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Chomsky: Instead of "Illegal" Threat to Syria, U.S. Should Back Chemical Weapons Ban in All Nations

NOAM CHOMSKY:

[Obama}can maintain the threat of force, which incidentally is a crime under international law, that we should bear in mind that the core principle of the United Nations Charter bars the threat or use of force, threat or use of force. So all of this is criminal, to begin with, but he’ll continue with that. The United States is a rogue state. It doesn’t pay any attention to international law.



He―it was kind of interesting what he didn’t say. This would be a perfect opportunity to ban chemical weapons, to impose the chemical weapons convention on the Middle East. The convention, contrary to what Obama said, does not specifically refer just to use of chemical weapons; it refers to production, storage or use of chemical weapons. That’s banned by the international norm that Obama likes to preach about. Well, there is a country which happens to be―happens to have illegally annexed part of Syrian territory, which has chemical weapons and is in violation of the chemical weapons convention and has refused even to ratify it―namely, Israel



The other things that he said were not unusual, but nevertheless kind of shocking to anyone not familiar with U.S. political discourse, at least. So he described the United―he said that for seven decades the United States has been "the anchor of global security." Really? Seven decades? That includes, for example, just 40 years ago today, when the United States played a major role in overthrowing the parliamentary democracy of Chile and imposing a brutal dictatorship, called "the first 9/11" in Latin America. Go back earlier years, overthrowing the parliamentary system in Iran, imposing a dictatorship; same in Guatemala a year later; attacking Indochina, the worst crime in the postwar period, killing millions of people; attacking Central America; killing―involved in killing―in imposing a dictatorship in the Congo; and invading Iraq―on and on. That’s stability? I mean, that a Harvard Law School graduate can pronounce those words is pretty amazing, as is the fact that they’re accepted without comment.




NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, once again, what’s particularly interesting is what he didn’t say. So, yes, a good idea to look at the videos of the gas attack in Syria. But then we could also look at the photos of deformed fetuses in Saigon hospitals still appearing decades after John F. Kennedy launched a major chemical warfare attack against South Vietnam, 1961, dousing the country with poisonous dioxin-laced Agent Orange. Dioxin is one of the major carcinogens. The attack was aimed at food crops, in an effort―and at ground cover, part of a general assault against the country―a huge number of atrocities, millions of people killed. The chemical―the effects of chemical warfare are felt until today, partially by American soldiers, too. Or we could look at the photos of other deformed fetuses coming regularly in Fallujah, attacked by U.S. Marines in November 2004, killing several thousand people, destroying much of the town, using weapons which―of unknown character, but which left radiation levels that epidemiologists have estimated are comparable to Hiroshima.




There’s hardly any international conventions that the U.S. has accepted, and those few that it has accepted are conditioned so as to be inapplicable to the United States. That’s true even of the genocide convention. The United States is self-authorized to commit genocide. In fact, that was accepted by the International Court of Justice. In the case of Yugoslavia v. NATO, one of the charges was genocide. The U.S. appealed to the court, saying that, by law, the United States is immune to the charge of genocide, self-immunized, and the court accepted that, so the case proceeded against the other NATO powers but not against the United States. In fact, the United States, when it joined the World Court―it helped introduce the modern World Court in 1946, and joined the World Court, but with a reservation. The reservation is that international agreements, laws, do not apply to the United States. So the U.N. Charter, the charter of the Organization of American States, the U.S. is immune to their―self-immunized to their requirements against the threat and use of force, intervention and so on.




NOAM CHOMSKY: The appropriate response would be to call for imposing the chemical weapons convention in the Middle East―in fact beyond, but we’ll keep to the Middle East―which would mean that any country that is in violation of that convention, whether it has accepted it or not, would be compelled to eliminate its chemical weapons stores. Just maintaining those stores, producing chemical weapons, all of that’s in violation of the convention, and now is a perfect opportunity to do that. Of course, that would require that U.S. ally Israel give up its chemical weapons and permit international inspections. Incidentally, this should extend to nuclear weapons, as well.


NERMEEN SHAIKH: And why do you think the U.S. started to push for military action so swiftly? 

NOAM CHOMSKY: As it always does. The United States is a violent military state. It’s been involved in military action all over the place. It invaded South Vietnam, practically destroyed Indochina, invaded Iraq, elicited a Sunni-Shia conflict, which is now tearing the region to shreds. I don’t have to run through the rest of the record. But the United States moves very quickly to military action, unilaterally. It can―sometimes can get some allies to go along. In this case, it can’t even do that. And it’s just a routine. The United States is self-immunized from international law, which bans the threat or use of force. And this is taken for granted here. So, for example, when President Obama repeatedly says all options are open with regard to Iran, that’s a violation of fundamental international law. It says we are using the threat of force, in violation of international law, to which we are self-immunized. There’s nothing new about this. Can you think of any other country that’s used military force internationally on anything remotely like the scale of the United States during these seven decades when, according to Obama, we’ve been the anchor of global security? 




U.S. credibility is at stake. Obama issued an edict, and it has to be enforced. That’s a familiar doctrine. It’s one of the leading doctrines of world affairs. Credibility of powerful, violent states must be maintained. It’s―occasionally called it the Mafia doctrine. It’s essentially the doctrine by which the godfather rules his domains within the Mafia system. That’s one of the leading principles of world order: Credibility has to be maintained.

But that has many variants. Sometimes it’s called the domino theory. If we don’t impose our will here, the dominos will start to fall, others will begin to be disobedient. In the case of Chile 40 years ago, to go back to that, what Latin Americans called the first 9/11, Henry Kissinger explained that Chile, under Allende, he said, is a virus that might spread contagion elsewhere, all the way to southern Europe


Just earlier on the program, you had an interview with Saul Landau, the late Saul Landau, with regard to [Cuba], and exactly the same doctrine applies there. The U.S. carried out―invaded Cuba, Bay of Pigs invasion.




The same was true in Vietnam. The primary motive for the Indochina wars, going back to the early 1950s, was presented here as the domino theory. But what that meant was, if you read the internal records, that there was a fear, a justified fear, that successful independent development in Vietnam might spread through the region, might spread contagion through the region. Others would attempt the same path, that itself was of no great significance, but it might spread as far as Indonesia, which has rich resources, and there, too, there might be a move towards independent development, independent of U.S. domination. And it was even feared that that might bring in Japan. John Dower, the famous Asia historian, described Japan as the "superdomino." The U.S. was concerned, deeply concerned, that if Southeast Asia moved toward independent development, Japan would "accommodate," the word that was used, to East and Southeastern Asia, becoming its technological industrial center and creating a system, an Asian system, from which the U.S. would maybe not be excluded, but at least which it wouldn’t control. Now, the U.S. had fought the Second World War to prevent that. That’s Japan’s new order, and it was in danger of being reconstituted if Indochina gained independence. That’s the domino theory.

Chomsky on 9/11, Syria’s "Bloody Partition" and Why U.S. Role Ensures Failure of Mideast Talks

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon, and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz





So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And he said, "Oh, it’s worse than that." He said―he reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper, and he said, "I just got this down from upstairs," meaning the secretary of defense’s office, "today." And he said, "This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." I said, "Is it classified?" He said, "Yes, sir."





NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I think that’s―it’s quite plausible. The Bush administration veered slightly, not far, but slightly, from the general pattern. Actually, the goal of U.S. policy for decades has been to control and dominate those countries. But the Bush administration was more extreme




There’s a long list of similar cases, going back to Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954. There was an assault against―major assault against Indonesia in 1958, an effort to strip away the outer islands where the resources are, and―because they were concerned about too much independence in Indonesia. That failed. Invasion of Cuba failed. The murder of Lumumba, in which the U.S. was involved, in the Congo destroyed Africa’s major hope for development. Congo is now total horror story, for years.





Iraq―the Iraq War was a very serious defeat for the United States, unlike the Vietnam War. In the case of Indochina, it’s called defeat, but that only means that the U.S. did not achieve its maximal objectives. It did achieve its major objectives, as McGeorge Bundy well understood. It had prevented a Vietnam from moving on a path of independent development, which might have had this contagious effect that Kissinger was concerned with. As it was put at the time, one rotten apple may spoil the barrel, meaning just what Arthur Schlesinger and others said. If you allow independent taking matters into your own hand in one place and it works, others will try to emulate it, system will erode―a standard principle for systems of power. The godfather of the Mafia understands it perfectly well. In the Mafia system, if some small storekeeper decides not to pay protection money, the money may not mean anything to the godfather, but he’s not going to let him get away with it. And, in fact, he’s not just going to go in and send his goons to get the money; he’s also going to beat him to a pulp, because others have to understand that disobedience is not tolerated. In international affairs, that’s called "credibility." The bombing of Kosovo, Wesley Clark’s bombing of Kosovo, was the same. After other―there were pretexts, but they collapsed, and the final one, as Tony Blair and George Bush said, was we have to maintain the credibility of NATO. NATO had issued edicts, and we must ensure that they’re obeyed.




NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, Syria right now is plunging into suicide. If the negotiations options that Lakhdar Brahimi and Russia and others have been pressing, if that doesn’t work, Syria is moving towards a kind of very bloody partition. It’s likely that the Kurdish areas, which already are semi-independent, will move towards further independence, probably link up with Iraqi Kurdistan, adjacent to them, maybe make some arrangements with Turkey―those are already in process―and the rest of Syria, what remains, will be divided between a bloody, murderous Assad regime and a collection of rebel groups of varying kinds, ranging from secular democratic to murderous, brutal terrorists. That looks like the outcome for Syria.

There is another part of Syria which is not talked about. It’s occupied by Israel and annexed by Israel. It’s the Golan Heights, annexed in violation of explicit Security Council orders not to annex it. Their credibility doesn’t matter, because Israel is an ally. So that’s another part of Syria.

That brings us to Israel-Palestine. Just a couple of days ago, Secretary Kerry, Secretary of State Kerry, appealed to the European Union to continue to support illegal, criminal Israeli settlement projects in the West Bank―wasn’t put in those words, but the way it was put is that Europe had taken the quite appropriate step of trying to draw back from support for Israeli operations in the illegal settlements―incidentally, that the settlements are illegal is not even in question. That’s been determined by the highest authorities―the Security Council of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice. In fact, up until the Reagan administration, the U.S. also called them illegal. Reagan changed that to "an obstacle to peace," and Obama has weakened it still further to "not helpful to peace." But the U.S. is virtually alone in this. The rest of the world accepts the judgment of the Security Council, the International Court of Justice, that the settlements are illegal, not just the expansion of the settlements but the settlements themselves

　

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