December 22, 2003
WHERE'S THE JOY?:
Dictators R Us (Noam Chomsky, December 21, 2003, AlterNet)
All people who have any concern for human rights, justice and integrity should be overjoyed by the capture of Saddam Hussein, and should be awaiting a fair trial for him by an international tribunal.An indictment of Saddam's atrocities would include not only his slaughter and gassing of Kurds in 1988 but also, rather crucially, his massacre of the Shiite rebels who might have overthrown him in 1991.
At the time, Washington and its allies held the "strikingly unanimous view (that) whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression," reported Alan Cowell in the New York Times.
Let's accept for the sake of argument that every single death Saddam Hussein is accused of was a function of US policy and our support for him. Okay, we came to our moral senses and now we've stopped him from killing anyone else. Wasn't that our responsibility, if the Chomskyian view is correct? Did he, therefore, support regime change? He says himself that we should be "overjoyed", so why isn't he? Posted by Orrin Judd at December 22, 2003 12:36 PM
Noam is just bitter because we also turned on one of his heroes, Ol' Joe Stalin, after WW II. Well, Joe tried to take over the world, but still....
Posted by: MonkeyPants at December 22, 2003 01:15 PMI hate to be suckered into this argument, because you have already presented the elegant defense.
However why should I accept the accusation that we supported Saddam's attacks on Iran. Yes we might have gotten vicarious pleasure from the Iraq invasion of Iran, and maybe even the practical effect of tempering the zeal of Khomeini but haven't I seen statistics showing that the biggest supporters in terms of military hardware were the Russian, French governments in that order.
Is it Chomsky's view that Russia (under communism) was a client state of the US?
Posted by: h-man at December 22, 2003 02:36 PMh-man:
That's the beauty of accepting it, if you're an interventionist. Yes, every bad thing on Earth is our fault, so why don't we clean the place up. It's an argument for unilateralism.
Posted by: OJ at December 22, 2003 02:46 PMh-man
Yes, you have. According to figures published last spring by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (and guess where their hearts lie), Russia, China and France supplied more than 90% of all arms sales to Iraq from 1979 to 2001. The figure for the US was less than 2%. It is very hard to believe Chomsky isn't fully aware of this.
Posted by: Peter B at December 22, 2003 04:39 PMAh, but the US gave Saddam a few satellite photos (supposedly). That is enough to condemn us to political hell.
Apparently Chomsky and his ilk cannot call a spade a spade, and cannot tell when they are sucking on the jackboot. Maybe it tastes good to them.
Posted by: jim hamlen at December 22, 2003 08:41 PMAfter consistently bashing the US on its East Timor "policy" (among other things), one might have thought that Chomsky would mellow after that ravaged country finally achieved independence.
Not to be, however, for Chomsky the vigilant (vigilant, that is, for every American fault, real or imagined)
To be sure, Chomsky may have been more than a bit chagrined when East Timorese president Jose Ramos Horta came out in studied favor of American military action in Iraq, basing his decision on the failed diplomacy that long plagued his own country's quest for independence from Indonesia.
If Chomsky somehow becomes convinced, however, that the US can be a force for good in the world, then it would appear that the Iraqi campaign, and its aftermath, is far more revolutionary than even the neo-cons ever imagined....
Not very likely. Still, if it helps sell books, why not? I can see "How I Learned to Love Bush" being a best-seller. He can always repudiate it later. Call it a temporary psychosis, etc....
Posted by: Barry Meislin at December 23, 2003 03:10 AM