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From the Radio Free Michigan archives

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NOAM CHOMSKY:
..... against the heat of those television lights. In fact, I'll
start believing in the miracles of Japanese technology when they
figure out a way to televise without roasting the person who's
standing up in front.

The announced topic was "The New World Order: Central America and
the Middle East" which touches quite a few bases. And a title like
that leaves essentially two options. One option is to speak in
general terms about "the new world order" which, as far as I'm
aware, is the old world order adapted to changing contingencies,
as happens all the time -- the most important of these changing
contingencies having been about twenty years ago when the post-war
national economic system was essentially torn apart and has been
reconstructed.

A second option would be to pick some crucial issues -- some
particular topics -- and to use them to illustrate the way the
general contours of the "new world order" (and that means the old
world order) [operates]. And in thinking about it, it seemed to me
that the second tack might be more informative. In fact, almost any
current issue could be used because they all illustrate the same
essential features of policy. And, given U.S. power, U.S. policy
has an overriding and often determinative influence. Furthermore,
they all illustrate the same aspects of the ideological cover
within which policy is presented to us, some examples of which you
just heard from our illustrious leader.

The two examples that are listed in the announcement, Central
America and the Middle East, are perfectly natural ones. Both
regions -- Latin America and the Middle East -- are covered by
what has been the long-standing central doctrine of U.S. policy,
the Monroe Doctrine, which says, in effect, that certain regions
of the world are U.S. turf. No one else raises their head.
No foreign entry, certainly, but crucially, no indigenous groups.
If they do, their heads are cut off "if they get out of control,"
as the doves like to put it. The Monroe Doctrine was, of course,
devised for the Western Hemisphere in less ambitious days.

It's meaning for the Western Hemisphere was recently clarified
in the Gates hearings. Maybe the only interesting thing that
happened in the Gates hearings, as far as I noticed, was a
memorandum that was released from December, 1984 (it was addressed
from Gates to William Casey, the head of the CIA) on U.S. policy
toward Nicaragua. And it opened by saying that we have to start
talking tough about Nicaragua. Let's stop the pretenses about
preventing arms [shipments] to El Salvador and all of this other
nonsense which is so easily exposed (although, I should say that the
media continued to trot it out when it was useful), and let's start
talking tough. And then he said: We have to rid the hemisphere of
this regime by any means necessary -- any means that we could use,
up to bombing. And he pointed out correctly that if we don't
accept this commitment to rid the hemisphere of anybody we don't
like, we will have abandoned the Monroe Doctrine which confers
upon us that right.

Well, it was interesting. Actually, the day that appeared I
happened to be talking to someone in Detroit, and I suggested
to the audience that they keep their eyes open to see what the
reaction will be to this memorandum predicting that there would
be a null reaction. And, in fact, that's true. It never came up
in Congress. The media didn't mention it. It wasn't considered
one of the big issues. And that's exactly correct because
essentially, everyone agrees. Across the spectrum, it's agreed
that we have the right to rid the hemisphere -- or, for that
matter, the world -- of anybody we don't like, by any means that
we find feasible and possible. And he is quite right in saying
that is the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine.

In this particular sense (meaning, we have the right to rid any
area of anyone we don't like) the Monroe Doctrine was extended
to large parts of the world after the Second World War. That's
just a reflection of the extraordinary power of the U.S., at the
time. In particular, it was extended to the Middle East which was
described by the State Department, right after the Second World
War, as the most important area in the world in the field of foreign
investment. As General Eisenhower described it: "the stategically
most important area in the world because of its enormous energy
reserves," which have two crucial features. First of all, whoever
has influence and control over them has a considerable amount of
leverage in world affairs. And secondly, there's a huge flow of
capital that comes from the profits of oil production in the cheapest
and most abundant areas. And that has to flow back to prop up both
the corporations and the general economy of the United States and
the country that in internal discussion is called "our lieutenant";
namely, Britain. The fashionable word is "partner", as Mike
Mansfield put it in the Kennedy years. So we have to prop up the
economy of "our lieutenant" and, of course, ourselves, more crucially.

Control of the energy resources and the profits that flow from them
is a major factor. In fact, that's discussed in internal, declassified
top secret planning documents. But it's also very evident in policy.
And we saw examples of that a few months ago. So, in other words,
Latin America and the Middle East are the obvious areas to discuss
if you want to consider the core of U.S. foreign policy interests.
Both areas reveal to us quite a lot about ourselves. The reason
is because of our overwhelming influence in Latin America for over
a century, and in the Middle East for over a century. And what we
find there can tell us a good deal about who we are -- a topic
which should be of interest to any honest person.

Well, discussion of Latin America could open, for example, with a
Latin American strategy development workshop. In Washington --
the Pentagon -- just a year ago, which involved noted academic
specialists and others ... they concluded (mostly quotes) that
current relations with Mexico (the Mexican dictatorship; that
means it's a rather brutal dictatorship with a democratic cover)
... current relations with the Mexican dictatorship they said
are extraordinarily positive. That means that they are untroubled
by such trivialities as stolen elections, death squads, endemic
torture, scandalous treatment of workers and peasants, ecological
destruction in the interests of private power, and so on. But,
they said that everything is not rosy. There are some problems
on the horizon. And the only problem they note is (I'll quote):
"a democracy opening up in Mexico could test the special
relationship by bringing into office a government more interested
in challenging the United States on economic and nationalist grounds."
But right now, everything is fine because it's just a brutal and
murderous dictatorship. But if there's a democracy opening, we may
have some problems, because a democracy opening might mean that
various popular interests might be reflected, and that would be
harmful to the U.S. concern, which is, of course, investment
opportunities and the local wealthy classes, and so on.


NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, that hits the nail on the head. The primary concern of the
United States in the Third World has, in fact, always been the
problem of meaningful democracy which is, in fact, a threat to
power and privilege. And that has to be crushed. It has to be
crushed abroad, and it has to be crushed at home. And without
understanding that, you understand very little about doestic or
foreign affairs, or about American society and culture.

Now, of course, the methods for crushing democratic forces at
home and abroad are different. Abroad, you can do it pretty much
in the way that it's done by totalitarian states. They use violence.
In fact, unrestricted violence. At home, over centuries of popular
struggle, the capacity of the state to coerce and control has
been limited, so a whole variety of other devices have been
needed. But it's been well understood -- and it's a major theme
of intellectual discourse, if you like, for centuries -- that
methods haveto be found to control and divert what they call
"the rascal multitude" and to keep them from interfering in what
is none of their business; namely the management of public affairs.
As Walter Lippmann put it: "The elements that rule have to be
protected from meddling and ignorant outsiders -- that is, the
mass of the population. And if you can't do it by force, you do
it by other means.

Well, a few weeks after this report on the extraordinarily
positive relations with the Mexican tyranny, a leading journal
in Mexico published an article reporting on a conference in
Mexico -- a conference on international traffic of children,
minors -- the report quotes a leading researcher at the National
University, the autonomous university in Mexico, from the institute
for law research, who writes: every year, twenty thousand Mexican
children are sent illegally to the United States for organ
transplants or for sexual exploitation, or for various experimental
tests. The conference report also quotes a report of the United
Nations saying that over a million children a year suffer from
slavery, forced participation in criminal acts, prostitution,
organ transplant sales to rich countries. Well, is any of this
true? The answer to that is: Nobody really knows, and more
importantly, nobody cares -- at least nobody important cares.
It's not the kind of thing we discuss around here. But whether
it's true or not (it may be; it may not be) an interesting fact
about our domains is that this is very widely believed. There are
lots and lots of reports like this one from all through Latin
America and other parts of the Third World domains, largely of
the United States, that report such things. You can get similar
reports from the London Anti-Slavery Society and others. And
whether they're true or not, the fact that they're widely believed
alone is a reflection of the reality of life in the areas where
our influence has been overwhelming.

This became much worse during the Reagan-Bush years which was a
period of an enormous catastrophe of capitalism throughout the
entire world, aside from the state-capitalist industrial countries
themselves which, in various ways, were able to protect themselves
from it.

Latin America is a striking example. We might proceed
with Latin America by quoting .... I'll just pick something that
happened to arrive in the mail yesterday, a Latin American church
journal which has an article from Uruguay by a Uruguayan journalist
called, "The War Waged on Latin American Street Kids" (that's the
English translation of it) and he describes (I'll give some quotes)
the war being waged against millions of abandonded children
throughout Latin America where death squads, run by the police and
financed by the business sector, target and exterminate street kids
who are trying to survive as beggars, thieves, prostitutes, drug
runners or cheap factory workers. Some of the victims are gunned
down while they are sleeping beneath bridges, on vacant lots or
on doorways. Others are kidnapped, tortured or killed in remote
areas. In Brazil, where U.S. influence has been decisive ....
the overthrow of Brazilian democracy was described as the greatest
victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century by the
Administration when it took place with no little U.S. support
.... In Brazil, the bodies of young death squad victims are found
in zones outside the metropolitan areas with their hands tied,
showing signs of torture, riddled with bullet holes. Street girls
are frequently forced to work as prostitutes. In one town, in the
first six months of 1991, a thousand so-called "disposable children"
were assassinated. In Guatemala City, another place where we have
succeeded in imposing the kind of values we like, the majority of
the five thousand street kids work as prostitutes. They are found
with their ears cut off and their eyes gouged out, and so on.
In Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, reports indicate that an average
of three children under the age of eighteen are killed daily by these
death squads financed by the business community. Almost all murders
have been attributed to those death squads. Going on, the journalist
points out that this is a region where a hundred and eighty-three
million people live in abject poverty, so that death by violence
is only one of the threats for street children. Regional statistics
show that every minute, twenty-eight children die from hunger.
According to UNICEF, sixty-nine million children survive by doing
menial labor, robbing, running drugs, and prostitution.
In Ecuador, about a hundred thousand children from age four up
work ten to twelve-hour shifts in one region -- in Western-run,
mostly U.S.-run corporations. Panama had a system of protection
for miners, but the miners' protective tribunal buildings were
bombed during the 1989 U.S. invasion, rendering work there nearly
impossible. Following the invasion, the number of criminal gangs
robbing stores in search of food increased. In Peru, fifty thousand
of the six hundred thousand children born this year will not survive
their first year. In one Brazilian state on the Bolivian border,
appoximately a thousand children work as slaves extracting tin.
Another two thousand adolescents work as prostitutes. According
to union sources, children work eighteen hours a day in water,
up to their knees, and are paid a daily ration of bananas and
boiled yucca, according to the labor union reports. Going on
(I won't go on reading it), the journalist ends up saying:
"Until recently, the image of the abandoned Latin American child
was of a ragged child sleeping in a doorway. Today, the image is
of a body lacerated and dumped in a city slum.

Well, we may feel proud of our contributions to this picture of
capitalist democracy triumphant in the "new world order", and
that's what the "new world order" is all about -- an intensification
of the horrors of the old world order.


NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, instead of continuing through the Latin American horror
chamber, which is what it is, I'll turn to the second area, the
Middle East. There's a lot to talk about there. We could talk
about a lot of our exploits in the Gulf, for example. But instead,
let me talk about the topic that's on the front pages right now,
and has been for the last several weeks: what's called "the Middle
East peace process", in particular, the conference in Madrid.
I'm not going to be continuing with Latin American atrocity stories,
but talking about diplomacy -- nice clean topics that won't be so
bloody. But let's have a look and see what we can learn about
ourselves from that.

Well, I'm sure you all read the newspapers, and you've noticed
that there is universal acclaim for the diplomatic triumph of
George Bush and James Baker in Madrid. So let me just remind you
of some of the boilerplate. Our heroes "exploited the historic
window of opportunity opened by their victory in the Gulf to
breathe life into the stalled Middle East peace process, showing
remarkable courage and vision." That happens to come from Anthony
Lewis who is one of the most critical commentators on U.S.
Government policies anywhere in the mainstream, and it sort of
goes from there over to the real accolades. The United States can,
at last, try to bring about its traditional goals of "land for
peace", and territorial compromise and autonomy for the
Palestinians in the context of a general peace now, that the
rejectionists are in disarray and the Russians are no longer
causing mischief, and the bad guys everywhere know that "what
we say goes", as the President put it last February. That's also
true in Latin America where "what we say goes" has been true for
a long time, with consequences of the kind that I've already
indicated. The news columns report, with considerable awe, that
"the President is dreaming great dreams of peace and justice, and
of course, marching forth to implement them." That's diplomatic
correspondent R.W. Appel in the New York Times. James Baker is
praised for his diplomatic skills and his tenacity in putting
together what the Times calls "the remarkable tableau in Madrid".
I should point out, to be accurate, that not everyone agrees that
the U.S. has really shown itself to be an honest broker. There are
people who claim that Bush and Baker have gone too far in allowing
their pro-Arab sympathies to influence what they do. But it's
agreed that they're both well on their way to a well deserved
Nobel Peace Prize.

Well, that's sort of standard, but more interesting than this
kind of rather standard sort of Stalinist style rhetoric ....
it's very reminiscent of the days of the genius Stalin, for those
of you who remember that kind of stuff. That's kind of standard,
but more interesting than that is the fact that similar perceptions,
though without the Stalinoid rhetoric, are pretty widespread in
substantial parts of Europe. And that's more interesting. In fact,
Europe has, to a large extent, come to accept the extension of
the Monroe Doctrine to the Middle East -- which is new -- and has
also come to accept, to a certain extent, the framework of U.S.
propaganda. That's also an interesting and a noticeable shift.
I think it's one worth study in itself. I think it has to do with
the end of the Cold War. Maybe I can comment on that later.

But even more interesting than that is that the euphoria is
reaching much further, even to towns and villages in the West Bank
and Gaza where expectations are apparently running quite high.
The lead article of the current issue of the Journal of Palestine
studies is by an advisor to the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation
in Madrid, Walid Khalidi, who lauds "the personal commitment of
the President of the United States," (I'm quoting) "in front of
Congress and the whole world, to a just and comprehensive
settlement". And he's also much impressed by "the invigoration of
international institutions, and the new recognition that we can't
go too far with double standards." So that's a pretty broad spectrum.

In my view, this is all total illusion. I'd like to give some
indication of why. Let's just start with a brief comment on the
matter of our abandonment of double standards. By chance, that
issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies happened to arrive at
my home on the same day that the lead front-page story in the
newspapers read: "U.S. ACCUSES LIBYA IN PAN AM BOMBING". That's
two hundred and seventy people killed. And the sub-heading read:
"RETALIATION WEIGHED, SAYS WHITE HOUSE." And the editorials issued
stern calls for just punishment, overflowing with self-righteousness.
The news reports told us that: "this fiendish act of wickedness had
become the horrific symbol of terrorism" -- quoting the New York
Times. Again, it was not entirely uniform, so the New York Times
ran an op-ed pointing out that the evidence about Libya was pretty
thin, and suggested some Government duplicity in identifying Libya.
The authors accused the Government of letting the Palestinians
off the hook at a sensitive moment in the peace conference. And
also, they charged that Syria and Iran had been let off the hook
for similar reasons. The authors of this article, representing the
dissidents, are Robert and Tamara Kupperman. Robert Kupperman is
a leading proponent of what is called "low-intensity conflict",
the author of manuals on how to implement it officially --
manuals in which he defines low-intensity conflict. Here's the
definition; it is: "the threat or use of force to achieve political
objectives without the full-scale commitment of resources."
That's to be distinguished from international terrorism which is
defined in U.S. Army manuals as "the threat or use of force to
attain goals that are political, or religious, or ideological in
nature." In short, low-intensity conflict IS international
terrorism, as the advocates and practitioners of it are kind enough
to inform us, not only in their definition, but also in the practice.

So we have a spectrum, then, ranging from those who assume that the
Government's case against Libya is proven on the obvious grounds
that it had been proclaimed. And then on the other extreme, we
have skeptics who are leading proponents of international terrorism,
and who think that the case hasn't quite yet been proven, and that
we should go after other favored enemies, like the Palestinians.
So the issue is: Should we mete out stern justice to Libya alone,
and also to other official enemies -- and should we use bombing or
maybe some other technique.

Well, that's what's known as an independent Press in a free society.


NOAM CHOMSKY:
Now, there were some things that were not discussed. At least I
didn't see them discussed. For example, one thing NOT discussed
was the worst air tragedy of the decade. That was the bombing of
an Air India plane in 1985 which killed three hundred and twenty-
nine people. There's a book by Leslie and Andrew Cockburn called,
"OUT OF CONTROL" which discusses some of the background for this.
Apparently, the two people who bombed it were trained in a
paramilitary training camp in Alabama. This was supposedly a sting
operation that went out of control. The fact that the U.S. had
been involved in training the people who bombed it was acknowledged
a couple of months later by the Attorney-General, Edwin Meese, in
India, who sort of promised the Indians that we would be careful
to see that that doesn't happen again. But that was not a "horrific
symbol of international terrorism" in that you don't have huge
squads of thousands of people scouring the region to see what
sensors you can discover, and so on and so forth. That one I didn't
see mentioned, though it's the worse air tragedy of the decade.

There was some mention of another air tragedy -- the downing of
an Iranian commercial jet with two hundred and ninety people
killed. That's also more than "the most horrific symbol of
terrorism of the decade." That was described, for example by
the Middle East correspondent of the Boston Globe, Mary Kurdias[sp],
as she put it: "The accidental downing of the Iranian passenger
plane by the U.S.S. Vincennes" which was part of a naval armada
that had been sent by George Bush to help out his pal, Saddam Hussein
in the Iran-Iraq War. And, in fact, the shooting down of this plane
was a rather decisive event in ending the war on Iraqi (meaning
U.S.) terms.

A question one might ask is: How can the news columns (these are
news columns, remember) be so sure that it was an accidental downing?
Well, of course, there's an easy answer to that. The U.S. did it,
and therefore, it follows that it was an accidental downing, just
as U.S. international terrorism is laudable. It's low-intensity
conflict; a good thing. It's not terrorism. However, not everyone
agrees. Again, there's a spectrum of opinion. In this case, for
example, one of the people who does NOT agree is U.S. Navy Commander
David Carlson, who was the commander of the vessel right nearby
the Vincennes, who wrote an article in the U.S. Naval Institute
Proceedings in which he describes (I'm quoting it now) how he
"wondered aloud in disbelief as they watched the Vincennes shoot
down what was perfectly obviously a commercial airliner, a
passenger jet, taking off at a commercial corridor." And his
assumption is that this is out of a need to prove the viability
of its high-tech missile system.

Well, the commander of the Vincennes didn't go completely unpunished.
The President reacted. He granted him the Legion of Merit Award,
along with the officer-in-charge of shooting down the commercial
airliner (I'm quoting from the citation), "for exceptionally
meritorious conduct and outstanding service, and for the calm and
professional atmosphere under his command in the Gulf."
The shooting down of the airliner was not mentioned in the citation,
although that's the only known action of the Vincennes.

The media kept a dutiful silence about this, at least at home.
In more civilized parts of the World like, for example, Malaysia,
Third World journals were quite open about reporting the facts,
including the Legion of Merit award, in reviews of U.S.
international terrorism which, they don't understand, is only
low-intensity conflict, and accidental.

Libya's response to these charges was a call for a hearing by the
World Court or some other international inquiry, a call that was
regarded as reasonable by the Arab League, but it was, of course,
dismissed here, without any discussion, as utter nonsense. That's
what's known as "invigoration of international institutions,"
just as what I just described is what's known as
"the abandonment of the double standard."

For those who are willing to consider fact, what I've just
mentioned is like a crumb from a mountain of evidence that
illustrates what a Salvadoran Jesuit journal recently described
as "the ominous halo of hypocrisy covering U.S. statements and
actions" -- an "ominous halo of hypocrisy" that sickens and
disgusts any honest person who suffers through the daily output
of the commissar culture. That's a major element of the "New
World Order", just as it was an element of the old world order.

Well, let's put that aside and turn to the third feature which
that lead article in the Journal of Palestine Studies finds so
encouraging, along with most other opinion: "the personal
commitment of the President to a just and comprehensive
settlement." Let me now review at least what I think is happening.

It seems to me that three major questions arise about what's
going on right now. One is: Why is it happening now? Why this
big diplomatic flurry right now? Two: Is there a break with
traditional American policy? And three: What about the apparent
conflict between the United States and Israel?

Let's start with the first: Why right now? And in fact, we might
turn back to page one of the Boston Globe which has that lead
story about the U.S. charges against Libya. That's the lead story,
and, by accident or because they've got a subversive in the
editorial board or something, there's an adjacent story next to
it which discusses White House concern over polls that show that
George Bush is falling rapidly because of the problems with the
domestic economy. Well, could there be a correlation between those
facts? Actually, there could be! The story of the past ten years --
the major story of the last ten years is the huge assault against
the general public, which you're familiar with -- the huge transfer
of resources from a large majority of the public, in fact, to
wealthy, priveleged sectors; investors, and so on.

Now when a state is involved in policies of that kind, it's necessary
to divert the public -- the ignorant and meddling outsiders --
somehow, so that they won't pay attention to what's going on
around them. And that's true whether it's a totalitarian state
or a democratic state. And there aren't a lot of ways to do this.
Two of the ways are to inspire fear of terrible enemies who are
about to destroy us. And that's got to be accompanied by awe for
our amazing leaders who rise just in time, and save us from
destruction so that we can, once again, be standing tall, as
Ronald Reagan put it when he succeeded in overcoming the threat
to our existence from Grenada, if you can remember that far back.

In fact, this is pretty much the story of the last ten years.
About every year or two, there's some fantastic threat to our
existence. But then, with incredible heroism, our leader somehow
beats it down. And that's a natural concomitant of the social
policies that are being carried out domestically. You'd find that
in any state. Just as another natural concomitant is various
devices to set sectors of the targeted populations -- most of the
population .... set them against each other so that they hate
each other, and so on, instead of having them paying attention
to what's going on. This is all pretty standard.


NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, it's all particularly important right now for several reasons.
For one thing, the social and economic catastrophe that resulted
from the Reagan-Bush programs is getting harder and harder to put
to the side. More and more people see it. And that means that
efforts at diversion are needed -- and rapid and increasing ones.
Secondly, it's also necessary to divert attention away from these
foreign policy triumphs that have supposedly shown what great
people we are, and have led to the Bush rhetoric. In fact, every
one of them has been a complete catastrophe from the point of view
of any human value, at least. That's true of Grenada, and Panama,
and most strikingly, recently, the Gulf.

It's not too pretty to look at the Gulf after our great triumph
there, and notice a couple hundred thousand corpses, an ecological
disaster, Saddam Hussein firmly in power, thanks to the support
given to him by George Bush and Norman Schwarzkopf who backed his
crushing of the popular rebellions -- the Kurdish and Shiite
rebellions. In fact, for once I should say -- I've got to give
the press credit -- the chief diplomatic correspondent of the
New York Times (that's a technical term meaning "State Department
spokesman in the New York Times") Thomas Friedman, had an accurate
description of what happened. He said that right after the ....
You know, George Bush was out fishing, and Norman Schwarzkopf was
patting himself on the back .... at the time when Saddam Hussein
was authorized to take care of the rascal multitude, the explanation
that was given by Friedman expressing the State Department's
position was that the United States was seeking to restore what
he called "the best of all worlds." The best of all worlds would
be a takeover by some Iraqi generals who would wield the iron fist,
much as Saddam Hussein did in the period up until his one mistake
in life; namely, when he stepped on U.S. toes on August 2nd, 1990
.... wield the iron fist, as Saddam Hussein had done, much to the
satisfaction of the U.S. allies, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and,
of course, the boss in Washington. Well, that's essentially correct.

It would be a little embarrassing to just restore Saddam Hussein
after the fuss. But we need a clone. We've got to find somebody
exactly like him. And surely, we don't want to allow anything as
dangerous as a democracy opening in the Middle East any more than
we want a democracy opening in Latin America -- or, for that matter,
in the United States. And if the way to block it is by supporting
Saddam Hussein's iron fist, well you know, in the interests of
what's called pragmatism, that's what we have to do. Pragmatism
is a nice technical term that means doing anything you feel like
doing for your own interests. And, therefore, we pursue pragmatism.
And that even overcomes our high moral commitments to human rights,
and so on and so forth.

So there is a need to divert attention. But still, it leaves kind
of a bad taste. I mean, maybe the smart guys understand that this
is the right thing to do. But the population, having been aroused
to considerable hysteria over the need to destroy the Beast of
Baghdad, has kind of a tough time figuring out these subtle points
about why we're supporting him while he's massacring everybody in
sight. So you've got to overcome that somehow.

There also are regional problems. The Arab tyrannies that lined up
in the Gulf crusade -- these are what the British imperialists,
in their day, called "the Arab facade" that manages the local oil
system in the interests of the imperial powers. The British view
was that we should veil absorption of the colonies behind
constitutional fictions such as "buffer state" or "sphere of
influence", and so on. But, of course, as Lord Lloyd George put it,
in complimenting the British on blocking an international
disarmament agreement, he said: "We have to reserve the right to
bomb the niggers." That's sort of the bottom line. So you "reserve
the right to  bomb the niggers", but you've got to have this "Arab
facade" out there, that you can sort of pretend they're countries,
but they're actually managing the local wealth for you. And those
guys have a problem too. Any tyranny too has to preserve a certain
degree of credibility with their population. And if they are
exposed as agents of the United States in restoring the traditional
Anglo-American condominium over the wealth that lies under the
ground in the Arab world, that won't be so good for them. So they
need something.

Thirdly, continuing with the urgency of the peace process, so-called,
there is, in fact, a window of opportunity. That's not a joke.
It is, in fact, correct. Bush is largely correct in saying that
"what we say goes." And, in fact, that means that what you see
in the Gulf is what we say because that's what we want. We hold
all the cards. And now that "what we say goes," we can ram through
traditional U.S. policy -- which takes us to the second point.

What are traditional U.S. policies? And: Is there a break with them?
Of course, the way in which we're going to get credit for this,
and the "Arab facade" is going to get some credibility is by
dealing with the festering Palestinian problem. The simple answer
to what U.S. traditional policy is is very straightforward. It has
been the adamant and inflexible opposition to the peace process.

Now, before I continue, I have to make a side comment on political
discourse. Every political discourse has two meanings. It has a
dictionary-meaning. And it has what we might call the PC-meaning --
the "politically correct" meaning. That is, the meaning that's
used to advance power ends. They're always different. So, for
example, "terrorism" in the dictionary-meaning is what the Army
manual says: "the use or threat of force to advance political ends."
But in the PC-meaning of the word, "international terrorism" is:
"the threat or use of force to implement political ends," when
it's carried out by others -- not when it's carried out by the
United States or [its] client states. Then, it has another name.
It's called "retaliation" or "defense of freedom" or something
like that. The same is true of the term, "democracy". There's
a dictionary-meaning in which a state is democratic to the extent
that the population has some meaningful way of participating in
managing their own affairs. But then there's the PC-meaning, in
which "democracy" means "the rule by elements who appreciate the
transcendent need of those who own American society and who,
therefore, must govern it." I borrow one of the favorite maxims
of the founding fathers. That's the principle on which the country
was founded. And only those who understand that are capable of
participating in "democracy" in the PC-sense.

Well, the same is true with the term "peace process." There's the
dictionary-meaning in which the "peace process" means something
like "efforts to advance peace." And then there's the PC-meaning
in which the "peace process" refers to whatever the U.S. happens
to be doing at the moment. If what the U.S. happens to be doing
at the moment is undermining the peace process and barring the
peace process at every turn -- that's the "peace process."

Actually, it's all quite simple once you understand the rules.
The reason for institutions like universities is to teach you
the rules. So don't forget to do your homework. But once you
figure all this stuff out, you can play the game rather well.


NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, breaking the rules and keeping to English instead of
PC-language, the traditional U.S. policy has been, as I said,
rigid opposition to the peace process -- rigid, inflexible,
invariant opposition to the peace process, which is why it never
gets anywhere. You can see this very clearly if you just look at
the more or less irrelevant, factual record. The record is
irrelevant because it's not "politically correct". It teaches
the wrong lessons. But let's look at it anyway. For example, you
could start with the U.N. General Assembly. The U.N. General
Assembly meets every winter and they have a vote every year on
advancing the peace process. I won't run through the whole record,
but the last one was December, 1990 when the vote was 144 to 2
(United States and Israel), and that's the way it is all the way
back. It's always something like that: N to 2, where N is everybody
who wasn't asleep that day, and 2 is the United States and Israel.
Sometimes it varies a little. In 1989, it was 151 to 3. For
completely unexplained reasons, Dominica joined with the United
States and Israel. Maybe somebody has some insight into that.
But, in effect, it's the United States and Israel blocking the
peace process at the General Assembly.

Well, what about the Security Council? Notice, incidentally, that
the United States is a very powerful country. That means that if
there is a vote at the General Assembly which is, let's say,
160 to 1 -- and things like that happen pretty commonly -- if the
one is the United States, it's vetoed. That's what it means to be
in a position to be able to assert "what we say goes." What about
the Security Council? Well, of course, that's out because there
the United States can just flat veto everything, as, in fact, it's
been doing since 1976. In 1976 -- first major U.S. veto -- there
was a resolution which called for (I'll quote it): "an Arab-Israeli
peace settlement on the pre-1967 borders" (that means the
internationally recognized borders) "with guarantees for the
sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of
all states in the area, and their right to live in peace within
secure and recognized boundaries, including Israel, and a new
Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza." That was introduced
to the Security Council by Jordan, Syria and Egypt. It was backed
by virtually the whole World. It was publicly backed by the P.L.O.
According to Israel -- the current President of Israel, Chaim
Herzog, who was then the U.N. Ambassador -- it was not only backed
by the P.L.O., but actually prepared by the P.L.O. Another example
of their terrorist past. It was vetoed by the United States. It is,
therefore, out of history. Try to find it in the records of the
peace process, or in documentary collections, and so on. In short,
it's just not "politically correct." The same thing happened in 1980.
But, in effect, the Security Council is ruled out as an agency for
advancing the peace process. There have been a series of other
proposals rejected by the United States, and Israel was opposed
to them. I won't run through the record.

Now, the U.S. is a very powerful country, so we can block a proposal
by saying "no", period! Israel is less powerful, and, therefore,
they have to be a little more vigorous in their opposition.
So, in the case of the 1976 Security Council Resolution, while the
U.S. just vetoed it, Israel reacted differently. They reacted by
bombing Lebanon, killing about fifty people in a raid that was
described quite openly and, in fact, even reported as not being
a reaction to anything -- which was not exactly correct. It was
actually a retaliation against the United Nations for considering
this resolution.

Then, in 1980, when Saudi Arabia announced the so-called Fahd Plan,
which again was sort of along the same lines (most of those plans
are along the same lines), Israel reacted, according to the
Israeli press, by sending Phantoms [American-made & paid F-4
fighter/attack jet aircraft], which probably means nuclear-armed
Phantoms over the oilfields. And the Hebrew press pointed out
that foreign intelligence agencies are digging into their files
to look up their records on the capacity of Israel to destroy
the oilfields, meaning: If you push too far, there are things
we can do!

Well, that's the way a weaker country has to respond. The U.S.
is simpler. We just say "no", and that means it's off the agenda
and it's out of history -- if you have a well-disciplined commissar
class, at least. Well, this problem continued through the 1980s.
Yassir Arafat, for example, kept annoying everybody by calling
for negotiations with Israel, leading to mutual recognition. This
required considerable acrobatics in the doctrinal institutions.
So, for example, let's take a typical case: The current chief
diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman,
who was the Jerusalem correspondent then .... he added new things
like, say, if headlines in the Israeli Press said:
ARAFAT OFFERS NEGOTIATIONS. PERES (who is supposed to be the dove)
SAYS "NO" .... there had to be an article by Thomas Friedman
a couple days later saying:
  "The Israeli peace movement has never been more distraught. There
   are no Palestinians to talk to."
There was an interview with Shimon Peres saying:
  "If only there were some Palestinians as beautiful as we are,
   we could settle all of this. But, unfortunately, they're all
   terrorists who won't talk to us."
And that routine went on year after year. The New York Times not
only refused to publish the facts, but even refused to publish
letters referring to the facts, and ocassionally even went as far
as writing to correspondents explaining that they were not going
to allow letters on it (actually, some of those are around).

It was all done quite brilliantly. The result was to craft a
version of history which has no relation whatsoever to the facts.
Actually, it has a relation to the facts for the logicians in the
audience: the relation of contradiction. Apart from that, it has
no relation to the facts, but it does have striking utility for
power. And that was achieved in a manner which would have been
pretty much admired by any totalitarian state.

Now, there are reasons for this. There are reasons why the United
States has been constantly opposed to the peace process. It has
two features which the United States will not accept. One is:
it calls for an INTERNATIONAL conference. And remember, the Monroe
Doctrine has been extended to the Middle East long ago. It's too
important to allow anybody to interfere.


NOAM CHOMSKY:
It's U.S. turf. Nobody is allowed in. So no international
conference.

Two: All international efforts to advance the peace process
have at least a rhetorical commitment, whether anybody believes
it or not. But they have some rhetoric about self-determination
for the Palestinians. And that's unacceptable to the United States,
not because the U.S. has anything in particular against the
Palestinians, (basically, they don't exist) but because that
would entail Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories,
and it's been U.S. policy that they should essentially maintain
continued control over those territories. Therefore, for those
two reasons, the U.S. has always blocked the peace process.

Now, turning to Madrid, you'll notice that it overcomes these
two defects. It's completely unilateral. Nobody else is allowed
in. Actually, to be more precise, Gorbachev was invited in, but
that's because he is the completely powerless leader of a
non-existent state, and therefore, he could provide a certain
propaganda cover that people could talk about in the international
conference. But anyone who had even met the minimal condition of
existence would not be allowed in.

Secondly, you'll notice again that there was nothing for the
Palestinians. In fact, that's built into the very structure of
the conference. They are part of a joint Palestinian-Jordanian
delegation, which is the traditional U.S. policy that there is
no independent Palestinian nationalism, hence, no issue for them
to talk about. And the outcome of both that meeting and any
aftermath will be determined by U.S. policy. So, going back to
that: What is U.S. policy? Well, here you can find out, actually.
There, the U.S. Government has been kind enough to inform us.
There's the public record. You can't find it in the media, as far
as I'm aware, but it's there. You can pull out the documents.
Some of it is even in the media occasionally. The U.S. position
was made very clear in the fall of 1989 by James Baker with what
was then called "the Baker Plan". The Baker Plan then had to do
with negotiations between Jordan, Israel and Egypt, with some
Palestinians, whom we like, allowed in. Baker presented five points,
and the five points were that .... you can read them in the State
Department bulletin, but one point was directed at the Palestinians.
It said that any Palestinians who are permitted in by their
overseers, the United States and Israel, will be permitted to
discuss one topic; namely, implementation of the so-called Shamir
Plan. In public statements, at the same time, Baker made it clear
and explicit that, as he put it, the only plan under consideration
is the Shamir Plan. There is no other initiative on the table.
So if we want to find out what U.S. policy is, we turn to the
Shamir Plan which is, in fact, the Shamir-Peres Plan -- the
coalition plan of the Labor-Likud Government (two major parties
in Israel) -- which had been put forth in May and was now endorsed.

The Shamir-Peres Plan (actually, the Shamir-Peres-Baker Plan)
has three basic principles. Principle One says (I'm quoting it):
"There can be no additional Palestinian state," meaning there
already is a Palestinian state: Jordan; and if Palestinians,
Jordanians and the rest of the world don't agree, that just shows
they're anti-Semites or ignorant Arabs, or something like that.
So there's no issue of Palestinian self-determination. There
already is a Palestinian state. That's Jordan; and there cannot
be an additional one. There can be no change in the status of
the Occupied Territories (they don't call it "Occupied"
Territories, but "territories", meaning the Gaza Strip and the
West Bank) except in accordance with the basic guidelines of the
Government of Israel which bar any form of Palestinian self-
determination. Point Number Three says: "no PLO", meaning that
Palestinians can't pick their own representatives, even to sign
a capitulation. Point Four says: there will be what are called
"free elections", run under Israeli military control (and if
you've ever looked at a television set, you know what that means),
with most of the Palestinian national leadership rotting away in
prison camps without charges. Those are "free elections."
So that's it. That's the Shamir-Peres-Baker Plan.

Nothing much has changed. Sometimes it's called autonomy. That's
the current term for it. In the Israeli Press, more honest than
here, one of the leading and most respected Israeli journalists,
Danny Rubinstein (right in the mainstream, and no particular dove)
just a couple of weeks ago described autonomy as "the kind of
autonomy that exists in a prisoner-of-war camp" (I'm quoting it),
"where the prisoners are autonomous to cook their own meals and
run cultural events." Furthermore, he went on to say that the
autonomy is exactly what the Palestinians have now; namely, the
right to run their own services. And there's a reason for that,
he explained. He's pointed out that even the most extreme
expansionists ("Greater Israel" enthusiasts) don't call for
literal annexation of the Territories because that would have a
problem associated with it. It would mean that you would have to
extend to the Territories Israeli law, including the minimal
services that are provided for the second-class citizens of Israel
itself, the Arab citizens. Obviously, that would bankrupt the
treasury and, he estimates, would probably double the income in
the Territories. So it's much more efficient to have heavy
taxation, but to provide nothing in return under autonomy; namely,
the autonomy of a prison camp. Well, that's what's being offered
now, exactly as it was offered at Camp David. That's why it's so
praised in the United States.

Well, there's a history to this. Somebody stop me if I go on too
long. But I'll give a little bit of history. It's worth looking at.
U.S. policy has undergone some changes. From 1967 to 1971, U.S.
policy was right in the mainstream. It called for what was then
the international consensus, which meant a political settlement
on the pre-1967 borders, with the wording that I just read. That
was actually drawn from the resolutions at the time, reiterated
in 1976: territorial guarantees, and security, and the right to
live in peace, and so on and so forth. At that time, there was
nothing for the Palestinians. They weren't part of it. It was
just a settlement on those borders. Official U.S. policy said
that there might be minor territorial adjustments which would,
furthermore, be mutual. "Minor" and "mutual" territorial
adjustments, just to fix things up, but that was the position.


NOAM CHOMSKY:
In February 1971, a problem arose. President Sadat of Egypt
offered a peace treaty in those terms -- virtually identical
with the terms of official U.S. policy. Israel rejected it.
That was under the "doves", incidentally -- the Labor Party,
looking for broader territorial gains. And the United States had
had to decide whether to pursue its own policy or to change that
policy. That was kind of an internal bureaucratic conflict. Henry
Kissinger then won out (he was then National Security Advisor)
and pursued his policy which was what he called "stalemate" --
keeping things the way they are; no peace treaty. Israel
responded to Sadat's offer by recognizing it as a genuine peace
treaty. The U.S. backed the rejection. That's a big split in
change in U.S. policy, actually. Coincidentally, that happens to
be the month in which George Bush appeared on the national scene
as U.N. ambassador, although he had nothing to do with policy
(probably no more than he does now). Ever since then, the U.S.
policy has been flatly rejectionist, and separated from the rest
of the World in the manner that I described.

>From `71 to `73, that was a period of great triumphalism in
Israel. The assumption was that Israel had overwhelming military
power. It could disregard the Arabs altogether. As the former
Chief of Military Intelligence in Israel, Yehoshefat Harkabi (now
a dove, incidentally) .... as he put it at the time, "War is not
the Arabs' game." They don't know which end of the gun to hold,
so we can just keep the stalemate. Kissinger accepted that, so
there was no need to respond to Sadat's offers, or anything.
Now, in October, 1973, those illusions were shattered. It turns
out that they did know which end of the guns to hold. It was kind
of a near thing. Policy had to shift. Kissinger, who was,
incidentally, no great genius, does understand things like violence.
He seemed to have a good understanding of that. And he could see
that Egypt had it, and therefore, he had to pay attention to them.
And therefore, U.S. policy shifted. It shifted in the perfectly
natural way. Since Egypt could not be simply dismissed as a basket
case, the thing to do was to incorporate it into the U.S. system;
that is, to accept Sadat's actually longstanding offers to turn
Egypt into a U.S. client state, and to remove it from the conflict.
That's the major Arab military force, and if you remove it from
the conflict you essentially eliminate the only Arab deterrent,
which means that Israel is then free to continue to pursue the
major policies which the U.S. supports and pays for; namely,
integrating the Occupied Territories and attacking its northern
neighbor, Lebanon.

Well, that is the Camp David Agreement. Kissinger's shuttle
diplomacy was culminated in the Camp David Agreement which had
exactly these properties. And that was quite obvious, at the time,
to anyone who was willing to look at the facts without ideological
blinkers. And it's actually conceded in retrospect. It's called
"ironic". "Ironic" is another one of those technical terms which
refers to the predictable consequences of intended U.S. actions
which happen to conflict too radically with the professed values.
So that's what's called "ironic" in the political science
literature, and so on. And that's a term that applies very broadly
to almost everything. So that was "ironic", but as I say, it was
obvious to any ten-year-old at the time. And it's now conceded.
Well, that's exactly what Israel did, of course, with HUGE U.S.
aid. The Carter Administration raised aid to the stratosphere so
that Israel could, in fact, continue to do this with the Arab
deterrent removed.

Well, then comes the invasion of Lebanon. Actually, there was one
in `78; another in 1982. It's purpose was to destroy the moderates
in the P.L.O. That's widely conceded .... not even conceded --
proclaimed in the Israeli literature. General Harkabi pointed out
that this was a war for the West Bank. The problem was P.L.O.
moderation. They kept making these annoying demands for negotiations
leading to mutual recognition, and so on. And that's no good.
We want them to go back to terrorism. We want them shooting down
planes, and that kind of stuff. Then, they're easy to deal with.
The point was actually put rather well by the editor of The New
Republic, Martin Peretz in an interview in Israel right before the
1982 invasion. He advised Israel (I'm quoting) "to administer to
the P.L.O. in Lebanon a lasting military defeat that will clarify
to the Palestinians in the West Bank that their struggle for an
independent state has suffered a setback of many years. Then, the
Palestinians will be turned into just another crushed nation like
the Kurds and the Afghans. And their problems, which are beginning
to be boring, will be forgotten."

Well, it's possible, with regard to the Afghans, that if you go to
some of the more extreme Stalinist elements in the Communist Party
bureaucracy, you could hear similar comments on the Afghans back in
those days. And I should say that Peretz's comments and attitudes
toward the Kurds do rather accurately capture U.S. policy toward
them, as we've just seen again. Well that's U.S. policy, and it
stays like that until today.

Now, there's a spectrum, as always. There are the hawks and the
doves. So let's look. According to the hawks, the Palestinians
deserve nothing like other crushed nations. And then there are
the doves. And here, a good example is Thomas Friedman again.
On the occasion of his receipt of the Pulitzer Prize for his
reporting on Israel ... he had several interviews in the Israeli
Press where he advised Israel to run the Occupied Territories
in the manner in which they run South Lebanon. Now, that means
under the control of a terrorist, mercenary army with big prison
camps where you hold hundreds of torture chambers; actually, where
you hold hundreds of hostages to ensure that the villages submit
to the rule of the terrorist mercenary force.


NOAM CHOMSKY:
And you bomb beyond their borders when you feel like it.

And so, this is the proper way to run the Occupied Territories.
However, remember that this is a "dove" speaking, so his position
is: You should give the Palestinians something. But what he actually
said is (quoting): "If you give Ahmed a seat on the bus, he may
limit his demands. So you ought to give Ahmed a seat on the bus."
Well, you could imagine that maybe there's some neo-Nazi somewhere
who's advising the Syrians that they should run what is now Israel
the way they run the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, but they should give
"Hymie" a seat on the bus. Then, maybe he'll limit his demands.
That would be the doves. Or maybe somebody is advising South Africa
that you should give "Sambo" a seat in the bus, and maybe he'll
shut up. That's the doves. So again, there's the spectrum, and we
learn a little more about ourselves by looking at it. Well, the
doves' view is that the Palestinians should be given a seat on
the bus; namely, autonomy -- the autonomy of a prison camp,
basically what they have now, but nothing more; no citizenship;
no independence.

The great achievement of the Madrid Conference, and the one that
has called forth such raptures in the American press, is that the
Palestinian representatives permitted in by the United States
have partially agreed to this. So the news -- actually, the Israeli
Lobby -- is naturally quite enthusiastic. The New York Times the
other day had an op-ed by the Deputy Director of something called
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy which is an
organization that journalists go to when they don't want to express
their own opinions, but they want their support for Israeli
policies expressed for them by an objective outsider. That's a
standard journalistic trick. The Washington Institute for Near
East Policy has no other function, as far as I'm aware, than to
provide such statements. Its deputy director notes (I'm quoting)
that: "Gains were made in Madrid. The Palestinians reversed their
thirteen-year rejection of autonomy which was called for in the
Camp David Accords" -- the accords welcomed by Menachem Begin
because they removed the Arab deterrent from the conflict and
offered the Palestinians the autonomy of a prisoner-of-war camp,
as the mainstream Israeli press points out. Well, the news columns
in the U.S. are much impressed by what theycall (quoting the
New York Times) "the Palestinian self-adjustment to the real world."
That is, the acceptance of a period of autonomy under Israeli
domination, during which Israel can establish the fact of permanent
domination with enormous subsidies from U.S. taxpayers. The idea
is that now that "Ahmed" has limited his demands, he's praised for
what is called "the new pragmatism", this willingness to accept
half a loaf under Israeli domination instead of the all-or-nothing
demands -- that's referring to the demands for self-determination
in a Palestinian state alongside Israel (a totally absurd idea,
supported only by the entire world outside of the United States
and its Israeli client), and therefore, by definition, extremist,
rejectionist, and not pragmatic. Pragmatic means: "self-adjustment
to the real world," which is: "What we say goes." If you do that,
then the news columnists are willing to welcome you as "pragmatic".
That's Clyde Haberman, and the same is true of a host of others.
I won't bother referring to it. In fact, there's so much of it,
and it's too late to talk about it, but it's standard. Open the
press at random and you'll find similar praise for "the new
pragmatism."

Until 1988, to continue with the history a little bit, the U.S.
was quite satisfied with the status quo, as was Israel. In 1988,
the Intifada was beginning to raise some costs -- costs for Israel
to control it, costs for the U.S. which, in fact, was becoming
something of a laughing stock internationally because of the
increasingly desperate insistence that the Palestinians were not
repeating the magic words produced by [Secretary of State] George
Schultz for them to say. It became a joke, in fact.

So the United States made the obvious decision to pretend that
the Palestinians had capitulated, and to impose upon them the
U.S. positions. They'd say, "Okay, they accepted our position."
There's actually a name for that in the diplomatic literature.
It's called "the trollop ploy," referring to the Trollop Novel.
This was done by the Kennedy Administration whom, you'll remember,
were big intellectuals. They referred to things like novels. And
the reference is to the Trollop Novel, where the heroine interprets
a meaningless gesture by the hero as an offer of marriage.

So the trick is, if you're really stuck in a diplomatic
corner, what you do, if you have enormous power and control over
the World Information System, is pretend that the other guy has
accepted your demands and then stick him with it. And count on
the media and the academic sholarship and so on to say, "Yeah,
they capitulated to your demands." In mid-December of 1988, George
Schultz went through this comic act. Claimed that Yassir Arafat
had said the magic words. In fact, as any literate person could
see, he was saying exactly what he had been saying for years.
It was just as far from the U.S. demands as ever. And no Palestinian
spokesperson could ever accept the actual U.S. demands. But now,
they were stuck with it because George Schultz had said so, and
everybody repeated it. So that ended that story.

The U.S. then moved to what was called a "dialogue" with the
Palestinians. They were offered an opportunity to have tea in the
master's ante chamber where they were told in the first meeting
(transcripts were leaked and published in Israel and Egypt --
not here, though they were in English in the Jerusalem Post, so
everybody could read them) that they should understand two things.
ONE: There would be no international conference, so forget about
that; and TWO: they should call off the Intifada, or what the
U.S. described as "the riots which we regard as terrorism against
the State of Israel." So, in other words: go back to the previous
status quo and forget about any political settlement, and then
we'll agree to talk to you. Well, this was understood very well
within Israel, I should say. The Defense Minister, Yitzhak Rabin
of the "dovish" Labor Party had a meeting with PEACE NOW leaders
shortly after the opening of the dialogue. And he told them:
"Don't worry about it. It's quite okay. We're in favor of it."
He said that the dialogue is a low-level dialogue which is
completely meaningless, and which will provide us, he said, with
a year or more to crush the Intifada by force. And he assured them
that they will be crushed. Well, that's what happened. They were
crushed! There's a limit to what flesh and blood can endure.
Violence works! The dialogue diverted attention, as intended.
Then came along the diplomatic initiative to divert the Bush/
Baker/Peres/Shamir Plan, the purpose of which was to divert any
attempt to implement the real peace process.


NOAM CHOMSKY:
That brings us right up until today. As far as I can see, that's
what's happening in Madrid.

This last comment. There is some thinking behind this. There is
a strategic conception behind it. It's one which is more or less
permanent. It's part of the old world order, the "new world order"
and all the next ten years' world order, and so on. The strategic
conception about the Middle East is pretty simple. The major issue
is the energy reserves. The U.S. has to control them. Nobody else
is allowed to interfere in U.S. turf. Too important. There's a
method for controlling them. The method is, first of all, to
construct an "Arab facade", family dictatorships which sort of
manage it for us. They're very weak, so you don't have to worry
about them having any funny ideas. The "Arab facade" has to be
protected from the population of the region. That requires
regional enforcers (that's the second part), preferably non-Arab.
They have an easier time killing Arabs. So that's Turkey, Iran,
Israel, Pakistan, to provide sort of a Praetorian guard for the
Saudi elite, and so on. That's what [Israel's first Prime Minister]
Ben-Gurion used to call "a periphery pact." So there is this
regional enforcer system. And then, in the background, there are
the guys with the real muscle -- the United States and Britain,
in case things get out of control. That's the system,
and that doesn't change very much.

Now, anyone who contributes to this system has some rights.
The "Arab facade" obviously contributes. They manage the oil
wells for us. The regional enforcers contribute. They have rights.
We obviously have rights; in fact, ultimately, we're the only ones
who do. And so does our British lieutenant, so long as they remain
a lieutenant. What about the Palestinians? Well, they don't
contribute to this system. They don't have wealth. They don't
have power. In fact, they're a damn nuisance. They stir up Arab
nationalism; you know, that is these pressures for these democratic
openings that are always a problem. So they have a negative value,
in fact. And since they contribute nothing to our domination of
the region, it follows, by quite simple logic, that they have
no human rights whatsoever. That's an elementary principle of
statecraft. Human rights depend on your contribution to the needs
of power and profit. Other than that, it's irrelevant.

Well, they don't have any rights. In fact, they have negative
rights. They're even a nuisance. And  from that, you can pretty
well predict U.S. policy. And, in fact, it works pretty well.
Remember, this stuff is not quantum physics. You don't have to
be a big thinker to understand it. Big efforts are made in the
academic disciplines and elsewhere to make it look difficult.
But, in fact, it's all pretty straightforward and, at least to my
knowledge, there's almost nothing in international affairs or,
again, in this stuff that a literate teen-ager couldn't figure
out within a few minutes. And that's pretty much the way it works.
If you understand it, you can see what's going on, and you can
usually pretty well predict what's going to happen. You have to
remember to translate "politically correct" discourse back into
English so you can get out of those problems, but that's not too
hard, either.

With regard to the Palestinians, the position really has not
changed, as far as I'm aware, since about 1948. Back in 1948,
the Joint Chiefs of Staff had already recognized Israel. They
were impressed by Israel's military victories, and they recognized
it as the second most powerful regional military force and a
possible potential base for U.S. power. That relationship then
got established in later years, but there's no time to discuss it.
There was also a discussion of the Palestinians. The Israeli
foreign records show it. The U.S. didn't talk about it much, and
didn't care about them. But the Foreign Ministry in Israel --
Moshe Sharrett's Foreign Ministry (this is, incidentally, the
doves) pointed out in their internal records that the Palestinians
.... they said: "They will be crushed! They will be dispersed
like human waste, and will join the most impoverished masses in
the Arab world!" So there's no worry about them. As Mark Peretz
put it: "They're just another crushed nation, like the Kurds. And
therefore, we don't have to pay much attention to them. That's
been the policy ever since. And, as I just mentioned, that was
Yitzhak Rabin's statement to the PEACE NOW leaders in February,
1989. He assured them that they will be broken.

Well, will they be broken? Actually, the answer doesn't lie in
the Middle East. It lies in the hands of those who are funding
the operation. There is certainly no hope -- no faith in the
President's "noble" intentions, or other illusions. Rather, it's
necessary to do some other things. The first one is to clear away
the mountains of rubble that conceal the events of history --
not only in this case, but in every other one -- to view what's
happening without any illusions, and to create public pressures
that can put an end to the extreme rejectionist policies that the
United States has been pursuing virtually alone in the World.
If we're honest, we'll also be able to see that this is true in
Central America and, indeed, throughout the subject domains
generally of what is euphemistically called "the South".

The President is right, to a degree, when he says "What we say goes."
What remains to be determined is what we choose to be.

Thanks.

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