Perilous Power

The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice

Noam Chomsky, Gilbert Achcar, Stephen R. Shalom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317254300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The volatile Middle East is the site of vast resources, profound passions, frequent crises, and long-standing conflicts, as well as a major source of international tensions and a key site of direct US intervention. Two of the most astute analysts of this part of the world are Noam Chomsky, the preeminent critic of U.S, foreign policy, and Gilbert Achcar, a leading specialist of the Middle East who lived in that region for many years. In their new book, Chomsky and Achcar bring a keen understanding of the internal dynamics of the Middle East and of the role of the United States, taking up all the key questions of interest to concerned citizens, including such topics as terrorism, fundamentalism, conspiracies, oil, democracy, self-determination, anti-Semitism, and anti-Arab racism, as well as the war in Afghanistan, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the sources of U.S. foreign policy. This book provides the best readable introduction for all who wish to understand the complex issues related to the Middle East from a perspective dedicated to peace and justice.

CHAPTER ONE

Terrorism and Conspiracies

Defining Terrorism

SHALOM: What do you think is a reasonable way to define terrorism?

CHOMSKY: I’ve been writing about terrorism since 1981. That’s the year the Reagan administration came into office, and they declared very quickly that a focus of the administration was going to be a war on terrorism—in particular, state-directed international terrorism. President Ronald Reagan, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and other officials of the administration spouted elaborate rhetoric about “the plague of the modern age,” a return to “barbarism in our times,” the “scourge of terrorism,” and so on.

Anyone with even a minimal acquaintance with history knew what was going to happen. It was going to turn into a terrorist war. You don’t declare a war on terrorism unless you’re planning yourself to undertake massive international terrorism, which is indeed what happened. And I expected that, as did my friend Ed Herman,¹ and together and separately we began writing about terrorism. Since this was in the context of the Reagan administration’s declaration of the war on terror, the natural thing to do seemed to be to take the official definitions of the U.S. government. So I took the definition that’s in the U.S. Code, the official system of laws, which is pretty reasonable; and shorter versions are in army manuals and so on. That’s the definition I’ve been using ever since. It is pretty much a commonsense definition. It says that terrorism is “the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature … through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.”² It’s also essentially the same as the official British definition, at present. However, the U.S. definition was rescinded in practice, presumably because of its obvious implications. If you take it literally, it turns out, almost trivially, that the United States is a leading terrorist state, and that the Reagan administration in fact was engaging in extensive international terrorism. So it had to change the definition, obviously, because it couldn’t allow that consequence. And since that time there have been other problems.

For example, under Reagan administration pressure, the United Nations passed resolutions on terrorism; the first major one was in December 1987, a resolution condemning the crime of terrorism in the strongest terms, calling on all states to work together to eradicate the plague and so on—a long, detailed resolution. It passed, but not unanimously. It passed 153 to 2 with 1 abstention. Honduras abstained. The two who voted against it were the usual two, the United States and Israel.³ In the General Assembly proceedings, the U.S. and Israeli ambassadors explained their votes, pointing out that there was an offending passage in the resolution that said_ “Nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right … particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination, nor, in accordance with the principles of the Charter and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration, the right of these peoples to struggle to this end and to seek and receive support.”⁴ The United States and Israel couldn’t accept that, obviously. The phrase “colonial and racist regimes” meant South Africa, which was still an ally under the apartheid regime. Technically, the United States had joined the embargo against South Africa—but in fact it had not. Trade with South Africa increased, and methods were found for getting around the embargo so Washington could continue to support the Pretoria regime—and the same with Israel, which was in fact one of the conduits for getting around the South Africa embargo. And “foreign occupation” was obviously referring to the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, so neither the United States nor Israel could permit resistance against that occupation—even legitimate resistance, which of course does not include terrorist attacks against civilians. So, although it’s not technically a veto in the General Assembly, the United States and Israel effectively vetoed the resolution.⁵

And when the United States vetoes something, it’s a double veto: For one thing, it’s blocked; and for another thing, it’s erased from history. And so this U.S. action wasn’t reported, right in the midst of the furor about terrorism, and it’s out of history. You can barely find it in scholarly studies, since it leads to the wrong conclusions. And the same is true of the official definitions—they are down the memory hole. I continue to use them, and they continue to be the official definitions. But since then, since the mid-1980s, a scholarly industry has developed, with conferences, and ponderous tomes and meetings of the United Nations and so on, to see if someone can solve this “very difficult problem” of defining terrorism. There are dozens of different definitions and analyses in the legal journals, and nobody can quite do it. It’s perfectly obvious why, but no one will say so. You have to find a definition that excludes the terror we carry out against them, and includes the terror that they carry out against us. And that’s rather difficult. People have tried to restrict it to subnational groups. But that doesn’t work because they want to talk about terrorist states. In fact, it’s extremely hard, probably impossible, to formulate a definition that would have the right consequences, unless you define it just in terms of those consequences.

The operative definition of terror ought to be, from the point of view of U.S. policymakers: Terror is terror in the standard sense if you do it to us; but if we do it to you, it’s benign, it’s humanitarian intervention, it’s with benign intent. That’s the definition that’s actually used. If the educated sectors were honest, that’s what they’d say. Then the whole problem of defining would be over. But short of that, we have only two choices: either to use the official definitions, which I do; or to say, well, it’s an impossible problem, very deep, and so on. And so it will remain unless we’re able to recognize the operative significance.

ACHCAR: One might point also to attempts at expanding the concept: for instance, the European Union’s definition of terrorism in June 2002,⁶ which included “causing extensive destruction to a Government or public facility … a public place or private property likely to … result in major economic loss,” or even “threatening to commit” any such destruction. This could encompass acts of the kind that global justice or environmentalist or peasant protestors have committed against, say, a McDonald’s restaurant or an experimental agricultural field with genetically modified organisms or the like, and these would fall therefore under the category of terrorism. This is a serious and dangerous expansion of the definition.

CHOMSKY: It’s part of the expansion, and in a way it makes sense. What you should do is simply define terrorism as acts we don’t like. And acts we do like, they are not terrorism.

It’s the same dishonesty we see in discussions of aggression or intervention. Aren’t there perfectly straightforward definitions of aggression? Robert Jackson, the chief counsel for the prosecution at the post-1945 International Military Tribunal for Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, gave a careful, clear definition of aggression.⁷ And that was reaffirmed in 1974 by a General Assembly resolution that passed in a voice vote with no objections, so there is an authoritative General Assembly resolution that says approximately the same thing.⁸ But it’s useless, because according to that definition probably every American president could be charged as a war criminal. Not only are things like the war in Vietnam or Iraq, of course, aggression; but even the Contra war waged by the Reagan administration against Nicaragua counts not as international terrorism but as aggression under the Jackson and General Assembly definitions. Part of one of the subcases of the definition of aggression is about supporting armed groups on the territory of a state to carry out violent acts in the state under attack without the agreement of that state.⁹ That’s the Contra war by definition. So that’s aggression. Thus, all of the members of the Reagan administration and of course the Democrats who pretty much supported them are guilty of war crimes. But you can’t have that. So, therefore, the definition of aggression is also held to be very complex and obscure.

ACHCAR: We’ve been talking about the official definitions of terrorism, but what then would we agree among ourselves to be the definition of terrorism? In the public mind, I would say that terrorism is seen as basically that which targets civilian populations or democratic governments. That’s the most common view of terrorism, the targeting of civilians for goals that are linked to attempts to get governments or other collectivities to act in a certain way. Actions against an occupying army are not labeled terrorism by most people. The irony is that even in the final statement of the conference of the Iraqi political forces held in Cairo, Egypt, in November 2005, a distinction was made between the right to resist foreign occupation, deemed legitimate—which, although it was not stated explicitly, meant that actions against U.S. occupying troops in Iraq are an exercise of the right of resistance—and reprehensible terrorism, which was restricted to attacks on fellow Iraqis. And that’s quite ironic, because this was a conference involving representatives of the supposedly U.S.-allied Iraqi government, including the president and the prime minister.

I would think that the definition of terrorism that is least problematic is that which points to acts against unarmed innocent civilians. Taking innocent civilians as targets or hostages is definitely terrorism, even in the fight against a foreign occupation.

CHOMSKY: Then you do get into a definitional problem, because shooting somebody on the street isn’t necessarily an act of terrorism. So it has to be the threat or use of force, primarily against civilian targets, for ideological, religious, political, or other purposes, perhaps aimed at influencing a government. (ACHCAR: Or a collectivity.) Or a collectivity.

ACHCAR: Not acts targeting individuals as such, but trying to impose something on a collectivity or a government. (CHOMSKY: E xactly. That’s correct.) That would be, I think, a rounded definition of terrorism, though not exhaustive.

CHOMSKY: And that’s very close to the official U.S. definition, though it’s not used in practice because this would make the United States a leading terrorist state.

SHALOM: And then there are tough cases about whether low-level government officials count as innocent civilians.

CHOMSKY: That’s true. Look, this isn’t physics. There are no terms of political or social discussion that have clear definitions.

ACHCAR: No. On the fringes, it becomes a legal matter. Then you have to discuss it case by case. It gets to the courts.

CHOMSKY: Even in the hard sciences, there weren’t clear definitions until the sciences became advanced. Even in mathematics: terms like “limit,” for example. Definitions don’t come until much later. So what you really want isn’t to find a sharp definition but to identify a concept. And this one’s easily identifiable; it’s just not acceptable. Because if you agree to this characterization, it’s going to turn out that the acts of the powerful fall under the definition of terrorism, and that’s not allowed.

ACHCAR: And then we might add to the definition the same distinction that you get in an International Relations 101 course, regarding the “actors”: the distinction between governmental, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental actors. The same distinction, the same categories, can be applied to terrorism. There is nongovernmental terrorism, which has been very prominent in the news these last few years, and there is governmental terrorism, and also intergovernmental terrorism, when you have NATO or such intergovernmental institutions conducting acts that we understand from our definition of terrorism to be terroristic. And the U.S. government itself cannot reject the idea that there is such a thing as governmental terrorism since it accuses many other states of being terroristic.

CHOMSKY: There have been efforts to restrict terrorism to subnational groups, but that runs against policy, because, exactly as you say, then you can’t label certain states as terrorist. But then you’re back to the same dilemma— how do you exclude yourself? (ACHCAR: Right.)

The Terrorist Threat

SHALOM: Is there actually a terrorist threat to Europe or the United States, or is that all concoction?

CHOMSKY: No, there’s a very serious threat. In fact, the threat is being escalated, consciously. It didn’t start on 9/11. If you go through the 1990s—first of all, there was an attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, which came pretty close to succeeding; with a little better planning—I think you, Gilbert, wrote this in your Clash of Barbarisms¹⁰—it would have killed tens of thousands. Then they were going to blow up the tunnels and the UN building, the FBI buildings, and so on. They were stopped just in time. They were essentially jihadis, trained by the United States in Afghanistan, led by an Egyptian cleric who was brought into the United States under CIA protection. That was a serious act of terror.

Throughout the 1990s, there was a whole literature of technical books, published for example by MIT Press—w...