--digsig
         James A. Donald
     6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
     Cw9A3jsPYePmDhNi/dP2sMPPjgEM7t0xYFOpfenB
     4Baeez92VNY9uFjy8XDuhqHmkKa1eYmqiN6rGq3/F

  ------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.

I find Chomsky interesting not for the details he provides but for the
things he makes you think about.  Several of my favourite examples...

Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran, and the Kurds, even as we
(and everyone else it would seem) were arming him.  Then he invaded a
small fiefdom and became the next Hilter over night without any real
comments or discussion in the media.

Similarities between Vietnam and Afganistan.  That is install puppet
regime, be invited in, ... ;)

The idea that the US enforces international law, yet when you look at
the records...

The talk of atrocities in Cambodia.  So far I've never seen it
mentioned that the US killed 600,000 Cambodians.  When Chomsky said
this I thought the guy was nuts.  I looked up the information, and
found it detailed by several CIA historians, talk about hiding facts in
the open.  Why wouldn't the media at least mention this in passing,
that's spooky.

In article <8l4oqo$c...@nnrp1.deja.com>,

--
---------------------------------------------------
Dan Clore

The Website of Lord Weÿrdgliffe:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/index.html
The Dan Clore Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/necpage.htm

--

Iraqi military power (including their WMD research) was built mainly on
Soviet hardware or Chinese knock-offs.  The Soviets even let the Iraqis
use airbases inside the USSR to strike targets deep inside Iraq.

Iraq also bought some French equipment (such as the Exocet missile used
against USS Stark).  Notice that today, in the UN Security Council,
these three -- the Russians, Chinese and French -- are the ones pushing
for a rapprochment with Iraq (vice the US-backed embargo).

Finally, Iraq also bought an assortment of low-end military equipment
from various third-world suppliers, such as their infamous long-range
artillery from South Africa.

To my knowledge, however, the Iraqi arsenal contained not a single
piece of equipment given by, purchased from, or even manufactured in
the United States.

Nor is there any evidence that, when it appeared Iran would defeat
Iraq, the US even considered using military force to preserve the Iraqi
regime.

Compare this to our relationship with the other Gulf Arab states.  We
sold them arms, trained their forces, helped them build defense-related
facilities, and so forth.  For example, we sold F-15s and E-3s to the
Saudis -- over strong objections from Israel, incidentally.  Their air
base at Dahran could have accomodated the entire Saudi Air Force
several times over;  it was built on the assumption that the US would
deploy forces there during a crisis.

If we "armed" Iraq, it was only by conducting normal commerce with it,
which created profits that the Iraqi regime could use to buy arms.
Perhaps we ought not have traded with Iraq.  On the other hand, the
same people who complain that we once armed Iraq (which must
necessarily refer to our economic trade with it) are now complaining
that our economic sanctions are starving the country.  Likewise, if we
had taken a more openly hostile stance towards him, the same people who
condemn us for coddling him would now condemn us for provoking him.
You just can't please some people.

Now, we may grant that politically, the US tilted towards Iraq for much
of the Iran-Iraq war.  We may also say that US political leaders were
slow to recognize Iraq as a threat.  But to be far, we must also grant
that none of our Arab allies in the region took that threat seriously,
either.

(US CENTCOM, on the other hand, was wargaming Iraq-Kuwait scenarios as
early as 1988.  So much for the canard that "the military is always
fighting the last war.")

To the extent we did tilt towards Iraq, that tilt was entirely
justified by circumstances during the Iran-Iraq war.  For most of the
war it looked like Iran (which was, unlike Iraq, implaccably hostile to
the United States) would win.  So, like the Gulf Arab states
themselves, we tended to support Iraq as an obstacle to Iranian
hegemony.

Remember, also, that while Iraq was the initial aggressor, Baghdad was
willing to end the war after its early offensive was turned back.  The
war continued chiefly because Tehran insisted on unreasonable terms,
and it ended only when Iran dropped those demands.  There were no "good
guys" (Henry Kissinger famously said that the best outcome would be for
both sides to lose), so it made sense to back the bad guy who seemed
less threatening at the time.

American news media serve an American audience, and usually cover
foreign news only to the extent it involves or affects Americans.  By
those criteria, Iraq simply wasn't newsworthy until it did (or
threatened to do) something that prompted a major US military
deployment.

Now, we may certainly question whether the public is well-served by
news media that ignore foreign affairs unless and until the US is
directly and immediately involved.  But that's what they do, and I
think the best explanation is that there simply isn't an audience for
seemingly-obscure foreign affairs stories -- not Chomsky's Byzantine
hypotheses of corporate media manipulation.

For that matter:  did Chomsky write much about Iraq prior to summer
1990?

But does the analogy have substance?  If not, then Chomsky is
not "making us think";  he's manipulating the reader into accepting a
falsehood.

Someone (John O'Sullivan?) once pointed out that when an oncoming bus
looks like it's about to hit an old lady, it's OK to shove her to
safety, but it isn't OK to shove her in front of the bus.  Clearly we
wouldn't say that both must be equally bad because they both involve
shoving an old lady.

By the same argument:  it's one thing to send troops to a foreign
country to save it from Stalinist totalitarianism (the US in Vietnam).
It's something very different to send troops to a foreign country to
establish or preserve Stalinist totalitarianism (the Soviets in
Afghanistan).  It's obvious nonsense to demand that we, or the media,
should ignore this distinction.

In any case, Chomsky's point about the American news media isn't
correct.  They did not ignore the alleged similarity;  on the contrary,
they frequently spoke of Afghanistan as the Soviets' Vietnam.

Nor do the media generally eschew the term "invasion" when discussing
US military action.  The press apparently use the term "invasion" to
describe the sudden introduction of large numbers of troops.  Our
Vietnam build-up was too gradual to be so described, but our actions in
Grenada and Panama were routinely described as "invasions".

In other words, Chomsky did what he usually does, as we saw in his
comparison of Cambodia and East Timor:  he picked two isolated data
points that did not provide an adequate test of his hypothesis, but
which pointed to the conclusion he wanted.

As an aside, we may also note that Chomsky gave credence to Soviet
propaganda rationales for the invasion of Afghanistan, something he
certainly never did with the thinking behind US policy in Vietnam.

(Granted, he qualified this endorsement with the usual doublespeak and
equivocation.  He repeated them uncritically, and gratuitously repeated
after each one that they were all "true", which plants in the reader's
mind the idea that these should be relevant to our judgment of Soviet
policy.  Then he casually declares that none of these facts should be
relevant to our judgment of Soviet policy.)

The only unclassified CIA document I have on hand is "Kampuchea: A
Demographic Catastrophe".  This was published by the CIA National
Foreign Assessment Center, way back in May 1980.  It does contain an
estimate that vaguely resembles yours.  Perhaps your CIA historians
were using this figure?

Specifically:  its description of the "Lon Nol Regime (1 July 1970 to
17 April 1975)" cites "an estimated 600,000 to 700,000 war-related
deaths" (p.2).  Note that this estimate covers "war-related deaths",
and includes periods of time when the US was not directly involved in
Cambodia (or even Indochina).

This means it includes Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, no doubt a
considerable number, perhaps even a substantial majority of the total
death toll.

To be fair, it also includes Cambodians killed by either the United
States or the Lon Nol government.  Unfortunately we don't know what
percentage of those deaths can be attributed to each belligerent.  It
also does it distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, nor
does it tell us how many non-combatants were killed deliberately versus
the number killed incidentally.

Based on what we know about the Khmer Rouge, I don't think it's
unreasonable to suppose that a majority of those 600k-700k deaths were
due to Khmer Rouge terror against civilians, whereas deaths caused by
US and allied forces were a relatively small percentage and were mainly
combat-related.

But I admit, that's just my guess, and in any case my source is dated.
Perhaps if you provide a specific citation, readers can better evaluate
your claim that "the US killed 600,000 Cambodians."

(After all, you can hardly condemn the press for failing to report
a "fact" that you yourself haven't substantiated.)

An analogy consist of more than just two situations being compared.  It
also is intimately tied to the comparison itself -- which, from the looks
of it, most of your analyses completely ignores.  

Nathan Folkert
nfolk...@cs.stanford.edu
http://www.stanford.edu/~nfolkert

*******************************************************
* The Danes came to Ireland with nothing to do        *
* But dream of the plundered old Irish they slew,     *
* "Yeh will in yer vikings," said Brian Boru,         *
* And threw them back into the ocean!                 *
*******************************************************
* The Sea, oh the Sea, is the gradh geal mo croide    *
* Long may it stay between England and me!            *
* It's a sure guarantee that some hour we'll be free. *
* Oh, thank God we're surrounded by water             *
*******************************************************

Do you see the problem?  Certainly the behaviour of the US in vietnam
and in the phase of the secret bombing indicates that a concern for
civilian casualties was not high on it's list of priorities in the
period under discussion.

Of course, it doesn't make a difference to the victims, who are dead
regardless.  But it does make a difference in our moral (and legal)
judgment of the alleged perpetrators.

For example:  consider a motorist who strikes and kills a pedestrian.
Certainly the law (and common sense) make a distinction based on
whether the collision was deliberate homicide, or the product of
criminal negligence, or pure accident.

By definition, war kills people in a big way.  Sometimes you kill the
wrong people.  Targets are misidentified, bombs and shells go astray,
and so forth.  You may even kill your own soldiers by mistake
("fratricide" or "friendly fire").  You try to avoid it, but in any
large military operation, it's going to happen sooner or later.

When you have non-combatants in the area of operations, some of them
are going to get hit.  You certainly try not to hit them, you try to
minimize the risk to civilians and other non-combatants, but inevitably
you will not succeed 100% of the time.  (Especially when the enemy
deliberately hides among non-combatants and uses "human shields".)

Yes, I think we can and should make a clear distinction between that
sort of accident, versus deliberate atrocity or culpable negligence.

(This also affects our judgment of the question below.  Even a major
bombing campaign would have a hard time killing 600k people by
accident.  If that many Cambodians really were killed by US bombing, it
suggests criminal negligence at best, deliberate targeting at worst.)

We know that the Khmer Rouge come from an ideological tradition with a
history of mass murder.  We also know with certainty that they killed
some large number of people once they took power -- serious estimates
are 1-2 million;  Chomsky's estimate is about half that.

Now, I don't know if there there has been any specific research
concerning the number of Cambodian civilians killed by the Khmer Rouge
before they actually occupied Phnom Penh.  I'm not even sure such
research is really possible, except for crude estimates that can always
be disputed, just as we are doing now.

However, I think it beggars the imagination to suppose that the Khmer
Rouge were basically nice, humane guys until 17 April 1975 -- when they
suddenly, for no discernable reason, became homicidal fanatics who
started killing their countrymen en masse.

It seems more plausible to suggest that their behavior was consistent,
and that before taking power they acted (in the areas they controlled
or influenced) much as they did after taking power.  Certainly this
would explain why refugees continued packing into Phnom Penh even after
the bombing stopped.

(It also explains Chomsky's otherwise-exculpatory observation that some
rural areas were not hit particularly hard by KR terror;  they had
already been terrorized before April 1975.)

What about the hated US military?

During World War II, the combined air forces of the Allies deliberately
carpet-bombed densely-populated urban centers in Germany.  Yet it's
generally agreed that not more than a million Germans were killed by
Allied bombing throughout the war.

On the other hand, in Cambodia the United States bombed sparsely-
inhabited areas of jungle along the Vietnamese border (and for a
shorter period of time).  I'm sure that some non-zero number of
Cambodian non-combatants were caught in the bombing.  But it's hard to
imagine that there were even 600k Cambodians living in the areas we
bombed.

Again, I don't know whether there is specific and reliable research on
this topic, so we can't do more than guess.  Stalin blamed the Ukranian
famine on capitalist wreckers.  Even today, there are Nazi apologists
who claim that the Jews died in the camps only because of wartime
privation caused by Allied bombing.  No doubt it's even easier to shift
blame from the Khmer Rouge to their enemies, given the more muddled
nature of the evidence available.

In any case, my point stands:  assuming the previous article was citing
this estimate, it is an estimate of total war-related Cambodia deaths --
 caused by both sides, including combatant and non-combatant deaths,
and with no distinction between war crimes and casualties caused
accidentally.

Contrary to what the previous author suggested, it is not an estimate
of the number of Cambodians killed by the United States specifically.
To say that it is, we must assume (as the source does not) that the
Khmer Rouge -- despite their subsequent record of brutality -- killed
no significant number of Cambodians before marching into Phnom Penh.

Surely, no matter how much you want to believe that the United States
was just as bad as the Khmer Rouge, you must agree that this
assumption, necessary to your argument, is implausible?

If one believes that the bombing ought never to have been done in the
first place, one is likely to think that since the level of concern was
too low to prevent the bombing entirely, it was (eo ipso) lower than it
should have been.

Does anyone have reliable casualty figures for comparable US bombing
missions during this period?  For example, we dropped a lot of bombs on
North Vietnam;  are their any independent estimates of how many
civilian causalties this caused?  For that matter, what did the North
Vietnamese themselves claim?  This might shed some light on whether the
600k estimate for the Cambodian bombing is plausible.

However, the point remains that it is not directly supported by the CIA
source that I cited.  I am still not sure whether the original
contributor to this discussion was citing this source, or a different
one.  Presumably we will hear from him anon.

I gather you're trying (a la Chomsky) to construct an argument which
equates the US bombing to the actions of the Khmer Rouge.  Your
estimate that the US killed 600k Cambodians is roughly the same as the
estimates for Khmer Rouge killings advanced by Chomsky.  Your phrasing
("bombing peasant societies") implies that we targeted Cambodian
society as such, not VC/NVA sanctuaries and lines of communication
within Cambodia.

If this were an accurate picture of what took place in Cambodia during
the 1970s, your implied equation would have merit.  To coin a phrase,
that's a big "if".  I would argue that it is hypothesis contrary to
fact;  that it is not an accurate description, and that by equating the
US to the Khmer Rouge, you are either defaming the US, excusing the KR,
or both.

Specifically, I suspect Chomsky is doing precisely what you attempted
to do in this instance:  taking an estimate for all war-related deaths
and simply attributing all those deaths to the US bombing.  As I
recall, this is more or less what he does with a similar estimate in
_Manufacturing Consent_.

Pizzo suggests that the diversion was actually a covert attempt by the
Reagan and Bush administrations to give Iraq money for weapons.  His
only source for this is Christopher Drougal, a bank official who was
indicted for bank fraud and offered this covert-operations story as his
defense.

Without prejudging Drougal's criminal trial, it isn't hard to imagine
why a defendant might fabricate something like this.  It's an
interesting story, and of course we can't possibly prove it isn't true,
but by itself it isn't remotely sufficient grounds to declare with
certainty that "the US armed Iraq".

Pizzo also claims that "hundreds of U.S. government documents" support
Drougal's claim, but his one example isn't very convincing.  He notes
the existence of a 1987 memo briefing Bush for a meeting with the Iraqi
ambassador, though he does not describe its contents.  He notes that
Bush and the ambassador discussed both the loans and the war.

Well, duh.  When the Vice President meets with an ambassador, he's
going to be briefed beforehand.  If the US is underwriting a loan to
that country, they'll discuss the loan.  If that country is at war,
they're going to talk about how the war is going.  Neither the
existence of the briefing memo nor the topics discussed at the meeting
support Drougal's theory that the loans and the war effort were
directly related.

Pizzo's insinuation that they do is mere conspiracy theory, which he
tries to support by putting a sinister spin on ordinary events (e.g.
Drougal's plea-bargain) and not-very-large coincidences.  Presumably
this weak evidence is actually the best he has available, since
supposedly he is citing only one example out of "hundreds".

No doubt the usual suspects will find this convincing -- the American
left has lately developed a habit of accepting exculpatory conspiracy
theories from criminal defendants.  And of course there are a lot of
people devoted to the proposition that anything bad must ultimately be
traced back to the United States.  But I don't think this is adequate
justification for your statement that the US did, in fact, arm Iraq.

I'm not familiar with Carlos Cardoen, and if you could provide more
information or a reference for this information, I'd be grateful.

However, the fact remains that no US-designed equipment ever showed up
in the Iraqi inventory.  Military references from the 1980s (Janes,
etc) indicate that the Iraqis had Soviet, Chinese, French, Italian,
South African, and even British equipment (the latter having been
acquired before the Ba'ath coup).  Yet not a single sidearm, canteen or
rucksack from the United States.

If the Iraqis were buying US equipment via this Carlos Cardoen, it
seems they have grounds to demand their money back.  ;-)

Unfortunately I haven't seen the report to which this record refers.  It
sounds promising though.  I don't know if it is related to "A
Demographic Catastrophe."

Here is the record from the CGP database (http://www.yale.edu/cgp/).

Title [200]

Political change in wartime; the Khmer Krahom revolution in Southern
Cambodia, 1970-1974

Summary/Allegations [330]

This account by a American Foreign Service Office is of considerable
historical significance. Quinn interviewed Cambodian refugees who fled
into South Vietnam in 1973-74 from areas under Khmer Rouge control in
southeastern Cambodia. ("Krahom" is the Khmer-language term for "red,"
or in French "rouge.")

Summary/Allegations [330]

This article, an edited version of a lengthy report to the U.S.
Department of State, analyzes the extreme and brutal social revolution
which the Khmer Rouge began in 1973 in areas under their cont rol --
policies extended after 1975 to the entire country and population. From
these earliest refugee accounts of Khmer Rouge brutality Quinn was able
to distill almost the full set of Khmer Rouge policies: forced labor,
forced population movements, the collectivization and State organization
of agricultural production, the extreme hostility to religion and ethnic
minorities, and the murderous revolution within the revolution. That is,
factions of the Khmer Rouge loyal to Pol Pot began killing off
theirSihanoukist and Vietnamese allies in the 1970-75 civil war against
the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime so that when the Khmer Rouge side won the
civil war the Pol Pot faction would come out in complete control.
Quinn's analysis, which was publicly available to Cambodia specialists,
provides the policy program or plan that makes sense of the earliest
refugee horror stories. (David Hawk).

Record ID [001]   BCH097

Language [101] Item is in original language: in English
Note (Source/Provenance) [317]   Bibliographic record from: Holocaust
and genocide bibliographic database. -- Jerusalem : Institute on the
Holocaust and Genocide, 1994 (ver 2.2)
Item in [463]  U.S. Naval War College Review, 1976 Mar.
Geographic Area [660]   a-cb---
Intellectual Responsibility - Personal Name [700]  Quinn, Kenneth
Cataloguing Agency [801]   Australia, BISA, 1997

Regarding your specific allegation:  I did not "exclude" the material
regarding the federal judge.  I saw no point in addressing the entire
article point-for-point, nor did I think I was obliged to do so.  No
doubt if you were expecting such a critique, you would have found it
lacking, which may account for what you call "many tiny oversights".

Readers will note that prosecutors objected that the judge in question
was biased, and he was removed from the case.  The author insinuates
that this was part of the cover-up.  Again, readers can make up their
own minds whether this is a reasonable statement, or merely self-
referential conjecture.

One additional point struck me today, after I posted my last article:

Pizzo claims that the Clinton administration abetted the cover-up
because it didn't want to embarass Republicans on the eve of the NAFTA
vote.  (NAFTA is quickly becoming an all-purpose bogeyman for the
left.)  But this is utter nonsense for three reasons.

First, Republicans already supported NAFTA.  Clinton didn't need to win
Republican votes.  He needed to win over a large enough minority of
Democrats so that, combined with the Republicans, he'd pass the
legislation.  He could have unleashed embarassing information about
Bush (assuming such information existed) without serious risk to
Republican votes.  Even if he wanted to keep his fingerprints off it,
it could have been leaked to sympathetic publications, something his
administration often did.

Second, Clinton has shown no reluctance to attack, embarass, or
otherwise pick fights with Republicans on issues of importance to him.
Clinton would certainly have welcomed the opportunity to discredit the
Bush administration -- especially given who's on the Republican ticket
this year.

Third, even if Clinton had wanted to avoid embarassing Republicans
around the time of the NAFTA vote, he would certainly have kept the
investigation open so that he'd have something up his sleeve, something
he could use to embarass them later.

Prizzo's conjecture requires an afwul lot of hidden collusion between
people with no obvious interest in (or habit of) colluding.  That's why
I said it reduces to conspiracy theory.

By way of example the British Government will charge a member of the
IRA who plants a bomb which kills a civilian, though intended to
destroy property, with murder.

How do you feel about the Oklahoma bombing?

I have no doubt that the Khmer Rouge were very bad indeed.  Personally
I think the support afforded them by the US and the west in general
after the Vietnamese invasion drove them from power was a particularly
sickening episode.  How do you feel about that?

Nothing in my articles is intended to shift the blame from the Khmer
Rouge.  I'm not even particularly concerned that people such as
yourself accept that the US had a major role in the direction Cambodian
society took.  I'm simply offering an opposing point of view to the
rather pernicious idea that the Khmer Rouge sprang fully formed from
the ground and proceded to slaughter large numbers of people.  That is
true revisionism.

Strictly I don't believe in good and evil.  Both the US and the Khmer
Rouge were brutal, both were responsible for the slaughter of
1,000,000 - 2,000,000 people in Cambodia (the Khmer Rouge did not
spring from a vacuum), both escaped unpunished.

What I do find interesting is the ideological contortions people are
prepared to perform to escape these rather obvious conclusions.

Charles P. Kalina <ckal...@capaccess.org> wrote in message
news:8lhrae$t4i$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
............................

This is patently wrong and is easily verifiable by the public record, almost
1/2 of Iraq's armorment was manufactured in the US, 1/4 of this was
purchased directly from the US during their war with Iran, the other 1/4 was
purchased on a very fertile military black market (most of this was also
purchased directly from the US verifieable when the records become
de-classified). This can be easily verified from almost all news sources'
stories at the time of the war, of which, ironically, is sourced from the
state department itself. Indeed, the Iraqis had an impressive mixed-bag of
weapons from all parts of the world as Charles stated, but 1/2 of it was US
made (Talk about creating demand from the US military-Industrial
complex...US planes blowing up US-made tanks).

Consider also some of the other effects of the bombing. Over 3 million
(about half) of the country's inhabitants became refugees (interviews by
Kenneth Quinn among others established that most gave the carpetbombing
as primary reason for fleeing). Other went the other way, and the Khmer
Rouge, who numbered about 800 in 1970, soom had tens of thousands of
cadre. The bombing killed about 75% of the draft animals in the country.
1100 of the 1400 rice mills were destroyed. The list goes on and on.

Even assuming that the US did in fact confine its bombing to the Ho Chi
Minh and so on (which we know to be false), the issue of the US's moral
culpability for these deaths would still be there. Why were the
Vietnamese in Cambodia in the first place? Because the US had invaded
Vietnam.

The fact is that Afghanistan _wasn't_ comparable to Vietnam, except
superficially.  In that sense the media's superficial use of the
analogy was more honest and less misleading that Chomsky's attempt to
fill it with real substance.

But the fact remains that every open-source reference I have consulted
lists no US equipment whatsoever in the Iraqi inventory.  Not half
their inventory:  zero, zilch, nada.  I've studied the Iran-Iraq war
and I have never read any reference to US equipment in the Iraqi
inventory.

Unless you can provide a specific, credible reference which says that
Iraq had some significant quantity of US military hardware I must stand
by my original assertion.  Heck, I'd settle for just the nomenclature
of some pieces of equipment they supposedly got.  What kind of planes?
What tanks?

Iran had lots of American equipment from before the revolution, maybe
half their inventory or more.  Perhaps Iraq captured some war materiel
from Iran, or bought some American hardware on the open market.  But
we'd be talking about a small amount of gear, not enough to show up in
the usual open-source references -- certainly not half the Iraqi
inventory.  You can't keep that much heavy equipment secret.

Before you get to anything related to Iraq or BNL, you have to wade
through ten minutes of Rep. Gonzalez patting himself on the back for
how much he cares about the poor and downtrodden.  Then you have to
puzzle your way through some weird historical allusions that reach all
the way back ancient Mesopotamia, some of which seem of dubious
relevance (or accuracy).

When we strip away this dross, we're left with even less substance than
we found in Pizzo's (mercifully more succinct) Mother Jones piece.
Rep. Gonzales simply lists Iraq's relationship with the west before
1990, and then blames it all on the United States, as if (for instance)
France is our puppet state and wouldn't sell someone Exocet missiles
unless we told them to.