In memoriam

and there were volumes of this kind of stuff, some of the worst of it on the broadcast media.

i have been a bit taken aback by certain people’s reaction to hilzoy’s claim that “the madness is over… the country as a whole does not seem to me to be crazy any more.” they react as though she had claimed that *all* madness was over, and that *no* part of the country seemed crazy to her any more. i.e., they really don’t read her words.

and i have to think that anyone who believes that the level of craziness now is comparable to the level of craziness back then, is just not doing a good job of remembering what it was like back then.

back when we had no blogs, back when we had no alternatives to the mainstream media, back when the new goddamned republic was as far left as voice as one ever heard. back when crap like that michael kelly screed was the unchallenged conventional wisdom.

and back when the loonies were actually running the white house, rather than merely barking out their impotent rage on the glenn beck show.

so i thank m.b. for posting some reminders of just how mad that period of madness was. hilzoy is right: that particular madness does not currently afflict us.

(she’s wrong to think we don’t need her help with the residual madness, but that’s a different issue.)

oh–and michael:

could you make sure to give hilzoy some tips on how to quit blogging?

i’m hoping she does it exactly the way you did.

My God, that Kelly editorial was revolting. I remember being stunned as I read it at the breakfast table all those years ago. How could we forget the comparison to Hitler:

Gore uttered his first big lie in the second paragraph of the speech when he informed the audience that his main concern was with “those who attacked us on Sept. 11, and who have thus far gotten away with it.”

Or the stupidity and arrogance and bat-shit insanity of this:

“…The men who “implemented” the “coldblooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans” are not at large. They are dead; they died in the act of murder, on Sept. 11. Gore can look this up. In truth, the “vast majority” of the men who “sponsored” and “planned” the crime are dead also, or in prison, or on the run. The inmates at Guantanamo Bay, and the hunted survivors of Tora Bora, and the terrorist cell members arrested nearly every week, and the thousands of incarcerated or fugitive Taliban, might disagree as to whether they have been located, apprehended, punished or neutralized.”

Yes, the hunted survivors of Tora Bora, includng a harmless fellow named bin Laden, and the fugitive Taliban, neutralized and never to bother anyone again.

I didn’t know Michael Kelly the private man, and for all know he was a great boss, father, and husband. But the public man was evil and I’m glad he’s dead.

Russell: four and some years on, I think we can exhale and admit that a large part of the problem in 2004 was that John Kerry was an authentically terrible candidate. A good man, a competent senator, a war hero, all of the above: but demonstrably in over his head when faced with the task of running for public office anywhere outside of New England, and either incapable of hiring the people who could have steered his course correctly or unwilling to listen to their advice having hired them. He showed up armed with a knife for a gunfight, and the results were, as they say, instructive.

Pretty sane, centrist stuff? Well, in the American frame, even in 2009, I guess it is centrist. But sane?

Gore accepts the basic frame laid down by Bush when he says, “Nevertheless, all Americans should acknowledge that Iraq does indeed pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf region, and we should be about the business of organizing an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction.”

And, of course, the subtext (barely sub) is that more aggression in Afghanistan is the only plausible course of action against Al Qaeda.

And this from the man whose rightful election was stolen so that Bush could impose those frames. But wait, impose? Democrats, and many quite sane citizens quite meekly accepted the frame. Re-reading the excerpt of Gore’s speech reminds me why his guttural “I will fight for you” in 2000 rang so hollow. He sure wasn’t fighting for the democracy that was so wounded when he conceded his own “defeat.”

I should add that her retrospective piece on the issue (which I think she did publish here, though I’ll not bother to go back and look just now) is very much worth reading.

For me, the indication that I was not the one who’d gone insane was Harper’s. Even though Harper’s itself has a tendency to go off the deep end, at least it showed me that I wasn’t the only one who thought that everything I was being told was obviously false.

For example:

The revision thing:
A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies, by Sam Smith
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/10/0079780

I’m pretty sure that The Nation, among others, has been publishing for around 100 years or so.

Like Michael, I read The Nation during this period, and it was pretty rubbish. This was also the time when Hitchens was using the column he still wrote for them to slap the rest of the magazine around in his best bar-fight manner. As a foreigner, though, I’ve always found the media persecution complex of The Nation (and Democracy Now!, for that matter) something of a turn-off.

It’s important to remember the sheer ugliness of American politics in 2002, just as the Bush administration began its “product launch” for Iraq — one of the more sickening examples being the smear-job run against Max Cleland by the nincompoop Saxby Chambliss.

One of the first attempts at blog pushback, I remember, was Warblogger Watch. It was kneejerky, rude and not that well-written, but it picked its targets well, and it displayed greater intellectual honesty than many who spent that rotten winter worshipping at the altar of Ken Pollack.

It’s also important to remember that it wasn’t just crazy right-wingers who were crazy in 2002. Some of our good friends here and throughout the liberal blog world were supporters, from mild to quite eager, of the Iraq war and other terrible, terrible ideas.

To our discredit, 2002-2003 was a bad moment for a lot of us.

oy. if this turns into a self-criticism session, it’s going to get really tedious.

if it turns into an ‘i was lefter than you back when session’, it will get tediouser.

has anyone yet countered the claim that the nation descended into a kind of mass psychosis back then?

(everyone but you, ducky, doubtless you were above it).

because that, i took it, was the point of the o.p., and of the examples from kelly.

that and saying thanks to hilzoy.

“Self criticism” may be tedious, but what’s more tedious is the fiction that “we all went crazy in 2002-3.” What happened was that people in power set out to manipulate public opinion for their own purposes. Most prominent Democrats and lots of liberal pundits went scrambling, but, as others have pointed out, others were able to question the rationales and point to the relevant history indicating we should be skeptical of the administration’s doomsday “we must kill them all or die” scenario. My recollection is that the Nation at the time was pretty good – Hitchens was terrible, of course, but didn’t he leave because he was alone on that? More importantly, though, people questioned it. Half a million people marched in NYC, remember? I recall conversations with very centrist or apolitical friends at the time – most were ambivalent at best about the war.

The question isn’t why didn’t anyone speak out, the question is, why wasn’t the political opposition more effective? A harder question to ask, but much, much more important.

I didn’t think it was particularly bright of Chomsky and Moore to suggest that bin Laden couldn’t have planned 9/11 from a remote cave in Afghanistan

Actually, what Chomsky said was:

” Bin Laden may or may not be directly implicated in these acts, but it is likely that the network in which he was a prime figure is … ” (Sept 19, 2001)

and

“Many who know the conditions well are … dubious about bin Laden’s capacity to plan that incredibly sophisticated operation from a cave somewhere in Afghanistan. But that his network was involved is highly plausible, and that he is an inspiration for them, also. These are decentralized, non-hierarchic structures, probably with quite limited communications links among them. It’s entirely possible that bin Laden’s telling the truth when he says he didn’t know about the operation.” (Sept 22, 2001).

Both quotes are from Chomsky’s 9/11. Considering that both statements were made within a few days of the attack, they seem perfectly reasonable.

And here’s the context of the “silent genocide” remark. It’s from a talk given on October 18, 2001, shortly after the US bombing commenced:

“After the first week of bombing, The New York Times reported on a back page, inside a column on something else, that by the arithmetic of the United Nations, there will soon be 7.5 million Afghans in acute need of even a loaf of bread and there are only a few weeks left before the harsh winter will make deliveries to many areas totally impossible. But with bombs falling, the delivery rate is down to half of what is needed. Casual comment. Which tells us that Western civilisation is anticipating the slaughter of three-four million people or something like that. On the same day, the leader of Western civilisation dismissed with contempt, once again, offers of negotiation for delivery of the alleged target, Osama bin Laden, and a request for some evidence to substantiate the demand for total capitulation. On the same day, the Special Rapporteur of the U.N. in charge of food pleaded with the United States to stop the bombing to try to save millions of victims. As far as I’m aware, that was unreported.

“Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide. It also gives a good deal of insight into the elite culture, the culture that we are part of. It indicates that plans are being made and programmes implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next few months.”

Again, given the circumstances in which the comment was made, the fact that he did actually offer some basis for it from news reports, and that his main purpose was clearly to draw attention to the complete lack of recognition in mainstream commentary that the US bombing could lead to massive loss of innocent life, it doesn’t seem so unreasonable.

Here’s what wikipedia says about the polls during the month of the invasion:

Days before the March 20 invasion, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll found support for the war was related to UN approval. Nearly six in 10 said they were ready for such an invasion “in the next week or two.” But that support dropped off if the U.N. backing was not first obtained. If the U.N. Security Council were to reject a resolution paving the way for military action, 54% of Americans favored a U.S. invasion. And if the Bush administration didn’t not seek a final Security Council vote, support for a war dropped to 47%. [9]
An ABC News/Washington Post poll taken after the beginning of the war showed a 62% support for the war, lower than the 79% in favor at the beginning of the Persian Gulf War. [1]

That’s not a nation gone mad, it’s a nation standing up remarkably well to relentless propaganda and fear-mongering. The fact that many liberal intellectuals did worse than the country as a whole shouldn’t bling us to the bigger picture.

I was merely saying that building an international coalition to block Saddam’s access to WMD in 2002, instead of invading the country, sounds pretty sane to me.

I’m going to gently note that your phrasing implied that there were no reasonable positions other than somehow preventing Saddam from acquiring “WMD.” We’re in violent agreement that anything would have been better than invading, but even using the phrase “WMD” is question-begging. This isn’t just a matter of being obstreperous to avoid accepting the Bushite “frame” — the position that Iraqi “WMD” posed no military threat to us is, at the very least, somewhat supported by the evidence.

As for whether chemical weapons should be included in that term of propaganda, I’ll leave that delicate question to the Kurds.

I suspect we agree more than disagree on the general aspects of this discussion, and there is no doubt that Saddam’s use of chemical agents against the Kurds was a war crime, but it seems slightly relevant to note that, circa 2002, the Kurds had won. Iraqi Kurdistan was de facto independent, a fact enforced at very little cost by the entirely conventional armaments of the US Air Force. Chemical weapons did not allow Saddam to prevail over so much as a rogue province of his own country; exactly why should any country with a functional army have felt threatened by them?

As for whether chemical weapons should be included in that term of propaganda, I’ll leave that delicate question to the Kurds.

That’s an excellent candidate for the Michael Kelly award right there.

Sorry, Michael, but I still think you’ve misrepresented Chomsky in both instances.

1) Re 9/11: Chomsky never expressed the slightest skepticism that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks; on the contrary. And he affirmed that bin Laden was “a prime figure” in al-Qaeda and “an inspiration” to it. He refers to al-Qaeda throughout 9/11 as “the bin Laden network” and never suggests any disagreement between the two. And his statements about bin Laden’s personal involvement (only ten days after the event, remember) are properly tentative: “may or may not have been involved” and “it’s entirely possible.” Moreover, he refers throughout the book and elsewhere to bin Laden’s “crimes,” in a way that leaves no doubt that he has no intention at all of absolving bin Laden of moral and legal responsibility for 9/11. You clearly mean to suggest that there’s something foolish or irresponsible about Chomsky’s statements, and I don’t believe there is.

2) Re Afghanistan: Here’s the full quote from page 128-9 of Hegemony and Survival: “‘Studied lack of interest’ in the likely consequences of war for the population of the country to be invaded is conventional. The same was true when, five days after 9/11. Washington demanded that Pakistan eliminate ‘truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population,’ and caused the withdrawal of aid workers along with severe reduction in food supplies, thereby leaving ‘millions of Afghans … at grave risk of starvation” — risk of what should have properly have been termed “silent genocide.” Estimates of the numbers at ‘grave risk of starvation’ rose from 5 million before 9-11 to 7.5 million a month later. The threat and then reality of the bombing elicited sharp protests from aid organizations and warnings of what might ensue, which received only scattered and very partial attention, and little reaction.” (Quotes from NY Times and International Security
He’s perfectly right that, given plausible warnings of mass starvation as a result of the planned bombings, all decent people should have seen this as a prospective “silent genocide” and vigorously protested it, and that very few decent people did. He is not saying, as you suggest, that it “should have been called a ‘silent genocide'” even after the feared mass starvation did not take place.
I think you also misinterpret the other quote you mention from Hegemony and Survival (p. 78). He is most definitely not saying that those who “reassessed the moral calculus” for continuing the war in Afghanistan after the resumption of the aid convoys and the non-occurrence of mass starvation were moral imbeciles. He is saying that those who ridiculed the decent people who warned of mass starvation and opposed the bombings for that reason were moral imbeciles, just as anyone who, after the world was not blown up in October 1962, absolved Khruschev of dangerous recklessness for having placed missiles in Cuba would have been a moral imbecile. Again, perfectly correct. They would indeed have been moral imbeciles; and mainstream commentators who ridiculed leftists who warned of a probable “silent genocide” were moral imbeciles.

“If this is true, surely it can be substantiated. Were those people and agencies really ridiculed? When and where and by whom? ”

That’s a very clever rhetorical trick, Michael, but it only works if there was some widespread public debate in the US in late 2001 about the famine warnings that were being put out by the aid groups. There wasn’t. And that’s Chomsky’s point, and he has been ridiculed repeatedly for making it, usually by people who don’t seem to know that there was a real danger of war-imposed famine in Afghanistan back then. The aid agencies weren’t ridiculed in the US, AFAIK, because in the US most people didn’t know the aid agencies were warning of a war-induced famine.

There was more of a debate in Great Britain, I think. And iirc, Clare Short (sp?) was critical of the aid groups for their famine warnings.

Donald, that argument is Kelly-esque. It’s possible that there would have been mass famine in Afghanistan, just like it was possible that that our first warning that Iraq had nuclear weapons would be a mushroom cloud over Manhattan.

Here is the Guardian story about the thousands that did die–

link

I would say that real deaths put the Afghan famine into a slightly different category from the imaginary deaths from an Iraqi nuclear weapon that occurred only in the heads of sensible war-supporting centrists.

here Chomsky disingenuously characterizes those who disagreed with his assessment of “silent genocide” (a phrase wholly of Chomsky’s devising, not used by any scholar or aid agency with regard to Afghanistan) as people who engaged in ridicule of proper warnings.

No again, Michael, this is a plain misreading of the passage you’re quoting. Chomsky is not, as you claim, calling those people who disagreed (at the time or afterward) with his assessment of the likely consequences of bombing Afghanistan “moral imbeciles.” He is, as I’ve pointed out several times, both on this thread and previously, calling people who ridiculed those who warned of the likely consequences of the bombing “moral imbeciles.” He’s not calling people who said: “No, the bombing poses no risk of mass starvation; let’s do it” moral imbeciles. He’s calling people who, after the fact, ridiculed those who had opposed the bombing because it might lead to mass starvation moral imbeciles. In answer to your question: I don’t know who he had in mind. He doesn’t name any names, at least here. But I hope we can agree that if anyone did, after the non-occurrence of mass starvation, ridicule those people who opposed the bombing because it might lead to mass starvation, then he or she was a moral imbecile.

I believe that the people who said, in late 2001, “thank goodness, famine was averted, the worst did not come to pass, and the Taliban was overthrown” were not, in fact, moral imbeciles.

For the nth time, these are not the people he called “moral imbeciles.” The people he called moral imbeciles are those who said: “Those who opposed the bombing because it might lead to famine were simply hysterical and are now unmasked as knee-jerk anti-American/pacifist leftists.”

No, the moral quality of a choice depends on the information available when the choice is made, not on subsequent information. To use an example I’ve used before, firing a gun you think is loaded at someone does not become harmless mischief when the gun unexpectedly turns out not to be. Or, to use Chomsky’s much better example, Khruschev’s reckless placing of missiles in Cuba is not rendered less reckless by the fact that the world fortunately did not blow up because of it. There was a good chance that the bombing of Afghanistan in October 2001 might have killed a very large number of innocent people. The fact that it fortunately didn’t doesn’t make the decision to bomb any less heinous.

To recap: according to Chomsky, the people who made the decision to go ahead and bomb were not moral imbeciles but, presumably, war criminals. Those who supported the decision then, or who signed on after the resumption of food aid and the non-occurrence of mass starvation, he does not characterize here. Those who ridiculed the people who opposed the decision to bomb because of the danger of mass starvation were moral imbeciles.

Most of the American and Israeli neocons who justify their crimes against the people of the Middle East and South Asia by reference to “moral clarity” are the same people who refer to anyone who disagrees with them as moral imbeciles. Considering that Al Qaeda and Hamas were originally the creation of the CIA and Mossod, respectively, to defeat Soviet and PLO ambitions renders either concept as morally moot.

@57: indeed. Better, therefore, to divide everyone into ‘incompetent moral imbeciles’ and ‘impotent pontificators’, and leave it at that. Or if you have a plan, do tell.

Donald, how is it specious? It’s the exact same argument. Chomsky’s claim of “silent genocide” would comfortably fit in any of Kelly’s bloviations. I’m sure Jonah Goldberg is working on her next book on how liberals are working to commit silent genocide right now.

Dsquared is right though that it’s probably a sign of masochism to get into the issue. There were good arguments against Bush-era foreign policy, and these arguments were shown by history to be completely correct, and that’s what’s important. Poor arguments we will always have with us.

I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what complaint is being made about Chomsky here. That nobody ridiculed ex post people who had made warnings about famines, etc? I’m sure that’s not true. That nobody prominent in the US did? I don’t know enough about USian punditry to say whether that’s right–as Donald points out people in the UK certainly did–but it’s not an objection to what Chomsky wrote. That when Chomsky remarked that people were ridiculed he was under a scholarly duty to specify exactly who was doing the ridiculing? That would be a bit silly, wouldn’t it?

On the ‘merest truism’ I think we evaluate someone’s past decision on two levels: on the one hand we can whether it was the right decision given the way things subsequently transpired, in actual fact. On the other hand we can ask whether it was a good decision given what was known or ought to have been known to the agent at the time. So if I accept the chance of winning a thousand dollars by playing Russian roulette, and it turns out the chamber is empty and I win, there is a sense in which I ‘made the right decision’–if I had acted differently I would be worse off. But there is another, perhaps more important sense, in which my decision was completely stupid.

For the xth time, —, would you be so kind as to direct me to those people?

Okay. In print, or in space-time?

Here, come visit me late 2003 in Madison, WI where I’m putting up anti-war protest posters in the Van Vleck building (a form of venting). Meet the PDEs prof who tells me with exasperated patience how the organization I’m posting posters for has lost its credibility, because the previous set of posters re: Afghanistan (back in 2001) “warned of all this crazy stuff” (that didn’t happen) so folks now know we were “just fear-mongering” (and therefore probably still are).

(By the way, if anyone remembers the Think Before You Bomb signs here and there in UW-Madison @ 2001, those were the ones being referenced here. They were pretty damned stupid, as I didn’t know how to frame my thoughts very well.)

OK, now in whenever-2002 walk with me down State St. where the guy in army fatigues accosts me and reminds me he’s a Vietnam vet just as he did when he yelled at me while I was protesting in 2001, which BTW was a damn scary thing, and after an initial bout of calling back and forth across the street we settle down and talk, standing right there, I think because we both started feeling self-conscious about arguing with a stranger. He said I accused U.S. soldiers of threatening innocent people with starvation, “and that’s like terrorism,” i.e. I had accused the Army of terrorizing Afghanistan. [Which wasn’t my vocabulary, but I guess it does align with the naive stuff I had said: “War threatens innocent people. Threatened people learn to hate.” Evidence points did include whatever source I had found at the time, I thiiiink maybe via the I. Red Cross, that suggested the possibility of starvation. Sub in terrorizes for threatens, and yeah, same thing.]

I mean, these two folks didn’t print anything. I dunno if anyone who felt that way published their feelings. And they were, I think now, being fairly reasonable in their hindsight assessment of me, and it irritates the hell out of me that Chomsky calls such folks “moral imbeciles” because it’s uselessly dismissive.

But, uh, it seems like you’re arguing these people don’t exist.

They exist, and they had a pretty good point, and they exist.

About commemorating Michael Kelly: doesn’t the guy deserve some recognition for being a washington-establishment wingnut who’s actually been inside a humvee?

Barry: I second this, with one exception: it’s S only; people doing this always beat up on others, and never self-flagellate.

I was typing a rather self-flagellating post even as you wrote this, & ended up posting it 7 minutes later. :-P Semi-interestingly, I ended up removing most of the self-flagellation in an edit, not because I felt it was wrong but because I figured nobody wants to read that sort of thing.

Walt, if you can’t tell the difference between warnings of imaginary weapons and an actual famine that did kill people, and could easily have killed more, then I don’t think you’re in a strong position to be using the word “specious” about anyone’s arguments.

As for Chomsky, I suspect that in the US he was talking about the people who ridiculed him for passing on the warnings of a possible mass famine (which in the event turned out to be a smaller famine). For examples of the kind of mindset he’s talking about, look at Walt here.

Based on the link below, Clare Short apparently attacked the aid agencies. I don’t think I’ll have time to track down her actual statement, so I don’t know what the attack consisted of. And I’ll repeat that the British press seems to have done a much better job than the cowardly Americans when it came to covering the issue of how the bombing might cause a major famine. Americans didn’t want to hear that our military action posed a threat to millions of people and that’s what Noam was talking about. I have no idea (well, actually, I do) why this is hard to understand.

link

Though I can’t pretend to have argued as effectively as George Scialabba, I have discussed some of these issues with MB in the past. And I just wanted to comment on this: “You realize, surely, that I have now taken it as my solemn task to determine, just for the record, whether you are willing to disagree with anything Noam Chomsky has said since 1935.”

I believe that Chomsky once wrote that most scholarship was effectively just clerical* work. (It may have been Fodor.) Though I don’t know if I can honestly disagree with him, I can say, to paraphrase Wyatt Earp’s remarks to Al Swearengen, that I didn’t care for its reprehending fucking tone.

I know that the origin of this word makes the remark even more problematic.

Decades ago I used to be able to fix an engine, and back then it was interesting indeed. But nowadays days, I am afraid, it’s pretty much clerical work too: you connect a computer to it, the computer tells you which part to replace. Intellectual work now is probably network administration or something…

dsquared @20 – yes, Chomsky has that quasi-Marxist ‘everything is structural, end of story’ attitude. He’s willing to acknowledge the existence of subvening human action when it comes to corporate power running smoothly (in very broad brush – control is exerted by managers). He’s not concerned though, it seems, to do much of the sorely-needed work of analysing the sociological and social-psychological phenomena involved in explaining how not-unusually-evil people combine to perform something functionally equivalent to dastardly conspiracies.

And when it comes to state and other covert criminal activity, he wants none of it. He talks about alternative 9-11 consp. thys (to many aspects of which, btw, I can’t see any justifiable approach other than suspension of judgement) here, trotting out the usual ex cathedrisms about how easy it is for whistleblowers to pull down the covert-action house of cards (the ‘virulent plague’ model of truth), etc.

He then revealingly retrenches to ‘who cares?’. Yes, such matters are solely a distraction from preaching to the coverted about (yawn) Orwellian use of language, so, yes – who cares?

The consensus against ‘conspiracy theories’ (a propaganda term as loaded as ‘WMD’ but unreservedly used by Chomsky) pervades political print from Popper to Chomsky – and btw appears to include CT’s very own Henry, with this bit of censorship accompanied by gross misrepresentation. (Sorry, but it’s true – and rather surprising I thought.)

As Robin Ramsay points out, academia is not just unconcerned with deep politics, parapolitics, covert action hypothesising, whatever you care to call it, but enforce a pretty strong taboo against it – if it threatens to go anywhere near any of yer actual specifics.

I thought it was hilarious when I read that Michael Kelly got his weaselly little ass killed in Iraq. He richly deserved it. No, I’m serious. The little scumbag was a major cheerleader for an illegal war of aggression, based on a hoax, that got a million Iraqis killed. I’m glad he’s dead.

Actually, I seem to (vaguely) remember Manufacturing Consent describing the mechanics of how the right people get into the right positions in a hierarchy; the usual “survival of the fittest” sort of thing, IIRC.

Well, I quit blogging (you’re welcome!) because I realized that Hilzoy (a leading indicator) would decide that things are OK again, so that she could quit blogging.

Nothing will be rolled back, any more than it was by Carter or by Clinton. There are about as many crazies as ever, and they haven’t lost their spirit in the slightest. Obama was tossed the biggest hot potato since the Civil War, and if he doesn’t succeed, the crazies will be back.

For the xth time, George, would you be so kind as to direct me to those people?

Frankly, Michael, this is getting a bit tedious. It might be true true that Chomsky doesn’t name names in the passage of Hegemony and Survival you quote, but he gives a handful of examples in other places that shows up in a five minute google search. Anyway, you could start with this link:

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200303–.htm

And there you have Bill Keller having incredibly offensive words. Besides, what Chomsky repeats tediously is usually sourced in one of his earlier work. In that case, I distinctly remember the existence of (rather funny) precise quotes in one of my audio book. If you are sincere about a fair assessment of this question, Michael, then I will make the effort of listening to them until I find the relevant passage, but I will do so only if I have the assurance that you in turn will acknowledge that his characterization was not baseless once I find the direct sourced quote (as I know I will). I write if because I must confess that your apparent unwillingness to concede that Geo is right in your conflicting interpretations of the passage under dispute, something which is evident even to someone with such a limited command of English as myself, does not suggest you approach this issue with the maximum possible good faith.

Now let’s get serious and forget about that retired linguistics professor. The covering of the Afghan war in the US media was terrible beyond imagination. If you have any doubt about it, you could start from this page and work your way through a few of the links. All the necessary details about ridiculing protesters are meticulously archived.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=18&region_id=10&pager_start=20

Ah, now I think we are reaching the crux of the disagreement. You say Laura Rozen simply contested the prediction on the merit; I would say that, though she is impeccably civil, the piece you linked is exactly part of the problem in question. The article you linked is not, by any mean, a fair assessment of the situation of Afghanistan at the time of writing, and yet I suppose it is at the very end of the spectrum of what was acceptable in the US at the time. “Crying wolf?” As Donald Johnson said, about 20,000 did die of starvation. “The lead U.N. food agency, the World Food Program (WFP), has been getting 2,000 tons of food a day into Afghanistan — up from 200 tons a day before Sept. 11”. Sure. The reason being that before Sept. 11, the main concern of aid agencies was not famine seeing that the flow of food in the country was not disturbed by a war (or threat thereof).

To me the following facts remain inescapable: US elite opinion apparently took for granted that the war in Afghanistan was just and humanitarian. Yet, taking in account how the US army was structured at the time (and not a fantasy military campaign), it was certain that there would be massive civilian casualties from bombing, and taking in account the way Afghanistan was structured at the time, it was certain that there would be a famine in the following winter. This was certain on Sept. 11 (indeed, in the game of “what were you doing when you learnt of the attack”, my answer is “writing a memo on that very subject for the French Air Force”, not literally true of course, but that’s what I started doing at this very moment). If pressed to give an evaluation of the number of casualties, I would have said (at the time) 3000 from bombing, 5000 from famine within 6 months. Aid agencies gave a much direr evaluation of the second part. It turned out that I was apparently underestimating widely myself.

I think reasonable people can differ on whether, based on these facts, one should have supported the war in Afghanistan on Sept. 11. I did not, but I can understand people who did at the time.

However, I do think it was criminal to support the war in Afghanistan without knowing these facts or without paying any attention to them and I do emphatically think that writing “Was the aid groups’ opposition to bombing ideological?”, not to mention “the opposition was mostly limited to the people who are reflexively against the American use of power,” either timid supporters or “isolationists, the doctrinaire left and the soft-headed types Christopher Hitchens described as people who, ‘discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’” is, well, I will strive to remain civil but, let’s say hopefully not the best instance of moral clarity and intelligence displayed by the authors of these quotes.

Thank you for your courteous response and for your thanks (undeserved in my opinion). Of course we clearly disagree on one point: I am myself much more opposed to the war in Afghanistan now that I was on prudential grounds in Sept. 2001, having felt twice in between the bitter remorse of widely underestimating the human sufferings caused by war. But so gracious is your reply to my not so gracious comments that it is a pleasure to acknowledge in return that “looks like what’s happening is some kind of silent genocide” was a very poor choice of words, a cheapening of the word genocide and precisely the kind of language Chomsky would have rightly denounced in a reverse situation.