we have bigger stick than rest of the world. Chomsky doesn't think like that way. He is far more progressive guy who desire for world peace and our peace with Mother Nature. Your comment is real silly.

[baldguy]

20. Santorum isn't President. Obama is.

And there's no way to spin Chomsky's comments other than to say that Obama is a terrorist.

Do you agree with Chomsky that Obama is a terrorist?

[Fumesucker]

23. If you lived with armed drones flying overhead and killing your neighbors from time to time..

Would you be scared of them?

[baldguy]

30. You think that is the most imminent physical threat people in Syria and Iraq face on a daily basis?

ISIS is just a bunch of simple farmers trying to live peacefully:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/30/mass-graves-hundreds-iraqi-sunnis-killed-isis-albu-nimr

And Obama is a terrorist trying to kill them without reason or cause, right?

[RedCappedBandit]

33. What was that you said about hyperbole? lol. nt.

[baldguy]

35. Oh, right. Obama is lying his ass off to start another war too.

Just like Bush did.

[TRoN33]

43. There is no another war under Obama.

Obama simply is being forced to continue the operations W. Bush started in first place. Get your friggin facts straight. Or better, get the fuck out of DU.

[Fumesucker]

46. People are not rational at threat assessment

Look at the recent fear meltdown/freakout over Ebola versus the reaction to the Newtown massacre (yawn then buy moar gunz).

Alien drones flying overhead randomly blowing your neighbors' homes to hell and gone is going to register pretty strongly no matter what else is going on.

[TRoN33]

41. Obama is not terrorists. Republicans are.

Republicans are pleased about potential non stop wars with Muslims because it is generating them more money and more power. Republicans want security over freedom. It's because it will enriched them in their own banks with the free gifts of stocks in defense industries. More than 40% of sitting Republicans owns stock in Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, and General Atomics. Only 10% of Democrats have it. W. Bush and his brothers owns stock in private military contractors, military-contracted ground excavator companies that literal ruined many holy sites of Islam in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, and Egypt.

Republicans are terror-fucking-ists. Not currently sitting President.

[blkmusclmachine]

3. ,

,

[Comrade Grumpy]

4. I think Mr. Fuller is correct. There was no US conspiracy to create ISIS...

...it's that our leaders too often aren't as smart as they think they are.

[TRoN33]

16. Thanks W. Bush, Cheney, Warmonger Neocons, Republicans, and DINO Democrats.

[libodem]

6. Proudly Exporting Terrorism World Wide

Since 2002.

[hughee99]

39. Since 2002?

Chomsky would tell you that you're off by about 100 years or so.

[libodem]

40. I concede that point

My friend. You are undoubtedly correct.

[whereisjustice]

8. We sent all the jobs to India and China, violence is the only thing we know how to manufacture

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

11. You can bet Noam won't be voting tomorrow

Or probably voting for some Green party wing nut who'll get less than 1%

[Maedhros]

28. Sorry, but Noam Chomsky has orders of magnitude more credibility than you. [n/t]

[Le Taz Hot]

32. "Green Party Nut."

I've never actually met a "green party nut" but I have met several Green Party candidates who do not qualify as "nuts." First off, what business is it of yours how he votes? Secondly, he is entitled to vote any way he chooses. As we've been trying to tell the party-before-country crowd for years now, the Democrats are not ENTITLED to anything.

I agree with the poster above, Noam Chomsky has more gravitas than all the people on this board combined. And he's right on with this article. We DO export terrorism -- it's why there is an ISIS.

[GeorgeGist]

34. Nice strawman.

Too bad it has no spine.

[L0oniX]

44. Attacking the messenger = got nothing ...YAwn ...boring.

[woo me with science]

49. Why did I just get this image

of Kim Kardashian criticizing Stephen Hawking?

[ProudToBeBlueInRhody]

52. "They're all the same" right?

Did you vote, or finally go full wingnut and just vote for the Republican?

[woo me with science]

53. Wow. More bile.

Indeed I voted, and NOT for Republicans...at least in part to piss off the Third Way and the DCCC.

"Accept Defeat" <--- newest DCCC fundraising email
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025736826

I have *never* in my life seen such a relentless and devoted campaign by corporate Democrats to try to depress turnout and attack every liberal in sight. And I suppose I should feel flattered, but I find it fascinating that you claim to know who I am, when I have no earthly idea who you are, apart from the two very sad examples you just provided of your schtick here...

Surely you can take a little break from the bile toward liberals by now. I mean, the polls are closing...

[woo me with science]

55. Actual liberals don't take vile, unwarranted smears of racism lightly

or use them as tools for a political agenda.

There are advantages to trying to stoke emotion and hurl every smear in the book, like you just did in that frothy paragraph, aren't there? Throwing everything at once reduces the chance that you will be called upon to defend *any* of it.

For example, if you tried to attack me *only* by claiming I say Republicans and Democrats are exactly alike, you already know (if you are telling the truth about being so familiar with my posts...) that I would embarrass you by citing all my posts saying just the opposite - in fact, describing in detail how the parties are careful to disagree especially on issues not important to the One Percent and how differences between the parties even on issues important to the One Percent are *used* by corporatists to enact a "lesser of two evils" con game on the electorate.

But you know something? Dangerous as it would be for you to focus on just one bogus attack, it's just as dangerous, and it turns out even more so, to try to hide disingenuous attacks among even more vile, slimy, and disingenuous smears.

Why? Because if you are called upon to defend ugly, unwarranted smears of racism aimed at other DUers and can't, you end up looking like an ethically challenged PR smearmonger instead of the passionate voter you are trying to appear to be.

So I'm going to ask you defend your smears here, particularly the bolded part of this vile sentence you wrote:

I'm sure there's some granola crunch nutbag Green candidate you can go vote for somewhere, who thinks Obama is "articulate&quot dog whistle) but just a puppet, maaaaaaaan".

Let me cut that down to the particularly ugly smeary part:

I'm sure there's some...candidate you can go vote for...who thinks Obama is "articulate" (dog whistle)

Forget the incidental smearing of all Greens that you use as an oily buffer to feign distance from your attempt to smear me personally. That's ugly enough in itself. But what I want to know is this:

[font size=3]

What basis do you have to make that vile accusation about me? Please explain to me and the community how you get off trying to publicly suggest that I would prefer a racist candidate.

[/font size]

Please be specific.

[niyad]

14. a very depressing, but totally unsurprising, article.

[woo me with science]

18. K&R

[dgauss]

19. Interesting excerpt from the NYT article that Chomsky references...

But in April 2013, President Obama authorized the C.I.A. to begin a program to arm the rebels at a base in Jordan, and more recently the administration decided to expand the training mission with a larger parallel Pentagon program in Saudi Arabia to train “vetted” rebels to battle fighters of the Islamic State, with the aim of training approximately 5,000 rebel troops per year.

So far the efforts have been limited, and American officials said that the fact that the C.I.A. took a dim view of its own past efforts to arm rebel forces fed Mr. Obama’s reluctance to begin the covert operation.

“One of the things that Obama wanted to know was: Did this ever work?” said one former senior administration official who participated in the debate and spoke anonymously because he was discussing a classified report. The C.I.A. report, he said, “was pretty dour in its conclusions.”

So here is Obama, asking the smart question, "Can you show me where this has worked in the past?"

The answer from the CIA seems to be "No not really."

The result, according to that article, was a sort of compromise.

Mr. Obama rejected that plan, but in the months that followed, Obama administration officials continued to debate the question of whether the C.I.A. should arm the rebels. Mr. Petraeus’s original plan was reworked until Mr. Obama signed a secret order authorizing the covert training mission after intelligence agencies concluded that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had used chemical weapons against opposition forces and civilians.

Asking if this kind of intervention has actually worked in the past is a good question, but maybe a better one would be to ask who has this kind of intervention worked well for in the past and who has suffered?

[baldguy]

21. The sad fact is that often there are just no good options.

Only some options that are less bad than others. And saying the President is a terrorist doesn't magically create good ones.

In this case, doing nothing was a much more bad option that doing what we did.

[dgauss]

25. I agree, I think it's a truism that sometimes all the options are bad.

I thought this was an example of the difficulty. Even to ask that question - "has this actually worked in the past?" is something I never hear on popular media and is not a question in most people's minds that I know who consider themselves as politically aware or informed.

Obama did ask the question, in private. I think of him as the most intelligent, thoughtful and decent president in my lifetime, but in the end we don't hear that question being voiced. We end up with policies that are still largely compromised by the worst forces in our society.

I'm not smart or informed enough to blame anyone with the certainty that most people seem to feel. I just think, finally here is one of the best, an amazing president, and we're still fucked.

[gratuitous]

22. Depends on what the meaning of "worked" is

If you mean, did it empower a formerly oppressed people to throw off the shackles of their oppressors and move toward effective self-government, the answer is "Hah!" If you mean, did it make a shitload of money for arms manufacturers, mercenaries, and other merchants of war, while de-stabilizing the area and forcing the U.S. to pay for more arms and mercenaries, then the answer is "You betcha!"

So, let's do the same thing again and see if we get a different result this time. It's not like anyone in authority will be held responsible when it all goes ker-flooey. Again.

[DeSwiss]

24. Well, yeah.

- It's our business model. Duh.

''The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.''

~George Orwell, 1984

''Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.''

~Robert Anton Wilson, from "Searching For Cosmic Intelligence"

''If armed force is a monopoly, it can not only be used to protect vested interests—it can also be made to turn a profit. Since Adams wrote the Law, manipulation of international conflict has become a fine art.''

~John Whiting, The Economics of Human Energy

''Let your life be a friction to stop the machine.'' ~ Henry David Thoreau

[Spitfire of ATJ]

26. "The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS,"

No. Republicans did.

They created an enemy so they could claim to be the heroes to save us all.

[baldguy]

31. Right. Republicans created ISIS, and people like Chomsky always find a way to blame Democrats.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

38. Thanks to the Clinton Era DLC.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

29. K&R for Chomsky and Truth-Out.

[malaise]

36. What Chomsky doesn't get is that the US thrives on war and weapons

and they need a war against Islam because there is no longer a war against Communism - hence they are not Muslims fighting back at our terror but Islam(ists).


One day soon there will be Hindu(ists) because the war machine must endure - the 1% have profit to make...in 'the US national interest'.

[Blue_Tires]

42. I'd still put Israel at #1

the USA is probably in the top 3, though...

[L0oniX]

45. It's wonderful for all the MIC investors ain't it.

[truedelphi]

47. Our Official New Doctrine - We have to kill all of them,

Before they start killing all of us."

[maced666]

50. Under President Obama...and not bush...

riiiiiight.......

[JEB]

51. We Americans love killing (Nam, Central America, Chile, ME etc.).

We are exceptionally good at killing. American exceptionalism.