--
On 17 Jul 2000 03:13:48 GMT, skul...@linc.cis.upenn.edu (Seth Kulick)
wrote:

Thank you.

    --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.

http://www.jim.com/jamesd/      James A. Donald

In article <39769dd8.6056...@nntp1.ba.best.com>,
James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:

You're welcome.  I only wish that I had seen your work in your Spart
days, or whatever it was you said you were in.  It must have been
awe-inspiring.  Carry on, comrade!

--
--------------------------------------------------------------
Seth Kulick                      "The hypnotic splattered mist
University of Pennsylvania          was slowly lifting" - Bob Dylan
skul...@linc.cis.upenn.edu  http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~skulick/home.html  

Very interesting question.

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.

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Before you buy.

600,000 cambodians were killed by the US? Can you tell me the period of
time an locations that the killing took place?
From 1964-70, I saw only one time that the local news had reported when
the bombing took place on Chantrea. If you take Chantrea casualties as
base and the population distribution along those borders, you might get
some idea of how many khmer were killed from 1964-70.
From 1970-75, how many khmer were killed, according to those CIA
historians?

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

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Before you buy.

The "secret bombing" took place from 1969 through 1973. Maps are given
in William Shawcross's book _Sideshow_, revealing that some of the most
heavily-populated areas of the countryside were carpet-bombed in this
campaign. A majority of this is nowhere near the Ho Chi Minh trail and
Vietnamese sanctuaries that were the alleged targets. Figures like
600,000 though, represent deaths not just from the bombing but from the
whole civil war in the period. (This appears to be a kind of
part-for-whole synecdoche.)

--
---------------------------------------------------
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

"Tho-ag in Zhi-gyu slept seven Khorlo. Zodmanas
zhiba. All Nyug bosom. Konch-hog not; Thyan-Kam
not; Lha-Chohan not; Tenbrel Chugnyi not;
Dharmakaya ceased; Tgenchang not become; Barnang
and Ssa in Ngovonyidj; alone Tho-og Yinsin in
night of Sun-chan and Yong-grub (Parinishpanna),
&c., &c.,"
-- The Book of Dzyan.

jvin...@yahoo.com, chairperson and founding member of the
jvin...@yahoo.com fanclub, said this:

have you got any sources for this to hand?

--

don't forget to pack a wife

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

If Chomsky does say this, he's wrong.  "We" (presumably meaning the
USA) did not arm Iraq in any reasonable sense of the term.

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.

Why should this seem strange?  The Iraqi regime were always bad guys.
What changed is that they stopped being bad guys we could deal with,
and started being bad guys we couldn't deal with.  This isn't a
particularly dramatic change, nor is it difficult to understand.

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?

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Before you buy.

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

[Iraq addressed at length separately]

Yes, there are superficial similarities between the US in Vietnam and
the Soviets in Afghanistan.  By fixating on these superficial
similarities, Chomsky insinuated that the US was no different that the
Soviet Union (at least in its foreign policy), except perhaps that it
was more hypocritical.

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.)

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Before you buy.

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

[material on Iraq and Afghanistan addressed separately]

I'm curious what your sources are for this estimate.

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.)

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Before you buy.

Oh, please, Charles.  They've also referred to Israel's occupation of
Southern Lebanon as "Israel's Vietnam" and argued against our involvement
in Yugoslavia because it would be "another Vietnam".  The "similarity"
they see is a prolonged, expensive, and ultimately losing battle, which is
of course not the analogy that Chomsky is making at all since it is a
largely meaningless comparison.

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

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