Speaking from MIT, Boston, on the 12th July 2012.
Q:President Bashir al-Assad claims the USA
are helping to destabilize Syria. Are they?
Chomsky: Take a look at what the US is
doing. This goes for a year up to a kind of standing off. They claim that they
can’t intervene because of the Russian veto. That has no credibility. If they
wanted to intervene, they wouldn’t care what the Security Council says. I mean,
evidence about that is just overwhelming. But I think they are using...they’re probably
internally quite happy about the Russian veto because it is a pretext for not
doing anything. So what they’re doing is giving some support to the rebel forces.
They’re obviously giving some arms and other support to them but not enough to
make much of a difference.
And I think the reason is--they don’t particularly
like Assad, but they are even more worried about what might follow. I mean the
fact that he’s a brutal dictator, that doesn’t get in anyone’s way. They’ve
supported much more brutal dictators quite happily in the past. So you put
rhetoric aside and take a look at the historical record and the circumstances
in Syria and you can see that there’s that kind of dilemma.
Assad is not our favorite person but he’s
been pretty much playing the western game, not perfectly but pretty well. But
what follows him might be worse. Actually, that was the same with Gaddafi. The
US and Britain were supporting Gaddafi pretty strongly, almost up to the day, the
Arab Spring. Sometimes it was comical. You recall the LSE scandal. That was one example. There was another one right here down the
street at Harvard. The Business School has a group called, I think, the Monitor
Group, which offers advice and aid to other countries. One of their main
clients was Gaddafi. They were organizing--they’re apparently the ones who
wrote the thesis for Gaddafi’s son who got a degree at the LSE. You know,
apparently they took care of that. But they were also bringing leading American
intellectuals to Libya to meet with a great thinker in his tent and to discuss the
Green book and so on.
There is a report by a London Times reporter,
which I haven’ t seen anyone investigate. But I think it’s at least credible.
Shortly before the bombing of Libya, the international tribunal dealing with Charles
Taylor in Liberia, the prosecution rested its case. But according to this
report--they had interviews with prosecutors, one of them is American law
professor and one of them is British Barrister--they said they were quite
unhappy to rest the case because what they wanted to do is to indict Gaddafi since
he was responsible for arming and training the forces that carried out the atrocities.
But they said they couldn’t do it because Britain and the United States threatened
to defund the Tribunal if they did. When the American law professor was asked
why, he said “Welcome to the world of oil.” That’s the answer. That was right
before the bombing.
But he wasn't, again, not the favorite
person for the US and Britain. He was more or less cooperative for these kind
of mercurial, doing all kind of things they didn’t like. For example, he’d been
the main funder of the African National Congress at the time when the US was
supporting the apartheid regime and in fact condemning Mandela’s African
National Congress and it was one of the more notorious terrorist groups in the world. So
they didn’t want Gaddafi funding him. There are other things they didn’t like. So
when an opportunity came, maybe to get something better, the imperial triumphant
took up the opportunity.
You can debate whether it was a right thing
to do or not but it was certainly, it was pretty isolated in the world. There
were alternatives that could have at least been explored. But it’s the same---there’s
nothing new about it. I mean that’s the history of imperialism as far back as
you want to go.
