FPIF Commentary |
Response to Chomsky
Ian Williams | August 21, 2009
Editor: John Feffer
|
|
|
|
I am afraid that simply because Noam Chomsky makes an ex cathedra observation does not make it "uncontroversial" — not even when he hyperbolically accuses me of having "blood on my hands." He still defends his statement that "NATO air raids on Serbia [beginning March 24, 1999] actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo," and is surprised that I find this untrue — let alone morally unpalatable.
One hesitates to teach logic, let alone linguistics, to the distinguished professor, but his use of the world "precipitate" shifts the blame for the massacres and mass deportations that he admits took place from the actual perpetrators to those who were trying to stop them. (Incidentally, at the time Bogdan Denitch and I called for intervention but also condemned the form of intervention that President Clinton chose — high-level bombing.)
One can certainly accuse the West of neglecting the plight of the Kosovars, but it was Milosevic and his regime that deprived the Kosovars of their rights and then began to kill and deport them. It was that regime that had recently killed up to 8,000 Bosnians at Srebrenica, whose dismembered and reburied bodies are still being found. There was no NATO bombing to blame for that rather shameful inaction.
In fact, faced with that cold-blooded massacre, NATO leaders had every reason to fear the worst in Kosovo.
I would recommend that Chomsky read the judgment of the UN war crimes tribunal, after it had considered the evidence of 113 witnesses for the prosecution and 118 for the defense, not to mention tens of thousands of pages of documents submitted by both sides. It found five Serb officials guilty of the "criminal enterprise" that he attributes to NATO. It concludes that "the direct testimony from many witnesses demonstrates that the Kosovo Albanian population was fleeing from the actions of the forces of the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] and Serbia, rather than the NATO bombing and the KLA."
For a flourish that should excite some indignation, the report added that "there is no doubt that a clandestine operation consisting of exhuming over 700 bodies originally buried in Kosovo and transferring them to Serbia proper took place during the NATO bombing" and adds that the "great majority of the corpses moved were victims of crime and civilians, including women and children."
In finding the Serbian officials guilty, the tribunal noted that "the NATO bombing provided an opportunity to the members of the joint criminal enterprise — an opportunity for which they had been waiting and for which they had prepared by moving additional forces to Kosovo and by the arming and disarming process described above — to deal a heavy blow to the KLA and to displace, both within and without Kosovo, enough Kosovo Albanians to change the ethnic balance. And now this could all be done with plausible deniability because it could be blamed not only upon the KLA, but upon NATO as well [italics mine]." The blame-shifting certainly seems to have worked with Chomsky, but the judges looked at the mass of evidence and decided to the contrary.
Chomsky betrays a persistent Manichaean worldview in which the United States is always the source of evil in the world. Even with that in mind he would surely like to reconsider his implied comparison of the United States with Nazis. ("It would be like raising the question of why Nazis didn't intervene to stop the slaughter of Jews by local forces in the regions they occupied.")
The United States is often, but not always wrong, and its enemies are sometimes, but not always right. The United States was certainly wrong in East Timor, and indeed in the near contemporary situation in Western Sahara, and I have been reporting on those injustices for many decades. Along with the other members of the Security Council the United States had a clear duty to intervene to assert international law. In the absence of effective international (i.e., U.S.) intervention, the Indonesian military would have been every bit as brutal and aggressive.
We could deplore this intervention as much as we like, but I fail to see what was going to stop Indonesia's brutality otherwise. Indeed, Chomsky points out that it was Clinton's intervention that persuaded the Indonesian general's that the game was up in East Timor. Yes it was long overdue, but it was an American intervention, which deserves some grudging credit. Also, by delegating U.S. forces to the UN on the Macedonian border, the United States successfully prevented yet another former Yugoslav republic being sucked into Milosevic's bloodstained mire. There are hundreds of thousands of dead Rwandans who would have welcomed a U.S. intervention there.
However, Chomsky takes an absolutist position on intervention in principle, which would have had him picketing the Normandy beaches to stop the war against German workers.
The United States is culpable in many ways over East Timor, but that should not detract from the primary role of the Indonesian government and military. Nor should any person of ethics try to shield the Milosevic regime from its unique culpability for events in Srebrenica and Kosovo. Chomsky's quasi-theological conception of the United States as the supreme evil power tends to exonerate the less evil powers, turning Ariel Sharon, the Indonesian generals, Milosevic, and the others into mere secondary agents. Meanwhile, condemning in principle any effective action to stop these malign actors actually lends them aid and comfort — while doing nothing for their victims.
Senior Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Ian Williams is a journalist and author. Much of his work can be found on his blog, Deadline Pundit.
|
|
|
|
Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). Copyright © 2009, Institute for Policy Studies.
Recommended citation:
Ian Williams, "Response to Chomsky," (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, August 21, 2009).
Web location:
http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/6376
Production Information:
Author(s): Ian Williams
Editor(s): John Feffer
Production: Jen Doak |
|
Latest Comments & Conversation Area
Editor's Note: FPIF.org editors read and approve each comment.
Comments are checked for content only; spelling and grammar errors are not
corrected and comments that include vulgar language or libelous content are
rejected. |
| |
| Name: |
Mano Zezez |
Date: Aug 22, 2009 |
| You start by disputing that "NATO air raids on Serbia actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo" but go on to argue only that the atrocities were carried out by "Serb officials" and that "the NATO bombing provided an opportunity" to carry out these crimes, "an opportunity for which they had been waiting".
Chomsky agrees on both of these points. His argument is precisely as you and the UN war crimes tribunal have outlined: that the NATO bombing provided an opportunity for those atrocities to be carried out. Had the bombing not occurred, that opportunity would not have arisen. That means it played a causal role in making matters worse, which is a good argument against intervention, especially since this outcome was anticipated "by the NATO command and the White House" (as Chomsky notes). This point is not, and as far as I know was never intended to be a reason to attribute a greater level of blame to NATO forces than to the Serbian officials who carried out the atrocities.
On the issue of East Timor, you have grossly misrepresented Chomsky and the truth with respect to US intervention when you said "Chomsky points out that it was Clinton's intervention that persuaded the Indonesian general's that the game was up in East Timor. Yes it was long overdue, but it was an American intervention, which deserves some grudging credit."
The point you seem to have completely missed is that what you have referred to as US 'intervention' involved ending it's military support for the Suharto regime in Indonesia. To quote Chomsky on the subject from his speech on Responsibility To Protect (R2P), delivered to the UN in July 2009:
"To end the atrocities in this case would not have required bombing, or sanctions, or indeed any act beyond withdrawal of participation. That was demonstrated ... when, under strong domestic and international pressure, Clinton formally ended US participation. The invaders immediately withdrew, and a UN peacekeeping force was able to enter facing no army. That could have been done any time in the preceding quarter-century. Astonishingly, this horrendous story was soon reinterpreted as vindication of R2P, a reaction so shameful that words fail." |
|
| Name: |
John Williamson |
Date: Aug 24, 2009 |
| Well-researched article and you make your points forcefully. See "The Anti-Chomsky Reader" for much more along these lines. And please don't give the Chompster too much credit in linguistics. None of his many theories have been able to shed much light on how language works. |
|
| Name: |
Daniel |
Date: Aug 25, 2009 |
| I don't see any difference between Mr. Noam Chomsky and his associate Edward S. Herman. Both of these gentlemen deny Srebrenica genocide.
"By seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the forty thousand Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica... " - Judge Theodor Meron [Polish-American Jew] http://www.icty.org/sid/8409
From 1992-95 Serbs constantly attacked Bosnian Muslim villages and towns around Srebrenica and burned alive scores of Bosniak women and children (view photos http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2008/12/bosniak-women-children-burned-alive-by.html ).
Contrary to Chomsky/Herman claims, Serbs never demilitarized around Srebrenica. They had repeatedly violated the 1993 demilitarization agreement.
In several days of July 1995, Srebrenica genocide resulted in the ethnic cleansing of 30,000 and summary executions of more than 8,000 Bosniaks (DNA confirmed by the ICMP http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2009/07/dna-results-reveal-6186-srebrenica.html). |
|
| Name: |
Zlatko Beretovac |
Date: Aug 25, 2009 |
| I find this response confused and confusing, misrepresenting its target as if the author had read nothing of Chomsky's work on the 1999 Kosovo conflict, apart from the (seriously misread) quotations provided.
You appear to confuse Chomsky's emphasis on US responsibility with a blinkered worldview, and his contextualisation of the Serbian army's guilt with exculpation. He has said repeatedly that Milosevic's regime committed atrocities, and has harped on virtually everywhere about the cultural and political virtues of life in the US - the phrase "most free society on earth" recurs in his writing to the point of eye-rolling familiarity.
The point he makes in writing about the Kosovo conflict is that the manichean framing of the issue in the media leads to both a structural misunderstanding of the issue and to outcomes which have only a glancing resemblance to the announced purpose of a particular intervention, in this case the bombing of Kosovo and Serbia.
The record of the Rambouillet negotiations (which included last-minute US demands known to be unacceptable, added after the Serbian parliament had agreed to allow an international force in) demonstrates at the very least that NATO and the US preferred the bombing option, and casts doubt upon the official story that this was a humanitarian intervention.
Other acts bore out a characterisation of NATO motives as revolving around asserting its credible threat by jumping into a conflict partly of its own creation, as Chomsky and others noted at the time.
The timing of the bombing was a crucial event in that, Chomsky argues, it works as a paradigm of media distortion. The Serbian army reacted to the announcement of the bombing, but news media presented the massive acceleration of expulsions and violence as provoking the bombing and justifying it. Surely this contributes to an important controversy about strategy, motives and consequences. The timing of the bombing certainly permits Chomsky's analysis of it as "precipitating" the outrages. Your reading of this as excusing the Serb military actions seems to be a misreading of Chomsky's attempt to distinguish between different agents and their respective roles.
You seem to be labouring under the illusion that Chomsky was trying to excuse or minimise atrocities carried out by the Serbs, as implicit in your use of the verb "admit":
the massacres and mass deportations that he admits took place
The insinuation is that he would rather think they hadn't happened, that he has an investment in one side being the good guys. I am assuming you are arguing in good faith and not deliberately distorting Chomsky's work, which is really not concerned with scoring points but with a sincere attempt to analyse US responsibility.
Chomsky has repeatedly said his work is a corrective, that the crimes of "official enemies" are already described in detail in the works of others, and that his role is to provide a reading of US foreign policy and the role of systematically distorted information in the pursuit of rational (but brutal) superpower goals.
He has never said that the US is the supreme evil; rather, US government and business elites should be rationally analysed like any other group, and one should not accept the propaganda of moral goals when actions and consequences contradict such claims.
His position on guilt is perhaps the point you misunderstand; he has often contended that US citizens who have not done what they could to understand and oppose their government's unjust policies (not the just ones, of which he "admits" there are some representatives) participate in a kind of civic guilt.
I imagine that you could argue against this moral charge quite convincingly, but the inaccurate and misleading analysis of Chomsky as a manichean absolutist undermines your case and irrelevantly confounds one thing with another. |
|
| Name: |
Ben Keegan |
Date: Sep 04, 2009 |
| "Chomsky betrays a persistent Manichaean worldview in which the United States is always the source of evil in the world." No, he doesn't. His works consider the validity and motives of action of all sides in international affairs. His failing, as many see it, is simply to consider the multifarious crimes of his own nation as being as equal to examination, analysis and, if necessary, condemnation, as those of the openly tyrannical regimes of this world. |
|
| Name: |
George Scialabba |
Date: Sep 09, 2009 |
| "One hesitates to teach logic, let alone linguistics, to the distinguished professor," Williams writes. He should have listened to his hesitations, or at least consulted a dictionary. "Precipitate" means "bring about" or "occasion." It does not mean "carry out." Therefore, it is exactly correct to say that the NATO bombing of Serbia precipitated the worst atrocities. To remind Chomsky and the rest of us that the victims of the Serbian atrocities were fleeing from the Serbians rather than from NATO would make perfect sense if Chomsky (or anyone) had suggested that the NATO bombing had inflicted those atrocities rather than precipitated them.
"Chomsky betrays a persistent Manichaean worldview in which the United States is always the source of evil in the world." "Chomsky takes an absolutist position on intervention in principle, which would have had him picketing the Normandy beaches to stop the war against German workers." This is the sort of drivel that even intelligent leftists like Williams frequently descend to in criticizing Chomsky. Puzzling. |
|
| |
| You may add a new comment here. It will not appear on this page until it has been approved by the moderator. |
| |
Contact FPIF's webmaster with inquiries regarding the functionality of this website.
Copyright © 2009, Institute for Policy Studies.
|
|
|
|
