E Wayne Ross

Here’s a great song and dance routine on all those magnetic yellow ribbons:

“Stick magnetic ribbons on your SUV”

The Georgia Straight: The vindication of Noam Chomsky

As political alienation grows, America’s most famous dissident finds the mainstream is coming to him

At the age of 77, after decades as one of the world’s most widely recognized and controversial critics of American government, Noam Chomsky is still occasionally taken aback by the politics of his country. For more than 30 years, he has tracked the steady and dramatic shift to the right in the attitudes and actions of America’s leadership, a trend that, as he recently told the Georgia Straight in an extended interview, began as a predictable reaction in the early ’70s to the preceding decade’s wave of activism. Still, he admits, “I didn’t think it would go this far.”Six presidents have come and gone since the renowned dissident and MIT linguistics pioneer published his first political work, American Power and the New Mandarins, in 1969. Yet the administration now governing surely counts as the most brazenly autocratic in that period. During their two terms, George W. Bush and his cohorts have taken virtually every step open to them to confine the powers of government to the Oval Office and its small coterie of appointed advisors. The result has undermined fundamental civil and human rights through such groundbreaking concepts as the USA PATRIOT Act and the suspension of habeas corpus. And all of it has served as scaffolding for a grimly innovative doctrine of unilateral military action that, as Chomsky argues in his latest book, Failed States, has radically weakened the fabric of international relations.

And yet, at the same time, Chomsky senses a growing openness in public political discussions that runs directly counter to this strong rightward current.

“I can see it in my own personal experience,” he says on the line from his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Last night I gave a talk, and the topics that I now discuss I could barely mention 10 or 20 years ago. It happened that this talk was on the Middle East, and I’d given another one a couple of days earlier. There were huge crowds. I was saying things that I couldn’t say in the past. When I talked about these topics even a few years ago, even in a place like Cambridge, Massachusetts, the ‘Athens of America’, there had to be police protection, literally, because the meetings were being broken up and there were threats of terror. But now it’s just totally gone—I talk freely and engage people. And the same is true all over the country.”

These impressions are backed up by the popular response to Chomsky’s books. Failed States (Metropolitan Books, $32), released in March (and, amazingly, his 58th publication on politics), continues to sell strongly, while his 2003 title Hegemony or Survival (Owl Books) currently resides in the top 30 of the New York Times’ bestseller list, the result of a spike in sales after Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s much-noted endorsement of the book during a recent speech at the UN. It can all be considered evidence of what Chomsky describes as the American public’s widespread feelings of alienation from an electoral process in which party platforms are increasingly indistinguishable from one another and increasingly distant from the genuine concerns of voters.

“When I look at public opinion, I’m not far out of the mainstream,” he says, referring to discussions in Failed States of recent polls suggesting a widening political split between most Americans and their leaders. “I’m in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I’ve ever said. For example, a small majority of the public believes that the United States ought to give up the veto at the [UN] Security Council and follow the will of the majority, even if we don’t like it. Have you ever heard those words expressed anywhere during an election campaign?”

A further example is the immediate prospect of serious environmental degradation, a matter that—according to an extensive 2004 public-opinion poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations that Chomsky cites—is of deeply pressing importance to most Americans. “We read in the press that the United States was one of the few industrial countries that wouldn’t sign the Kyoto protocol, that didn’t support it,” he explains. “That’s true if by ‘United States’ you exclude its population. The population was overwhelmingly in favour of it—in fact, so strongly in favour that a majority of Bush voters assumed that he was in favour of it. That’s partly a reflection of the fact that the party’s election managers are very careful to keep issues off the table so you don’t know where candidates stand.”

And so on with a host of other major issues, from universal health care to the invasion of Iraq. Chomsky sees few reasons to believe that matters will be any different in the American midterm elections slated for next month, even though one might reasonably expect Bush’s Republicans to suffer a resounding defeat in response to a slew of scandals, misdeeds, and distortions of vital fact.

“If there were a genuine opposition party in the United States, it would have been making hay in the last year or two,” he notes. “I mean, every week the Bush administration has been shooting themselves in the foot on something, often in grotesque ways. But, although their popularity has declined as a result, the Democrats have gained very little from it.…The reason is because they’re perceived—quite accurately—as not presenting much of an alternative. On issues of major concern to Americans, they don’t take any clear position.…There are exceptions—I don’t want to talk about everybody. But as a general rule, the tendency is that they [Democrats and Republicans] both appeal to pretty much the same constituencies, namely concentrations of economic power and privilege. I mean, you don’t run in an American election—again, with rare exceptions—unless you have substantial support of sectors of corporate power. And in fact the elections themselves have over the years become increasingly deprived of political content.”

Chomsky has long argued that this hollowing-out of democratic debate, to the point of vacuousness during election campaigns, is largely the result of the growing prevalence and sophistication of the public-relations industry—“the same people who are selling lifestyle drugs and toothpaste on television”, as he remarks to the Straight.

“Everyone knows that when you look at a television ad, you do not expect to get information,” he explains. “You expect to see delusion and imagery. And when they sell candidates, they naturally do the same thing, particularly because there’s pressure in both parties to keep away from issues, since the public by and large doesn’t agree with them on issues.”

Thus the extraordinary usefulness of the war on terror, which, as a tool for misdirecting public attention, has been all the more effective for being hazily defined. As Chomsky argues in Failed States, it is merely the latest and most streamlined version of a tactic in use since the outset of the Cold War. Like its predecessors’, its power is reductive: complex and often unpalatable plans for dominance on the world stage are transformed into simple dramas that pit a wholly benign American superpower against the diabolical enemy of the day—even when, as in the case of Saddam Hussein, that enemy was relatively recently a favoured ally. Its basis is a PR–like appeal to emotion, he says, focusing on fear for the purpose of blurring the surrounding facts. And foremost among the current facts, as Chomsky points out, is the increasing evidence that Bush’s adventure in Iraq has worked directly against its stated aims.

“This is a very frightened country,” he notes. “Actually, it’s been a frightened country all through its history, where it’s been very easy to mobilize people in fear. That’s true of many countries, but particularly true here. There is a genuine fear of terror, and it has a basis, like most fears. The Bush administration’s main appeal to the country—in the 2004 election and today [in the midterm-election campaigns]—is ‘Keep away from all issues; we’re going to protect you from terror.’ Is there any truth to that? No.”

For proof, Chomsky points to a recent intelligence report—initially leaked in the New York Times on September 24 and reluctantly declassified by the president two days later—in which a range of U.S. intelligence agencies assessed the ongoing occupation of Iraq as a “cause célèbre” for violent Islamist groups around the world.

The report, Chomsky says, merely “stressed what has been known in the past. But now we have it from a higher authority, and in more detail, that the war, exactly as predicted, has increased the threat of terror and, in fact, has increased it far beyond what was anticipated. The dynamics were understood. It was predicted by intelligence agencies and specialists. It’s been verified since by the CIA and others.”

Where, then, is the widespread public outcry? If, as Chomsky claims, the majority of American voters reside some distance to the left of their leaders in the political spectrum, and if they are now more open than ever to opinions and ideas that have been consistently excluded from official discussion, why is there a clear lack of organized popular opposition, especially as the next set of elections approaches?

Chomsky suggests that there is “another new strain” growing alongside this greater public openness. “At least it’s new in my experience, which goes back 60 years: a feeling of hopelessness. I mean, we have every possible opportunity, and an incomparable legacy of freedom, of privilege, of opportunity, and there’s numbers that I’ve never seen involved, engaged, and concerned. But they feel they can’t do anything. They feel hopeless.”

Such desperation, he argues, is the result of an array of forces at work on average Americans, among them a deliberate erosion of key institutional and organizational structures, such as unions, “in which people used to get together and form opinions and prepare actions.” Reinforcing the “atomizing” trend, he adds, is a rising tide of materialism, driven on by what he refers to as the “fabrication of consumers”.

“That’s by now a huge industry, and it affects everyone,” he says. “People are deeply in debt—for much of the population, debt is greater than income. So they’re trapped.…People are induced—you can’t say compelled, but induced under tremendous pressure—to purchase commodities that they don’t want.”

Couple this with the stagnation of real wages that most of the population has experienced over the past 25 years, Chomsky says, and “people do feel helpless. I mean, if you’re working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.”

The fact that these options remain provides Chomsky with his greatest source of optimism at this late stage of his career. Indeed, although he has throughout the years been accused by opponents on both the right and the left of being motivated by a kind of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, he invokes the long, hard-won traditions of civil liberties and intellectual freedom that have flourished in the United States, most often through popular resistance.

“You know, we’re not living in a fascist state,” he says. “We don’t have to face torture chambers and secret police and so on. Consumerism is a much easier threat to face than torture chambers. We can overcome this, as in the past. There have been similar periods of regression that have been overcome. The 1960s is a recent example. It really led to civilizing society in significant ways. The rights of minorities, the rights of women, opposition to aggression—these were substantial changes. And there was a backlash…and very self-conscious efforts to try to beat back the democratizing wave. And, yes, we’re in the middle of that period now. But not forever. It’s continuing, but I think its hold on power is very fragile and it could be overcome. It’s a matter of will, really.”

Tom Engelhardt: George Bush’s Iraq in 21 Questions

So what exactly does “victory” in George Bush’s Iraq look like 1,288 days after the invasion of that country began with a “shock-and-awe” attack on downtown Baghdad? A surprising amount of information related to this has appeared in the press in recent weeks, but in purely scattershot form. Here, it’s all brought together in 21 questions (and answers) that add up to a grim but realistic snapshot of Bush’s Iraq. The attempt to reclaim the capital, dipped in a sea of blood in recent months — or the “battle of Baghdad,” as the administration likes to term it — is now the center of administration military strategy and operations. So let’s start with this question:

How many freelance militias are there in Baghdad?

The answer is “23” according to a “senior [U.S.] military official” in Baghdad — so write Richard A. Oppel, Jr. and Hosham Hussein in the New York Times; but, according to National Public Radio, the answer is “at least 23.” Antonio Castaneda of the Associated Press says that there are 23 “known” militias. However you figure it, that’s a staggering number of militias, mainly Shiite but some Sunni, for one large city.How many civilians are dying in the Iraqi capital, due to those militias, numerous (often government-linked death squads), the Sunni insurgency, and al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia-style terrorism?

5,106 people in July and August, according to a recently released United Nations report. The previous, still staggering but significantly lower figure of 3,391 offered for those months relied on body counts only from the city morgue. The UN report also includes deaths at the city’s overtaxed hospitals. With the Bush administration bringing thousands of extra U.S. and Iraqi soldiers into the capital in August, death tolls went down somewhat for a few weeks, but began rising again towards month’s end. August figures on civilian wounded — 4,309 — rose 14% over July’s figures and, by late September, suicide bombings were at their highest level since the invasion.

How many Iraqis are being tortured in Baghdad at present?

Precise numbers are obviously in short supply on this one, but large numbers of bodies are found in and around the capital every single day, a result of the roiling civil war already underway there. These bodies, as Oppel of the Times describes them, commonly display a variety of signs of torture including: “gouged-out eyeballs… wounds… in the head and genitals, broken bones of legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns… acid-induced injuries and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin… missing teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails.” The UN’s chief anti-torture expert, Manfred Nowak, believes that torture in Iraq is now not only “totally out of hand,” but “worse” than under Saddam Hussein.

How many Iraqi civilians are being killed countrywide?

The UN Report offers figures on this: 1,493 dead, over and above the dead of Baghdad. However, these figures are surely undercounts. Oppel points out, for instance, that officials in al-Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency “and one of the deadliest regions in Iraq, reported no deaths in July.” Meanwhile, in Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad, deaths not only seem to be on the rise, but higher than previously estimated. The intrepid British journalist Patrick Cockburn recently visited the province. It’s not a place, he comments parenthetically, “to make a mistake in map reading.” (Enter the wrong area or neighborhood and you’re dead.) Diyala, he reports, is now largely under the control of Sunni insurgents who are “close to establishing a ‘Taliban republic’ in the region.” On casualties, he writes: “Going by the accounts of police and government officials in the province, the death toll outside Baghdad may be far higher than previously reported.” The head of Diyala’s Provincial Council (who has so far escaped two assassination attempts) told Cockburn that he believed “on average, 100 people are being killed in Diyala every week.” (“Many of those who die disappear forever, thrown into the Diyala River or buried in date palm groves and fruit orchards.”) Even at the death counts in the UN report, we’re talking about close to 40,000 Iraqi deaths a year. We have no way of knowing how much higher the real figure is.

How many American and Iraqi troops and police are now trying to regain control of the capital and suppress the raging violence there?

15,000 U.S. troops, 9,000 Iraqi army soldiers, 12,000 Iraqi national police and 22,000 local police, according to the commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. James Thurman — and yet the mayhem in that city has barely been checked at all.

How many Iraqi soldiers are missing from the American campaign in Baghdad?

Six Iraqi battalions or 3,000 troops, again according to General Thurman, who requested them from the Iraqi government. These turn out to be Shiite troops from other provinces who have refused orders to be transferred from their home areas to Baghdad. In the capital itself, American troops are reported to be deeply dissatisfied with their Iraqi allies. (“Some U.S. soldiers say the Iraqis serving alongside them are among the worst they’ve ever seen — seeming more loyal to militias than the government.”)

How many Sunni Arabs support the insurgency?

75% of them, according to a Pentagon survey. In 2003, when the Pentagon first began surveying Iraqi public opinion, 14% of Sunnis supported the insurgency (then just beginning) against American occupation.

How many Iraqis want the United States to withdraw its forces from their country?

Except in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq, strong majorities of Iraqis across the country, Shiite and Sunni, want an immediate U.S. withdrawal, according to a U.S. State Department survey “based on 1,870 face-to-face interviews conducted from late June to early July.” In Baghdad, nearly 75% of residents polled claimed that they would “feel safer” after a U.S. withdrawal, and 65% favored an immediate withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign forces. A recent Program on International Policy Attitudes or PIPA poll found 71% of all Iraqis favor the withdrawal of all foreign troops on a year’s timetable. (Polling for Americans is a dangerous business in Iraq. As one anonymous pollster put it to the Washington Post, “If someone out there believes the client is the U.S. government, the persons doing the polling could get killed.”)

How many Iraqis think the Bush administration will withdraw at some point?

According to the PIPA poll, 77% of Iraqis are convinced that the United States is intent on keeping permanent bases in their country. As if confirming such fears, this week Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish president of the U.S.-backed Iraqi government ensconced in the capital’s well-fortified Green Zone, called for Iraqis to keep two such permanent bases, possibly in the Kurdish areas of the country. He was roundly criticized by other politicians for this.

How many terrorists are being killed in Iraq (and elsewhere) in the President’s Global War on Terror?

Less than are being generated by the war in Iraq, according to the just leaked National Intelligence Estimate. As Karen De Young of the Washington Post has written: “The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.” It’s worth remembering, as retired Lt. Gen. William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, told a group of House Democrats this week, that Al Qaeda recruiting efforts actually declined in 2002, only spiking after the invasion of Iraq. Carl Conetta of the Project for Defense Alternatives sums the situation up this way: “The rate of terrorism fatalities for the 59 month period following 11 September 2001 is 250% that of the 44.5 month period preceding and including the 9/11 attacks.”

How many Islamic extremist websites have sprung up on the Internet to aid such acts of terror?

5,000, according to the same NIE.

How many Iraqis are estimated to have fled their homes this year, due to the low-level civil war and the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods?

300,000, according to journalist Patrick Cockburn.

How much of Bush’s Iraq can now be covered by Western journalists?

Approximately 2%, according to New York Times journalist Dexter Filkins, now back from Baghdad on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. Filkins claims that “98 percent of Iraq, and even most of Baghdad, has now become ‘off-limits’ for Western journalists.” There are, he says, many situations in Iraq “even too dangerous for Iraqi reporters to report on.” (Such journalists, working for Western news outlets, “live in constant fear of their association with the newspaper being exposed, which could cost them their lives. ‘Most of the Iraqis who work for us don’t even tell their families that they work for us,’ said Filkins.”)

How many journalists and “media support workers” have died in Iraq this year?

20 journalists and 6 media support workers. The first to die in 2006 was Mahmoud Za’al, a thirty-five year old correspondent for Baghdad TV, covering an assault by Sunni insurgents on two U.S.-held buildings in Ramadi, capital of al-Anbar Province on January 25. He was reportedly first wounded in both legs and then, according to eyewitnesses, killed in a U.S. air strike. (The U.S. denied launching an air strike in Ramadi that day.) The most recent death was Ahmed Riyadh al-Karbouli, also of Baghdad TV, also in Ramadi, who was assassinated by insurgents on September 18. The latest death of a “media support worker” occurred on August 27: “A guard employed by the state-run daily newspaper Al-Sabah was killed when an explosive-packed car detonated in the building’s garage.” In all 80, journalists and 28 media support workers have died since the invasion of 2003. Compare these figures to journalistic deaths in other American wars: World War II (68), Korea (17), Vietnam (71).

How many U.S. troops are in Iraq today?

Approximately 147,000, according to General John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, significantly more than were in-country just after Baghdad was taken in April 2003 when the occupation began. Abizaid does not expect these figures to fall before “next spring” (which is the equivalent of “forever” in Bush administration parlance). He does not rule out sending in even more troops. “If it’s necessary to do that because the military situation on the ground requires that, we’ll do it.” Finding those troops is another matter entirely.

How is the Pentagon keeping troop strength up in Iraq?

4,000 troops from the 1st Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, operating near Ramadi and nearing the end of their year-long tours of duty, have just been informed that they will be held in Iraq at least 6 more weeks. This is not an isolated incident, according to Robert Burns of the Associated Press. Units are also being sent to Iraq ahead of schedule. Army policy has been to give soldiers two years at home between combat tours. This year alone, the time between tours has shrunk from 18 to 14 months. “In the case of the 3rd Infantry,” writes Burns, “it appears at least one brigade will get only about 12 months because it is heading for Iraq to replace the extended brigade of the 1st Armored.” And this may increasingly prove the norm. According to Senior Rand Corporation analyst Lynn Davis, main author of “Stretched Thin,” a report on Army deployments, “soldiers in today’s armored, mechanized and Stryker brigades, which are most in demand, can expect to be away from home for ‘a little over 45 percent of their career.'”

The Army has also maintained its strength in through a heavy reliance on the Army Reserves and the National Guard as well as on involuntary deployments of the Individual Ready Reserve. Thom Shanker and Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times recently reported that the Pentagon was once again considering activating substantial numbers of Reserves and the National Guard for duty in Iraq. This, despite, as reporter Jim Lobe has written, “previous Bush administration pledges to limit overseas deployments for the Guard.” (Such an unpopular decision will surely not be announced before the mid-term elections.)

As of now, write Shanker and Gordon, “so many [U.S. troops] are deployed or only recently returned from combat duty that only two or three combat brigades — perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 troops — are fully ready to respond in case of unexpected crises, according to a senior Army general.”

How many active duty Army troops have been deployed in Iraq?

Approximately 400,000 troops out of an active-duty force of 504,000 have already served one tour of duty in Iraq, according to Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times. More than one-third of them have already been deployed twice.

How is Iraq affecting the Army’s equipment?

By the spring of 2005, the Army had already “rotated 40% of its equipment through Iraq and Afghanistan.” Marine Corps mid-2005 estimates were that 40% percent of its ground equipment and 20% of its air assets were being used to support current operations,” according to analyst Carl Conetta in “Fighting on Borrowed Time.” In the harsh climate of Iraq, the wear and tear on equipment has been enormous. Conetta estimates that whenever the Iraq and Afghan wars end, the post-war repair bill for Army and Marine equipment will be in the range of $25-40 billion.

How many extra dollars does a desperately overstretched Army claim to need in the coming Defense budget, mainly because of wear and tear in Iraq?

$25 billion above budget limits set by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld this year; over $40 billion above last year’s budget. The amount the Army claims it now needs simply to tread water represents a 41% increase over its current share of the Pentagon budget. As a “protest,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker chose not even to submit a required budget to Rumsfeld in August. The general, according to the LA Times’ Spiegel, “has told congressional appropriators that he will need $17.1 billion next year for repairs, nearly double this year’s appropriation — and more than quadruple the cost two years ago.” This is vivid evidence of the literal wear-and-tear the ongoing war (and civil war) in Iraq is causing.

How is Iraqi reconstruction going?

Over three years after the invasion, the national electricity grid can only deliver electricity to the capital, on average, one out of every four hours (and that’s evidently on a good day). At the beginning of September, Iraq’s oil minister spoke hopefully of raising the country’s oil output to 3 million barrels a day by year’s end. That optimistic goal would just bring oil production back to where it was more or less at the moment the Bush administration, planning to pay for the occupation of Iraq with that country’s “sea” of oil, invaded. According to a Pentagon study, “Measuring security and stability in Iraq,” released in August, inflation in that country now stands at 52.5%. (Damien Cave of the New York Times suggests that it’s closer to 70%, with fuel and electricity up 270% from the previous year); the same Pentagon study estimates that “about 25.9% of Iraqi children examined were stunted in their physical growth” due to chronic malnutrition which is on the rise across Iraq.

How many speeches has George W. Bush made in the last month extolling his War on Terror and its Iraqi “central front”?

6 so far, not including press conferences, comments made while greeting foreign leaders, and the like: to the American Legion National Convention on August 31, in a radio address to the American people on September 2, in a speech on his Global War on Terror to the Military Officers Association on September 5, in a speech on “progress” in the Global War on Terror before the Georgia Public Policy Foundation on September 7, in a TV address to the nation memorializing September 11, and in a speech to the UN on September 19.

***

This week, the count of American war dead in Iraq passed 2,700. The Iraqi dead are literally uncountable. Iraq is the tragedy of our times, an event that has brought out, and will continue to bring out, the worst in us all. It is carnage incarnate. Every time the President mentions “victory” these days, the word “loss” should come to our minds. A few more victories like this one and the world will be an unimaginable place. Back in 2004, the head of the Arab League, Amr Mussa, warned, “The gates of hell are open in Iraq.” Then it was just an image. Remarkably enough, it has taken barely two more years for us to arrive at those gates on which, it is said, is inscribed the phrase, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

[Note to readers: Among the many sites I found helpful in compiling this piece, I particularly want to recommend (as I so often do) Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, Antiwar.com, and the War in Context. All three do invaluable work. ]

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com (“a regular antidote to the mainstream media”), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The Last Days of Publishing, a novel, and in the fall, Mission Unaccomplished (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.