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

Notes
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
438
Orwell’s problem,” in Knowledge of Language (Praeger, 1985).
93. Even this lunacy was solemnly reported by the media, which have yet to
update the story with the information that the secret official US list of 14
“Libyan terrorists” was in fact a list of prominent members of the
Lebanese Shiite party Amal, including its leader Nabih Bern and the
religious leader of the Lebanese Shiite community, most of the rest being
aging Lebanese politicians; to compound the absurdity, Amal is strongly
anti-Libyan. The document was obtained by the New Statesman in
London; Duncan Campbell and Patrick Forbes, NS, Aug. 16, 1985. They
note that on Dec. 7, 1981, at the height of the furor, Reagan told the
world press: “We have the evidence and he [Qaddafi] knows it.” Libyan
denials were “laughed off, and were of no avail in killing the story.”
94. As noted, the shift, both in programs and rhetoric, began in the late
Carter Administration.
95. Norman Podhoretz, NYT, Oct. 30, 1985.
96. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 108, 110.
97. Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy Towards Latin
America (Princeton, 1981), 219; the Senate had opposed an earlier
proposal to this effect in 1958. Charles Maechling, “The Murderous
Mind of the Latin Military,” LAT, March 18, 1982.
98. Ruth Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures 1981 (World
Priorities, 1981, 8); Paul Quinn-Judge, Far Eastern Economic Review,
Oct. 11, 1984. One consequence, he notes, as a “major political gap for
the new regime,” since “the south was stripped of the trained, disciplined
and presumably committed young cadres who would have formed the
backbone of the present administration”—a propaganda victory much
exploited in the West, since this contributed to a North Vietnamese
takeover.
99. See chapter 2.2, above.
100. Hans Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest (Knopf, 1951),
80-1.
101. It is an achievement not quite matched in the USSR, with regard to its
invasion of Afghanistan; see my “Notes on Orwell’s problem.”