MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, introduced as the eighth most-cited human being in history after Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, and Ford during an interview earlier this week with The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur , said the U.S. was defeated in Iraq of achieving its chief war aim which was securing preferential access to Iraq’s oil reserves. And Mr. Chomsky speculated that President Barack Obama is trying to salvage some form of victory in Afghanistan lest he’s slaughtered by the right-wing propaganda system. During the discussion Chomsky also chastised Obama for enriching the very same people who created the financial meltdown.
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DEFEATED IN IRAQ
Chomsky stated that there were very solid reasons for invading Iraq, chief among them being that Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world. Establishing a client-regime with a major military base in Iraq and getting preferential access to its resources would be of great value to the aforementioned nexus. However, Chomsky said the U.S. did not achieve their goals:
Iraq is an interesting case because it was a defeat. U.S. goals were defeated in Iraq, very important fact. At the beginning there were of course all sorts of pretexts, "they’re tied with Al Qaeda", "weapons of mass destruction", when that collapsed there was a new pretext "we’re bringing democracy". The U.S. in fact fought democracy every step of the way. It tried to prevent elections, and when it couldn’t prevent them it tried to manipulate them.
By 2008 when it was pretty clear the U.S. was not going to achieve its goals, the Bush administration made strong significant declarations in which they discussed what the outcome must be, and what they said it must include was the U.S. right to use military bases in Iraq indefinitely as a base for combat and other operations and privileged access to Iraqi energy resources for U.S. corporations. At that point it was said pretty explicitly because they were getting pretty desperate.
Well they didn’t get either of those because the United States had not been able to suppress Iraqi nationalism. The U.S. could kill any number of insurgents that wasn’t a big problem but what they couldn’t deal with was the mass popular non-violent resistance. The U.S. was defeated. But it’s clear what the war aims were, they were sensible aims.
OBAMA BAILS OUT HIS CRONIES
Uygur wondered if America had a functional democracy at all considering the system was so captured and Chomsky said:
Democracy isn’t a yes or no affair, it isn’t even a more or less affair, it has many dimensions. In some respects the United States is very free. So, take for example freedom of speech. That is protected more in the United States than any other country I know of, and that’s a very good thing. It is an achievement, it’s not in the Bill of Rights incidentally, it was gained mostly in the 1960s - that’s when the great Supreme Court cases were reached under the impact of the Civil Rights Movement.
On the other hand, we barely have a political system. 50 years ago analysts pointed out that the U.S. has essentially one political party – the business party, which has two factions called Republicans and Democrats, they consistently follow policies that are in the interests of their business constituency, sometimes some help to the population, sometimes not.
Take President Obama. The core of his funding was financial institutions. By now they are the largest part of the economy, they don’t contribute much to the economy but they have enormous weight - they are probably 40% of corporate profits. Very questionable what they contribute to the economy, anyway they’re very powerful. And in the tradition of U.S. politics which has been quite well-studied and well-documented, it’s typically the case that concentration of funding pretty much determines the policies. The funders expect to be paid off.
So it comes as no great surprise the greatest beneficiaries of Obama’s policies were the very financial institutions who tanked the economy. And you could see that right away. I mean the people he picked for his economic advisors - they were not Nobel Laureates who condemned the policies that led to the crisis, not people like Josef Stiglitz or Paul Krugman and others, he picked the people who created the crisis such as Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers - who was famous for having undermined the regulation of derivatives, one of the main causes of the crisis - and Tim Geinther, and they created an enormous bail-out of financial institutions. Something obviously was needed, the financial institutions had destroyed the economy, something had to be done. But it’s doubtful it had to be done in a way that enriches those who created the crisis and makes them more powerful than ever. But that’s what you’d expect from the way politics works.
The interviewer then wondered if it was a conscious decision by President Obama, to pick the guys that destroyed the economy because they were the ones that paid him. Chomsky responded:
If you go back to the Politburo in the Soviet Union and you ask what the people were thinking, we have a good idea what they were thinking because there have been internal documents released. They were thinking that they were saving democracy from the assault by the fascists led by the United States, they’re going to bring wealth and benefits to people. You read Japanese fascists, we have a ton of documentation because they’re a conquered country. The documents of Japanese fascists are just overflowing with loving kindness. I mean when they were carrying out huge massacres in China but thought they were bringing an earthly paradise to China and protecting the people from the bandits. Almost anything you look at you will find self-serving ideologies created.
Uygur asked Chomsky if Obama had been brainwashed by the system. Chomsky’s classic response was:
I don’t know anything about Obama. You’ll have to ask his psychiatrist or his family and I also don’t think it matters. I mean I don’t care what Brezhnev actually thought, I care what he did.
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