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  On your office door at MIT you have a bumper sticker featuring a quote from the two-time Medal of Honor winner Major General Smedley Butler, who was a veteran of many U.S. interventions, from China to Nicaragua. The sticker says, “War is a racket. The few profit, the many pay.”

  In fact, he very eloquently described the way war is a racket. He says, “I was a racketeer for capitalism,” and he describes his role in many interventions.27 Actually, a very timely example is Haiti. When Woodrow Wilson invaded Haiti in 1915, Smedley Butler was one of the commanders, though not the top one. He was the person who President Woodrow Wilson sent to disband the parliament. The parliament of Haiti had refused to accept a U.S.-written constitution, which permitted American corporations to buy up Haitian land. This measure was considered very progressive. If you go back to the time, the big thinkers were saying that Haiti needs foreign investment in order to develop. You can’t expect American investors to put money in Haiti unless they can own the place, so we have to have this progressive legislation. And these backward people don’t understand it, so we have to disband the parliament. Butler says we disbanded them by typical Marine Corps measures, at gunpoint. After that, the marines, under Butler, ran a referendum in which they got 99.9 percent approval of the U.S.-imposed constitution, with 5 percent of the population participating—namely, the rich elite.28 That was considered a great democratic achievement. It was another step in the process of driving the population off the land, turning them into assembly plant workers or something considered to be to their “comparative advantage” by progressive thinkers. And finally you get the hideous catastrophe we’ve just seen with the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

  In his later years, Butler was pretty bitter. He also stopped a business coup that planned to overthrow the administration of and kill President Franklin D. Roosevelt.29 He intervened and somehow put an end to it. He was vilified for speaking out, but he was a real hero.

  Let’s talk more about Afghanistan and the U.S. war there. In March 2010, Obama visited Bagram air base.30 It is a site of major war crimes, which went virtually unmentioned in news reports. Obama told the troops that their mission was “absolutely essential,” declaring, “We did not choose this war. This was not an act of America wanting to expand its influence; of us wanting to meddle in somebody else’s business. We were attacked viciously on 9/11.” And finally he told the assembled troops, “If I thought for a minute that America’s vital interests were not served, were not at stake here in Afghanistan, I would order all of you home right away.”31 What are those vital interests from Obama’s point of view?

  There are a few strategic interests but, by this point, I suspect it’s mostly domestic politics. Daniel Ellsberg observed this about the war against Vietnam. If you pull out without victory, which is called losing, you’re literally dead. Obama inherited the war. And I suspect the dominant interest is self-preservation.

  The United States didn’t invade Afghanistan because we were viciously attacked. It’s true that there was an attack on 9/11, but the government didn’t know who did it. In fact, eight months later, after the most intensive international investigation in history, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation informed the press that they still didn’t know who did it. He said they had suspicions. The suspicions were that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan but implemented in Germany and the United Arab Emirates, and, of course, in the United States.32

  After 9/11, Bush II essentially ordered the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden, and they temporized. They might have handed him over, actually. They asked for evidence that he was involved in the attacks of 9/11. And, of course, the government, first of all, couldn’t give them any evidence because they didn’t have any. But, secondly, they reacted with total contempt. How can you ask us for evidence if we want you to hand somebody over? What lèse-majesté is this? So Bush simply informed the people of Afghanistan that we’re going to bomb you until the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden. He said nothing about overthrowing the Taliban. That came three weeks later, when British admiral Michael Boyce, the head of the British Defense Staff, announced to the Afghans that we’re going to continue bombing you until you overthrow your government.33 This fits the definition of terrorism exactly, but it’s much worse. It’s aggression.

  How did the Afghans feel about it? We actually don’t know. There were leading Afghan anti-Taliban activists who were bitterly opposed to the bombing. In fact, a couple of weeks after the bombing started, the U.S. favorite, Abdul Haq, considered a great martyr in Afghanistan, was interviewed about this. He said that the Americans are carrying out the bombing only because they want to show their muscle. They’re undermining our efforts to overthrow the Taliban from within, which we can do. If, instead of killing innocent Afghans, they help us, that’s what will happen.34 Soon after that, there was a meeting in Peshawar in Pakistan of a thousand tribal leaders, some from Afghanistan who trekked across the border, some from Pakistan. They disagreed on a lot of things, but they were unanimous on one thing: stop the bombing.35 That was after about a month. Could the Taliban have been overthrown from within? It’s very likely. There were strong anti-Taliban forces. But the United States didn’t want that. It wanted to invade and conquer Afghanistan and impose its own rule.

  The same was true in Iraq. If it hadn’t been for the sanctions, it’s very likely that Saddam Hussein would have been overthrown from within in much the same way as a whole rogues’ gallery of other gangsters the United States and Britain have supported, like, say, Nicolae Ceauescu, the worst of the Eastern European dictators. Nobody wants to talk about him anymore, but the United States supported him until the very end. Suharto in Indonesia, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haiti, Chun Doo-hwan in South Korea, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire—they were all overthrown from within. But the United States didn’t want that in Iraq. It wanted to impose its own regime. And the same in Afghanistan.

  There are geostrategic reasons. They’re not small. How dominant they are in the thinking of planners we can only speculate. But there is a reason why everybody has been invading Afghanistan since Alexander the Great. The country is in a highly strategic position relative to Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. There are specific reasons in the present case having to do with pipeline projects, which are in the background. We don’t know how important these considerations are, but since the 1990s the United States has been trying hard to establish the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAPI) from Turkmenistan, which has a huge amount of natural gas, to India. It has to go through Kandahar, in fact. So Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India are all involved.

  The United States wants the pipeline for two reasons. One reason is to try to prevent Russia from having control of natural gas. That’s the new “great game”: Who controls Central Asian resources? The other reason has to do with isolating Iran. The natural way to get the energy resources India needs is from Iran, a pipeline right from Iran to Pakistan to India. The United States wants to block this from happening in the worst way. It’s a complicated business. Pakistan has just agreed to let the pipeline run from Iran to Pakistan.36 The question is whether India will try to join in. The TAPI pipeline would be a good weapon to try to undercut that.

  In fact, that’s probably one of the main reasons why the United States entered into a deal with India in 2008 to permit India to openly violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty and to import nuclear technology—which, of course, can be transferred to weapons production.37 That’s another way to try to draw India more into the U.S. orbit and separate it from Iran.

  So all of these things are going on. There are a lot of broad considerations involved. But I still suspect that domestic politics is uppermost. We can’t get out of Afghanistan without victory or we’ll be slaughtered.

  Is that related to the greatly expanding drone attacks on Pakistan?

  Yes. They’re horrible, but they’re also interesting. They tell us a lot about American ideology. The dron
e attacks are not a secret. There’s much we don’t know about them, but mostly they’re not a secret. The Pakistani population is overwhelmingly opposed to them, but they’re justified here on the grounds that the Pakistani leadership covertly agrees.38 Fortunately for us, Pakistan is so dictatorial that they don’t have to pay much attention to their population.39 So if the country is a brutal dictatorship, it’s great, because the leaders can secretly agree to what we’re doing and disregard their population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to it. Pakistan’s lack of democracy is considered a good thing. And then in an adjacent newspaper article you read, “We’re promoting democracy.” It’s what George Orwell called “doublethink,” the ability to have two contradictory ideas in mind and believe both of them.40 That’s almost a definition of our intellectual culture. And this is a perfect example of it. Yes, the bombing is fine, because secretly the leadership agrees, even though they have to tell the population they’re against it because the population is overwhelmingly opposed.

  India, Pakistan’s neighbor, has seen a huge surge in internal resistance to neoliberalism. Manmohan Singh, the current prime minister, was the finance minister in the early 1990s. He let the cat out of the bag when he told the Indian parliament in June 2009, “If left-wing extremism”—the catchall phrase for Naxalites, Maoists, terrorists—“continues to flourish in important parts of our country which have tremendous natural resources of minerals and other precious things, that will certainly affect the climate for investment.”41

  It’s certainly true. There are foreign investors and, for that matter, Indian investors who want to get into these resource-rich areas, even if that means, of course, getting rid of the tribal people, destroying their way of life. But India has been at war internally ever since its founding. In fact, this war goes back way before, to the British in earlier periods. Large parts of India are at war at the moment. Whole states are under attack. You have to get the resources for what’s called economic growth.

  India figures into U.S. geostrategic planning vis-à-vis China. There has been a major expansion of U.S. weapon sales to India, training, intelligence sharing.42 Israel is involved, as well.43 How has India gone from a country that was once nonaligned to one that’s become very aligned with Washington?

  India was not only nonaligned, it was a leader of the nonaligned movement. It had pretty close military relations with Russia, but in both power and ideology it was at the core of the nonaligned movement. It’s shifted. India is playing a complicated game. It’s keeping its relations with China, although there are also conflicts with China. So economic and other relations with China are proceeding. At the same time, there is a conflict with China in the Ladakh area. The Sino-Indian War was fought there in 1962, and it still remains a conflicted area.

  I think India is trying to decide how to position itself in the global system. The relations with the United States and with Israel, its U.S. client, are very close. Indian forces attacking the tribal areas are apparently using Israeli technology.44 For years, one of the services Israel has provided to the United States is to carry out state terrorism. It’s very efficient at doing that. Israelis did it in South Africa and Central America.45 Now they’re doing it in India. They’re probably doing it in Kashmir—it’s claimed, but I don’t know if it’s true—and very likely in the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq.46

  Israel has been a hired gun for thirty years and has helped the United States—by “the United States,” I mean the White House—get around congressional sanctions. For example, there were congressional sanctions against giving aid to Guatemala, the worst of the terrorist states of Central America. So Washington funneled money through Israel and Taiwan.47

  The United States is a big power. Small countries hire individual terrorists like Carlos the Jackal. The United States hires terrorist states. It’s much more efficient. You can do a much more murderous and brutal job. Israel is one. Taiwan is another. Britain has also played that role.

  Indian-Israeli relations have gotten very close as part of the overarching U.S. effort to maintain a global system that will give the United States a geostrategic advantage over China. But it’s complex. China, for example, is now moving into Saudi Arabia, the real heartland of U.S. concerns. I think China may be the leading importer by now of Saudi oil.48 And China has had a historic relationship with Pakistan. It’s now moving to develop a port system in Karachi and Gwadar, which would be a way for China to get access to the South Asian seas and also key for importing oil and even minerals from Africa.49 Actually, the same thing is going on in Latin America. China is now probably the leading trading partner of Brazil. It has surpassed the United States and Europe.50

  We were both at a talk that Arundhati Roy gave at Harvard describing the rather extraordinary amount of resistance to neoliberal policies in India.51 There is a tremendous amount of push-back. I wrote to Howard Zinn about her talk. He wrote back to me, in one of the last e-mails I received from him, “Compared to India, the United States seems like a desert.”

  It wasn’t at one time. If you go back to the nineteenth century, the indigenous population of the United States resisted. In this respect, the United States is a desert because we exterminated the native people. The United States won that war. By the end of the nineteenth century, the indigenous people were essentially gone. India is now in the stage the United States was in during the nineteenth century.

  I’m thinking more of workers here who have lost their jobs, who have lost their pensions and benefits. At a talk you gave in Portland, Oregon, called “When Elites Fail,” you decried the fact that the Left has not been able to mobilize dissent.52 The Right has certainly been able to.

  That’s true. But I don’t think India is a good comparison. Earlier periods in U.S. history are a better comparison.

  Take, say, the 1930s. The Depression hit in 1929. About five years later, you started getting real militant labor organizing, the forming of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, sit-down strikes.53 That’s what basically impelled Roosevelt to carry out the New Deal reforms. That hasn’t happened in the current economic crisis. Remember the 1920s were a period when labor was almost completely crushed. One of the leading labor historians in the United States, David Montgomery, has a book called The Fall of the House of Labor.54 The rise of the house of labor was from the nineteenth-century militants on through the early-twentieth-century labor agitation that was crushed by Woodrow Wilson, who was as brutal internally as he was externally. The Red Scare almost decimated the workers’ movement. That was the 1920s. There was a change in the 1930s, in the course of the Depression. But it took quite a few years. And the Depression was much worse than the current recession. This is bad enough, but that was much worse.

  And then there were other factors. For example, we’re not supposed to say it, but the Communist Party was an organized and persistent element. It didn’t show up for a demonstration and then scatter so somebody else then had to start something else. It was always there—and it was in for the long haul. That’s not the type of organization we have now. And the Communist Party was in the forefront of civil rights struggles, which were very significant in the 1930s, as well as labor organizing, union struggles, union militancy. They were a spark, which is lacking now.

  Why is it lacking?

  First of all, the Communist Party was totally crushed. In fact, the activist Left was crushed under President Harry S. Truman. What we call McCarthyism was actually started by Truman. The unions did grow in size, but they grew as collaborationist unions. That’s one of the reasons why, say, Canada, a very similar country, has a health care system and we don’t. In Canada, the unions struggled for health care for the country. In the United States, they struggled for health care for themselves. So if you’re an autoworker here in the United States, you had a pretty good health care and pension system. Union workers won health care for themselves in a compact with the corporations. They thought it was a deal. What they couldn’t see was that it’s a suicide pac
t. If the corporation decides the compact is over, then it’s over. Meanwhile, the rest of the country didn’t get health care. So now the United States has a completely dysfunctional health care system, while Canada has one that more or less works. That’s a reflection of different cultural values and institutional structures in two very similar countries. So yes, the working class did continue to develop and grow here, but with class collaboration, that is, in a compact with the corporations.

  You may recall in 1979, Doug Fraser, who was the head of the United Auto Workers, gave a speech in which he lamented the fact that business was engaged in what he called “a one-sided class war” against working people.55 We thought we were all cooperating. That was pretty dumb. Business is always engaged in a one-sided class war, especially in the United States, which has a very class-conscious business community. They’re always militantly struggling to get rid of any interference with their domination and control. The labor unions went along with it. They benefited their own workers temporarily. Now they’re paying the penalty.

  In a lecture at the Left Forum in New York on March 21, 2010, you talked about Joseph Stack and his manifesto.56 He is the man who took a plane and flew it into the IRS building in Austin.57 You went on to talk about the Weimar Republic. You said, “All of this evokes memories of other days when the center did not hold, and they’re worth thinking about.” Talk about Stack. And why did you bring up Weimar?

  Joe Stack left a manifesto, which liberal columnists just ridiculed. They dismissed him as a crazy person. But if you read his manifesto, it’s an eloquent and insightful commentary on contemporary American society. He starts by describing how he grew up in an old industrial area. It happened to be Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. When he was about eighteen or nineteen, he was a college student living on a pittance. In his building there was an eighty-year-old woman who was living on cat food. And he tells her story. Her husband had been a steelworker, someone who belonged to what is called the “privileged working class,” the part that made out pretty well during the period of economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s. He was guaranteed a pension. He looked forward to his retirement. It was all stolen from him. He died prematurely. That happens pretty commonly among people who are faced with these situations. His future was stolen by the company, by the government, and by the union. And she’s left eating cat food. That was his first recognition that something was wrong with the picture of the world that he had been taught in grade school. Then he goes on to say, “I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.”