Noam Chomsky Says What Almost No One Is Thinking

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

I know that, despite identifying as a progressive, I’m probably far more hawkish than a lot of people on the Left in America. So no one will be surprised that I generally disagree with Chomsky; I’m just not his sort of Leftie.

But I’ve also been a very vocal critic of the Bush administration and virtually every decision that was undertaken in the 2000s. I think that the use of torture on our enemies, the rush to war (with all of its terrible consequences), and the erosion of American civil liberties have resulted in a catastrophic mess.

What is completely missing here is any discussion of intentions: Osama Bin Laden intended to kill thousands of civilians; he drew no distinction between military and non-military targets when he stood at the head of an organization that flew commercial jets into buildings filled with ordinary Americans. George Bush, whatever else we might say about him and his adminstration, did not intend the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else. This isn’t to argue that the wars his administration began are somehow good or that the civilian deaths are somehow permissible.

But to attempt to create some sort of moral equivalency based on the fact the civilians were killed by the decisions of both men — or, actually, to argue that Bush is far worse than Bin Laden — is stunning and, to my mind, incredibly problematic.

(Source: guernicamag.com)