Noam Chomsky - Interventions

Copyright by Noam Chomsky 2007

All Rights Reserved

The writings in this book are adapted from essays by Noam Chomsky distributed by

The New York Times Syndicate.

The Open Media Series is edited by Greg Ruggiero and archived by

the Tamiment Library, New York University.

Cover art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Unfinished Flag of the United States, oil on board, 28 x 51.5 in., 1988.

Cover design: Pollen

Text design: Gambrinus

Back cover author photo by Don J. Usner.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chomsky, Noam.

Interventions / by Noam Chomsky.

p. cm.(City lights / open media series) Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-87286-483-2

ISBN-10: 0-87286-483-9

1. United StatesForeign relations2001- 2. Unilateral acts (International law) 3. Intervention (International law) 4. Iraq War, 2003- 5. War on Terrorism, 2001- 6. United StatesPolitics and government2001- 7. Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946-I. Title. II. Series.

E902.C476 2006

327.730090511dc22

2006030218

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Visit our Web site: www.citylights.com

For the past seventeen years Noam Chomsky has contributed many titles to the Open Media Series, including his runaway international bestseller, 9-11, and the work that launched the series itselfa transcript of an antiwar speech Chomsky gave at Harvard University in November 1990. What few people have known, me included until very recently, is that in the months after his 9-11 hit the New York Times extended bestseller list, Chomsky began producing concise essays, approximately 1,000 words each, distributed by The New York Times Syndicate as op-eds.

Chomskys op-eds have been picked up widely by the international press, but much less so in the United States where newspapers of record have declined to publish them. None of the essays distributed by the Syndicate have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post or Boston Globe, though they have been picked up and published by a few regional papers, like the Register Guard, the Dayton Daily News, and the Knoxville Voice, a Tennessee-based monthly.

That our mainstream media system seems unwilling to tolerate a range of political thought wide enough to include Chomskys but is willing to market them outside our intellectual and geographic borders is ironic and revealing. Tariq Ali says that if Chomsky were living in Italy, Germany, France, or Britain, he would have a regular column in one of those countries major newspapers. Chomskys columns have appeared in the mainstream British press, including the International Herald Tribune, the Guardian, and the Independent. One of Mexicos national newspapers, La Jornada, publishes Chomsky frequently; it just hasnt happened yet in Chomskys home country.

It is thus a great honor to present readers in the United States with Interventions, a complete collection of the op-eds Chomsky has written to date for The New York Times Syndicate, minus one or two that were verbatim excerpts from his recent books. Interventions also includes one pieceA Wall As a Weaponwritten specifically for the New York Times, not for the Syndicate, two parts of the same company. Chomsky has taken the occasion of producing this collection to add notes and, in some cases restore passages from his original drafts that had been edited out for reasons of space. He also added material expanding what was in the original drafts background, and other information. As a book, Interventions has benefited from these additions.

It is important to note that during the period that Chomsky wrote the essays in this book2002 to 2007he also wrote several major works: Hegemony or Survival (which held ground for weeks on the New York Times bestseller list after Hugo Chvez praised it during a speech before the United Nations in 2006), Failed States and Perilous Power (with Gilbert Achcar and Stephen Shalom), all of which discuss many of the ideas contained in Interventions in greater detail.

In composing op-eds, Chomsky is taking advantage of the fact that our society is still one of the freest in the world: openings still exist to challenge the White House, the Pentagon, and the corporations enriched by them. Chomsky believes that the freedom to challenge power is not just an opportunity, its a responsibility, and he takes advantage of the op-ed form to do just that. These brief, fiercelyargued essays were written in order to reach readers in the popular, shared space of their daily newspapers, and Chomsky demonstrates that he can just as persuasively strike at the heart of todays political contradictions, deceptions, and hidden horrors with a few hundred words as he can with a few hundred pages.

Despite the profound inequities in this country and the nightmare of being a nation at war, Chomsky reminds us that ordinary people still have power to drive change. One of the clearest lessons of history, he writes, including recent history, is that rights are not granted; they are won. The purpose of the Open Media Series, and of Chomskys work, is to encourage readers to use their rights for creating greater justice, human rights, democracy, and to insist on a media system which supports them.