James van Luik

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1. WHY 2,245 IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG

ERIK LEAVER

Cindy Sheehan and Beverly Young's arrests at the State of the Union for wearing opposing "protest" T-shirts is the latest illustration of how the Iraq War is the nation's most provocative issue. The attack on free speech for both sides was in fact outrageous. But lost in the T-shirt battle is what really matters: President George W. Bush's failure to tell the nation about the true costs of the war.

Any honest national discussion about the war must begin with the death of Sheehan's son Casey and the other 2,244 soldiers who have died because of this conflict.

The number of soldiers killed boldly written on Sheehan's shirt was a shocking, in-your-face accounting of the State of the Union over the last three years. As horrific as they are, those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg of the human costs of this war. Along with those soldiers are 16,584 soldiers wounded in combat, and upwards of 100,000 needing mental health services, just to start with.

Bush didn't mention the human cost of war because in part gross mismanagement by the administration has inflated it. For example, both Bush and members of Congress have pledged to fix problems with body and vehicle armor year after year. But despite promises to fix the situation, the military recently reported that 80 percent of Marines killed by torso wounds could have lived if they had better body armor.

That's hard to swallow, especially when one of the makers of body armor, CEO David H. Brooks of DHB Industries, received $87,500 in compensation for "foregone vacation," almost three times what an Army private makes in an entire year of combat. With complete disregard for rampant war profiteering, Brooks earned $70 million in 2004.

Those veterans who return from Iraq are finding Washington's promises to care for them are violated with impunity. Last year, the Veterans Affairs Department suspended enrollment of 263,257 vets seeking health care. The VA underestimated the number of veterans needing care upon return from Iraq and Afghanistan by 300 percent, so qualified veterans were simply cut from the rolls. Maybe they thought no one would notice.

In addition to the war's human costs, Bush overlooked the financial costs. Three days after the State of the Union address, budget officials announced another $70 billion will be requested. Such a large initiative should have been highlighted for all of the nation. With these funds, the U.S. will spend more than $320 billion in the Iraq War.

As astonishing as this number is, it does not include many of the indirect and long-term costs. Adding in estimates for future Veterans Administration and ongoing health care costs along with the interest on the debt, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes recently estimated the long-term cost of the war at $1.3 trillion.

Instead of calling for a plan to pay for the shared sacrifice needed to cover the war's costs, Bush urged Congress to make his tax cuts permanent. Surely the government could use these funds to offset the looming Social Security crisis he highlighted. Or the sorely needed reconstruction of those cities destroyed by Hurricane Katrina could be accelerated.

The irony of the war's outrageous financial costs is that they hobble the very social and economic programs that keep this country strong. While Iraq staggers under the occupation-spurred violence, the war is exacting a huge toll at home.

The costs of war might be worthwhile if there was indeed a "plan for victory." But squeezing the same lemon again and again isn't producing very good lemonade. The lack of leadership and vision coupled with the tremendous loss of life and staggering economic costs make the Iraq War one of the nation's greatest tragedies.

Ignoring the real human and economic costs of the war, it was easy for Bush to use his State of the Union speech to vow to stay the course. But while Cindy Sheehan and her tell-the-truth shirt from the Capitol were quickly removed from public view, the reality of the war is not so easy to hide.

2. THE TRIAL OF SADDAM HUSSEIN/

ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT MUST REJECT COLONIAL 'JUSTICE'

SARA FLOUNDERS

The trial of Saddam Hussein, which has opened with much international publicity, is a desperate attempt to justify and convey some legitimacy on the criminal U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is an effort to demoralize and divide the resistance to the occupation. It has nothing to do with justice or truth.

All the political forces internationally that have opposed the 15-year-long U.S. war on Iraq--which has included starvation sanctions, bombing and invasion--should also oppose all the efforts to justify the continued occupation, including the present trial of the former Iraqi leader and seven members of his government.

Regardless of the wide spectrum of political views on the character of Saddam Hussein’s government, it is essential to oppose this U.S. justification for the war. To be silent on this issue is to give credibility to a U.S.-created phony court at the giant U.S. command center called the Green Zone.

The U.S. government has no right to have even one soldier in Iraq. It has no right to bomb, sanction or starve the Iraqi people. It has no right to impose a colonial government or to establish courts in Iraq. It has no more right to decide the fate of Saddam Hussein than it does to control the oil and resources of Iraq.

The detention of Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants, along with tens of thousands of other Iraqis, is all based on a criminal, illegal war of aggression.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal and the trial of Saddam Hussein are also a violation of international law. The Geneva Convention, to which Washington is a signatory, explicitly forbids an occupying power from creating courts. In addition, the trial itself, along with the total isolation of the defendants and denial of all visitation and legal rights violates the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights.

The defense lawyers who have stepped forward have been threatened and intimidated. Two lawyers on the defense team have been assassinated.

Today in Iraq there is no judicial system. There are no codes, no laws, no courts. There still is no agreement on a constitution. The entire structure of the Iraqi state was destroyed. In its place is only the most brutal form of outright military domination.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal has been illegitimate since its very formation. It is a creation of L. Paul Bremer III of the U.S., former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority--the illegal, occupying power. Bremer initially appointed Salem Chalabi, the nephew of Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, to organize and lead the court.

Chalabi had returned to Iraq from exile with the aid of U.S. tanks in April 2003. He opened a law office to draft the new laws that have reopened Iraq to foreign capital, in collaboration with the law firm of former Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith, a war profiteer, an ideologue of the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld cabal and a principal architect of the war.

Bremer also appointed the tribunal judges. The funding and the personnel are totally controlled by U.S. forces. The U.S. Congress has appropriated $128 million to fund the court. Of course, the court has no jurisdiction over crimes committed by U.S. forces in the invasion and occupation!

Role of demonization

The trial underway now is part of the sustained U.S. effort to totally demonize Saddam Hussein. This has been an essential part of the 15-year war on Iraq

U.S. propaganda has relentlessly described Hussein as an evil madman, a brutal dictator and a threat to the entire planet who was poised to strike with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons within minutes. He was charged with having a role in 9/11 and being in league with al-Qaeda.

Both Republicans and Democrats knew this was a fraud. U.S. bombs had destroyed Iraq’s entire industrial capacity. But no politician was willing to challenge the demonization.

Every U.S. war against oppressed peoples and nations has begun with saturating the entire civilian population with war propaganda that so demonized the leader of the targeted population that any crime was treated as acceptable and beyond question. This has been true since the wars against Native populations and the demonization of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Geronimo and many, many other Indigenous leaders, up to the leaders of every progressive or revolutionary struggle over the past 50 years.

It doesn't matter how mild or committed to non-violence the leader is. Consider the case of the kidnapped former priest, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, who was charged with corruption, drug running and gang violence. Today President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran are increasingly portrayed as madmen, dictators and evil incarnate.

Since the days of the Roman Empire, victor's justice has meant humiliation, degradation and placing the defeated leader in the dock in order to establish a new order. It hides the brutality of overwhelming force and gives legitimacy to the new rulers.

The trials of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner in the ante-bellum South were the slave owners' way of cloaking the violence and degrading brutality of slavery in "god-given" property rights. The kidnapping and trial of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic after the 78-day U.S/NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, in which hundreds of civilians died, was a similar case of victor’s justice.

U.S. and WMDs

While the U.S. demonizes Saddam Hussein, it should be remembered that the Pentagon has used weapons of mass destruction not only in Iraq but against countless other defenseless populations, from Korea and the Philippines to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Libya, Lebanon and Yugoslavia.

It is the U.S. military machine that should be put on trial for having used the most horrendous weapons, from nuclear bombs to napalm, white phosphorus, anti-personnel weapons, so-called bunker busters and radioactive depleted-uranium weapons.

In Iraq intentional civilian destruction was calculated, photographed and studied. The infrastructure was consciously targeted. Reservoirs, sanitation and sewage plants, chlorine and water pumping stations were bombed. The electrical and communications grids were destroyed. Food production was targeted, from irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides to processing, refrigeration and storage.

In the 1991 bombing more than 150,000 Iraqis died. There were 156 U.S. soldiers killed.

Year after year international delegations that had been to Iraq, including many organized by the International Action Center (IAC) and led by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, reported on the impact of the 1991 bombing and the years of U.S.-imposed UN sanctions. The sanctions created an artificial famine. Imports of food, medicine and civilian necessities were withheld.

By the UN's own estimates, over 1.5 million Iraqis died of preventable diseases. Half a million children under the age of 5 years died between 1991 and 1996. Both the sanctions and the bombing, begun under George H.W. Bush, continued through the eight years of the Clinton administration. U.S. bombing continued at an average of 25 raids a day for 12 years.

Ramsey Clark, founder of the IAC, has courageously challenged the legitimacy and legality of the Iraqi Special Tribunal as a legal adviser to Saddam Hussein.

As an international human rights lawyer, his position is entirely consistent with his 15 years of opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq--from his visit to Iraq in 1991 when the U.S. bombed every 30 seconds for 42 days, through the 12 years of starvation sanctions, to his opposition to the 2003 invasion. It is consistent with his principled opposition to other U.S. wars and interventions in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Grenada, Iran, Libya, Lebanon and Panama.

Standing up to demonization is part of standing up to the U.S. war and its propaganda machine.

Target is Iraqi sovereignty

The agents of U.S. imperialism have established corrupt and brutal dictatorships and trained and funded military rule from one corner of the globe to the other--from Indonesia to Chile to Congo.

Their problem with Saddam Hussein was not that he was a dictator. It was that he refused to surrender the sovereignty of Iraq. He refused to give U.S. corporations control over Iraqi oil, nationalized beginning in the 1960s. His worst crime in their eyes was that he refused to bow down to the New World Order.

It is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Blair who should be on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The global movement that opposes the U.S. occupation in Iraq must seriously consider its responsibility to oppose every aspect of the U.S. war--especially the phony courts and staged elections that seek to legitimize and legalize this piracy.

Implicit in the call to bring the troops home now is the demand to stop the whole brutal process of recolonization. This means cancellation of the U.S. corporate contracts that have privatized and looted Iraqi resources, closing the hundreds of U.S. bases and the thousands of U.S. checkpoints, canceling the "search and destroy" missions and closing the secret prisons where tens of thousands of Iraqis are tortured and humiliated.

And closing the illegal, U.S.-created courts.

3. BUSH REPORT ON DRUG IMPORTS: GOOD DATA, BAD CONCLUSIONS

PETER ROST

Some recentt headlines:

"HHS reports drug imports likely won't save money."

"Net saving on drug import not worth action."

"Legalizing drug imports not worth it."

"Bush panel sees scant savings in drug imports."

These were based on a report released two weeks ago by the Department of Health and Human Services which concluded that "total savings to drug buyers from legalized commercial importation would be 1 to 2 percent of total drug spending."

If this were true, reimportation of drugs would never take off. Why, then, would the drug industry spend so much time fighting this plan? What is it that the drug companies know but that the Department of Health and Human Services doesn't want you to understand?

The answer is that the data in the report don't support the department's conclusions.

The research in the report actually indicates the possibility of saving 17.5 percent, or $37.8 billion, annually in the United States. And this also explains the drug industry's fear of importation.

The department's conclusion that reimportation will not result in significant savings is built on the premise as stated in the report that "imported drugs may be around 12 percent of total use ... because drug companies have incentives to impede exports." This assumption doesn't take into account that reimportation bills would make it illegal to limit supply something the drug companies are keenly aware of but the Department of Health and Human Services completely forgot.

The second faulty premise is that "U.S. drug buyers may get discounts of only 20 percent or less, with the rest of the difference between U.S. and foreign prices going to commercial importers."

This statement should be contrasted with a chart in the report showing that U.S. retail drug prices are 100 percent higher than in Europe. So this premise assumes unprecedented price gouging by importers and a complete lack of competition among them. Of course, the drug industry knows that is not how the free market works, but the Department of Health and Human Services feigns ignorance.

The third premise in the report is that "about 30 percent of total drug spending may be unchanged by legalizing commercial importation because about that much is now spent on products that are inappropriate for importation." According to the report, these would include such drugs as those used during surgery, those that are injected, controlled substances or low-cost generics.

Let's now do the analysis of savings possible in the United States, based on the data in the report. We know that according to the report drug prices in Europe are at least 50 percent lower than in the United States. Let's be very conservative and assume as much as half of this price difference is captured by greedy importers a pretty unlikely scenario because with such costs, reimportation would never have existed within Europe.

Then we take the report's premise that 30 percent of the U.S. market will not have competition from reimported drugs because they are generics or belong to categories that can't be imported easily.

That leaves 70 percent of the market multiplied by a 25 percent price reduction, for a saving of 17.5 percent on the total U.S. drug bill of $216 billion, resulting in a net saving of $37.8 billion.

This is a simplified analysis, but more complex mathematical models based on the Department of Health and Human Services' research data result in similar savings. In summary, the report has the right data but the wrong conclusions.

4. INTERBREEDERS

ANNALEE NEWITZ

There's an anthropologist in St. Louis who used a computer simulation to prove that people interbred with other species for at least a million years. You know what that means -- Homo erectus is more ripe for punnage than ever. Washington University professor Alan R. Templeton published his findings in the recently issued Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, explaining that he'd finally disproved the popular "out of Africa" theory, which holds that Homo sapiens zoomed out of Africa roughly 100,000 years ago, killing every other hominid it met (including fellow tool users and fire makers Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalis).

Instead of killing, Templeton found, early humans were more likely having sex with these hominids on their way out of Africa into Asia and Europe. They also probably migrated out of Africa in three waves, rather than one or two, seeding Asia and Europe with early hominids who later cozied up with newly arrived groups.

Templeton figured all this out using a computer program called GEODIS, which reconstructs early human mating patterns by doing statistical analysis on population distributions of haplotypes, chunks of genes that get inherited together over long swaths of history. Based on what he found, Templeton says, "The hypothesis of no interbreeding is so grossly incompatible with the data that you can reject it."

It's always struck me as kind of weird that the dominant theory of human evolution -- often called the "replacement theory" or "single origin hypothesis" -- holds that Homo sapiens evolved all on its own in Africa, without any interbreeding with its comely hominid neighbors. The single origin hypothesis says that when Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, it simply destroyed (or, in polite anthropology-speak, "replaced") all the other hominids. But even if we assume that Homo sapiens are such a bloodthirsty lot that their response to another form of intelligent life is to battle it, we all know what happens in battles. The conquered are often raped and/or enslaved. This seems like such a time-honored occurrence -- even inspiring a snotty little book by some prim profs a few years ago called A Natural History of Rape -- that it's hard to believe it wasn't happening in our earliest evolutionary incarnations.

Now you may be saying, sure, humans could have been raping Homo erectus, but that doesn't mean any of them made babies -- that's like saying humans who rape chimps are interbreeding. And you'd be right if it turned out to be true that there was only one migration out of Africa 100,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens had diverged enough from its fellow hominids that matings were likely to be sterile. But if Templeton's findings are accurate, there were migrations out of Africa 1.5 million years ago and 700,000 years ago, as well as the familiar one we all know and love, 100,000 years ago.

What Templeton's arguing is that the forebears of the creatures we are today -- Homo sapiens -- were interbreeding with the forebears of other hominid groups. His theory about the migrations at 700,000 years ago could help explain the sudden expansion in brain pan size among humans at that time, as well as evidence that tool use had begun to spring up among hominid groups across Europe and Asia. In Templeton's vision, we are hybrid hominids, not some pure species whose coolness and ingenuity allowed it to sweep over Asia and Europe "replacing" everything we found. We didn't "replace" other hominids; often, we merged with them.

Interestingly, Templeton sees his discoveries as a refutation of more than the replacement hypothesis. He sees it as scientific proof that racism has no rational basis. "You can be 99 percent confident that there was recurrent genetic interchange between African and Eurasian populations," he says. "So the idea of pure, distinct races in humans does not exist. We humans don't have a tree relationship, but rather a trellis. We're intertwined."

It's good to remember that for every scientist who wants to prove that Africans are genetically distinct from Europeans, there's one who wants to prove they aren't. Especially in conservative times, science is often the enemy of oppressed racial groups (think of "The Bell Curve," the Tuskegee syphilis studies and countless "scientific" eugenics programs). But once in a while, an anthropology geek with a cool computer program reminds us that real science does not give answers that fit easily into cultural stereotypes. Good science overturns them.

5. TELLING IT LIKE IT ISN'T

ROBERT FISK

I first realized the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston Globe. I expressed my sorrow that he was leaving a region where he had obviously enjoyed reporting. I could save my sorrows for someone else, he said. One of the joys of leaving was that he would no longer have to alter the truth to suit his paper's more vociferous readers.

"I used to call the Israeli Likud Party 'right wing,' " he said. "But recently, my editors have been telling me not to use the phrase. A lot of our readers objected." And so now, I asked? "We just don't call it 'right wing' anymore."

Ouch. I knew at once that these "readers" were viewed at his newspaper as Israel's friends, but I also knew that the Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu was as right wing as it had ever been.

This is only the tip of the semantic iceberg that has crashed into American journalism in the Middle East. Illegal Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land are clearly "colonies," and we used to call them that. I cannot trace the moment when we started using the word "settlements." But I can remember the moment around two years ago when the word "settlements" was replaced by "Jewish neighborhoods" — or even, in some cases, "outposts."

Similarly, "occupied" Palestinian land was softened in many American media reports into "disputed" Palestinian land — just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in 2001, instructed U.S. embassies in the Middle East to refer to the West Bank as "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory.

Then there is the "wall," the massive concrete obstruction whose purpose, according to the Israeli authorities, is to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from killing innocent Israelis. In this, it seems to have had some success. But it does not follow the line of Israel's 1967 border and cuts deeply into Arab land. And all too often these days, journalists call it a "fence" rather than a "wall." Or a "security barrier," which is what Israel prefers them to say. For some of its length, we are told, it is not a wall at all — so we cannot call it a "wall," even though the vast snake of concrete and steel that runs east of Jerusalem is higher than the old Berlin Wall.

The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely.

If a Jewish colony built illegally on Arab land is simply a nice friendly "neighborhood," then any Palestinian who attacks it must be carrying out a mindless terrorist act.

And surely there is no reason to protest a "fence" or a "security barrier" — words that conjure up the fence around a garden or the gate arm at the entrance to a private housing complex.

For Palestinians to object violently to any of these phenomena thus marks them as a generically vicious people. By our use of language, we condemn them.

We follow these unwritten rules elsewhere in the region. American journalists frequently used the words of U.S. officials in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency — referring to those who attacked American troops as "rebels" or "terrorists" or "remnants" of the former regime. The language of the second U.S. pro-consul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, was taken up obediently — and grotesquely — by American journalists.

American television, meanwhile, continues to present war as a bloodless sandpit in which the horrors of conflict — the mutilated bodies of the victims of aerial bombing, torn apart in the desert by wild dogs — are kept off the screen. Editors in New York and London make sure that viewers' "sensitivities" don't suffer, that we don't indulge in the "pornography" of death (which is exactly what war is) or "dishonor" the dead whom we have just killed.

Our prudish video coverage makes war easier to support, and journalists long ago became complicit with governments in making conflict and death more acceptable to viewers. Television journalism has thus become a lethal adjunct to war.

Back in the old days, we used to believe — did we not? — that journalists should "tell it how it is." Read the great journalism of World War II and you'll see what I mean. The Ed Murrows and Richard Dimblebys, the Howard K. Smiths and Alan Moorheads didn't mince their words or change their descriptions or run mealy-mouthed from the truth because listeners or readers didn't want to know or preferred a different version.

So let's call a colony a colony, let's call occupation what it is, let's call a wall a wall. And maybe express the reality of war by showing that it represents not, primarily, victory or defeat, but the total failure of the human spirit.

6. NOAM CHOMSKY ON THE HOPEFUL SIGNS ACROSS LATIN AMERICA

BERNIE DWYER

Bernie Dwyer: I am minded of a great Irish song called "The West's Awake" written by Thomas Davis in remembrance of the Fenian Uprising of 1798. It is about the west of Ireland asleep under British rule for hundreds of years and how it awoke from its slumbers and rose up against the oppressor. Could we now begin to hope that the South is awake?

Noam Chomsky: What's happening is something completely new in the history of the hemisphere. Since the Spanish conquest the countries of Latin America have been pretty much separated from one another and oriented toward the imperial power. There are also very sharp splits between the tiny wealthy elite and the huge suffering population. The elites sent their capital, took their trips, had their second homes, sent their children to study in whatever European country their country was closely connected with. I mean, even their transportation systems were oriented toward the outside for export of resources and so on.

For the first time, they are beginning to integrate and in quite a few different ways. Venezuela and Cuba is one case. MERCOSUR, [the trading association now including many Latin American countries] which is still not functioning very much, is another case. Venezuela, of course, just joined MERCOSUR, which is a big step forward for it and it was greatly welcomed by the presidents of Argentina, Brazil.

For the first time the Indian population is becoming politically quite active. They just won an election in Bolivia which is pretty remarkable. There is a huge Indian population in Ecuador, even in Peru, and some of them are calling for an Indian nation. Now they want to control their own resources. In fact, many don't even want their resources developed. Many don't see any particular point in having their culture and lifestyle destroyed so that people can sit in traffic jams in New York.

Furthermore, they are beginning to throw out the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the past, the US could prevent unwelcome developments such as independence in Latin America, by violence; supporting military coups, subversion, invasion and so on. That doesn't work so well any more. The last time they tried in 2002 in Venezuela, the US had to back down because of enormous protests from Latin America, and of course the coup was overthrown from within. That's very new.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened. Argentina is just essentially ridding itself of the IMF, as they say. They are paying off the debts to the IMF. The IMF rules that they followed had totally disastrous effects. They are being helped in that by Venezuela, which is buying up part of the Argentine debt.

Bolivia will probably do the same. Bolivia's had 25 years of rigorous adherence to IMF rules. Per capita income now is less than it was 25 years ago. They want to get rid of it. The other countries are doing the same. The IMF is essentially the US Treasury Department. It is the economic weapon that's alongside the military weapon for maintaining control. That's being dismantled.

All of this is happening against the background of very substantial popular movements, which, to the extent that they existed in the past, were crushed by violence, state terror, Operation Condor, one monstrosity after another. That weapon is no longer available.

Furthermore, there is South-South integration going on, so Brazil, and South Africa and India are establishing relations.

And again, the forces below the surface in pressing all of this are international popular organizations of a kind that never existed before; the ones that meet annually in the world social forums. By now several world social forums have spawned lots of regional ones; there's one right here in Boston and many other places. These are very powerful mass movements of a kind without any precedent in history: the first real internationals. Everyone's always talked about internationals on the left but there's never been one. This is the beginning of one.

These developments are extremely significant. For US planners, they are a nightmare. I mean, the Monroe Doctrine is about 180 years old now, and the US wasn't powerful enough to implement it until after the 2nd World War, except for the nearby region.

After the 2nd World War it was able to kick out the British and the French and implement it, but now it is collapsing. These countries are also diversifying their international relations including commercial relations. So there's a lot of export to China, and accepting of investment from China. That's particularly true of Venezuela, but also the other big exporters like Brazil and Chile. And China is eager to gain access to other resources of Latin America.

Unlike Europe, China can't be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they've been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don't see any need to. The United States is afraid of China; it is not a military threat to anyone; and is the least aggressive of all the major military powers. But it's not easy to intimidate it. In fact, you can't intimidate it at all. So China's interactions with Latin America are frightening the United States. Latin America is also improving economic interactions with Europe. China and Europe now are each other largest trading partners, or pretty close to it.

These developments are eroding the means of domination of the US world system. And the US is pretty naturally playing its strong card which is military and in military force the US is supreme. Military expenditures in the US are about half of the total world expenditures, technologically much more advanced. In Latin America, just keeping to that, the number of the US military personnel is probably higher than it ever was during the Cold War. The US is sharply increasing training of Latin American officers.

The training of military officers has been shifted from the State Department to the Pentagon, which is not insignificant. The State department is under some weak congressional supervision. I mean, there is legislation requiring human rights conditionalities and so on. They are not very much enforced, but they are at least there. But the Pentagon is free to do anything they want. Furthermore, the training is shifting to local control. So one of the main targets is what's called radical populism, we know what that means, and the US is establishing military bases throughout the region.

Bernie Dwyer: It appears, from what you are saying, that the US is losing the ideological war and compensating by upping their military presence in the region. Would you see Cuba as being a key player in encouraging and perhaps influencing what's coming out of Latin America right now?

Noam Chomsky: Fidel Castro, whatever people may think of him, is a hero in Latin America, primarily because he stood up to the United States. It's the first time in the history of the hemisphere that anybody stood up to the United States. Nobody likes to be under the jackboot but they may not be able to do anything about it. So for that reason alone, he's a Latin American hero. Chavez: the same.

The ideological issue that you rightly bring up is the impact of neoliberalism. It's pretty striking over the last twenty-five years, overwhelmingly it's true, that the countries that have adhered to the neo-liberal rules have had an economic catastrophe and the countries that didn't pay any intention to the rules grew and developed. East Asia developed rapidly pretty much by totally ignoring the rules. Chile is claimed as being a market economy but that's highly misleading: its main export is a very efficient state owned copper company nationalized under Allende. You don't get correlations like this in economics very often. Adherence to the neoliberal rules has been associated with economic failure and violation of them with economic success: it's very hard to miss that. Maybe some economists can miss it but people don't: they live it.

Yes, there is an uprising against it. Cuba is a symbol. Venezuela is another, Argentina, where they recovered from the IMF catastrophe by violating the rules and sharply violating them, and then throwing out the IMF. Well, this is the ideological issue. The IMF is just a name for the economic weapon of domination, which is eroding.

Bernie Dwyer: Why do you think that this present movement is different from the struggle that went before, in Chile for instance where they succeeded in overthrowing the military dictatorship? What gives us more hope about this particular stage of liberation for Latin America?

Noam Chomsky: First of all, there was hope in Latin America in the 1960s but it was crushed by violence. Chile was moving on a path towards some form of democratic socialism but we know what happened. That's the first 9/11 in 1973, which was an utter catastrophe. The dictatorship in Chile, which is a horror story also led to an economic disaster in Chile bringing about its worst recession in its history. The military then turned over power to civilians. Its still there so Chile didn't yet completely liberate itself. It has partially liberated itself from the military dictatorship; and in the other countries even more so.

So for example, I remember traveling in Argentina and Chile a couple of years ago and the standard joke in both countries was that people said that they wish the Chilean military had been stupid enough to get into a war with France or some major power so they could have been crushed and discredited and then people would be free the way they were in Argentina, where the military was discredited by its military defeat.

But there has been a slow process in every one of the countries, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, all the way through, there's been a process of overthrowing the dominant dictatorships - the military dictatorships which have been almost always supported, and sometimes instituted, by the United States.

Now they are supporting one another and the US cannot resort to the same policies.

Take Brazil; if Lula had been running in 1963, the US would have done just what it did when Goulart was president in 1963. The Kennedy administration just planned a military dictatorship. A military coup took place and that got rid of that. And that was happening right through the hemisphere.

Now, there's much more hope because that cannot be done and there is also cooperation.

There is also a move towards a degree of independence: political, economic and social policies, access to their own resources, instituting social changes of the kind that could overcome the tremendous internal problems of Latin America, which are awful. And a large part of the problems in Latin America are simply internal. In Latin America, the wealthy have never had any responsibilities. They do what they want.

Bernie Dwyer: Do you think that the recent growth and strength of broad based social movements in several Latin America countries have played a significant role in bringing progressive governments into power in the region?

Noam Chomsky: There can be no serious doubt of this. Latin America has, I think, the most important popular movements anywhere: the MST (Landless Workers Movement) in Brazil, the indigenous movements in Bolivia, others. That accounts for the vibrancy and vitality of democracy in much of Latin America today -- denounced in the West as "populism," a term that translates as "threat to elite rule with marginalization of the public in systems with democratic forms but with only limited substance," those naturally preferred by concentrated private and state power.