I am not inclined to go over the ground of that exchange once more. I thought that my last reply to Chomsky was pretty definitive, so I gave him the last word and I will give it to you as well. Anyone who wants to judge for themselves, can go to the actual exchange, thanks to Donald finding it reproduced in this Wikipedia entry: LINK.

“Your frequently repeated point that the US bombing was carefully planned to minimize loss of life on the night of the bombing, and that this makes all the difference between the mens rea of Clinton and bin Laden, does not prove as much as you seem to think. The CIA found trace amounts of a guilty chemical in the soil outside the plant grounds and then told the Secretary of Defense that it was “as sure as it gets” that chemical weapons were being manufactured inside. … ”

Oh, sure they do. How about “the Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” or “Saddam is as bad as Hitler”? Both of these were probably repeated in public something like a million times more often than any comparison between 9/11 and al-Shifa, and probably to something like a million times more political effect in the real world. If that’s true, or anywhere near true, would you agree that the decent, responsible left ought to have devoted approximately a million times more energy to refuting the former moral equivalences than the latter—especially before the former worked their incalculably greater mischief? Do you think that’s about the actual proportion in which the decent left’s efforts did divide?

Here again is the passage of Chomsky’s that you consider “particularly instructive” about his moral and intellectual irresponsibility:

The September 11 attacks were major atrocities. In terms of number of victims they do not reach the level of many others, for example, Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and probably killing tens of thousands of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the UN and no one cares to pursue it).

In this passage, he asserts that: 1) the US had no credible pretext for bombing Sudan; 2) about half its pharmaceutical supplies were destroyed; 3) tens of thousands of people probably died, more than on 9/11, although we cannot know this for sure because 4) the US has consistently blocked investigation into it.

Throughout your long critique of Chomsky, you do not dispute (1) or (4). You raise some objections to (2), though in the end you more or less agree. All your fire is directed at (3). You argue cogently, though in the end I (and apparently other commenters here) are not at all convinced that “the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence” goes against Chomsky’s—explicitly qualified—claim. What you do not and cannot show is that his tentative claim was implausible, much less irresponsible. There was (and apparently remains) plenty of reason to say “probably,” though it would probably have been wiser at the time to say “quite possibly.”

Your frequently repeated point that the US bombing was carefully planned to minimize loss of life on the night of the bombing, and that this makes all the difference between the CIA found trace amounts of a guilty chemical in the soil outside the plant grounds and then told the Secretary of Defense that it was “as sure as it gets” that chemical weapons were being manufactured inside. Not only was this absurd, but the CIA must have known that the plant manufactured badly needed pharmaceuticals, since foreign NGOs knew it perfectly well. Clinton may have been ignorant—though unpardonably ignorant—but the US government as a whole was not ignorant and therefore bears moral responsibility for bombing a facility on which an unknown number of civilians were known to have relied for essential, life-sustaining, not easily replaced products. And on no credible pretext. Whether the US’s moral guilt in such a case is greater or less than that of the al-Qaeda terrorists is debatable. (And Chomsky did not say it was, merely comparing the number of apparent deaths.) But that you—and many others on the decent left—thought it irresponsible, even offensive, to have mentioned the two episodes in the same breath is something I continue to find incomprehensible.

Your comment about Chomsky’s “opposition” to the US intervention in Serbia/Kosovo is misleading. Chomsky’s published writings on those subjects—I haven’t read all his interviews—are concerned entirely with showing that: 1) much of the justification offered for the NATO intervention by the US government and in the media was false; 2) that the result of the bombing was expected to be, and was, a sharp increase in Serbian atrocities; 3) the possibilities of a peaceful (ie, diplomatic) solution were not yet exhausted, and that part of the responsibility for this lay with the US.

Chomsky acknowledged in this case, as any sensible person must, that wrong actions may produce good consequences. But that truism does not absolve the citizens of the US from their urgent responsibility to understand the real determinants and purposes of American foreign policy. Unless they do—if they continue to believe fairy tales about our government’s good intentions and benevolent purposes—then the prospects for an international culture of law-abidingness are very dim.

No. About the performance of the American mass media in the runup to the war in Iraq, and for a couple of years thereafter as well, I have no quarrel with Chomsky whatsoever. In fact, I acknowledge in my book that the Pentagon program of seeding the teevee with “analysts” conforms to the Manufacturing Consent model pretty damn well. I’m only saying that on the periphery of the mass media, millions of people—including most of the progressive press and lots o’ blogs—doubted not only the WMD rationale but the “let freedom ring” rationale as well, and it’s worth acknowledging the fact and emphasizing the breadth of the opposition.

I would simply point out to Barry at 111 that a great deal of what I did in that exchange with Chomsky was examine the claim that the Sudan had lost a significant source of vital medicine that could not have been readily replaced. I suppose it is not surprising that I believe I showed that the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence did not support that claim.

To Salient at 108, I don’t think that there was a single, homogeneous view on the American left in 2001, or that Walzer’s essay posits one either—it is clearly written from what was a position within the left itself, albeit one which was critical of what Walzer saw as the dominant strains of the left. I do not know that I would agree with Walzer that the dominant view was the one he described in the sentence: perhaps in the precincts of the small organized left which consists largely of ideological ‘true believers’ and perhaps even on large parts of the academic left [there is overlap between those two categories], but certainly not in the broad mass left of trade unions, civil rights organizations, feminists, the gay and lesbian movement, etc. And it is the broad mass left which matters. But I do think that there was then, and continues to be today, those who pretty much fit Walzer’s characterization in that sentence, and see any and all opposition to American power as expressions of righteous revolt by the oppressed. In just such a vein, I have read some incredibly stupid apologies for Somali pirates in the last few days.

At 107, I think that George helps elucidate what some of the real political differences are here. He finds it wrongheaded to conclude that Chomsky proposed a moral equivalence between 9-11, on the one hand, and the bombing of the al-Shifa factory, on other hand; I don’t see a plausible reading of what Chomsky said immediately after 9-11 [quoted in 104] that would support anything but the conclusion of moral equivalence. Moral equivalences just don’t get much plainer than that.

And while George is entirely correct to note that I characterized Chomsky’s worldview as Manichean and fundamentalist, he neglects to add what was the really the main thrust of my conclusion in that piece: that such a worldview “undermines our capacity as citizens to compel the U.S. government to do the right thing in the world.” In this regard, it is telling that when faced with a theocratic authoritarian state in the Sudan that had engaged in a very real and very un-silent genocide against its southern African peoples for many years [now extended to African peoples in the Darfur region], Chomsky trained none of his fire against it, but instead focused on the American government. Indeed, he went so far as to criticize the American government for not accommodating itself to the Sudanese regime at a time when the Congressional Black Caucus, the AFL-CIO and human rights groups were all urging stronger opposition.

And all this was at a time when Chomsky had just finished taking the same side as Pat Buchanan and the xenophobes of the American right in opposition to American intervention against the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosova, and following a period of remarkable silence over the American and European failure to take any action against the genocide in Rwanda.

I understand that how we understand this pattern, and the longer pattern of Chomsky’s interventions on issues of American foreign policy, is a matter of interpretation, one that can be read in different ways. There are, of course, cases where he was right, because the use of American power was clearly wrong and destructive, from Vietnam to Iraq. But if there was ever a single instance of him supporting the use of American power when it was desperately needed, such as in Rwanda or Darfur, much less of supporting the use of American power when it accomplished important and right ends, such as in Bosnia and Kosova, I have yet to see it.

not to bizarre comments by your interlocutors

Michael, please disregard this question. Just reread your post and understood that you were referring to Henry’s (apparently) close anticipation of one of the major themes of your forthcoming book, not to bizarre comments by your interlocutors.

Link

Chomsky often adopts what I call the “I alone have escaped from the US to tell thee”

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5631882395226827730