Chomsky on Afghanistan

Noam Chomsky's latest thoughts on US foreign policy have been posted on his weblog. They deal with the US-led overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001, and they are beyond bizarre. Go see. Chomsky begins (ellipsis and square brackets in original):

...[T]he invasion was not undertaken to overthrow the Taliban. That was an afterthought, added after three weeks of bombing. The second, and far more important reason [for the invasion], is that the invasion was undertaken with the recognition that it might drive literally millions of people to starvation and death, which makes it a major war crime.

He goes on to assert inelegantly:

In both Afghanistan and Iraq, evaluation of choices has to at least compare invasion with permitting internal popular overthrow of a hated regime.

The last time - literally the last time - "internal popular overthrow" of Saddam Hussein's regime was attempted was in the wake of the first Gulf War. For various reasons that seemed plausible at the time, yet proved horrifying misguided - notably the belief that Saddam's regime would prove as fragile as the East European Communist regimes that had lately been swept away, and the determination to adhere to the letter of UN Security Council resolutions that had authorised Saddam's expulsion from Kuwait but not his overthrow - the US did not intervene to assist revolt against Saddam. The outcome was the slaughter by Saddam's regime of an estimated 20,000 Kurds in the North and between 30,000 and 60,000 Shi'ah in the South. The notion that we should have eschewed military intervention in Iraq and trusted to, let alone explicitly urged once more, an internal uprising is one of the most irresponsible suggestions I've yet heard in the entire debate over Iraq.

But consider the first passage quoted above, and an apt comment by one of Chomsky's readers (the second published comment below the post):

Chomsky writes: "The second, and far more important reason [for the invasion], is that the invasion was undertaken with the recognition that it might drive literally millions of people to starvation and death, which makes it a major war crime."

This sentence is either incoherent (on one interpretation) or else an outrageous lie. The ambiguity turns on what Chomsky means by "reason". If Chomsky means "motive" or "purpose", then he is alleging that the very motivation and purpose of the invasion was not to overthrow the Taliban or disrupt Al-Qa'ida (i.e. it was not Colin Powell's stated objective "to rip up" the al-Qa'ida terror network of training camps, lethal laboratories, etc.) but rather to "drive literally millions of people to starvation and death". That would be consistent with Chomsky's claims elsewhere that successive U.S. administrations have a morality no better than that of the Nazis, so maybe he really thinks genocide was the intended PURPOSE of the invasion.

On Friday evening I posted a link to Chomsky's comments and also to these critical remarks. Of course, Chomsky's critic is right, and saved me the trouble of going into a long argument on the subject. I also noted that Chomsky's post appeared to be a transcription of oral comments, given the interpolations. But on reading Chomsky's post again a short while later, I wondered whether those bracketed comments might have altered the sense of Chomsky's remarks. I'm unable to tell from this post alone, but with that uncertainty, I took down my comment temporarily pending further information. Chomsky has published no clarification or amendment of his remarks, though, so we must assume - as he has complete editorial control of his own weblog - that he's happy with them as they stand. I am thus posting this comment to alert my readers again to his remarkable argument, though with the caveat that Chomsky may possibly - and prudently - come round to saying that his argument has been distorted by his own editor. In that case, I would take his word for it. There is quite enough material from Chomsky that is unambiguous and on the record - most particularly his use of source material - to discredit him as it is.

UPDATE: There is still no correction to the Chomsky blog post, and I'm fairly sure there should be one, so I have written to ZNet magazine to point out that it appears to have maligned the famous dissident through an errant interpolation. I shall let you know of any response. Chomsky does have a history of making some rather startling assertions about US foreign policy, of which the 'silent genocide' accusation about policy in Afghanistan is one well-known example. But in this case I have concluded that he cannot have meant what his editors have attributed to him, and I have done him an injustice by being slow to realise this.

UPDATE II: Another commenter on Chomsky's blog has confimed that the interpolation is false, quoting the original reply that Chomsky gave in a ZNet forum, and suggesting: "In light of the understandable confusion this has generated, it would probably be a good idea to amend the original post to clarify this." That would explain it. ZNet is certainly at fault in its rendering of Chomsky's reply, as am I in having initially taken that rendering seriously.