India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 01 :: Jan. 02 - 15, 1999

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COVER STORY

Chomsky and Frontline

ASHA KRISHNAKUMAR

PROFESSOR NOAM CHOMSKY is one of the most important commentators on United States foreign policy and a consistent critic of U.S. intervention in West Asia, Central America and the Caribbean.

From the time of the Gulf War, Chomsky has spoken to Frontline on several occasions on a range of issues, including military and economic action against Iraq, the United States-led "New World Order" and what he has called the "secular priesthood", those sections of society, including the press and academia, that are responsible for its "doctrinal consensus".

In 1991, Chomsky was in the vanguard of the movement in the U.S. that sought a peaceful resolution of the crisis in West Asia. In a major interview in Frontline (March 2-15, 1991), he described the U.S. attack as an "unlawful use of force" and as "basically another war in the Vasco da Gama era of world history." He argued forcefully that the war on Iraq had nothing to do with the invasion of Kuwait. It had to do with U.S. opposition to a diplomatic settlement of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and, in a larger sense, to U.S. opposition to a diplomatic settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

On the United Nations' role in the 1991 war, Chomsky said that "the United Nations has been blocked overwhelmingly by British-American obscurantism" and that since the 1960s, when the U.N. fell out of U.S. control, Washington has tried to undermine its role and authority.

About the sanctions imposed by the U.N. on Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, he said: "The sanctions were of absolutely unprecedented severity. There has never been a case in the past when sanctions were imposed on food, even in much worse cases of aggression and atrocities than this one, and there are many worse cases."

Chomsky characterised the U.S.-led "New World Order" as one that sought to block "diplomacy and... reliance on economic power, because the U.S. is not ruling now" and shift "confrontation to the arena of force, where the U.S. reigns supreme." U.S. policy in West Asia, he said, was an index of the contours of the emerging New World Order.

ON June 27, 1993, the Clinton administration ordered a missile attack on Baghdad on the pretext that the Iraqi Government had attempted to assassinate President Bush. In an interview Chomsky gave Frontline on July 1 (Frontline, July 30, 1993) he described the U.S. missile attack as a "flagrant act of aggression".

IN February 1996 Chomsky visited India, where his hosts were the Delhi School of Economics; the Government of West Bengal; the Department of Linguistics, Central University, Hyderabad; the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvanan-thapuram; and Frontline. Frontline reported on the significant intellectual-political event in a Cover Story (February 23, 1996).

In two interviews, Chomsky spoke about the impact of the policies of globalisation and liberalisation on less-developed countries and on media issues. In his lecture at the Delhi School of Economics during that visit, Chomsky argued that "the striking feature of the times is not flourishing democracy and markets but the attack on the rights of the people and democracy." He was scathing in his criticism of the "peace process"; "for 25 years", he said, "the U.S. has been standing in the way of a peace process in West Asia".