Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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the progress of the democratic enterprise in Nicaragua” to which the US
has always been committed—by definition, independently of any facts.
Turning to the New Republic, we discover that the pragmatic liberal, as
always, has nothing but scorn for those who are “opposed in principle,
for reasons of international morality, to the exercise of military pressure
against the Nicaraguan government” (though naturally we maintain this
principled stand with regard to official enemies, and profess great
indignation if they adopt the stance recommended here), and we must
therefore continue to use military force “to push the Sandinistas, to force
them to do what they promised to do when they took power in July
1979: establish a pluralist political system, a mixed economy, and a
non-aligned foreign policy”—exactly our goals, as a century of
involvement in Nicaraguan affairs clearly demonstrates to the faithful. 110
The record of atrocities in Nicaragua and El Salvador is considered of
little moment among sophisticated commentators. British journalist
Timothy Garton Ash writes in the New York Review of Books that
“During a month’s stay in El Salvador and Nicaragua I nonetheless
found—to my surprise—one or two good reasons for Western Europe’s
moral questioning.” These reasons are rather abstract, having to do with
the principle of non-interference in “the sovereignty and selfdetermination
of weaker nations,” and the “inconsistency” he perceives
in elections conducted “out of respect for the wishes of the majority” in
which largely illiterate peasants are forced to vote and in US policy
towards Nicaragua—“inconsistencies” that arise only on condition of
abandonment of rationality and naive faith in the official doctrine, as
already discussed. Surely this skeptical and very knowledgeable
conservative correspondent was aware before his visit of the tens of
thousands of tortured and mutilated victims, the terror of the air war, the
physical destruction of the political opposition and the media, and so
on; but these did not provide any reason for “moral questioning” then,