Why Iraq?

foreign foreign foreign you ah so you know if you all go out and vote tomorrow we will have a landslide victory in Massachusetts uh my name is dan glickman I am director of the policy institute I would like to welcome you all to a forum where I think we have the greatest crowd of the year, a tribute to you Professor Chomsky, this has been a very busy and unique year in the forum because we have been absorbed in two important things, one is the midterm elections that are tomorrow and in addition to the potential conflict in Iraq is also unique because, as a Democrat, I have to tell you that I have been a little concerned that lately we have had more Republicans than Democrats on the forum;

In fact, the Kennedy Schools Democratic caucus came to see me. and i rightly pointed out that this semester the yop has been full of republicans, including the republican national chairman, former republican senator cohen, former first lady barbara bush, former senator warren rudman bush, administration officials and others, so I asked these Democrats who they would like to host who in just one night would make up for all the conservatives we have received on the forums and the answer was simple, it was you, so Professor Chomsky is a professor of linguistics, linguistic theory, syntax and philosophy of language and, at the same time, has been a favorite on college campuses over the years, goes beyond public discourse and debate in our country and will challenge us all tonight to think carefully about many issues, but particularly the issue of going to war in Iraq, whether you agree with it or not. it is important to listen to what he has to say he is the critic he is the voice that questions power and that is a critical role in our society son of a Hebrew scholar born in Philadelphia in 1928 while earning his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 , much of his research leading up to his degree was conducted here at Harvard between 1951 and 1955.

At age 19, in 1955, he joined the MIT faculty and in 1961 was named a full professor in the Department of English. and Modern Linguistics due to his opposition to the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s to the manufacturing consent of his book in 1988 to his even more controversial book 911 published after the terrorist attacks last year, he makes the most of what he a free society offers its citizens even if he does not believe that the United States lives up to its promise all or even some of the time he is a provocative, thoughtful and important voice the professor will speak for approximately 20 to 25 minutes about why Iraq and then respond questions from the audience, ladies and gentlemen, professor noam chomsky thank you uh after the introduction i think maybe i should give a campaign speech for jill stein.

Well, I am disciplined, so I will talk about what I was asked to talk about, which is Iraq and the connection between Iraq and the In the so-called war on terrorism there is a connection, it is quite weak, but it has been established. Intelligence agencies have noted that they cannot detect any real connection between Iraq and terrorist networks, you know, Al Qaeda and the rest, which they are not. Too surprising, but there is a connection anyway and it has been pointed out that we can create a link if we want and the best way to create the link would be to attack Iraq.

It is expected that if we attack Iraq, it will very likely trigger terrorist attacks perhaps that are already being planned as a possible deterrent and will very likely generate a new generation of terrorists who will seek revenge and also deterrence and deterrence is not an issue. Minor for those of you who have been following international politics. public relations literature I'm going to be very established in this talk. I'm just going to quote people from the mainstream, people who have been following it know that leading academics, respected figures in international relations, have been pointing out for some time in It's a fact long before Bush that American adventurism It is stimulating a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as a deterrent that is not only the countries that are being specifically attacked but also others that are concerned about deterring a state that seeks, I am quoting now, a unilateral world. domination through absolute military superiority and is becoming a threat to itself and the world under radical nationalist leadership.

I have been quoting Kenneth Waltz, a well-known figure in international relations, and Anatol Yevan, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, that in fact, even the real hardliners are expressing some pretty serious concerns, because what one of the leading military and strategic analysts is concerned primarily with the Middle East. Anthony Cortesman is as hardline as you can find within anything that can be called the spectrum of sanity that you have been warned about. He recently warned against what he called the neocon fantasies of the sillier armchair strategists and their plans to rebuild the Middle East and perhaps the world he was referring to Richard Pearl and Douglas Fife, but that also includes Wolfowitz Rumsfeld and others who happens to be very close to the far right in Israel, so you are getting a lot of clear and good reporting from the mainstream Israeli press about them, as you may know Richard Pearl, who is very close to the planning center now, and Douglas Faith were writing. uh, position papers for benjamin Netanyahu, the new foreign minister of Israel, who has welded Ariel Sharon's right, you know, they were doing that in the 1990s and those are their connections and contacts, and it's not understandable that even a hardline military analyst like Courtesman is worried about his fools. proposals that are actually being considered and can be implemented uh well uh why that's the only connection I know between Iraq and terrorism right now we can encourage terrorism if we really intend to so why Iraq I mean obviously no to stimulate terrorism long before it comes to that.

Start with some kind of truism that should not need to be mentioned in the case of threat or resort to violence, the burden of proof always falls on those who advocate, so that is true whether it is abuse domestic. or international affairs and it is a heavy burden and maybe there is an argument for it, but it is the person, those who advocate force and violence who have to bear the burden and it is a heavy burden, you never need any argument against the use of violence, that is automatic. I need an argument because it has to be a very strong one that should be obvious and I'll just put it in the back, so why do they want to do it right?

They are just for simplicity since time is short. Pick two views that are expressed fairly prominently in the mainstream and I'll quote mainstream analysts, so here's the first interpretation. I'll start with Joseph Ibrahim in the International Herald Tribune a couple of days ago, he's a senior member of the Council on Foreign Relations. and he was senior Middle East correspondent for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for about 30 years. He recently moved to CFR. Recently his interpretation is that the objectives of the Bush administration are basically two, one to obtain short-term political advantages and two.

I'm quoting him now and turning Iraq into a private American oil pumping station. Well, there's an argument against that in the New York Times yesterday, maybe its response, I don't know, by Serge Shmon, who argues that kind of disparagement. the oil relationship on the basis that there will not be an instant bonanza for Iraqi oil, that is true, but it is not a very persuasive argument. I mean, with the same argument you can show that no one was interested in Iraqi oil 80 years ago or Texas oil or Saudi Arabian oil or Venezuelan oil or certainly not Alaskan oil or North Sea oil, I mean, very expensive to get it, so with that argument, yes it is true, you will not get billions of dollars tomorrow and funds will be needed for development, but the argument is very weak, in fact, much weaker in the case of Iraqi oil , which is vast and relatively easily accessible than in many other cases, so I think we can rule out the counterargument, which I think was front-page news in the times we can review.

Yesterday well, that's Joseph Ibrahim uh Yevin, who I quoted earlier, has a more detailed analysis along the same lines and suggests that the Bush administration is following the political aspect. I am quoting you the classic modern strategy of a right-wing oligarchy in danger of extinction which is to divert mass discontent towards nationalism inspired by fear of enemies who are about to destroy us and you speak for many people in the world when you consider that the policies of the US government are now a threat to itself, that is, to the country and to the world. September 11 provided a pretext for resorting to force not only for the United States, but throughout the world and was immediately predicted for the Russians and Chechnya, the Chinese against their Western minorities, Indonesia and Aceh, Israel and the territories occupied, that is, around the world, repressive governments that were engaged in violent repression, used 9/11 as a pretext to escalate it under the guise of a war on terrorism and correctly assuming that they would get approval from the boss in Washington and it's not too surprising that the United States itself adopted the same idea, so yes, 9/11 was a pretext and was also used as a pretext to discipline populations around the world again under the guise of a war against terrorism. terrorism and that ranges from the dictatorships of Central Asia to the most democratic countries, including our own, so the fact that 9/11 was a pretext for a war in Iraq is not a great surprise and, in fact, this It was also noted to pursue the domestic political agenda, as Lieven points out, it is only natural for an endangered right-wing oligarchy to do that, especially when a fairly extensive attack is being carried out against the national population, it is not a big secret or it shouldn't be in the US, as was immediately pointed out by, for example, Paul Krugman and one of his known scammers.

Economists in one of their regular New York Times columns immediately reported that literally before the dust had settled on the ruins of the World Trade Center, Republicans signaled that they were determined to use terrorism as an excuse to pursue a radical right-wing agenda and he and others have been documenting how they have been pursuing that course ever since. It shouldn't be a secret, so I won't follow it. The beast of Baghdad was then turned into an even more terrifying threat and there are independents too. The reasons there is a long-standing goal Ibrahim and others are surely right and it is quite obvious that there has been a long-standing goal of restoring US control over the world's second largest oil reserves; has been recognized since the mid-1940s.

Quote to the State Department in 1945 that this is an important component of what they called a tremendous source of strategic power and one of the largest material prizes in world history and an important issue of the American foreign policy since World War II has been to ensure that the United States dominates it, France was expelled with the interesting argument that it was an enemy state since it had been occupied by Germany, so its contracts were void and England was slowly reduced to what the foreign office calls a British foreign ministry calls a junior partner America puts it another way 40 years ago, a leading statesman, probably Dean Atchison, in an internal discussion described Britain as our lieutenant.

The buzzword is partner and you like to hear the buzzword, but reality is the real word and control over Middle East oil has been a big part of this comes from the second world war, let me emphasize that it is control , not access. There is a lot of confusion that the United States doesn't really care much about access to Middle East oil, until the 1970s it didn't. Not at all, North America was the largest producer, but that did not affect the need to control the region since then, the largest importers have generally been Venezuela, if you look at US intelligence projections, for example, the projections of the National Intelligence Council for the next 15 years. and suggest that the United States should rely on more secure resources in the Atlantic basin, West Africa and Latin America, but that had absolutely nothing to do with control over Middle East oil, but rather has to do with it being one of the largest material prizes in world history, which means that whoever controls it and can have an effect on setting prices and production levels can alsodetermine that wealth a large amount of wealth flows backwards, um here what it does, is independent of access to oil, a great source of strategic power has nothing to do with it. it's about access it's about that translates as a lever of global control and that's been clearly recognized since the 1940s and it's still true today.

Well, 9/11 provided a pretext: domestic politics affect timing and the strategy has been working quite brilliantly. Right now, in the midterm elections, uh, it's even going to be even more important next year, presumably if they step into the shoes of, say, Karl Rove, who will be the campaign manager when the presidential campaign begins in just over a year. Do they really want people? be thinking about what is happening with their pension or how they are going to take care of their elderly mother or do you know what they have done, what is happening with their job or do you know why they can't get medical care, otherwise what about an environment that their children might live in, you know, things like that are certainly not what they want people to pay attention to, they want them to want people to be, you know, praised by singing praises to the brave cowboy who saved them from destruction at the hands of a colossal enemy, you know, a kind of Martian enemy and by then you will be marching towards a new adventure exactly as they say, that is the tradition, the classic strategy of a right-wing oligarchy in danger of extinction that wants to divert massive content that has a lot of ground for nationalism and fear, and it takes a lot of work to overlook the fact that the only people who are afraid of the mushroom cloud of condoleezza rice that is going to consume us imminently the only people who are The Americans are afraid, not the people of the region, for example, I mean, they are afraid, but they are afraid. of the United States more than Iraq, of course, the Iraqis are afraid of Saddam Hussein and they have every right to be, but that cannot be the reason for the United States' war.

I mean, the United States was supporting Saddam during his worst atrocities. helping him develop weapons of mass destruction right after the day of the invasion of Kuwait and they are the same people running Washington right now, so whatever the reasons, it's not like that, so yeah, they're not afraid. of Saddam Hussein, but they also know that he can't do much, in fact, very little, if he made a move anywhere, you know Iraq could be destroyed, he knows it and the people of the region know it, but even the United States . Press The national press, normally very supportive of power, now acknowledges that, citing the world, it is more concerned about the unbridled use of American power than about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

It was a lead story in the Christian Science Monitor a couple of days ago. and others have pointed it out so there is definitely a security problem there is a problem of securing the agenda of the radical right oligarchy and ensuring that they can continue for another four years undermining living standards destroying social policy concentrating wealth in one very narrow sector of an unusually corrupt part of the business establishment, as Krugman and many others have been pointing out, and pursuing that to secure that agenda is very serious and it is a security problem and that is about the only security problem that anyone can seem evoke but it is real of course, well that is an interpretation, an interpretation within the dominant establishment is what I just said, there is a long-term goal of regaining control over the second largest resource in the Middle East and ensuring the dominance of the greatest of the greatest material prizes in world history and its dependent source of strategic power on 9/11 gave a pretext as it gave a pretext throughout the world for the intensification of violence and the disciplining of populations and internal considerations and that very important security issue that probably explains the timing so it has to be this winter, not next, which will be too late, but then we will be consumed by the mushroom cloud that will avoid everyone else but will hit us uh and uh and so uh and of course it is something of an accident that this will be right in the middle of the presidential campaign, just as it is an accident that the people of the region are afraid, but above all of us, joining a large part of the world and that, well, that's one interpretation.

Oh, by the way, all of this is not only the classic strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy under radical nationalist leadership, as Living points out, but it's also second nature to the people of Washington. Remember that the people who run the show are almost recycled Reaganites. They entirely came out of the Reagan administration when they were doing exactly the same thing, I mean, the first thing they did when they came into office when the Reagan administration took office 20 in 1981. The first thing they did was declare a war on terrorism with pretty much the same rhetoric right today at that moment Americans had to be terrified of Libyan hitmen roaming the streets of Washington planning to kill our leader, another brave cowboy hiding in the white house surrounded by tanks, I mean if you're old enough You will remember or your parents will remember that it was 20 years ago and they had to be worried about the Sandinistas who were just a two day march from Texas, the brave cowboy told us and they were following a script, the Mein Kampf script in their plan. to conquer the hemisphere, if not beyond that, it was george schultz, the administration moderated the colin powell of the moment and there was a national emergency that was renewed each year due to the threat to the security and survival of the united states represented by people like that, for example, Gaddafi, who was planning to expel the United States from the world according to Reagan or at least his speechwriters and people were afraid.

I mean, this is traditionally a very scared society. You can ask about the reasons, but it is well known. It turns out that Americans are more afraid of almost anything. that most people are all kinds of historical reasons, but it is clearly true that it can be a crime, you know, aliens, drugs, whatever, there is a lot of fear, and it is not difficult to arouse fear among the population and it was happening all the time. in the 80s, so all this is absolutely natural for policymakers today and it wouldn't be too surprising if that's what they're planning right.

My time is about to run out, but that's okay because there is another vision I can have. fortunately skip it as there is no time and that's what you hear every time George Bush or Tony Blair or someone who supports them reads their note cards or maybe they make them up themselves and we can and you're familiar with it so I do it enough to repeat. It's, uh, just end with this, uh, we could go over the arguments, I don't know if that's necessary, but, in a way, the most interesting thing is to just accept all the statements as true, so let's say that everything they say is true , OK?

Then we can perform a small experiment, it is quite easy to show that if the statements are true, there are very simple ways to achieve the announced goals. I'm not just talking about sending inspectors back, there are other ways if you decide a war is necessary. measures that have not really been considered as instructive to ask why, but I will stop there as time is running out, well we have plenty of time for questions, we have four microphones, two down here and two up there, I would ask if that is so . We may allow Harvard Kennedy School students to ask the questions first.

If possible, I would ask you to say your name and where you are here and try to keep your questions short and end with a question mark and we have a linguist in the audience who can tell us that the question is in fact the question or not. , so why don't you come and stand up here and we start over here and then we go around this gentleman. come on hello professor my name is ryan cunningham and I'm a freshman at the kennedy school um you ended his speech with a big blank and I want to give you a chance to fill it in.

I'm very curious to know what else the government could be doing and as private citizens what can we actually do to be effective in letting the government know how we feel? What the government can do. The easiest thing the government can do is like ask if, say, you had a battered wife in front of you and yeah, well, what else can a husband do right? One thing you should do is stop being abusive, okay, that's one possibility, pretty simple, and like I said, the burden of proof is all you're asking for. the wrong question the burden of proof falls on those who advocate violence you don't need an argument against them that's fine they have to make the argument so what can the government do right?

It can do what the rest of the world wants, for example, it can stop it. uh I'm desperately trying to block inspections and can I allow inspections to happen. Okay, that's something they could do if they really believe everything they're saying and I doubt they will. There are other simple proposals, I mean, I could suggest a Couple They Never Talked About, but there are simple proposals, but the easiest one is to simply allow the inspectors to return. They have done much more to eliminate Saddam's weapons than bombings or sanctions, and the inspectors had a great effect.

They won't find everything. you know, in fact, you can't find everything, it's a lot when Romesfeld says, well, they never will, we can't be sure that they will find everything, he's surely right, I mean, if a country has a biology laboratory in a school secondary, it probably has the ability to develop biological weapons, okay, so you can't, so the only way to find everything is to destroy the entire country, okay, but the development of nuclear weapons is very easy to detect, so If that's what anyone is worried about, yes, you can handle that. Many intelligence agencies around the world make a very strong case when they say Saddam Hussein, the likelihood of him being involved in inciting or even supporting terrorist acts is extremely low if you're worried about nuclear weapons being produced in a new country. hotel room in York, which is not impossible, in fact there are technical articles in the literature from four or five years ago that say things like that have a much higher chance of success than a missile attack, if you're worried about that, then worry about loose nukes.

In the world, like in the former Soviet Union or in Pakistan, which is a really serious threat, but because people in Washington don't care much about that threat, they're not doing it, so yeah, they're easy. things to do like that and then as I say there are also other iphones if war is necessary there are simple proposals much easier than the ones suggested gentlemen up here sir my name is rick arthur I am a student here I would like to call you about your rock test and I called it in action always um you're you're in advocated in action uh against the genocide in Bosnia and in several other incidents similar to that, can you refer to somewhere where I referred to an action, well, Bosnia was one.

Can you refer to a place where I did it? You called for action. Can you mention a place I reference for an action? Can you take either side of the swords? Well, I don't have it. You do not have one in front of you because there is none. What you are doing is paying attention to the gossip that you hear in various columns. If you believe gossip, sir, what are you doing? I like to take you to the light that you carry when you talk about the damage caused by terrorism. terrorism causes dramatic instability specifically has caused dramatic instability in New York and that has dire economic causes or excuse me from the facts, that is absolutely correct, that is why I have opposed terrorism for years. arguing against what I mean, 20 years ago, 20 years ago, I was writing about the massive terrorist wars of the Reagan administration and I continue to do so to this day.

Your question: What concrete measures would you recommend to the United States as a superpower to combat terrorism? Furthermore, nothing well, first of all, there is an easy way to reduce terrorism. The easiest way possible is to stop participating in it. reduces it by a very substantial factor huge in fact to the present i' I'll give you examples if you don't know I'll be happy to hear from you uh second uh uh yeah to talk about that much smaller little category of terrorism that is directed against the West, okay , it exists and it is serious, say al-Qaeda-style terrorism, well, of course, one way to stop it and reduce it is to stop encouraging it, so remember where these groups came from.

These are the groups that were organized, trained and armed by the CIA in the 1980s and its associates to fulfill reasons of state did not care about Afghanistan in 1993, after the first attempt to blow up the World TradeCenter, which was very close to success. Bill Clinton was sending members of Al Qaeda or at least Afghan Islamic radicals from Afghanistan. along with people from Hezbollah who fly them to Bosnia to fight the American side in that war. Well you know one way to continue the Bali bombing is another case if you want to look at it up close so another way to reduce terrorism is Stop encouraging and organizing terrorists around the world but let's take the attacks against the States United, like September 11.

How is that handled? Well, you know, one way to deal with it is to bomb Afghanistan, which, according to American intelligence, is anyone's guess. at least it had almost no effect on terrorism and may have spread it, it's US intelligence. However, there are ways to reduce threats like that and we know what they are, they have been carried out through careful police work, for For example, mainly in Germany, which is the leader in this police work, in fact, it has dismantled a very important Al Qaeda network and yes, that is the way crimes are dealt with, the other way they are dealt with and everyone knows that this is analyzing the complaints that every serious scholar wants to deal with terrorism, the head of each intelligence agency, anyone who has a screwed up head knows what is done with it by looking at where it comes from, if you want, I can quote the boss of the Israeli Shabbat and the head of the Israeli Shabbat. military intelligence and prominent academics here and so on, yes, they all say the same thing just when Britain finally discovered that it wants to deal with anger terrorism, uh, it's no use, it wouldn't be any use to bomb Belfast or Boston, for example, where The funding came from what made sense at first.

They tried violence that simply increased terrorism. They finally started to pay attention to the grievances that are quite real and there has been some progress and that is true everywhere, so yes, there are many ways to deal with them. terrorism but the main way is to stop participating in it this man here hello, this is a good distance, my name is shahi wartani and I am a university student um, before I say anything, I want to thank you for all the books that you have written, they are quite prolific and my friends and I you know we sat around reading them and we enjoyed it a lot so you have better stuff than that and what I wanted to say is I've been reading several articles on this question whether you know we should go to war o No, and you know, I read an article that said that Hussein went to the north and executed many of the Kurds that are there and that they commit genocide there and that the link to terrorism lies in the fact that He gives $25,000 to the families of the suicide bombers so that there is a monetary link.

You're asking about a connection, so I would say it lies in those two things, so let's take those two things, sorry. I'm almost down, okay, go ahead, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's those two, he is, um, who has broken the internationally undermined United Nations resolutions on the war with Iran and Kuwait, which he knows to stabilize the region and that is yes. I'm familiar with the arguments, so what's the question? What is said about those things? Yeah, yeah, okay, so let's go over them so it's perfectly true. Let's go back to the main arguments that are given, I mean every speech by Blair and Bush and the British dossier or take the New York Times a couple of days ago which had a great insert taken from the Kennedy school, by the way, from a project of research from the Kennedy School into the crimes of Saddam Hussein and what is accused is all correct, there is only one thing missing in all these accusations three little words with our support okay, yes, he invaded Iraq, he used chemical weapons in the war, he used gas against what is called his own people, they are the Kurds or his own people in the sense that the Cherokees were Andrew Jackson's people, but yes. used, used gas against the Kurds, then carried out the stop-file massacre, maybe we killed a hundred thousand of them, or something like that, always with the strong support of the United States and Great Britain, it is Well, in fact, the people who are now in charge who do not even have the minimum decency to say well, we did something wrong, what they do is leave out the words with our support and everyone who reports it leaves the words out with our support. support which continued to include giving him the means to develop weapons of mass destruction, missiles, nuclear weapons, biological and chemical weapons, and everything that happened literally until the day of the invasion of Kuwait, and in fact, he invaded Kuwait when it was an ally of the United States.

United States, just as Iran invaded when it was an ally of the United States. We are allies, so yes, he committed all those crimes and those are by far the worst crimes in his history. With our support, the next worst crimes on his record were in March 1991, after the war, right after the Gulf War, when there was a Shiite uprising that probably would have overthrown him, there were rebel Iraqi generals who didn't ask the U.S. U.S. remember that was the time when the U.S. had total control of the entire region, you know, it was after the war, but the people who are now in Washington decided to support their old friend Saddam like that. who refused to allow rebel Iraqi generals access to captured weapons, authorized Saddam to use military helicopters and other weapons, and killed tens of thousands more people while they watched and had an official reason, said the reason is because we need what's called stability, we don't want to make sure that Iraq doesn't disintegrate, the chief diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times explained it quite well, well, without approval, Thomas Friedman, he said, well, he said the best of all worlds to The United States would be an iron-fisted military junta that would rule Iraq the same way Saddam did, but with a different name because this one is a bit embarrassing.

So those would be his worst crimes by far. Did he violate you in resolutions? I'm sure you know that. It's not the only one, actually, people correctly point out that Israel has violated many more, but that's missing the point, uh, if Iraq had the idea, think for a minute, if Iraq had the ability to veto Council resolutions Security Council, I would not be in violation of any of them, I mean the main way to violate security council resolutions is to veto them and who is in the lead in vetoing security council resolutions since the UN left control with decolonization, say since the In the 1960s, well, the United States is second only to Britain, no one else is even within shouting distance and it's about all kinds of issues, so, for For example, the United States is the only country on record to have vetoed a resolution calling on all states to observe international law.

It was after the United States rejected the World Court ruling ordering it to stop its terrorist attacks against Nicaragua. So yes, there are many countries that have violated Security Council resolutions. That's true. Does it have anything to do with the attack on Iraq? No, nothing, we have a lot of people standing. It would keep you awake. I'll ask again. People should be Harvard students. The Kennedy school is possible because otherwise it is not fair to other people. Let me add a word because I forgot to talk about the supposed 25,000 suicide bombers, which may or may not be true.

I've never seen a source about it, but let's say it's true. Before there were suicide bombers, the same sources also reported that Saddam Hussein was giving ten thousand dollars to the families of anyone who was killed by Israeli atrocities there were many of them. Well, I should have been doing that, so let's take, say, the first month of the current intifada. Now I only trust sources from the IDF, the Israeli army. What the sources now say is that in the first days of the Intifada the Israeli army fired a million bullets. One of the senior military officers said that means one bullet for every child.

During the first month of the Intifada, about 70 people were killed. using American helicopters and in fact Clinton sent new helicopters to Israel as soon as they started using them against civilians, that was only the first month and at that time there were no suicide bombers. At that time it was reported that Saddam Hussein was giving ten. a thousand dollars to each family, well, they support terrorism, I mean, they seem to be sending helicopters to Israel when they use them to attack apartment complexes that support terrorism, okay, that's just, yeah, my name is Christy Lanzel , I have an aversion to shiny things. lights, I'm protecting my eyes.

I wrote the only initiative on tomorrow's ballot that addresses foreign policy. You signed it two and a half years ago. Call the United States. Deploy troops outside Colombia. My question concerns the political climate in Massachusetts. tomorrow's elections it seems to me that the three initiatives on the state ballot comply with the original meaning of the term reactionary and that they want to go back to the past I want to ask you specifically about number two, um, which would end bilingual education, it seems to me The Massachusetts Republicans They have a policy that is more like the language policies of Francisco Franco and Benito Mussolini than those of Texas Republicans.

You're a Harvard student, that's right. No, I'm unemployed and disabled, I mean, I'd be happy to talk about it at some point, but I don't think it's the right thing to do. Tomorrow's elections. Would you like to say something about it? Right here, Lucy Nesbitta from the Kennedy School, could you please talk about the American smallpox doctrine as the primary organizer of United States foreign policy? Well, are you referring to, for example, the national security strategy report from a month ago that was quite brazen and that everyone knows doesn't need to be repeated, it was a pretty brazen statement and it's part of the reason why much of the world, including Europe, considers the United States a threat to itself and the world, I quote the event again, yes it is part of the reason it scared Europeans and others, on the other hand, If you think about it, Colin Powell pointed out in a press conference right after that it wasn't that new and even the preemptive strike doctrine he said wasn't that new. new and he was right it's an old principle and America didn't invent it of course it's just that America is by far the most powerful state so when he proposes it it means something but it can be traced back to the time when that the United States became a major world power after World War II and before that was also true, but in the region it is called the Monroe Doctrine, in fact, dates back to when Kennedy John F.

Kennedy 40 years ago years he ordered his staff to unleash the terrors of the earth against Cuba by intensifying an international terrorist campaign already underway the reason was that it can now be read in a declassified record the reason was that the very existence of the Castro regime was a successful challenge to the United States and to a 150-year-old policy that the United States had been following, that is, it was the existence of a regime that did not follow American orders and they traced it back 150 years, so we had to carry out a large terrorist campaign that was extends into the 1990s, so yeah. colin powell is right, it's not new and, furthermore, it's even in the public record, you know, if we go to the declassified record, then if we go back 40 years since I spoke at the Kennedy school with the Kennedy administration in 1962 62 or 63.

Right around then 62, I think the statesman and Dean Atchison, Kennedy's senior advisor, gave an important speech to the American society of international law. He was talking about the United States' economic war against Cuba, which was widely recognized as illegal and now by all, all relevant agencies. even the normally accommodating organization of American states has declared that it is illegal about what and uh at that time the terrorist war was already underway but it was not so public except, of course, the Cubans who knew all about it, but uh, uh, and. He told the American Society of International Law that in the case of a US response he said there is no legal question.

I'm quoting it now. No legal question arises. your position of power or prestige okay, that actually goes beyond the Bush doctrine announced a month ago and that's the other end of the spectrum, it's the Kennedy administration, okay and that was public like it wasn't a secret, It's the American society of international law, eh, and there. There are many examples among true preemptive strikes, so the idea of ​​a preemptive nuclear strike that was announced, you don't know those words, but everyone understands them in the so-called Bush doctrine, it's also a Clinton document, eh, check it out . In an important step, the Clinton Strategic Command's flagship study, which is from 1995.

Called Essential Elements of Post-Cold War Deterrence, partially declassified, is the primary document crafting a post-Cold War strategy,well, one of the things that advocates is what they call preventive response is a nice phrase think about it preventive response that includes nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that have signed the non-proliferation treaty if it is considered necessary okay, it also explains the background it says that we have than to convey a national personality of being irrational and vindictive uh that they say will scare people in the professional literature of political science and international relations is a term for it it's called establishing credibility uh that's very important you have to establish credibility you know you want to know what does that mean ask your neighborhood and the mob have explained to you what it means you don't just collect protection money from someone if they don't pay you certainly don't ask for a court order what you do is beat them to a pulp which establishes credibility so others know who's boss and that's how international relations work too, so yes, there is direct precedent there and you can trace it back quite a bit.

There's this gentleman up here. Hi, I'm John Mensing, I'm a first-year MPP here. at the kennedy school and we've talked a lot tonight about America's motivations here, you know, they're a little cynical, but we'll accept them for discussion purposes. I really want to talk about the relevant question here is whether the world would be a better place if Saddam was out of power, regardless of our motivations behind this regime change. Know? Wouldn't we be even better off if this guy, you know, nasty guy, was out of power? Absolutely, we would be too. You would be better off if a regime was out of power and widely seen in the world, including Europe, as a threat to itself and the world.

Yes, we would be better off and, in fact, there are many very brutal regimes around. Do you want me to start naming them from A to Z? For many of them, Saddam Hussein is certainly a threat to anyone within reach, just as he was when people in Washington today offered him generous support and, in the process, explained why there was nothing they could do. . The cold war has nothing to do with the war against Iran, it was because of our duty to support American exporters, as John Kelly, the state department's head of near-Middle East affairs, testified, uh uh uh, in early the 1990s, yeah, that's why we had to do it and then he was a real danger, uh, when we were so yeah, the world would be better off if many regimes were out of power.

I can list many of them and some of them are pretty close to home, but what does that mean? It has to do with this, I mean, if we want to get rid of Saddam Hussein, there are easier ways to do it, in fact, there are easier ways through war, much easier. Could you enlighten us on those? These are perfectly obvious. I mean, let me point out before I mention it that the suggestion is totally crazy. The only merit is that it is much more reasonable than what is being discussed, so one possibility is to free Iran.

We can offer them logistical support and, you know, missiles and bombing, all from a safe distance, let them fight. That has many advantages over what is being discussed. being proposed uh to start with uh don't think about them for a minute uh, I mean, there's no doubt, not only will they get rid of Saddam, they'll break them into pieces and everyone who's close to him, they'll eliminate everyone. trace of weapons of mass destruction that really threaten them and, furthermore, they will do so with any successor regime, which the United States will not do, therefore they will make a real contribution to disarmament in the region and, in fact, they will even live. even a paragraph of the famous resolution 687 that is always issued when it is reported, namely article 14 that says that disarming Iraq must be part of the general disarmament in the region.

Okay, that makes sense and by disarming Saddam's successor regimes, yes, there will be a lot of help, another advantage is that there will be no American casualties, okay, there will be no Israeli casualties, no one will be, you know, there is no point in shooting missiles to a country in Israel when its main enemy is invading, that would be ridiculous. so there were no casualties, that's fine, but there were a lot of Iraqi and Iranian casualties, but that can't be a concern, I mean, the United States, these guys in Washington were supporting massive Iranian and Iraqi casualties in the 80s, they continued during the '90s, uh, probably.

Saddam would use chemical weapons, but again, that cannot be a concern. Not only did we support him when he did in the past, but we continued to help him develop more. In fact, as I said, we continue to help him develop weapons of mass destruction well. Afterwards, that cannot be like that and there are no problems with the UN. You don't have to go through all that nonsense. If anyone bothered to stop the liberation of Iraq, the United States could veto it as always, but it wouldn't come up anyway. There's no doubt that Iran would be, Iranian troops would probably be welcome in a large part of the country.

Remember that most of the 60 years, 65 percent of the country is Shiite, they are not pro-Iranian, but they are much more likely to welcome Iranian troops. that American troops will, in fact, be in Basra and Karbala, they will shout from the rooftops thanking the liberators and we can all join the Iranian journalists who write about the liberation and the noble effort and open a new era of humanitarian intervention and we can all By joining in with that, we are spared the embarrassment of pretending that our leaders have suddenly undergone a miraculous conversion of which we will not have the slightest evidence that they will be able to do much better than us. by introducing democracy to Iran in Iraq, I mean the United States is going to have a big problem making sure that the vast majority of the population essentially has no voice.

If we want to talk about the Kurds, they will be in trouble, but the United States. has a horrendous record regarding the Kurds, most recently in Turkey where the US was right through Clinton, during the Clinton administration some of the worst atrocities of the 1990s took place in southeastern Turkey , where millions of people were driven from their homes for dozens of years. thousands of people were murdered through every barbaric form of torture imaginable, in 1997 alone the Clinton administration sent more weapons to Turkey than in the entire cold war period combined up to the beginning of which, for example, in the Boston world this morning is called the counterterrorism campaign counterterrorism is what we call our terrorism, so if you read the world this morning there is a little insert about the success of the counterterrorism campaign but it was this, so you know, we asks us to save the Kurds. that's not very substantial and stuff, so what's up with that?

Well, you know that, and in fact, why not discuss it for a second? Note: it is not and there is a very good reason for that. It's crazy, I mean, it totally is. crazy, but it is much more reasonable than what is proposed and, in fact, all you think about is that in your spare time there is only one flaw in this proposal: the flaw is that it is not going to leave the United States in control of Iraqi oil and it's I'm not going to solve the internal political problems of the reactionary right-wing oligarchy beyond that, I don't see any flaw in that, so if I'm going to deviate from them for a moment, we have a distinguished member here in The Institute of One Ted Sorensen of politics and would like to ask you a question, professor.

A while ago he was quite successful in embarrassing the young interrogator who had no specific quotes to back up his questions, but when he comes to Kennedy. school and attack on john f kennedy i am listening in two instances you did two instances first you tried to impeach kennedy with a speech given by dean atchison to the international uh i said a senior remember what i said a senior advisor he was not a senior advisor he was unopposed in the Kennedy administration but he was an advisor he was an advisor he was an advisor to the Kennedy administration no, it was not the only advice he gave the only advice he gave that I quoted on this platform two weeks ago Kennedy totally rejected it, okay, secondly you said that Kennedy He gave an order to the White House staff to unleash everything against Cuba.

No, that's not what I said. I said that Unleashing never gave such an order. If you're talking about Operation Mongoose, which was a CIA operation that was not authorized by kennedy and at a conference in cuba two weeks ago speaking to the cubans about operation mongoose i pointed out what kennedy's real principles and policies were and said to the extent that operation mongoose violated his mandate and went beyond the policies and principles of kennedy by inflicting violence I apologize, should we operate mongoose? I took the phrase terrors of the earth from the main academic source on the United States and Cuba from Pierogliazis' recent study on conflict missions, which cites the declassified record and quotes Kennedy ordering his staff to unleash the terrors of the earth against Cuba because to which i said, it is a successful challenge to the united states, that is, the very existence of the regime is a successful challenge to the united states, etc., as i cited, operation mongoose was not an operation of the eisenhower administration, it was It wasn't a CIA operation, but you know better than I that the CIA is simply the executive branch's way of maintaining plausible deniability.

They don't do anything on their own. This was a Kennedy operation, not just a Kennedy operation, but it was violent. and brutal, we have an extensive declassified record on that now we go over it if you want and if it was happening up until the Cuban missile crisis right before that, in fact, one of the operation mongoose uh well, I won't even do it. It goes into this but it continued further and in fact ten days before the assassination that Kennedy ordered new opera terrorist operations and other more extensive ones, if you want, I'll give you the resources but that's all, you can't deny it anymore because everyone in the declassified record I think that Do you want to give an answer to this and then we will move on to another Mr.

Sorensen we will stay here with Terry Do you want to give an answer to this sir What we just heard was also false? go ahead want to respond mr sorensen uh something new I would be happy if professor chomsky would send me a record in which president kennedy made such a statement well, I will give you the footnote right now no, I'm not you're going to see a real pit , you can write a letter to pierre glaresus and ask him, actually he quotes uh, oh, sure, and I've read the classified record and you have too, and you know you're going to get a little order here now this gentleman up here is well if you want i will be happy to send you the exact reference just write me an email i will be happy to send you the exact reference i cant give you the page in my memory this gentleman thank you hello my name is Farooq Hadid I am a first year in graduate school in business uh the question I have actually concerns the debate over Iraq and always the question I have is I would like to know what your thoughts on that are about the long-term consequences for Arab cohesion and identity in Africa the long-term consequences of Arab cohesion and identity after a war or subsequent occupation a long-term occupation of Iraq as an Arab this I am concerned because I would like to know what consideration, if any, is being given to the preservation of identity and the strengthening of nationalism in a postwar region.

You're talking specifically about Iraq or the Arab world, starting with the people who are going to be occupied. Well, you know, nobody knows. I mean, once you start a war, you don't know what's going to happen. I mean, there's a lot of historical evidence that the CIA doesn't know. Rumsfeld doesn't know. Don't know. Nobody knows you. trigger a major war, all kinds of things can happen if we look at the historical record as a guide, we know what the United States' record has been not only in the Middle East but also near Latin America, where we have, as I cited the declassified record of the Kennedy administration we have a 150-year policy now we can see what has been done so we can take a look at, let's say, the country that has been the biggest beneficiary, let's say, of the greatest American intervention in the 20th century. century since Woodrow Wilson invaded Haiti, which is the poorest country in the hemisphere, and that intervention lasted until the 90s, sports terrorism, in fact, a prominent terrorist is now hiding in Queens and the United States will not extradite him, Emmanuel Constant , head of the group that killed about 4,000 people in the early 90s and everyone knows why he is not extradited, is going to spill the beans about our participation in terrorist forces, which is why Haiti is the country with the highest intervention, the second largest intervention in the 20th century.

State of Nicaragua, which is now the second poorest country in the hemisphere, competing with it in second place is Guatemala, which is also competing in second place for the largest intervention, we can reach the record in the Middle East, we have a long history , so in fact, again the declassified record is extremely illuminating andagain it takes some discipline not to look at it, so George Bush, remember his plaintive question why they hate us because we're so good and so on? He wasn't the first president to ask. that question that President Eisenhower posed in 1958 in an internal discussion where he discussed with his staff what he called the campaign of hate against us by the people of the Arab world and the national security council gave an analysis of it and gave an answer reasonable.

They said it's based on recognition I'm mixing a couple of things from 1958 are not day after day in the national security council of 1958 they pointed out they discussed what they call the recognition in the Arab world that the United States supports harshly and oppressive regimes and blocks democracy and development because of our interest in controlling their eastern oil and they recommended more of the same and it continues to the present we do not have a declassified record from last year but we have a public record so after September 11, some of The best magazines, like the Wall Street Journal, to their credit, tried to do some studies of opinions from the parts of the Arab world that care about the rich, so they did a study of what they called the Muslim meaning of money. bankers and you know, lawyers and managers of multinationals and so on, all the people who are involved in the entire American system, they know of no objection to American-style globalization or anything else, and they gave the same answers as in 1958, They said yes, we admire the United States, we like its values, we love its freedom, but we wish they would not deprive us of them.

What we oppose are American policies of supporting oppressive and brutal governments and blocking democracy and development. I mean, that's now exacerbated by particular policies that didn't do that. It didn't exist in the 1950s, but those are constant tensions and you hear right now in Pakistan, Egypt, everywhere you look, the same complaints, so it is a basis for thinking that democracy is going to be established. Well, you know again that you can believe in religious beliefs. conversion and have blind faith in your leaders, but other than that I see no basis, that's this gentleman here hello, my name is david goldstein, I'm in the mpid program here at the kennedy school, my views tend to fall in the center left.

On the spectrum of things, but for the sake of discussion, you made an interesting point in your talk, which is that the real reason we're going to Iraq or the administration wants to go to Iraq is to get the oil, which is the greatest material prize. that exists in the world and I tend to agree with you I think one of the greatest materials one of the greatest in the history of the world uh that's the state better than incidentally that's not me so if you accept that that's true what I do um is there is some calculation that someone who is sitting in the place of a condoleezza rice could make him responsible for the best outcome for American citizens, and there is an advantage to going to Iraq, which is that we get this greater possession material, one of the largest material possessions in the history of the world and there are disadvantages that bother the international community and maybe there will be more terrorism and can't you imagine? a calculation where they say for sure that is the reason and it is a good reason , let's do it what's the flaw in the calculation oh, I think that's exactly your calculation, but then we should be honest and say look, we're a bunch of Nazis alright let's drop the whole discussion, you know, we saved a lot of trees and we can throw the newspapers and most of the academic literature and just going out of state and straight up and saying it, you know, saying we're going to do whatever we want because we think.

We are going to win from this and, by the way, it is not the American citizens who win everything, they do not win from this, but the narrow sectors of domestic power that the administration is serving with quite unusual dedication. Yes, they will win, so you know, Dick Cheney will win. Halliburton wins and so on, the American high-tech industry will win, for example, one of the ways to recycle petrodollars is the sale of weapons, that is misleadingly called the military-industrial complex, but anyone who looks closely, certainly anyone who works in the mit. where you pay your salaries knows perfectly well that the military system is a kind of cover for the high-tech industry, that is, anyone who is using a computer or telecommunications or the Internet or who benefits from automation or containerization or just whatever be it, I mean. a lot of this comes from the state sector of the economy, which is very dynamic and innovative and operates under the cover of military spending quite often, uh, but uh, yeah, so there's sort of shrinking profits, but if that's what we're interested in well let's say it instead of the whole helen line here my name is joe pace i'm a college freshman in july of this year a group of bipartisan senators issued what was thankfully an unsuccessful call for change of regime in Iran and given that Iran is also an access partner of the evil state, what do you think is the possibility that this slogan of peace through Baghdad will become peace through Tehran and, if so, What do you think are the justifications we would make for it?

That would be nice, I actually quoted Anthony Cortesman before urging anyone to remember that he is a very conservative military strategist. I quoted him warning the administration not to follow the dumber strategists who are now close to power and that's what one of the things they're asking for now we don't know this is what we do know something about this uh Israel has basically become practically in a US military base at this point uh and since it's a small country but like us as A branch of the Pentagon has more or less an extremely powerful army according to IDF analysts.

Israeli army analysts. The Israeli air force and navy are larger and more technologically advanced than those of any NATO power, except the United States, of course. Right now, apparently, more than 10 percent of the air and naval forces are permanently based in Turkey, at large US bases in eastern Turkey, and presumably armored forces are also there to help if needed. continue atrocities against the Kurds in the region if they rise again, what are they doing right there according to American academic sources such as Robert Olsen and recent Middle East policy? They are flying over the Iranian border.

Looking ahead to the next stage, Iraq is a bit small. You know you can crush that. they get up easily but Iran is big and is Israel's main enemy because they know it's the only country in the region that they can't easily dominate militarily so they've been trying to get the US to do it for them for years and that apparently is happening and he and others also report that there are plans in the offing to try to divide Iran, perhaps dispossessing the mostly Azeri northern regions of Azerbaijan, and other plans, well you know how accurate that is, we do not know.

I know, but they are certainly thinking about it and again, if you read the Israeli press, which is very informative about this and quite reliable, in particular it has been very informative for a long time because of the close connections between the Rumsfeld Wolfwood. The pearl circles and far-right in Israel are reporting it extensively. These are exactly the kind of plans they have in mind, but they are much broader. I mean, they also talk about plans to extend the Hashemite kingdom of the Jordanian kingdom into part of Iraq. and part of saudi arabia rebuild the entire region in a kind of Ottoman style, you know, with the power centers in Ankara and Jerusalem, of course, all under the aegis of the region and the US, you know, leave the regional affairs to local people practically as they were. the Ottoman empire led those are the plans that have been around for a long time, some of them are on the public record and those are the kind of things that cortisone warns about, in fact, it says they're going to go to China, you know? that is why there is a discussion in the region about the axis of evil, so if you want to quote the semi-official Egyptian press, they refer to the axis of evil referring to the US, Turkey and Israel, they say that is the axis of evil, has an advantage over the one created by Bush's speechwriters in that at least it is an axis, eh, it is a real axis.

Iran and Iraq have been at war for 20 years and North Korea was probably included so it wouldn't seem like everything was stacked against each other. Muslims, but there is certainly no axis there and there is a lot of evil everywhere we look, so that is not a problem, but the alliance between the United States, Israel and Turkey is very real. Oh, I mean, that's part of the reason the United States supported mass atrocities. in the southeast of Turkey, in the 90s, and suddenly I was there a few months ago and it is something similar in Colombia, where I was also.

There are places where you could actually stop terrorism by not participating in it, so that's real and the Israeli air force and navy are real and maybe these reports are correct, they are certainly being discussed in serious places, so yes, that is very possible. I'm going to ask you to take the prerogative of the chair and ask the last question. I found your comments interesting, frankly, a little worrying because I have some difficulty equating the motives of the United States with the motives of other countries in the world that you have put in the same league as me.

I have some difficulty doing so, but let me ask you this. Question: What if you believed Saddam Hussein? he had biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and was going to use them imminently perhaps not against us but against his neighbors and with the potential to kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people. Would there be any circumstances where you would agree that it would be worth it for the United States to use military force against him, as I said there are better options, for example letting Iran use military force which has huge advantages over allowing us use military force, for example, the ones they mentioned, except for the defect that it does not leave.

We are in control and it does not handle political issues but there are certainly cases where it could be possible but let me repeat that no one in the region cares about this, it is not a bit surprising, I mean Kuwait and Iran for example . of them invaded by Saddam when he was our ally do not ask for the use of military force, in fact they oppose it. The only country in the region that requests military forces. Israel and have their own reasons. uh, the only people who seem to be afraid of this possibility, in fact, even Israeli military intelligence, the head of Israeli military intelligence recently announced that they don't and they watch it very closely, that they don't see any nuclear threat from Iraq. . maybe in four or five years, but not in the near future, he denied forgiveness but also, there is a small question, I mean, I am strongly opposed to allowing Iraq to develop nuclear weapons, that's why when george bush and the number one and his cohorts were providing assistance to Saddam in developing nuclear weapons.

I was writing against and opposing it, give him the quotes if he wants. That's 1990 1998 1989 1988 yes, I was strongly opposed to the efforts of the United States and Britain at the time to provide Saddam with the means to develop weapons of mass destruction and it was horrible and I certainly wouldn't want it to happen now and if we're interested ​​in stopping it, yes, everyone knows the way inspectors recover, certainly for nuclear weapons that is going to work, maybe not for everything. something else, but think for a second, let's say I had nuclear weapons in my backyard, for example, could I be a threat to anyone or would I be a deterrent only on one condition: that I let people know I have them right? if they have them? hidden in my garage, then it's a threat or a deterrent, everyone knows that.

If Saddam Hussein, in the extremely unlikely contingency that he developed nuclear weapons, if they were usable for anything, he would have to let people know that he has them. Well, the moment there's even a hint that he has them, Iraq is destroyed. Well, I guess some move was made to use them. Well, you know, they get a destroyed square. You know, that's why the people of the region, apart from not believing it, are not afraid. about this and why they are afraid of the United States, there are reasons for there to be many things to worry about, for example, loose nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, that is a problem that is not new and that predates the September 11, like me.

I mentioned that you can read technical articles in the literature, for example, in International Security magazine, which you know, four or five years ago, noting that I'm quoting close to citing now that this is long before 9/11 and that the quote actually excites government studies. showing what concludes that a well-planned effort to smuggle weapons of mass destruction, i.e. nuclear weapons, into the United States would have a 90percent probability of success, much higher than any missile attack with or without national missile defense that lasts about four or five years. About four years ago, if you want a guide for terrorists, Mit Press published a so-called America's Achilles heel by three well-known strategic analysts who pointed out all sorts of ways in which terrorists, would you know that people with my limited ability They could carry out major terrorist attacks in the United States those things are really problems and they are not new and we all know them since 1993 at least I remember in 1993 the ramifications of the groups that were organized by the United States and Afghanistan in the 80s Almost They blew up the World Trade Center, the FBI building, the UN buildings and the tunnels under the river.

They had ambitious plans according to the World Trade Center construction engineers. If they had planned a little better, they would have killed tens of thousands of people. These are not new threats, you know, I mean, everyone has known about them for years. Your life read the newspapers to find out. If you read the technical literature, it's been everywhere. Those are problems and if we are serious about trying to prevent, say, nuclear energy. explosions in New York the way to do it is to go after the problem of loose nuclear weapons and we know where the problem is: it is in the former Soviet Union and in Pakistan and in other places where there is very weak oversight over nuclear weapons.

Are we doing something? No, practically nothing about it, I mean very limited funding to try to do something about it, the so-called last treaty, which is not really a treaty, is a memorandum of understanding between Bush, between Russia and the United States on weapons nuclear, it does nothing. It does not even reduce the number of nuclear weapons below the level already planned and does not provide for any supervision. The same thing happens with biological weapons, for example, on October 23, like just a week ago, the first United Nations committee that basically approved two resolutions, one of them calling for the reaffirmation of the Geneva convention of 1925 opposing the use of chemical weapons and the second was effectively the reaffirmation of the 1967 outer space treaty prohibiting the placement of weapons in outer space. which sooner or later we will call nuclear weapons was approved almost unanimously two countries opposed the United States and Israel is actually one country because Israel's vote is reflexive so one country opposed the United States the United States carried out its opposition in the way it usually does in these committees but disarmament committees by abstaining and an abstention by the United States as a veto is in fact a double veto on the one hand, it kills the proposal and on the other, it prohibits its access to the public, for So there wasn't a single mention of this in any US newspaper, a friend did a database search, which is normal, so it usually works under the assumption that it's not a good idea. inform citizens about what is being done to end biology's only experiment with higher intelligence. time, but those are real threats, I mean, if we opposed shortly before the United States opposed any steps, even within 10 years, to add some law enforcement devices to the biological weapons treaty that the United States refused to ratify at the last minute, endorse, yes.

Those are real threats, you know, we want to do something about them, yes, put teeth into them and fulfill our responsibilities under the non-proliferation treaty that we signed. A nonproliferation treaty commits those who have nuclear weapons to make good faith efforts to get rid of them. of them is fine, now let's put effort into that and stop stimulating the proliferation of nuclear weapons, as Kenneth Waltz pointed out, countries are going to feel that they need them as a deterrent, all of those are concrete things that we can do to increase our own security many thank you professor thompson I have a very good one let me uh I just uh I think in the tradition of the best that America's universities have to offer we certainly heard a different perspective a different point of view and It was listened to with great dignity and I appreciate the assistance.

Let me mention something else tomorrow night, we have a big election tomorrow, midterm elections and tomorrow night we will have a big meeting here to watch the elections. We invite everyone present to do so. thank you all, your firewood