I'd never read any Chomsky before, but I'd seen one of his movies and
heard of his reputation. I was worried he was just going to be a
predictable, knee-jerk Vietnam-era peacenik.
He discusses the Middle East, particularly Iraq, in a lot of
intelligent detail, and then concludes (surprise!) that the US should
withdraw all its forces from Iraq immediately and unconditionally, and
that if we did that the Sunnis and Shia would just magically quit
fighting against each other.
I felt pretty ripped off, because I thought while he was
discussing the situation in so much detail he was actually thinking and
digesting information that would drive a conclusion, while in fact the
policy he was going to recommend was never in question and had no
relationship with the facts on the ground being discussed.
When he was discussing Afghanistan, he says some ridiculous things.
One thing he said was that the Taliban were
seriously thinking about handing Bin Laden over before we attacked
them. It was obvious to me they would have been less hasty in
handing Bib Laden over than the Iranians were about returning the
embassy hostages. They despised us, they would have made demands,
such as that an impossibly high burden of proof of Bin Ladens guilt be
met (though he had declared war on the US and made no secret for years
of the fact that he had exactly this sort of activity in mind).
Bin Laden had done interviews with the international press that made
his agenda, which included mass murder of westerners, known to the
whole world, including the Taliban, who welcomed him as their guest
because they were sympathetic to that agenda.
Chomsky describes the US bombing of Afghanistan as
"terrorism". He does not specifically define how he defines
terrorism to be different than legitimate warfare, which seems pretty
relevant when you make a statment like that. From this book, I
get the impression Chomsky feels that any use of military force is
wrong, unless it is directed agains the US or Israel.
I had the feeling Chomsky
doesn't really seem to feel that the US has any right to defend itself
against terrorism, rather, he seems to feel that we should accept it as
our just fate because we're such an evil country. As Ann Coulter says,
"Terrorist don't hate America as much as liberals do - if they had that
much energy, they'd have indoor plumbing by now!".
