Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky (17 page)

In fact, I’ve been arguing for years with friends of mine who are campaigning for “conversion” of the economy from military production to social spending that they’re basically talking nonsense. I mean, it’s not that business has to be
told
“for this many jet planes we could have this many schools, isn’t it awful to build jet planes?” You don’t have to convince the head of General Motors of that: he knew that forty years before anyone started talking about “conversion,” that’s why he wanted jet planes. There is no point in explaining to people in power that “conversion” would be better for the world. Sure it would. What do they care? They knew that long ago, that’s why they went in the opposite direction. Look: this system was designed, with a lot of conscious and intelligent thought, for the particular purpose that it serves. So any kind of “conversion” will just have to be part of a total restructuring of the society, designed to undermine centralized control.

And I mean, you’re going to need an
alternative
—it’s not enough just to cut off the Pentagon budget, that’s just going to make the economy collapse, because the economy is dependent on it. Something else has to happen unless you just want to go back to the Stone Age. So the first thing simply has to be creating both a culture and an institutional structure in which public funds can be used for social needs, for human needs. That’s the mistake that a lot of the “conversion” people make, in my opinion: they’re just identifying what’s obvious, they’re not focusing enough on creating the basis for an alternative.

W
OMAN
: What is the hope, then, for dismantling the whole military system?

There have to be large-scale institutional changes, we need a real democratization of the society. I mean, if we continue to have domination of the economic and political system by corporations, why should they behave any differently? It’s not that the people
in
the corporations are bad people, it’s that the institutional necessity of the system is to maintain corporate domination and profit-making. I mean, if the Chairman of General Motors suddenly decided to start producing the best quality cars at the cheapest prices, he wouldn’t be Chairman any longer—there’d be a shift on the stock market and they’d throw him out in five minutes. And that generalizes to the system as a whole. There is absolutely no reason why the people who own the economy would want it to be set up in a way that undermines or weakens their control, any more than there’s a reason why they would want there to be a political system in which the population genuinely participates—why would they? They’d be crazy. Just like they’d be crazy if they opened up the media to dissident opinion—what possible purpose would there be in that? Or if they let the universities teach honest history, let’s say. It would be absurd.

Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do. Even within the current structure of power, there’s plenty of latitude for pressure and changes and reforms. I mean, any institution is going to have to respond to public pressure—because their interest is to keep the population more or less passive and quiescent, and if the population is
not
passive and quiescent, then they have to respond to that. But really dealing with the problems at their core ultimately will require getting to the source of power and dissolving it—otherwise you may be able to fix things up around the edges, but you won’t really change anything fundamentally. So the alternative just has to be putting control over these decisions into popular hands—there simply is no other way besides dissolving and diffusing power democratically, I think.

Libyan and American Terrorism

W
OMAN
: Switching to current events a bit, Mr. Chomsky—“terrorism” is a phenomenon that really took off in the media in the 1980s. Why do you think all of a sudden Libya became such a great threat to us?

Well, because from the very first minute that the Reagan administration came into office, it immediately selected Libya as a punching bag.
  ¹²
And there were very good reasons for that: Libya’s defenseless, Qaddafi is sort of hateful and kind of a thug—a very small-time thug, I might say, but nevertheless a thug—and he’s also an Arab, and there’s a lot of anti-Arab racism around.
  ¹³
And the Reagan administration needed to create fear: it had to mobilize the population to do things they didn’t want to do, like support a massive increase in military spending.

I mean, Reagan could
talk
about the “Evil Empire,” but he couldn’t get into any confrontations with the Evil Empire—because that’s dangerous; the Soviets can fight back, and they’ve got missiles and things like that. So the trick was to find somebody who’s frightening enough to scare Americans into accepting a huge military build-up, but nevertheless weak enough so you could beat him up without anyone fighting back. And the answer was Qaddafi, and international terrorism generally.

International terrorism by Arabs is certainly real. I mean, overwhelmingly international terrorism comes out of Washington and Miami, but there is a relatively small amount of it that comes from the Arab world.
  ¹⁴
And people don’t like it—they blow up planes, and it’s scary, and it’s Arabs, it’s weird-looking guys who have dark faces and mustaches. How does it become a big enough threat that we have to build more missiles and so on? Well, it’s
Kremlin-directed
international terrorism.
  ¹⁵
This stuff was crafted from the first moment—and furthermore, it was all utterly transparent right from the very beginning, like I was writing about it as early as 1981.
  ¹⁶
The media pretend they don’t understand it, scholarship pretends it doesn’t understand it, but it’s been as predictable as a broken record: they put it on in 1981, and it’s still playing.

The whole media campaign on terrorism started with a series of C.I.A. disinformation releases about Libya. In 1981 the C.I.A. leaked a story to the press about U.S. efforts to assassinate Qaddafi, in the hope that this would lead Qaddafi to some kind of erratic reaction which we could then use as an excuse to bomb him. Okay, that was exposed: the first reference to C.I.A. disinformation about Libya appeared in
Newsweek
in August 1981, when
Newsweek
stated that it had been subjected to a disinformation campaign by the government.
  ¹⁷
Since then, there have been about a half-dozen similar cases in which Washington floated some lunatic story about Libya and the media bought it, then discovered later that it was disinformation and pretended they were all surprised; I mean, at some point you’d think they would begin to ask what’s going on, but apparently not. And some of these cases were completely crazy—there was a story about Libyan hitmen wandering around Washington, S.W.A.T. teams on alert patrolling the White House, that kind of thing. It was all total madness.
  ¹⁸

Well, every one of these confrontations with Libya has been timed for some domestic purpose. The big one, the bombing of Libya in April 1986, was timed for the contra aid vote in Congress—the point was to build up a lot of hysteria beforehand, and it kind of worked: they rammed through a big aid package a month or two later.
  ¹⁹
It was all a complete set-up, totally prefabricated. First, a confrontation was arranged in which Libyan artillery guns fired at a U.S. fighter plane. You’ll notice that somehow it’s always the
U.S
. Navy or the
U.S
. Air Force that Libya is shooting at—they never shoot at
Italian
planes, or
French
planes, or
Spanish
planes, it’s always American planes. Well, what’s the reason? One possibility is the Libyans are insane: they go after the people who are going to wipe them out. The other possibility is that the Americans are
trying
to get shot at, which is of course the truth. The reason the Libyans only shoot at American planes is because American planes are sent over there to
get
shot at; nobody else sends planes into the Gulf of Sidra, because there’s no point in doing it, so therefore they
don’t
get shot at.

See, Libya says the Gulf of Sidra is a part of its territorial waters, and the United States refuses to accept that. Well, there’s a way that countries can resolve such disputes: you take them to the World Court and get a ruling; a law-abiding state does it that way. Alright, that option was raised in the United States, but the State Department said, no, we can’t do it, it’s much too desperate a situation; getting a decision from the World Court will take two years. You know, we can’t put off for two years whether the U.S. Navy can go into the Gulf of Sidra, the United States will collapse. All this stuff is so ludicrous you can barely repeat it.
  ²⁰

The beginning phase of the 1986 confrontation occurred when American planes penetrated Libyan territorial air space and finally got shot at—happily, because they know they’re never actually going to be hit by the Libyan air defenses. They then flew back to the fleet, and the American Navy bombed a bunch of Libyan navy vessels and killed lots of Libyans. That was great, a real victory.

Following that, on April 5th, 1986, a discotheque in West Berlin was bombed; two people were killed. Rather crucially, one of them was a Turkish woman and the other was a black American G.I.—the reason was, this was a black Third World bar, not an insignificant fact. The White House immediately announced that they had evidence, intercepts and so on, that showed that this terrorist act was perpetrated by Libya, though they never presented any of this evidence.
  ²¹
Then nine days later, on April 14th, we bombed Libya.

It was completely obvious that we
were
going to bomb them. In fact, I have a way of monitoring the Associated Press wires on my personal computer, and there were dispatches coming out all day because it was evident we were going to bomb them. So I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at a ticker-tape, but a story comes out about every minute, and all through the day there were tons of stories coming out about Libya; the last one before the bombing came through at 6:28
P.M.
It was bylined West Berlin, and it said: West German and U.S. military intelligence say they have no information about any Libyan connection to the disco bombing, but they suspect a possible Libyan connection.
  ²²

Okay, half an hour later, at precisely 7
P.M.
—rather crucial, it was at 7
P.M.
precisely
—the United States started bombing Libya. Why 7
P.M.
? Because that’s when the national news started on the three U.S. television networks: this was the first bombing in history ever timed for prime-time television, and I mean that literally. It was a tricky operation to arrange: you had to synchronize a six-hour flight from England so that a squadron of F-111 bombers would arrive in Libya precisely at 7
P.M.,
when the three national networks began their newscasts. They had to travel all the way across the Mediterranean, two planes had to turn around and so on, but still they hit it precisely at 7—that means there had to have been extremely careful planning: they didn’t want the bombing to start at ten after seven, say, because that would have lost the effect.

Now, every journalist who isn’t totally insane knew that this was a setup: I mean, how likely is it that you would get a bombing at 7
P.M.
Eastern Standard Time, precisely on the nose? And if you watched the news that evening, some of you will remember that the anchormen, Peter Jennings and those guys, started off by saying: “Alright, we’re going to switch over to Tripoli”—then they switched over to Tripoli, and there was the whole A.B.C. news team. What the hell were they doing in Tripoli? They’re never in Tripoli. Well, they were in Tripoli because they knew perfectly well there was going to be a bombing, that’s why. I mean, they didn’t know the exact minute, but everybody was in place in Tripoli because they knew the place was going to be bombed. Of course, they all pretended it was this big surprise.

So, 7
P.M.,
the United States bombs Tripoli and Benghazi, kills plenty of people: you go to the exciting events live, you hear the loud noises, the television news is preempted because this is so exciting. Then they flash back to Washington, and the Reagan administration spokesman, Larry Speakes, gets on T.V., and for the next twenty minutes they preempt the destruction to give you the State Department line. Meanwhile, the whole Washington press corps is just sitting there, these pussycats like Sam Donaldson and the rest of them, who would never ask an embarrassing question in a million years. Speakes gets up and says, “We knew for certain ten days ago that Libya was behind the disco bombing”—and nobody asked the obvious question: if you knew for certain ten days ago, how come you didn’t know half an hour ago? Barring colossal incompetence in the newsrooms, every journalist there knew what I knew—they read the A.P. wires at C.B.S. as much as I do, I guess, so that means they knew that up until a half-hour before the bombing, American and West German intelligence had no information about a Libyan connection. But Larry Speakes gets up and says, “We knew for certain ten days ago”—and none of them even batted an eyelash.
  ²³
Nobody asked another obvious question: how come the bombing was scheduled for 7
P.M.
Eastern Standard Time? How did you set it up so that a six-hour flight from London happened to arrive in Libya at precisely the instant when the television news started in the U.S.? Nobody asked that question. In fact, there’s a whole series of questions which nobody asked—everyone in the press just swallowed the absurdities. Then Reagan got on and pontificated for a while. Next day’s news, a hundred percent—everybody said, this is terrific, we finally showed these Libyans. Not a note of discord.
  ²⁴