Noam Chomsky

Do you think that U.S. foreign policy always narrowly serves our national self-interest?

No, I don't think it's national self-interest. That's a term of propaganda. It implies that it's in the interest of the nation. No state acts in the interest of the nation. They usually act in the interest of powerful internal groups that dominate policy. Again, that's a historical truism. I don't think Nazi Germany was acting in the interest of the German people. In the case of the United States, we know who the planners are and where they come from, and yes, I think they usually act in their own interest. It's not very surprising.

Do you think foreign interventions might ever be driven by a mixed bag of motivations?

Sure, every atrocity in history, including Hitler's invasions and the Japanese conquests, was a mixed bag. Take Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, look at the rhetoric. They were going to Christianize and uplift the natives and end slavery and bring liberty and freedom to the benighted Africans. Certainly the U.S. State Department believed it; they approved of it. It's always a mixed bag.

Is it your position that we're driven by imperial designs?

No more than any other country. It happens that the U.S. is overwhelmingly the most powerful country in the world and has been for 50 years, so of course its reach is far greater. Luxembourg might be driven by the same goals but can't do much about it.

What would our imperial interest have been in Kosovo, then?

I take the official reasons very seriously. I tend to be rather literal; I assume people are telling the truth. The official reasons were three that were repeated over and over again by Defense Secretary [William] Cohen in his congressional testimony a year after the war. The first was to prevent ethnic cleansing. The second was to ensure the stability of the region. And the third was to establish credibility. The first we can dismiss because it's agreed on all sides that ethnic cleansing took place after the bombing began.

But Milosevic had already carried out ethnic cleansing in other regions of Yugoslavia before Kosovo and he was pressuring the Albanian population in Kosovo, so the threat -- and intention -- was clearly there.

Well, yes, but there's a very detailed record of this. The State Department has presented extensive documentation, as has NATO, the Kosovo observers and so on. There were plenty of atrocities going on. In fact, the British government, which was the most hawkish element of the coalition as late as January 1999, attributed most of the atrocities to the Kosovo Liberation Army. Look, it was a very ugly place -- there may have been 2,000 people killed on all sides in the preceding years and a lot of people displaced. But that was not the ethnic cleansing anyone's talking about. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had no registered refugees at the time the bombing was started.

The massive ethnic cleansing and atrocities began a little bit after the withdrawal of the monitors on March 22. But it really began after the bombing on March 24. That's just not contested. We can contest whether it was a consequence of the bombing. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the commander, announced that a predictable consequence of the bombing would be ethnic cleansing. Maybe he's right, maybe he's not. So we know that the bombing was not undertaken to prevent the ethnic cleansing that followed it. Clark himself, three weeks after the war, was asked over British television whether the reason for the bombing was ethnic cleansing. He said of course not. Ethnic cleansing was never a factor.

So we're left with the next two reasons: ensuring stability and maintaining credibility. I think those are probably the reasons. Maintaining stability has a very special meaning. It doesn't mean that the area is quiet. Stability means under Western control. What does maintaining credibility mean? It means making sure that people are afraid of you and what you're going to do.

What would the alternative have been? If the West had not intervened, Milosevic could have carried on with his atrocities unmolested.

In Kosovo, right before the bombing, there were two positions on the table. One was the NATO position, the other was the Serbian government position. They both called for an international presence in Kosovo but they differed on what that should be. The NATO position was that it had to be a NATO-led international presence with a free run of all of Serbia. The Serbian position was vague. If you take a look at the peace treaty, it's a compromise between the two positions. Suppose they had pursued the possibility of the compromised solution which, in fact, was reached on paper at least. Could that have worked? Well, we don't know because it was refused.

I'm not a pacifist. I think use of force is sometimes legitimate. However, if someone is calling for the use of force, they have a heavy burden of proof to meet. The burden of proof is always on those who call for the use of violence, in particular extreme violence. That's a moral truism. The question is, was that burden met? Try to find some argument which meets that burden of proof. Don't take my word for it, check the facts. You'll find that the literature on this almost entirely overlooks the crucial evidence which is the extensive, detailed evidence from Western sources on what was happening up to the bombing. The only book I know that covers this is my own.

Second, take a look at the arguments that are given to justify the bombing. Either they claim that ethnic cleansing and atrocities were going on before the bombing -- which we know is false -- or they claim the bombing was carried out because ethnic cleansing was going to take place. Well, by that argument you could justify anything.

Couldn't NATO have been basing its actions on what we'd all seen Milosevic was capable of in Bosnia and Croatia?

They could have. But by that argument, if you really believe that, then they should have been bombing Jakarta, Washington and London. Which of course nobody believes.

At that very same time, Indonesia was carrying out much worse atrocities in East Timor. Furthermore, the Indonesian generals were announcing very loudly and clearly that unless the planned referendum went their way, they would just wipe the place out. Britain and the United States were still supporting the Indonesians, who had wiped out a third of the population. So according to the argument you're proposing, you're saying that the United States should have bombed themselves and Indonesia. We don't believe that.

Let me repeat a moral truism. If there is a principle that we apply to others, we must insist that the principle apply to us. If there is a principle that justified the bombing in Serbia, formulate the principle and ask -- does it apply to us?

But as the world's largest superpower, we are called on, sometimes by countries that have criticized us, to intervene in conflicts. What role is the world's superpower supposed to play?

The first, simplest role it should play is to stop participating in atrocities. In 1999, for example, one role the U.S. could have played is to stop participating in the atrocities in East Timor. Britain could have played the same role. That would have made a big difference. In fact, when the U.S. finally did inform Indonesia that the game was over on Sept. 11, after the worst had happened, they instantly withdrew. The power was always there.

Take another case. There was much talk about how NATO couldn't tolerate atrocities like those in Kosovo right near its borders. A small fact was overlooked: NATO was not only tolerating but in fact supporting much worse atrocities right within its borders -- namely, Turkish atrocities against the Kurds inside Turkey. Eighty percent of the arms were coming from the United States. They peaked in the late 1990s and led to tens of thousands of people killed and 3,500 towns and villages destroyed. There were 2 to 3 million refugees. One way the greatest superpower could act is by terminating its massive and critical support for these atrocities.

Some of your positions, on Kosovo for example, have led people even on the left to suggest that you think no matter what the U.S. does it's unacceptable simply because the U.S. is doing it.

If people believe that, that's because they insist on pure propaganda and refuse to look at the facts. You can easily see whether in fact I said that. I didn't. And I don't believe it. I can't help what intellectuals decide to believe. If they want to fabricate propaganda images and believe what they say or they hear in gossip, that's their metier.

As you know, people like you and Susan Sontag have gotten a lot of outraged reactions to some of the things you've said after Sept. 11 -- again, even from some on the left. What do you think about the future of the American left?

It's certainly much better than it's been in the past. The outraged reactions are coming mostly from intellectuals, liberal intellectuals. But that's standard. It was much worse in the '60s. In fact, liberal intellectuals typically tend to support the use of state violence. Who initiated the Vietnam War? Liberal intellectuals, that was Kennedy's war. Back in those days, in the early '60s, I remember very well attempts to raise even the most mild criticism of the war at that time. You couldn't get four people in an auditorium to listen to you. In Boston, which is a pretty liberal city, we couldn't have a public demonstration against the war until about 1966 without it being physically attacked by people and protected by police. It's incomparably better.

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