Noam Chomsky

Love him or loathe him , Noam Chomsky , the political commentator discusses his new book in an interview with Z-Net . It is called Perilous Power , co-authored by Gilbert Achcar and written in the form of a dialogue between them, and is all about the United States diplomatic manouverings in the Middle East . Chomsky certainly understands the motives of competing nations when it comes to foreign policies and their raison d'etre.

"Shalom:.. a lot of people in the antiwar movement were sort of cheering on France and Germany and Russia, and other governments that opposed the war. How reliable are these governments in their antiwar stances?
Chomsky: Their reliability is approximately zero. Sensible antiwar activists don't ally themselves with governments... Tomorrow they'll do the opposite, because they're acting out of pure cynicism -- power interests -- anyway"

And later:-

" Rulers like Chirac, Putin, or Schröder should definitely not be regarded as allies by the antiwar movement, especially since they are themselves hawkish warmongers when their interests are at stake. Russian forces are waging a terrible quasi-genocidal war in Chechnya. The French government still considers itself a colonial power in Africa, and behaves as such. Not to mention the fact that both France and Germany are involved in Afghanistan, along with the U.S. troops. To that we should add that although Paris and Berlin did not support the invasion of Iraq politically, technically speaking they did everything they could to facilitate it: the Germans, of course, by letting the whole U.S. military infrastructure on their territory be used for that purpose, the French by opening their airspace to U.S. warplanes. So we should not be fooled by such governments. "

Achcar points out :-

"The United States and British refusal to lift the embargo -- that is, to allow the lifting of the embargo if and when UN inspectors determined that Iraq had disarmed -- was rightly perceived by Paris and Moscow as a refusal to permit them to take advantage of the oil concessions they had been granted. And they very much saw the dedication of Washington and London to invade Iraq as a desire to snatch the prize from them. Actually one of the first proclamations after the invasion was that all contracts granted by Saddam Hussein were to be considered null and void. So that's the main reason why Paris and Moscow opposed that war."

And Chomsky's observations upon American lip-service to democracy can be biting .

"He [ Paul Wolfowitz] berated the Turkish military for not intervening to compel the government to overrule 95 percent of the population; he basically ordered them to apologize to the United States..."

The Socialist Party often find much merit in what Chomsky says but we do have our reservations , needless to say . Analysis of his ideas can be found in this article and reviews of two of his books here and here .