Noam Chomsky

Washington is teaching the world a very ugly and dangerous lesson: If you want to defend yourself from us, you had better mimic North Korea and pose a credible military threat. Otherwise we will demolish you.

The invasion was brutal, some of the incidents—such as during the second attack on Fallujah in November 2004—truly shocking. Women and children were allowed to leave, but men had to remain in the city. Then came a major attack by the U.S. Marines, which was lauded in the press. I remember the first day of the attack, when the U.S. forces took over the general hospital, which is a major war crime. The soldiers threw patients on the floor, threw doctors on the floor, and tied them up. The press was euphoric; the New York Times had a picture of the general hospital, talking about how wonderful it was and blaming the attack on the “terrorists.”4 The press described how the U.S. Marines found the “packrats” in their “warrens” and killed them. Nobody knows how many people were killed, since we don’t count our atrocities. Dangerous weapons were used, including lots of depleted uranium, lots of radioactivity, which increased the rates of cancer. Studies from Iraqi doctors followed, and from Iraqi human rights groups; both showed the scale of the atrocity

In Iraq, the United States could not establish a government pliable enough to run it for them. That became a problem when the United States was forced to withdraw under Iraqi pressure in 2007. The Bush administration produced a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in November 2007, which they wanted the Iraqi government to accept. For the first time, this SOFA stated explicitly the U.S. motives for their war. Anybody with their eyes open knew it already, but this was an explicit statement. The agreement provided special privileges to U.S. corporations, meaning U.S. energy corporations, to exploit Iraqi resources. That was one point. The second was that the United States had to have permanent military bases in Iraq. These are the two essential points of the SOFA. To make sure that everyone understood that the U.S. government was not going to budge from these points, in January 2008, when the U.S. president presented the budget, he put out signing statements to say that he would ignore anything that interfered with the proposals in the SOFA agreement. This was really serious, which meant that the United States was going to insist on giving special privileges to U.S. corporations and to the existence of permanent military bases. The press cooperated by never reporting it, and commentators and scholars did not report it. It was the most important statement about the war.

Kofi Annan said that the U.S. war on Iraq was a crime. That’s a textbook case of a crime—a war of aggression—for which Nazi war criminals were hanged. There was no credible pretext for the invasion, no UN Security Council authorization, overwhelming opposition of the world’s population, no possible redeeming feature. Hitler invaded Poland based on the “wild terror of the Poles,” who had to be repressed in the name of peace. When Hitler took the Sudetenland, he said it was to bring peace and security to an area where people were in conflict, and where the Nazis would bring … the advantages of German civilization. That’s about as credible a justification as that given by Washington for its invasion of Iraq. In the entire mainstream commentary on Iraq, you will not find one person saying that the war on Iraq was the same kind of crime as the war of aggression of Germany, which resulted in the Nuremberg trials. What you will find is someone like Obama calling the invasion of Iraq a “strategic blunder,” which is what the Nazi generals said after the Battle of Stalingrad. Others who said they didn’t like the war in Iraq are being greatly praised for their courage and integrity. Try to find one of them who says that the attack on Iraq was a criminal endeavor. If we take the Nuremberg trials seriously, then these people who engineered the Iraq War should be tried on the Nuremberg principle. The chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, Justice Robert Jackson, said something very interesting at the end of the proceedings: “We are handing these defendants a ‘poisoned chalice,’ and if we carry out similar crimes we must suffer the same consequences, or else this Tribunal is a farce.” Well, you can draw your own conclusions from this statement.

United States seems to always find a reason to remain in Iraq. It bombs Iraq in 1991, it maintains a pretty ruthless sanctions regime during the 1990s, it bombs Iraq again in 2003, and then invades and occupies it off and on for the next several years. The reasons for this long war against Iraq are legion: the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the need to create democracy, the threats from al-Qaeda and then ISIS, the need to protect the Kurds, and so on.

Iran is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Its status as a nuclear power state is guaranteed by the NPT. It is on that basis that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitors Iran’s nuclear industry. But meanwhile, Israel is not a member of the NPT, has no IAEA monitors, and yet has a growing nuclear arsenal.

These attacks against the Kurds were horrendous, major crimes. The worst by far were committed in the 1980s, during the Anfal campaign, including the gassing of Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1988 (which came alongside the chemical warfare against Iran). The invasion of Kuwait, though a serious crime, added little to the Iraqi government’s already horrendous record. Saddam, however, in the 1980s remained a favored ally and trading partner of the United States, Britain, and West Germany, which further abetted these crimes. The Reagan administration even sought to prevent congressional reaction to the gassing of the Kurds, including the failed plea of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Claiborne Pell that “we cannot be silent on genocide again.” So extreme was Reagan’s support for Saddam that when the ABC correspondent Charles Glass revealed the site of one of Saddam’s biological warfare programs a few months after Halabja, Washington denied the facts, and the story died.

Middle East. There are such zones around the world. They can’t function, because the United States violates every one of them by putting nuclear weapons on foreign military bases or by harboring submarines that have these weapons. There’s an African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty based on the Pelindaba Treaty (2009), which the United States violates by turning, with British support, the colonial island of Diego Garcia into a military base with nuclear facilities. So, it can’t be established. There’s one in the Pacific, and this can’t go into effect because the United States insists on nuclear weapons facilities on specific islands. The most important would be the Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. Why not institute it with intensive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which we know would work? We already have experience under the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), the Iran nuclear deal, which worked until the United States pulled out of it unilaterally. There are intensive inspections, including by U.S. intelligence, worked into the plan. Let’s have a nuclear weapons free zone with intensive inspections. Is there a problem instituting it? Not really. The Arab states have been demanding it for twenty-five years. Iran strongly supports it. The G77, about 130 countries of the global south, very strongly support it. Europe raised no objections. So, what’s the problem? Well, the usual one. The United States won’t allow it. The United States vetoes any suggestion of it in international forums. Obama vetoed it in 2015 when it came up during the conference of the nonproliferation treaty. Since then, the United States has blocked it.

e Zone conference to be held in Helsinki in December 2012 was scuttled by Israeli pressure. The 189 member nations of the NPT—including Iran—said they would attend. Israel refused. There are three other states, apart from Israel, that are not in the NPT: India, Pakistan, and South Sudan. In September 2013, Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani told the UN General Assembly that Israel should join the NPT “without further delay.” This was met in Tel Aviv with stone silence. As you say, Noam, the scofflaw of the region—Israel—refuses to accept international agreements or to help create a zone of peace in West Asia. But it is not alone. The United States currently houses nuclear weapons in its bases along the Gulf, from Bahrain to Qatar and outward to Djibouti. A Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone would mean an end to the U.S. practice of housing tactical nuclear weapons in the waters around the region. In May 2015, the United States and the United Kingdom killed off the final document of a conference of the NPT states because of the concept of the Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. Each Arab state and Iran agreed to the concept, despite the otherwise fractious divides in the region. Only Israel and the West raised objections to it. It tells one a great deal about who maintains and monitors the roadblocks to peace in West Asia.

OAM: The U.S. position has been very clear. It was actually formalized by Trump in his one geopolitical achievement, the Abraham Accords. Technically, these accords did not draw in Saudi Arabia, but effectively they did. This is a formal agreement among the most reactionary states in the region: Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Morocco. The UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco normalized relations with Israel. Sudan was forced into it because the United States told them that if they did not, then they would return to the terrorist list. Arms deals were cut with the UAE and Morocco to seal the deal. Part of the deal was Trump’s authorization of Morocco’s illegal takeover of Western Sahara in violation of international law. Morocco has a virtual monopoly on phosphates, an irreplaceable mineral that is vital for agriculture; Western Sahara has phosphates, which now extends Morocco’s monopoly. This Abraham alliance combined resource control with military muscle and technical capacity (the latter mainly from Israel). Egypt was not formally part of it, but Egypt has an open relationship with Israel. This is an alliance of reactionary states, which is a core part of Steve Bannon’s international program, but it is inherent in the U.S. policy of trying to create alliances of the most reactionary states, which are the basis for U.S. power.