Bruce where ever there is oil under an arab foot, there the american dick cheney trying to steal it.

I was simply wondering if the invasion had anything to do with a certain (oil) pipeline, or whether oil politics plays into it in any way.

zubub you are good. Fancy language, indignant comments... marvelous job!!! Are you planning on taking this material any further like say... the comedy network or something. Let me know I always get a good laugh trying to make sense of your incoherent ramblings.

Common Sense this adds nothing to this discussion. Although most of us enjoy you and Zubrus talking nonsense, when you ask rhetorical questions like this it really exposes you. Noam Chomsky is a respected writer and thinker. You may disagree with him, but your put-downs are plain silly... thanks for the laughs though but stop wasting our time... unless that is the plan?

Of course the overthrow of the Taliban was NOT a mere "afterthought" added three weeks later (Chomsky) but declared in the ultimatum issued to the Taliban BEFORE the military operations began. And of course the idea that "in retrospect" it seems "possible" that the Northern Alliance could overthrow the Taliban by itself is pure fantasy on the part of Chomsky, further evidence that he invents "facts" as needed for the anti-American polemic of the moment. Ed's correction demonstrates only that of the two plausible interpretations of Chomsky's comments as first posted here, one of them - the incoherent interpretation - was wrong, and the other - the outrageous falsehood interpretation - was correct, i.e. that Chomsky stated several outrageous falsehoods. Since all of these facts are within recent memory - 9/11, the ultimatum to the Taliban, the latter's refusal to comply in handing over bin Laden, the previous collapse of the Northern Alliance as they were pushed hundreds of miles northward and then their leader Massoud assassinated by al Qa'ida two days before 9/11 - the conclusion is scarcely avoidable that Chomsky is knowingly stating falsehoods, i.e. lying (unless he is no longer capable of distinguishing between fact and wishful fantasy).

It might not have been a clear and firm decision from the outset, nor might it have been the major purpose, but that doesn't make it an afterthought. The Taliban had to meet the demands or face the same (violent) consequences, and that was stated up-front. It was a possibility and was clearly identified as such. An "after thought", at least in my understanding of the word, would be if someone three weeks in went "hey, I've got an idea! Let's blow up the Taliban too!" Then, on a more practical note, I don't think anyone actually expected the Taliban to give in to these demands, given their previous history of failure to comply with UN resolutions. If that's so, then the attack against the Taliban was pretty much foreordained from the moment of this speech, and is again not an afterthought in any common sense of the term. As for the demands, they certainly do not include the fate of ordinary people (except indirectly via the exhortation to protect "aid workers"), but I'm not sure it is or should be our role to bomb countries into democracy. As for the failure to mention regime change, I'm not sure what else Bush could have meant when he said that the Taliban would suffer the same fate if they failed to comply. As I said before, it was conditional, and the conditions were not likely to be met.

Sorry - that last line should read 'the major purpose of US policy at this time'.  Bush's remarks were made just prior to the commencement of military action.  Tried to edit the above to correct this, but for some reason the 'edit' function is not working.

It does seem pretty clear: I read it as stating that the Taliban will be allowed to stay in power so long as they hand over the terrorists.  The demands read:

• Deliver to United States authorities all of the leaders of Al Qaeda who hide in your land.

• Release all foreign nationals, including American citizens you have unjustly imprisoned.

• Protect foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers in your country.

• Close immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. And hand over every terrorist and every person and their support structure to appropriate authorities.

• Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps, so we can make sure they are no longer operating.

These demands relate exclusively to shutting down terrorist training camps and protecting foreigners in Afghanistan.  There's a lot of rhetorical posturing before these demands about how awful the situation in Afghanistan is, how oppressed the people are, and how the US respects the people of Afghanistan, but when the demands are actually listed, the rights and liberties of those people are conspicuous only by their absence.  None of the demands even mentions the ordinary people in Afghanistan.  Neither is 'regime change' mentioned, nor for that matter is democracy.

That's surely a problem for any interpretation of US policy which sees "overthrowing the Taliban" as the major purpose of the invasion at the outset?  Chomsky dates the decision to overthrow the Taliban to three weeks after this point.  Perhaps he is mistaken, in which case someone should suggest a more plausible date.  But the text of this speech (insofar as official pronoucements constitute reliable evidence) tends to support the argument that overthrowing the Taliban was not the major pupose of the invasion at this time.

Does anyone know the basis for the claim that the overthrow of the Taliban "in retrospect looks possible"?  Just how possible is "possible," anyway?  If I remember correctly, the UN, at least, had been issuing endless resolutions against the Taliban with their usual lack of success.

 Moreover, the claim that the overthrow of the Taliban was an afterthought seems demonstrably false.  Consider Bush's speech on 9/20/01:

"By aiding and abetting murder, the Taliban regime is committing murder. And tonight the United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban:

[snip]

"The Taliban must act and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists or they will share in their fate."

That seems pretty clear.  Perhaps I have misunderstood something, though.

I'd like to thank ed for clarifying what was actually said.  The comments make a lot more sense when they're seen in the context of the original question.

I do have one point to ponder, though.  Chomsky asserts that "[a]ctions are evaluated on the basis of likely consequences, not whatever may have happened," which makes good sense, at least as a general principle.  I do wonder, though, how we might apply it not just to the US but to other actors on the world stage.  Bin Laden, for example, must have known that his actions would likely cause a massive US military response.  Therefore, by Chomsky's argument, some of the blame for the situation in Afghanistan (and maybe Iraq) must lie at his feet.  Not that that excuses what the US did; it just adds another bad actor to the mix.

I mention this because it isn't quite my view (for reasons that I can get into if people are interested) but it seems to be an unacknowledged consequence of Chomsky's view.

Kosovo is another horrible story. I suggest reading the Rambouillet Accord. Some quite shocking statements in there. The "deal" was made worse and worse each time Milosevic agreed. He went much farther than the West thought, but in the end they put in bad enough lines so that they got their will, as Milosevic finally had to reject the dictat. Chapter 4a: "1. The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles." Appendix B: "6. a. NATO shall be immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal. 8. NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations." Appendix B was added very late in the process, without Russia's knowledge or approval. This was what finally got Milosevic to reject it, and got the West their much-wanted war. This process is bad enough, then there is the bombing itself. NATO forces of course took out defensive installations and SAMs so they could fly around bombing whatever they wanted without fear of being fired at. They took out bridges, power, water and you-name-it. The result of the bombing was increased murder from the Milosevic regime. It's a very dirty story, in many respect very similar to what's going on in Iraq.

hmm the no fly zone was implemented after the insurgency against Saddam failed . the no fly zones were never made to protect KURDS.. if the Idea was to protect KURDS, the no-fly zone would have been better USED in TURKEY.. Turkey has the best records of mudering Kurds, I am not sure but I think number of death surpass Kosovo..

No, Chomsky does not need a 'mental health evaluation'.

For those who do not know: these comments are selected from replies made by Chomsky to people on the ZNet sustainer forums.  Members ask questions, ZNet staff put them to Chomsky, then they post his replies on the forums.  Some replies are then picked and posted to this weblog.  Chomsky does not post them himself.  It's not dissimilar from other interviews that he does, except here the questions are put by ZNet members rather than by professional journalists.

In this case, the editorial job (as the interpolations might suggest) has altered the sense of Chomsky's reply.  I'm not a big fan of this format myself anyway as the blog posts often make little sense in themselves even when reproduced verbatim, since they omit the original question.

In this case, the question put to Chomsky was:

My friend Wahid,  who's not exactly big on US policy in general says that Afghanistan is much better off due to the US presence.  For one, the country was living on such a backwards and extreme dictatorship that US imperialism isn't so bad by comparison.  US companies won't beat the shit out of people for having too short of a beard, for example.  I'm not saying I support the invasion, but I think Afghanistan is better off and we should stay until the people say otherwise.  Iraq on the other hand....  what a mess.

To which Chomsky replied:

His conclusion sounds reasonable to me, and what happens now should be up to the population, if that can be determined -- not so easy.

None of this has anything at all to do with support for the invasion.  One reason is that the 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, 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.  The fact that the worst didn't happen has nothing to do with the justification for the actions, clearly.  Actions are evaluated on the basis of likely consequences, not whatever may have happened.

Nothing in the original reply justifies the editor's interpolation of '[for the invasion]' after 'far more important reason'.  In light of the understandable confusion this has generated, it would probably be a good idea to amend the original post to clarify this.

Does anybody know if Chomsky has had a mental health evaluation? 

There were no kurds inside the no-fly zone.. merely the kurds were just an imaginary excuse to maintain US and British positions. Its is because of this no-fly zone that the US were able to restrain Hussein from rebuilding his military conventional weapons..it always new he had no more WMD. zubub, no kurds lives under the no-fly zone, they wouldnt trust the americans intelligence.

This is a good point. But let's get things straight. First, was there already a no-fly zone in place? As far as I recall, the no-fly zones were imposed as a CONSEQUENCE of Saddams' new butchery and President Bush's (the elder's) embarrassment in the face of it. The northern no fly zone was imposed to protect the Kurds, and the southern to protect the Shi'a and Marsh Arabs (at least from direct attack, not from draining their swamps, obviously). Of course they were imposed too late to prevent tens of thousands of Shi'ites from perishing, but it's astonishing that you bring this up in this context (more below). Second, are you suggesting that this is what Chomsky is suggesting??? That the U.S. should have more aggressively confronted the Iraqi forces militarily? I doubt it. To be sure, Chomsky's stance at the time was utterly hypocritical, so I agree that anything is possible. For instance, in 1990 he had a piece in the Guardian denouncing the American-led preparations for attack on Iraq, because there were peaceful alternatives to getting Saddam to leave Kuwait, such as diplomacy and sanctions! (the latter which he now calls "genocide"). It strikes me as nothing short of astonishing that Z-Netters end up saying the U.S. should have earlier imposed the no-fly zone. Everytime the Americans and British enforced the zones, shooting down Iraqi fighter planes and protecting the Kurd zone, the freeest polity in the Middle East after Israel and Turkey, there were howls of protest and sarcasm from the Chomsky clones: what gives the U.S. the right to be the policeman of the world, the no fly zones are illegal, blah blah. So now this is what you take the U.S. to task for - not imposing the fly zone early enough? And this is how you interpret Chomsky's complaints? Actually I think Chomsky was referring to the later period - probably some fantasy about how sanctions or actually the very imposition of the no-fly zone "undermined" some imagined "popular" uprising, but to be frank, who the hell knows?

The uprising also controlled most of Iraq's regions right after the first Gulf War. It had spread quite a lot. They wanted access to weapons depots but was not allowed access by the US. US helicopter pilots literally watched idle by (as they were not allowed to intervene) as the Iraqi uprising got slaughtered by the recovering Iraqi forces.

Simply put the war that began in 1980 ( Iraq-Iran) against Shi'a has been won by a smiling, dead Ayathollah in his coffin. This is a big screw-up..

'The claim that the U.S. "seriously undermined popular Iraqi efforts to overthrow Saddam from within" is further fantasy. What "popular efforts"? Could Chomsky provide details?'

 

The first Gulf War, the US allowed Iraqi helicopters into the no-fly zone in Southern Iraq, to allow Saddam butchering the popular revolt.  It would take little to no effort for the US to bar helicopters, but instead chose to watch as the gunships slaughtered freedom fighters.  Of course how could the US allow a pro-Iranian popular Shi'a revolt when it could mean an independent oil-rich muslim democracy?

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. But let's at least try to read him more charitably. Let's say he doesn't mean that was the purpose, but just that the U.S. knew that genocide would be a "likely consequence". (Actually, Chomsky first says they knew it "might" happen, which just means POSSIBLE consequence, but in the next sentence slides (typically) to the need to evaluate the action on the basis of genocide having been a "likely" consequence. Presumably he then means that the U.S. believed it would be a LIKELY consequence; otherwise on his own grounds the U.S. would be blameless since they may have believed it to have been merely a possible but not likely, and in fact very unlikely, consequence. In fact it was so unlikely a consequence that not only did it not even begin to happen, but the very opposite happened; the entire need for refugee camps in the first place soon disappeared, while even before then channels of aid opened up that surpassed the aid that had hitherto been going to the refugees). But then, on the 'charitable' interpretation, the sentence is plain incoherent. A "reason" for the war cannot be an unintended but putative consequence. That is just sheer non-sense; it is incoherent blather. But now let's really address the main political issue. It is clear to any rational observer that the objectives of the war were to overthrow the Taliban and disrupt Al-Qa'ida. It is just a vicious lie of Chomsky to claim that either of these were just "an afterthought, added after three weeks of bombing". Administration spokesmen stated from the beginning of the bombing, and before it, that either the Taliban had to hand over Bin Laden or else face overthrow. Secondly, Chomsky's allegation that the claim "in retrospect looks possible" that the Northern Alliance could have overthrown the Taliban without American help is complete rubbish. The Northern Alliance had been consistently pushed in one direction, backwards, and after the assassination of their charismatic leader Ahmed Shah Massoud on Sept. 9 by al-Qa'ida (two days before 9/11, probably not coincidentally), who had been holding disparate factions together, by all reports they were completely demoralised. Their military situation never looked worse than at the commencement of American bombing, and it is the devestation of Taliban forces by that bombing which according to every respectable military observer reversed the Northern Alliance's prospects. Again, sheer invention by Chomsky. The claim that the U.S. "seriously undermined popular Iraqi efforts to overthrow Saddam from within" is further fantasy. What "popular efforts"? Could Chomsky provide details? The idea that "the effect of Pearl Harbour was to drive the imperial powers out of Asia" is so ludicrous that only a longtime Z-Net Chomsky-cult-member could believe it. American influence literally suffused Japan post-war, while it had been relatively shut out from pre-war Imperial Japan. Japan was Americanised during the opst-war American occupation from top to bottom, from baseball to military bases to free market to parliamentary democracy to free press. The one thing Chomsky managed to get right is that Japan prospered unprecedently post-war, but this was a direct result of its entry into the American orbit, along with the American funded Marshall Plan to rebuild its economy. On the other hand, imperial decolonisation was a global phenomenon in the fifties and sixties; to imply this was a result of Pearl Harbour is beneath comment. And where was this "plenty of local support" for the Imperial Japanese due to their anti-imperialist (!) efforts? Does Chomsky mean the indoctrinated Japanese themselves, or is he trying to imply that, say, the Chinese or Indochinese offered the Japanese "plenty of local support"? (I'd like to see him tell that to the face of a Chinese or Korean person!) In either case the suggestion is patent nonsense; Japan was itself the leading imperialist power, committing genocide and mass rape with impunity all over the region UNTIL the Americans vanquished them, to the everlasting gratitude of Koreans, Singaporeans, and ethnic Chinese. How many absurdities did Chomsky pack into a couple of paragraphs? I've lost count.

[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 This sort of opinion you gave that people could risk starvation, may have influenced accelelarated food relief to the population of Afghanistan. This may make me sound like an apologist to your statements, really who knows how worse this could had been if you didnt take this stance against the invasion. I think it is ok to be wrong when holding pacifist views if there is a remotest chance to save lifes. If you recall Vietnam, you were instrumental and a participant within the peace movement that stop the War. Its very difficult to estimate how many more poor people would have died without he pacifist movement intervention and opinions. It would appear that the US had more friends in Afghanistan than in Iraq, in Iraq the US had only Saddam Hussein for friend..