Excerpt from an Al Jazeera interview of Noam Chomsky
Let’s start with the obvious. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It’s now been moved forward to 90 seconds to midnight.
Midnight as the termination of the human experience on Earth, racing towards the threat of nuclear war. The threat of imminent climate disaster is increasing – Israel will be one of the major victims.
And our leaders, their major sin is that they’re racing towards disaster. We’re just now commemorating the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq … worst crime of the century, it’s being commemorated here. The US Navy just commissioned its most recent assault vessel and named it the USS Fallujah in memory of one of the worst atrocities of the US attack. Fallujah had been … a beautiful city. Marines invaded, destroyed it, killed thousands of people … People are still dying from the weapons that were used with phosphorus, depleted uranium.
It’s more than atrocious, it’s symbolic. Look over the past 20 years, see if you can find one sentence anywhere near the mainstream that says that the invasion of Iraq was a crime – it was the worst crime of the 20th century. The worst criticism you can make is it was a ‘mistake’. It’s been reconfigured, reshaped to be presented – even by liberal commentators – as a failed effort to save the Iraqi people from an evil dictator, which has absolutely nothing to do with why the war began.
And furthermore, it overlooks a small fact the United States strongly supported Saddam Hussein during the period in which he carried out his most horrible crimes, including things like the poisoning of Iraqis and the Halabja massacre, chemical weapons, killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians. The US was delighted, supported him right through.
So now, history is reconstructed so that we were trying to ‘save Iraqis’ from the person we were strongly supporting. Iraqis were not exactly clamouring for rescue from the country that had imposed sanctions in the 1990s that were so vicious and murderous that there were leading international diplomats who resigned because they regarded them as genocidal. But that’s the way the intellectual classes managed to reconstruct crimes of state. There are people who object around the periphery. You don’t hear their voice, they’re marginalised. You want to learn about the USS Fallujah? You’re not going to read it in the American press. You can read it in critical commentary around the edges where people like me were able to find out about it, not from the American press, but from Al Jazeera.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Noam Chomsky understands two things Cicero said: Victor Imperatus Tthe winners tell the story) and Ubi solitudenum facieunt, pacem appellant (They made a wasteland and called it peace).
It’s easy enough to blame Bush the Younger and his minions for lying us into a war. But, as Chomsky points out, that war was a culmination of the hypocrisy in several Administrations’ policies and the rapaciousness of the military contractors who helped to put, and keep, them in office.
There should be a Nuremberg-style trial for all of them.
I sometimes wonder if the hanging chads went the other way in Florida in 2000 how different the world would be. Old Bush actually green lit Saddam going into Kuwait “U.S. won’t get involved with any Iraq border disputes) which started the whole cascade of wars in Iraq.
I grew up with the “rah-rah USA” indoctrination extolling the supremely exceptional superiority of our country and its way of life. As a younger person, I didn’t question the things that our country did, even if those things madd me feel uncomfortable. I bought the notion that the USA only participated in just wars where we were needed to keep the world from falling apart. As I have aged, I see that we were lied to and that I didn’t do due diligence to investigate further. It’s disgusting the types of military situations we have created.
I already started questioning that with Vietnam. It was all too obvious in the buildup toward invading Iraq. The shocking thing was how many people who should have known better, supported that unjust invasion.
I grieve every day over what has happened in Iraq, and how newspapers I once respected such as the NYTimes were so eager for the U.S. to invade Iraq. I vividly remember the night in which missiles rained down on Iraq on television in live, theatrical, incendiary time, and Rumsfeld chortled about “shock and awe,” and my heart died.
I find my emotions these days ranging from rage to despair. Every day there’s another front opened up in the culture war😢😢