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

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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nor do they afterwards. Evidently the moral level in these cultivated
British circles has changed little since the days when Winston Churchill,
then Secretary of State at the War Office, expressed his attitude towards
the use of poison gas in 1919, shortly after the furor over its use by the
Germans, a major war crime: “I do not understand this squeamishness
about the use of gas . . . I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas
against uncivilised tribes”—namely, against tribesmen in Mesopotamia
and Afghanistan, and against Bolsheviks in Russia during the 1919
intervention, when the first use of chemical weapons in air warfare was
considered by the British GHQ to be the primary factor in early military
successes. 111
In short, what has been done to El Salvador and Nicaragua is taken
to be the prerogative of the US—or as a knowledgeable cynic might say,
its historical vocation.
The debate in mainstream circles, as noted, is contained strictly
within the framework established by the state propaganda system: Is
Nicaragua offering assistance to guerrillas in El Salvador—that is, in the
real world, to people defending themselves from American terror? The
US government claims that it is, and is thus engaged in “armed attack”
against El Salvador, which entitles the US to respond in “collective selfdefense.”
Critics note that the evidence is unconvincing, and therefore
question whether Nicaragua is guilty of such an armed attack. But the
major issue, clearly, is the American attack against much of the
population of El Salvador, and this issue is excluded from the framework
of debate set by the state and accepted by the critics. Even the US
peace movement is in part guilty of this moral crime: the “pledge of
resistance,” under which many people have been arrested for civil
disobedience, refers to aggressive acts against Nicaragua, not to the far
more horrifying crimes in El Salvador. Similarly, in the 1960s, the
debate focused primarily on the bombing of the North, murderous and