HAVANA - U.S. linguist and political dissident
Noam Chomsky said on Wednesday that President Bush will have to
"manufacture" another threat to American security to win
reelection in 2004 after U.S failure in occupying Iraq.
Chomsky, attending a Latin American social sciences
conference in Cuba, said that since the Sept. 11 attacks on the
United States, the Bush administration had redefined U.S.
national security policy to include the use of force abroad,
with or without U.N. approval.
"It is a frightened country and it is easy to conjure up an
imminent threat," Chomsky said at the launching of a Cuban
edition of a book of interviews published by the Mexican
newspaper La Jornada, when asked how Bush could get reelected.
"They have a card that they can play ... terrify the
population with some invented threat, and that is not very hard
to do," he said.
Noam Chomsky (L), MIT professor of linguistics and philosophy, talks with Cuban President Fidel Castro at a conference of the Latin American Social Sciences Council (CLACSO), in Havana October 28, 2003. Chomsky, in a lecture attended by Castro, said President George W. Bush's administration will have to resort to a 'fear factor' and 'manufacture' a new threat to U.S. national security to win the 2004 elections. (Rafael Perez/Reuters)
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After the "disaster" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bush
could turn his sights on Communist-run Cuba, which his
administration officials have charged with developing a
biological weapons research program, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology professor of linguistics said.
Chomsky said the military occupation of Iraq, to topple a
"horrible monster running it but not a threat to anyone," was a
failure.
"The country had been devastated by sanctions. The invasion
ended sanctions. The tyrant is gone and there is no outside
support for domestic dissidence," he said. "It takes real
talent to fail in this endeavor."
Chomsky said it was reasonable to assume the Bush
administration would try to "manufacture a short-term
improvement in the economy" by incurring in enormous federal
government debt and "imposing burdens on future generations."
The Bush administration was a continuation of the Ronald
Reagan presidency that declared a national emergency over the
threat posed by Nicaragua's leftist government in the 1980s, he
said.
"The same people were able to present Grenada as a threat
to survival of the United States the last time they were in
office," Chomsky said, in reference to the U.S. invasion of the
Caribbean island in 1983 to thwart Cuban influence.
Chomsky, a leftist icon who is better known today for his
critique of U.S. foreign policy that for his revolutionary
theory of syntax and grammar in the 1960s, gave a lecture on
the U.S politics of domination on Tuesday night that was
attended by Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
The author of "Language and mind," "Manufacturing Consent,"
"Profit Over People" and "9-11" said the Bush administration
was out to dominate the world by the use of military force if
need be, and Iraq was the first test.
Chomsky criticized Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar
for backing the United States and Britain in invading Iraq
under a false pretext that the Arab country possessed weapons
of mass destruction.
Chomsky praised Cuba's defiance of U.S. hostility and trade
sanctions for four decades. But he also criticized the jailing
of 75 Cuban dissidents earlier this year by Castro's
government.
"Yes, I have criticized them for that," he said in an
interview on August 28 with Radio Havana. "I think it was a
mistake."
Noam Chomsky's new book, "Hegemony or Survival : America's Quest for Global Dominance [The American Empire Project ]" has just been released.
Copyright © 2003 Reuters Limited
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