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Noam Chomsky, �The New Military Humanism�

Started March 17 � Finished March 18, 2003; 200 pages. Posted 24 March 2003

WARNING: Yet another rant about war follows.

I started reading this on the same day Bush jr. gave his eviction notice to Saddam Hussein. I was already angry enough. After all, even a tenant in California, a place not known for its liberal housing laws, gets a 30-day notice.

Of course, that�s not what I was really mad about. What is infuriating for this entire situation is that I cannot put my finger on what Bush�s angle really is. It�s naive to say that this is an issue over oil. Oil prices are set up by OPEC, which is controlled by U.S. allies in Saudi Arabia. It�s more naive to say we have to wage war in order to promote peace.

The subtitle for this book is �Lessons from Kosovo.� In it, Chomsky calls NATO bombing of Milosevic�s forces the beginning of the so-called �Military Humanism,� a nice way of saying, �We had to destroy the village in order to save it.� The lessons learned here are well taken, as this seems to be the stance Bush uses as justification for his private war. Over and over, Bush says we are there to liberate the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator — a dictator we continually provided weapons to for their nine-year war against Iran.

Whoops.

Of course we stopped, eventually, and then imposed economic sanctions against Iraq, sanctions which even hawkish military analysts stated �may well have been a necessary [sic] cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history.�

So where is the humanism here? And if Bush�s reasons are humanitarian, which I think hardly anyone truly believes, why the focus in Iraq? What about East Timor? Cambodia? Fucking North Korea? The regions in Vietnam and Afghanistan that are still suffering from military actions?

I�m frustrated. I�m not looking for easy answers, I�m just want for ones that sound halfway plausible. But over it all, over the politicking, over the maneuvering, over the uncertainty of the future in an increasingly militaristic Pax Americana, there is one simple reason why the U.S. should not pursue warfare, ever.

And that is because when you make war, the hippies come out of the woodwork.


Rating: Surprisingly accessible for a Chomsky book, and more relevant than many of his other works. Worth New.

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