Recently on Real Time with Bill Maher the noted intellectual and MIT professor Noam Chomsky stopped by via satellite for a little sojourn into the war in Iraq and the election results. What ensued was one of the most disturbing displays of virulent political rhetoric I’ve ever seen.
When asked about his views about the war in Iraq Chomsky contended that the United States should be brought up on charges of war crimes for invading the beleaguered mid-eastern country and ousting Sadaam Hussein. According to international law the most serious offense a country can commit is a war of aggression against another sovereign nation. A war of aggression is the unprovoked attack by one nation on another. The most glaring and notorious instance of such a war is Germany’s invasion of Eastern Europe, Russia, North Africa, and Western Europe which sparked WWII. Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution was responsible for the wholesale extermination of over twelve million Jews, gypsies, disabled, and political dissidents. Japan’s attack on China during WWII, the former Soviet Union’s war with Afghanistan, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991, and China’s take over of Tibet are but a few other examples of wars of aggression.
Chomsky has also contented that the United States, through its support of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, is the world’s foremost terrorist state of modern times. Chomsky has also been deeply critical of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians.
Now I dislike our current president’s policies as much as the next guy but to equate Bush with Hitler, perhaps the most crystalline human personification of pure unadulterated evil ever born, is reckless, ignorant, and quite frankly stupid. To state that the U.S. is guilty of war crimes for invading Iraq is a dangerous and virulent concept. While the rationale for invading Iraq may have been questionable it is folly to ignore the danger that Iraq posed to the U.S. and the rest of the Middle East. Even though Iran and North Korea were and are more eminent threats to the United States because of their nuclear capability Iraq was headed by a tyrant who operated with reckless abandon. Bush’s mandated invasion of Iraq hardly equates to Hitler’s subjugation of an entire continent and his extermination of twelve million “enemies of the state”.
Chomsky should be ashamed.
