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Noam Chomsky, neoliberalism, and thenew war on IraqArundhati Roy aa New Delhi, IndiaPublished online: 03 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Arundhati Roy (2003) Noam Chomsky, neoliberalism, and the new war on Iraq,Contemporary Justice Review: Issues in Criminal, Social, and Restorative Justice, 6:4, 321-327, DOI:10.1080/1028258032000144767

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ISSN 1028-2580 print; ISSN 1477-2248 online © 2003 Arundhati RoyDOI: 10.1080/1028258032000144767

Contemporary Justice Review, 2003, Vol. 6(4), pp. 321–327

NOAM CHOMSKY, NEOLIBERALISM, AND THE NEWWAR ON IRAQ

ARUNDHATI ROY

New Delhi, India

This article was originally presented as an address on May 31, 2003, when Ms. Roy received the 2003 NoamChomsky Award at the annual conference of the Justice Studies Association in Albany, New York.

Sitting in my home in New Delhi, watching an American TV news channel promote itself(“We report. You decide”), I often imagine Noam Chomsky’s amused, chipped-toothsmile.

Everybody knows that authoritarian regimes, regardless of their ideology, use the massmedia for propaganda. But what about democratically elected regimes in the “freeworld”?

Today, thanks to Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, and some others, for thousands,possibly millions, of us, it is almost axiomatic that in “free market” democracies, publicopinion is manufactured just like any other mass market product—soap, switches, or slicedbread. We know that while, legally and constitutionally, speech may be free, the space inwhich that freedom can be exercised has been snatched from us and auctioned to the highestbidders. Neoliberal capitalism isn’t just about the accumulation of capital (for some). It’s alsoabout the accumulation of power (for some) and the accumulation of freedom (for some).Conversely, for the rest of the world, the people who are excluded from neoliberalism’sgoverning body, it’s about the erosion of capital, the erosion of power, the erosion offreedom. In the “free” market, free speech has become a commodity like everything else—justice, human rights, drinking water, clean air. It’s available only to those who can afford it.And naturally, those who can afford it, use free speech to manufacture the kind of product,confect the kind of public opinion, that best suits their purpose. (News they can use.) Exactlyhow they do this has been the subject of much of Noam Chomsky’s political writing.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, for instance, has a controlling interest in major Italiannewspapers, magazines, television channels, and publishing houses. “[T]he prime minister ineffect controls about 90 per cent of Italian TV viewership,” reports the Financial Times. Whatprice free speech? Free speech for whom? Admittedly, Berlusconi is an extreme example. Inother democracies—the U.S. in particular—media barons, powerful corporate lobbies, and

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government officials are imbricated in a more elaborate but less obvious manner. (George BushJr.’s connections to the oil lobby, to the arms industry, and to Enron, and Enron’s infiltration ofU.S. government institutions and the mass media—all this is public knowledge now.)

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist strikes in New York and Washington, themainstream media’s blatant performance as the U.S. government’s mouthpiece, its display ofvengeful patriotism, its willingness to publish Pentagon press handouts as news, and itsexplicit censorship of dissenting opinion became the butt of some pretty black humor in therest of the world.

Then the New York Stock Exchange crashed, bankrupt airline companies appealed to thegovernment for financial bailouts, and there was talk of circumventing patent laws in orderto manufacture generic drugs to fight the anthrax scare (much more important and urgent ofcourse, than AIDS in Africa). Suddenly, it began to seem as though the twin myths of freespeech and the free market might come crashing down alongside the twin towers of the WorldTrade Center.

But of course that never happened. The myths live on.There is, however, a brighter side to the amount of energy and money that the

establishment pours into the business of “managing” public opinion. It suggests a very realfear of public opinion. It suggests a persistent and valid worry that if people were to discover(and fully comprehend) the real nature of the things that are done in their name, they mightact upon that knowledge. Powerful people know that ordinary people are not alwaysreflexively ruthless and selfish. (When ordinary people weigh costs and benefits, somethinglike an uneasy conscience could easily tip the scales.) For this reason, they must be guardedagainst reality, reared in a controlled climate, in an altered reality, like broiler chickens orpigs in a pen.

Those of us who have managed to escape this fate and are scratching about in thebackyard, no longer believe everything we read in the papers and watch on TV. We put ourears to the ground and look for other ways of making sense of the world. We search for theuntold story, the mentioned-in-passing military coup, the unreported genocide, the civil warin an African country written up in a one column-inch story next to a full-page advertisementfor lace underwear.

We don’t always remember, and many don’t even know, that this way of thinking, this easyacuity, this instinctive mistrust of the mass media, would at best be a political hunch and atworst a loose accusation, if it were not for the pioneering work of one of the world’s greatestminds. And this is only one of the ways in which Noam Chomsky has radically altered ourunderstanding of the society in which we live. Or should I say, our understanding of theelaborate rules of the lunatic asylum in which we are all voluntary inmates?

Speaking about the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, President GeorgeW. Bush called the enemies of the U.S. “enemies of freedom.” “Americans are asking whydo they hate us?” he said. “They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom ofspeech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

If people in the U.S. want a real answer to that question (as opposed to the ones in theIdiot’s Guide to Anti-Americanism, that is: “Because they’re jealous of us,” “Because theyhate freedom,” “Because they’re losers,” “Because we’re good and they’re evil”), I’d say,read Chomsky. Read Chomsky on U.S. military interventions in Indochina, Latin America,Iraq, Bosnia, (the former) Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. If ordinary peoplein the U.S. read Chomsky, perhaps their question would be framed a little differently. Perhapsit would be: “Why don’t they hate us more than they do?” or “Isn’t it surprising thatSeptember 11 didn’t happen earlier?”

Unfortunately, in these nationalistic times, words like “us” and “them” are used loosely.The line between citizens and the state is being deliberately and successfully blurred, not just

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by governments, but also by terrorists. The underlying logic of terrorist attacks, as well as“retaliatory” wars against governments that “support terrorism,” is the same: both punishcitizens for the actions of their governments.

If I were asked to choose one of Noam Chomsky’s major contributions to the world, itwould be the fact that he has unmasked the ugly, manipulative, ruthless universe that existsbehind that beautiful, sunny word “freedom.” He has done this rationally and empirically. Hisanalysis is relentless and unswerving. The mass of evidence he has marshaled to construct hiscase is formidable. Terrifying, actually. The starting premise of Chomsky’s method is notideological, but it is intensely political. He embarks on his course of inquiry with ananarchist’s instinctive mistrust of power. He takes us on a tour through the bog of the U.S.establishment, and leads us through the dizzying maze of corridors that connects thegovernment, big business, and the business of managing public opinion.

Chomsky shows us how phrases like free speech, the free market, and the free world havelittle, if anything, to do with freedom. He shows us that, among the myriad freedoms claimedby the U.S. government are the freedom to murder, annihilate, and dominate other people.The freedom to finance and sponsor despots and dictators across the world. The freedom totrain, arm, and shelter terrorists. The freedom to topple democratically elected governments.The freedom to amass and use weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological, andnuclear. The freedom to go to war against any country whose government it disagrees with.And, most terrible of all, the freedom to commit these crimes against humanity in the nameof justice, in the name of righteousness, in the name of freedom.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has declared that U.S. freedoms are “not the grant of anygovernment or document, but . . . our endowment from God.” So, basically, we’re confrontedwith a country armed with a mandate from heaven. Perhaps this explains why the U.S.government refuses to judge itself by the same moral standards by which it judges others.(Any attempt to do this is shouted down as “moral equivalence.”) Its technique is to positionitself as the well-intentioned giant whose good deeds are confounded in strange countries bythe scheming natives, whose markets it’s trying to free, whose societies it’s trying tomodernize, whose women it’s trying to liberate, whose souls it’s trying to save.

Perhaps this belief in its own divinity also explains why the U.S. government has conferredupon itself the right and freedom to murder and exterminate people for their own good. Andnow, of course, we have imperial democracy delivered to your doorstep with a daisy-cutter.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42% ofthe American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for theSeptember 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC news pollsaid that 55% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported Al Qaeda. Noneof this opinion is based on evidence (because there isn’t any). All of it is based on insinuation,auto-suggestion and outright lies circulated by the U.S. corporate media.

Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multi-tiered edificeof falsehood and deceit coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by thepress.

We had the invented links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. We had the manufactured frenzyabout Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. No weapons of mass destruction have been found.Not even a little one.

Now—after the war has been fought and won, and the contracts for reconstruction havebeen signed and sealed—the New York Times reports that “The Central Intelligence Agencyhas begun a review to try to determine whether the American intelligence community erredin its prewar assessments of Saddam Hussein’s government and Iraq’s weaponsprograms.”

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Meanwhile, in passing, an ancient civilization has been casually decimated by a veryrecent, casually brutal nation.

Throughout more than a decade of war and sanctions, American and British forces firedthousands of missiles and bombs on Iraq. Iraq’s fields and farmlands were shelled with threehundred tons of depleted uranium.

In their bombing sorties, the Allies targeted and destroyed water treatment plants, aware ofthe fact that they could not be repaired without foreign assistance. In southern Iraq there wasa fourfold increase in cancer among children.

In the decade of economic sanctions that followed the war, Iraqi civilians were deniedmedicine, hospital equipment, ambulances, clean water—the basic essentials.

About half a million Iraqi children died as a result of the sanctions.The corporate media played a sterling role in keeping news of the devastation of Iraq and

its people away from the American public. It has now begun preparing the ground with thesame routine of lies and hysteria for a war against Syria and Iran—and, who knows, perhapseven Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps the next war will be the jewel in the crown of George Bush’s 2004 electioncampaign. Though he may not need to go to such great lengths, since the Democrats haveannounced that their strategy for the 2004 election is to charge that the Republicans are weakon national security. It’s like a small-town teenage bully telling the Mafia it has too manyscruples.

America’s presidential elections sound as though they will be a complete waste ofeverybody’s time. Although that’s not exactly breaking news.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was perhaps the most cowardly war ever fought in history.After using the “good offices” of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons

inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, after making sure that most of itsweapons had been destroyed, the “coalition of the willing”—better known as the coalition ofthe bullied and bought—sent in an invading army.

Then the corporate media gloated that the U.S. had won a just and astonishing victory!Just after the war “ended,” Tony Blair visited Basra, where, according to the New York

Times, the “city remains troubled, with trash piling up in the streets, disease on the rise andthe economy at a standstill.” Blair said to British soldiers there: “You fought the battle, youwon the battle, and you fought it with great courage and valor. . . . But it didn’t stop there.You then went on to try to make something of the country you had liberated. And I thinkthat’s a lesson for armed forces everywhere, the world over.”

TV watchers witnessed the joy that the U.S. army brought to ordinary Iraqis. All thosenewly liberated people waving American flags, which they must have somehow hoardedduring the years of sanctions.

Never mind that the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square (shownover and over on TV) turned out to be a carefully choreographed charade played out by ahandful of hired extras coordinated by the U.S. marines. Robert Fisk called it the “moststaged photo-op since Iwo Jima.”

Never mind that in the days that followed American soldiers fired into a crowd of peaceful,unarmed Iraqi demonstrators who were demanding that U.S. troops leave their country: 15people were shot dead.

Never mind that a few days later U.S. soldiers killed two more and injured several peoplewho were protesting the fact that peaceful demonstrators were being killed. Never mind thatthey murdered 17 more people in Mosul.

Never mind that in the days to come the killing will continue. (But it won’t be onTV.)

Never mind that a secular country is being driven to religious sectarianism.

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Never mind that the U.S. government helped Saddam Hussein’s rise to power andsupported him through his worst excesses, including the eight-year war against Iran and the1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, crimes which 14 years later were re-heated andserved up as reasons to justify going to war against Iraq.

Never mind that, after the first Gulf War, the Allies fomented an uprising of Shias in Basraand then looked away while Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and slaughtered thousandsin an act of vengeful reprisal.

After the invasion of Iraq, western TV channels’ ghoulish interest in the mass graves theydiscovered evaporated quickly when they realized that the bodies were of Iraqis who hadbeen killed in the war against Iran and the Shia uprising. . . . The search for an appropriatemass grave continues.

Never mind that U.S. and British troops had orders to kill people, but not to protect them.Their priorities were clear. The safety and security of Iraqi people was not their business.

The security of whatever little remained of Iraq’s infrastructure was not their business. Butthe security and safety of Iraq’s oil fields was. The oil fields were “secured” almost beforethe invasion began.

It’s worth noting that the reconstruction of Afghanistan, which is in far worse conditionthan Iraq, hasn’t merited the same evangelical enthusiasm in reconstruction that Iraq has.Even the money that was so publicly promised to Afghanistan has not for the most part beenhanded over.

Could it be because Afghanistan has no oil? It has a route for a pipeline, true, but no oil.So there isn’t much money to be extracted from that vanquished country.

On the other hand, we were told that contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq could jump-start the world economy. It’s funny how the interests of American corporations are so often,so successfully, and so deliberately confused with the interests of the world economy.

The talk about Iraq’s oil for Iraqis and a war of liberation and democracy and representativegovernment had its time and place. It had its uses. But things have changed now . . . .

Having escorted a 7,000-year-old civilization into anarchy, George Bush has announcedthat the U.S. is in Iraq to stay “indefinitely.” The U.S., in effect, has said that Iraq can onlyhave a representative government if it represents the interests of Anglo-American oilcompanies. In other words, you can have free speech as long as you say what I want you tosay.

On May 17, the New York Times said, “In an abrupt reversal, the United States and Britainhave indefinitely put off their plan to allow Iraqi opposition forces to form a nationalassembly and an interim government by the end of the month. Instead, top American andBritish diplomats leading reconstruction efforts here told exile leaders in a meeting tonightthat allied officials would remain in charge of Iraq for an indefinite period.”

Long before the invasion began, the world’s business community was tingling withexcitement about the scale of money that the reconstruction of Iraq would involve. It has beenbilled as the biggest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe after WorldWar II.

Bechtel Corporation, based in San Francisco, is leading the pack of jackals moving in toIraq.

Coincidentally, former Secretary of State George Schultz is on the Board of Directors ofthe Bechtel Group, and happens also to have served as the chairman of the advisory boardof the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

When asked by the New York Times whether he was concerned about the appearance of aconflict of interest, Shultz said, “I don’t know that Bechtel would particularly benefit fromit. But if there’s work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody

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looks at it as something you benefit from.”Bechtel already has a contract for $680 million, but, according to the New York Times,

“[I]ndependent estimates are that the final cost for the reconstruction effort of the extentoutlined in Bechtel’s contract with USAID would be $20 billion.”

In an article appropriately headlined “Feeding frenzy under way, as companies from allover seek a piece of the action,” the Times notes (without irony) that “governments aroundthe world and the companies whose causes they support have besieged Washington in acampaign to win a piece of the reconstruction action in Iraq.”

“The British,” the article notes, “though their appeals are understated, offer what someBush administration officials argue is the most convincing case: that they shed blood inIraq.”

Whose blood was shed has not been clarified. Surely they didn’t mean British blood, orAmerican blood. They must have meant that the British helped the Americans to shed Iraqiblood.

So “the most convincing case” for reconstruction contracts is when a country can arguethat it is a co-murderer of Iraqis.

Lady Simmons, the deputy leader of the U.K. House of Lords, recently traveled to Americawith four leaders of British industry. Apart from staking their claim to contracts based ontheir status as co-murderers, the British delegation also invoked their colonial past, againwithout irony, making the case that British companies “had a long and close relationship withIraq and Iraqi business from the imperial days in the early 20th century until internationalsanctions were imposed in the 1990s.” Glossing over, of course, that this meant Britain hadsupported Saddam Hussein through the 1970s and 1980s.

Those of us who belong to former colonies think of imperialism as rape. So you rape. Thenyou kill. Then you demand the right to rape the corpse. That’s usually known asnecrophilia.

Extending this horrible analogy, Richard Perle said recently: “Iraqis are freer today and weare safer. Relax and enjoy it.”

A few days into the war, the news anchor Tom Brokaw said: “One of the things we don’twant to do . . . is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we’re going toown that country.”

Now the ownership deeds are being signed. Iraq is no longer a country. It’s an asset.It’s no longer ruled. It’s owned.Noam Chomsky has demonstrated how the fundamentalist ideology of neoliberal

capitalism—which goes by the name of the “free market”—is the engine that drives the U.S.to war and conquest. To justify itself, it fashions enemies. Earlier it was Communism. Nowit has become Islamic terrorism, a brilliant ruse to wage unending war.

As a child growing up in the state of Kerala, in South India—where the first democraticallyelected Communist government in the world came to power in 1959, the year I was born—Iworried terribly about being a “gook.” Kerala was only a few thousand miles west ofVietnam. We had jungles and rivers and rice-fields, and communists, too. I kept imaginingmy mother, my brother, and myself being blown out of the bushes by a grenade, or moweddown, like the gooks in the movies, by an American marine with muscled arms and chewinggum and a loud background score. In my dreams, I was the burning girl in the famousphotograph taken on the road from Trang Bang.

As someone who grew up on the cusp of both American and Soviet propaganda (whichmore or less neutralized each other), when I first read Noam Chomsky, it occurred to me thathis marshalling of evidence, the volume of it, the relentlessness of it, was a little—how shallI put it?—insane. Even a quarter of the evidence he had compiled would have been enough

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to convince me. I used to wonder why he needed to do so much work. But now I understandthat the magnitude and intensity of Chomsky’s work is a barometer of the magnitude, scope,and relentlessness of the propaganda machine that he’s up against. He’s like the wood-borerwho lives inside the third rack of my bookshelf. Day and night, I hear his jaws crunchingthrough the wood, grinding it to a fine dust. It’s as though he disagrees with the literature andwants to destroy the very structure on which it rests. I call him “Noam.”

Being an American working in America, writing to convince Americans of his point ofview must really be like having to tunnel through hard wood. Chomsky is one of a small bandof individuals fighting a whole industry. And that makes him not only brilliant, butheroic.

Some years ago, in a poignant interview with James Peck, Chomsky spoke about hismemory of the day Hiroshima was bombed. He was 16 years old:

I remember that I literally couldn’t talk to anybody. There was nobody. I just walked off by myself. I was ata summer camp at the time, and I walked off into the woods and stayed alone for a couple of hours when Iheard about it. I could never talk to anyone about it and never understood anyone’s reaction. I felt completelyisolated.

That isolation produced one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time.When the sun sets on the American Empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky’s work

will survive. It will point a cool, incriminating finger at a merciless, Machiavellian, empireas cruel, self-righteous, and hypocritical as the ones it has replaced. (The only difference isthat it is armed with technology that can visit the kind of devastation on the world that historyhas never known and the human race cannot begin to imagine.)

As I could’ve been a gook, and who knows, perhaps a potential gook, hardly a day goesby when I don’t find myself thinking—for one reason or another—“Chomsky Zindabad.”

Biography

A writer and activist, Ms. Roy received the Booker McConnell Prize in 1997 for The Godof Small Things, the first non-expatriate Indian author and the first Indian woman to win thisprize. She has immersed herself in causes such as the anti-nuclear movement and theNarmada Bachao Andolan. Her latest works, War Talk (2003), Power Politics (2nd ed. 2001)and The Cost of Living (1999) fit nicely with her other social justice writing and speaking,such as her speech at the opening of the Hague Appeal for Peace conference in 1999; “TheArt of Spinning: How Uncle Sam Turns Indian Gold Into Straw”; and criticism of ShekharKapur’s film about Phoolan Devi “Bandit Queen” which led to a court case in 1994. She wasborn in 1961 in Bengal and grew up in Kerala, the daughter of Mary Roy, the woman whosecourt case changed her country’s inheritance laws in favor of women. Trained as an architectat the Delhi School of Architecture, she soon became known for her complex, scathing filmscripts.

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