Chomsky.... Avenging angel of angst.

Yes he's right on a lot of things, but he's also an incredible axe grinder that likes to preech from on high, ascribing the most nefarious motives to his politcal opponents.

He often takes a very ideological stance with little insight into pragamtic human nature or the rationale of his opponents, no matter how flawed they may be.

Having said that, he's right the US has a terrible international image exactly becasue we've been supporting people like Saddam or Pinochet and so many others.

.  .  .  the vast majority of Moslems would brand  .  .  .  .  Arraf

The "vast majority" has no role in nor effect upon history.  It is a mere nullity which does not rise even to the level of a cipher. 

If I were a journalist Jane...I wouldn't be sitting here pushing propaganda for the Bush regime..

I'd be doing my job...

Jane you are a veritable Icon of Disaster
 

What's Wrong With Cutting and Running?
by Lt. Gen. (ret.) William E. Odom


If I were a journalist, I would list all the arguments that you hear against pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, the horrible things that people say would happen, and then ask: Aren't they happening already? Would a pullout really make things worse? Maybe it would make things better.

Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:

We would leave behind a civil war.
We would lose credibility on the world stage.
It would embolden the insurgency and cripple the move toward democracy.
Iraq would become a haven for terrorists.
Iranian influence in Iraq would increase.
Unrest might spread in the region and/or draw in Iraq's neighbors.
Shi'ite-Sunni clashes would worsen.
We haven't fully trained the Iraqi military and police forces yet.
Talk of deadlines would undercut the morale of our troops.
But consider this:

1. On civil war. Iraqis are already fighting Iraqis. Insurgents have killed far more Iraqis than Americans. That's civil war. We created the civil war when we invaded; we can't prevent a civil war by staying.

For those who really worry about destabilizing the region, the sensible policy is not to stay the course in Iraq. It is rapid withdrawal, reestablishing strong relations with our allies in Europe, showing confidence in the UN Security Council, and trying to knit together a large coalition including the major states of Europe, Japan, South Korea, China, and India to back a strategy for stabilizing the area from the eastern Mediterranean to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Until the United States withdraws from Iraq and admits its strategic error, no such coalition can be formed.

Thus, those who fear leaving a mess are actually helping make things worse while preventing a new strategic approach with some promise of success.

3. On the insurgency and democracy. There is no question the insurgents and other anti-American parties will take over the government once we leave. But that will happen no matter how long we stay. Any government capable of holding power in Iraq will be anti-American because the Iraqi people are increasingly becoming anti-American.

Also, the U.S. will not leave behind a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq no matter how long it stays. Holding elections is easy. It is impossible to make it a constitutional democracy in a hurry.

President Bush's statements about progress in Iraq are increasingly resembling LBJ's statements during the Vietnam War. For instance, Johnson's comments about the 1968 election are very similar to what Bush said in February 2005 after the election of a provisional parliament.

Ask the president: Why should we expect a different outcome in Iraq than in Vietnam?

Ask the president if he intends to leave a pro-American liberal regime in place. Because that's just impossible. Postwar Germany and Japan are not models for Iraq. Each had mature (at least a full generation old) constitutional orders by the end of the 19th century. They both endured as constitutional orders until the 1930s. Thus, General Clay and General MacArthur were merely reversing a decade and a half of totalitarianism – returning to nearly a century of liberal political change in Japan and a much longer period in Germany.

Imposing a liberal constitutional order in Iraq would be to accomplish something that has never been done before. Of all the world's political cultures, an Arab-Muslim one may be the most resistant to such a change of any in the world. Even the Muslim society in Turkey (an anti-Arab society) stands out for being the only example of a constitutional order in an Islamic society, and even it backslides occasionally.

4. On terrorists. Iraq is already a training ground for terrorists. In fact, the CIA has pointed out to the administration and Congress that Iraq is spawning so many terrorists that they are returning home to many other countries to further practice their skills there. The quicker a new dictator wins political power in Iraq and imposes order, the sooner the country will stop producing experienced terrorists.

Why not ask: "Mr. President, since you and the vice president insisted that Saddam's Iraq supported al-Qaeda – which we now know it did not – isn't your policy in Iraq today strengthening al-Qaeda's position in that country?"

5. On Iranian influence. Iranian leaders see U.S. policy in Iraq as being so much in Tehran's interests that they have been advising Iraqi Shi'ite leaders to do exactly what the Americans ask them to do. Elections will allow the Shi'ites to take power legally. Once in charge, they can settle scores with the Ba'athists and Sunnis. If U.S. policy in Iraq begins to undercut Iran's interests, then Tehran can use its growing influence among Iraqi Shi'ites to stir up trouble, possibly committing Shi'ite militias to an insurgency against U.S. forces there. The U.S. invasion has vastly increased Iran's influence in Iraq, not sealed it out.

Questions for the administration: "Why do the Iranians support our presence in Iraq today? Why do they tell the Shi'ite leaders to avoid a sectarian clash between Sunnis and Shi'ites? Given all the money and weapons they provide Shi'ite groups, why are they not stirring up more trouble for the U.S.? Will Iranian policy change once a Shi'ite majority has the reins of government? Would it not be better to pull out now rather than to continue our present course of weakening the Sunnis and Ba'athists, opening the way for a Shi'ite dictatorship?"

6. On Iraq's neighbors. The civil war we leave behind may well draw in Syria, Turkey, and Iran. But already today each of those states is deeply involved in support for or opposition to factions in the ongoing Iraqi civil war. The very act of invading Iraq almost ensured that violence would involve the larger region. And so it has and will continue, with or without U.S. forces in Iraq.

7. On Shi'ite-Sunni conflict. The U.S. presence is not preventing Shi'ite-Sunni conflict; it merely delays it. Iran is preventing it today, and it will probably encourage it once the Shi'ites dominate the new government, an outcome U.S. policy virtually ensures.

8. On training the Iraq military and police. The insurgents are fighting very effectively without U.S. or European military advisers to train them. Why don't the soldiers and police in the present Iraqi regime's service do their duty as well? Because they are uncertain about committing their lives to this regime. They are being asked to take a political stand, just as the insurgents are. Political consolidation, not military-technical consolidation, is the issue.

The issue is not military training; it is institutional loyalty. We trained the Vietnamese military effectively. Its generals took power and proved to be lousy politicians and poor fighters in the final showdown. In many battles over a decade or more, South Vietnamese military units fought very well, defeating VC and NVA units. But South Vietnam's political leaders lost the war.

Even if we were able to successfully train an Iraqi military and police force, the likely result, after all that, would be another military dictatorship. Experience around the world teaches us that military dictatorships arise when the military's institutional modernization gets ahead of political consolidation.

9. On not supporting our troops by debating an early pullout. Many U.S. officers in Iraq, especially at company and field grade levels, know that while they are winning every tactical battle, they are losing strategically. And according to the New York Times, they are beginning to voice complaints about Americans at home bearing none of the pains of the war. One can only guess about the enlisted ranks, but those on a second tour – probably the majority today – are probably anxious for an early pullout. It is also noteworthy that U.S. generals in Iraq are not bubbling over with optimistic reports the way they were during the first few years of the war in Vietnam. Their careful statements and caution probably reflect serious doubts that they do not, and should not, express publicly. The more important question is whether or not the repressive and vindictive behavior by the secretary of defense and his deputy against the senior military – especially the Army leadership, which is the critical component in the war – has made it impossible for field commanders to make the political leaders see the facts.

Most surprising to me is that no American political leader today has tried to unmask the absurdity of the administration's case that to question the strategic wisdom of the war is unpatriotic and a failure to support our troops. Most officers and probably most troops don't see it that way. They are angry at the deficiencies in materiel support they get from the Department of Defense, and especially about the irresponsibly long deployments they must now endure because Mr. Rumsfeld and his staff have refused to enlarge the ground forces to provide shorter tours. In the meantime, they know that the defense budget shovels money out the door to maritime forces, SDI, etc., while refusing to increase dramatically the size of the Army.

As I wrote several years ago, "the Pentagon's post-Cold War force structure is so maritime heavy and land force weak that it is firmly in charge of the porpoises and whales while leaving the land to tyrants." The Army, some of the Air Force, the National Guard, and the reserves are now the victims of this gross mismatch between military missions and force structure. Neither the Bush nor the Clinton administration has properly "supported the troops." The media could ask the president why he fails to support our troops by not firing his secretary of defense.



Journalists can ask all the questions they like, but none will prompt a more serious debate as long as no political leaders create the context and force the issues into the open.

I don't believe anyone will be able to sustain a strong case in the short run without going back to the fundamental misjudgment of invading Iraq in the first place. Once the enormity of that error is grasped, the case for pulling out becomes easy to see.



The U.S. invasion of Iraq only serves the interests of:

1. Osama bin Laden (it made Iraq safe for al-Qaeda, positioned U.S. military personnel in places where al-Qaeda operatives can kill them occasionally, helps radicalize youth throughout the Arab and Muslim world, alienates America's most important and strongest allies – the Europeans – and squanders U.S. military resources that otherwise might be finishing off al-Qaeda in Pakistan.);

2. The Iranians (who were invaded by Saddam and who suffered massive casualties in an eight-year war with Iraq.);

3. And the extremists in both Palestinian and Israeli political circles (who don't really want a peace settlement without the utter destruction of the other side, and probably believe that bogging the United States down in a war in Iraq that will surely become a war with the rest of Arab world gives them the time and cover to wipe out the other side.)

The wisest course for journalists might be to begin sustained investigations of why leading Democrats have failed so miserably to challenge the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The first step, of course, is to establish as conventional wisdom the fact that the war was never in the U.S.' interests and has not become so. It is such an obvious case to make that I find it difficult to believe many pundits and political leaders have not already made it repeatedly.

Michael Massing at the NYRB asks the question of whether we are seeing "the end of news" and a kind of permanent rightwing hegemony over information (it is not that real information isn't there, it is that it can't get easily heard).



Juan Cole asked a good question today at Informed Comment


Proof of the pudding is in the tasting Jane

I've read the majority of Chomsky’s classics as well as some of his recent works. I used to be quite impressed by him and still have respect for him for grinding an axe not many others were. Unfortunately, over time one sees the many serious flaws in his arguments.  You will too probably. Chomsky tends to be popular at college age whe one has little experience.

FYI, his work on linguistics, while brilliant and responsible for founding modern linguistics, is a bit like the work of Freud. Innovative, brilliant, thought provoking, inspiring to others, and ultimately very flawed. Contemporary researchers don't use his theories any more, they've been generally discredited because they don't gel with observed reality.

Perhaps the problem is he is just too left for you.

Although Iraqi officials may say they want US troops to leave immediately what many really want is for them to stay for now - in a less visible, less inflammatory role that includes not treating all Iraqis and all Moslems as the enemy.

Dude, for your information US troops are not and never have been "treating all Iraqis and all Moslems as the enemy" that's just the kind of BS that gets the left labled "anti-military" every assumtion you makes is based on the "evil heart" and "ignorance" of the American soldier.

why isn't model for Iraq Yugoslavia?  Yugoslavia, like Iran, was a product of post WWI.  Disparate and hostile groups were held together by the ironfisted Tito.  Tito died and  various ethnic strongmen arose using secular emnities to gain power for themselves.  Yugoslavia then became a serious of ethnic wars complete with ethnic cleansing.  The United States was not present nor responsible.

As the war in Yugoslavia continued Europe was unable to do anything about it.  They looked to America to save them from their feebleness.  Using Nato Clinton, with support from Bob Dole, applied American airpower against the Serbs.

There are three different issues in Iraq that do not necessarily meld together. Having lost the murderous strongman as leader can Iraq hold together as one multiethnic country.  Can it be multiethnic and democratic?  Will democratic Iraq bring to power political Shia in the south and political Sunnis in the center who will want to spend more effort killing each other than recreating their county.  

Attributing to the United States some magical all powerful abilities is an error of the Cheney right and the Chomasky left.  

Because lies have consequences, the link

On Bullshit
Harry Frankfurt
Princeton


Dr. Frankfurt thanks Jane and all the CNN supporting cast for the popularity of his new book from old essay.