Doctrines And Visions: Who Is To Run The World, And How?

[Violet_Crumble]

by Noam Chomsky
June 07, 2004


We have just passed the first anniversary of the President's declaration of victory in Iraq. I won't speak about what is happening on the ground. There is more than enough information about that, and we can draw our own conclusions. I will just mention one aspect of it: What has happened to Iraqis? About that, we know little, because it is not investigated. Some surprise has recently been voiced in the British press about this gap in our knowledge. That's a misunderstanding. It is quite general practice. Thus we do not know within millions how many people died in the course of the US wars in Indochina. Information and concern are so slight that in the only careful study I have found, the mean estimate of Vietnamese who died is 100,000, about 5% of the official figure and probably 2-3% of the actual figure. Virtually no one knows that victims of the US chemical warfare that began in 1962 are estimated at about 600,000, still dying, or that it was recently discovered that the use of devastating carcinogens was at twice the announced rate, and at levels incomparably beyond anything tolerated within the industrial societies -- all in South Vietnam; the North was spared this particular atrocity.

As a thought experiment, we might ask how we would react if Germans estimated deaths in the Holocaust at 2-300,000 and had little knowledge or interest about the modalities of the slaughter.

There is one exception to lack of information about casualties in Indochina. There have been very intensive efforts from the start to reveal, or very often simply to invent, atrocities that could be attributed to the Khmer Rouge. Post-KR literature on the topic is substantial, ranging from astonishingly low estimates of KR crimes in the curious 1980 CIA demographic study, when evidence had become available about the peaking of atrocities at the end, to far higher and more credible estimates by serious and extensive scholarship. One can hardly fail to observe that the single exception to the rule involves crimes that are doctrinally useful.

Turning to Iraq, information is as usual slight, but not entirely lacking. A study by the London-based health organization MEDACT last November, scarcely mentioned in the US, gave a rough estimate of between 22,000-55,000 Iraqi dead, and also reported rising maternal mortality rates, near doubling of acute malnutrition, and an increase in water-borne diseases and vaccine-preventable diseases. "The most important thing that comes out of is that the data are not available," Dr. Victor Sidel commented. He is a noted US health authority, past president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and an adviser to the study. Two months ago, a fact-finding mission by the Belgian NGO Medical Aid for the Third World found that even the devastating effects of the US-UK sanctions have not been overcome, including their veto of medicines, and that infant mortality is apparently increasing and general health declining because of deteriorating living conditions: lack of access to food, potable water, or medical aid and hospitals, and a sharp decline in purchasing power - largely the result of the remarkable failures of what should have been one of the easiest military occupations ever. "It has been one of the most extraordinary failures in history," the veteran British correspondent Patrick Cockburn observed, quite plausibly.

The best explanation I have heard was from a high-ranking official of one of the world's leading humanitarian and relief organizations, who has had extensive experience in some of the most awful places in the world. After several frustrating months in Baghdad, he said he had never seen such a combination of "arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence" -- referring not to the military, but to the civilians who run the Pentagon. In Iraq they have succeeded in achieving pretty much what they did in the international arena: quickly turning the US into the most feared and often hated country in the world. The latest in-depth polls in Iraq - before the recent revelations about torture -- found that among Iraqi Arabs, the US is regarded as an "occupying force" rather than a "liberating force" by 12 to 1, and increasing. If we count also Kurds, who have their own distinct aspirations and hopes, the figures are still overwhelming: 88% of all Iraqis according to one recent poll, also pre-Abu Ghraib. Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz and associates have even succeeded in turning the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, previously a marginal figure, into the second most popular leader in Iraq, right below Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, with 1/3 of the population "strongly supporting" him and another third "somewhat supporting" him. Other Western polls find support for the occupying forces in single digits, and the same for the Governing Council they appointed.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=5660

[I thought so.]

1. Its 5 hours.

Chumpsky is a yawn.

[bemildred]

2. Good read thanks.

Vintage Chomsky.