Noam Chomsky on Rojava: a Correspondence (12/21/2018)
With Trump’s recent Syria withdrawal announcement scrambling the discourse, I noticed a lot of people debating WWND: what would Noam do? So I asked. I sent a long email and got a prompt and thorough response:
Here is the my original email, his response, and my follow-up:
“Dear Professor,
People are going mad online trying to square the circle of your views on Syria. Their frameworks of anti-imperialism seem to be clashing with the idea of US military support of Rojava, as in your NY Review of Books open letter:
Could you clarify “continue military support for the SDF.” Glenn Greenwald seems to think you mean some form of military support qualitatively different than what the US is/has been doing.
One thing I’ve noticed in mainstream discussion is false dichotomy. Imperialist/isolationist, hawk/dove, warmonger/peacenik. Obviously you can intervene a lot nonviolently, as in the other three planks in the open letter. Logical fallacies should be rooted out wherever they are, correct?
It seems to me that anti-imperialists could consider some factors whether an intervention is justifiable. One is, is the US invited by the local government. In this case yes. Is the local government a human rights abuser or waging aggressive war? In this case, no. They are defensive. As you know, the record of Turkey against them is down the mainstream memory hole, but clearly they are under threat.
Another question could be whether we should intervene or let someone else do it. Jeffrey Sachs says there should be a UN security vote, but would there be a veto? Could a veto be overcome by concessions that the corrupt security state wouldn’t accept, such as on Israeli territorial issues? If the hypothetical veto were to stand, should respect for the greater good of international law compel us not to help them?
People tend to want to have a consistent position historically, and the mainstream narrative tars left anti-imperialists as opposing effective measures to prevent “worthy lives” genocides. I know you get smeared as a denier of genocide in the Balkans or Cambodia, but to me the thing to deny is that they had to let a situation get to the point where an extreme level of violence was required to stop an ongoing genocide, rather than peacefully changing material circumstances along the way many miles upstream from genocide — including our own responsibility in causing it, like our bombing in Cambodia leading to the Khmer Rouge, or support of/failure to rein in Turkey from Clinton until now. Is this restating your position correctly?
I take it as kind of a fluke that every now and then the interests of the imperial military industrial complex could happen to align with a genuine self-determined movement of national liberation. As with Trump, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. If he says to get out of Syria, and I already believed that we shouldn’t be there, it is alarming to see people not want to get out if it’s just to oppose him — like cutting off the nose to spite the face. But Barbara Lee and others say that he will do the right thing in the wrong way, perhaps leaving the Kurds high and dry. Is this the real risk of overdoing it on anti-imperialism?
Is peaceful partition the ideal endgame? The other options seem to include genocide in the most literal sense, if Erdogan is a Hitler-type figure. (Of course when we compare to Hitler/Germany, I what year people mean: 1923, 1933, 1941; how far along.) When I hear of Trump talk about immigrants as the fable of the old lady who took in a snake only to have it bite her, it sounds a lot like the poisonous mushroom a la Der Stürmer.
Anyways, I think there is a real phenomenon where some of your fans’ egos can’t take that they might disagree with you. People have a hard time with disagreement these days. The propaganda term “divisiveness” is overused by establishmentarians, but I do think it’s really true that people seem less equipped temperamentally and logically or persuasively to handle disagreement. People turn to emotional appeals, which can be fine but only if the underlying logic is correct. In fact if you point out a logical fallacy, people think you’re a nerd or a “pedant.” and I think that’s wrong. Lazy thinking abounds.
I am a fan of Glenn’s, but one thing he says that bothers me is that he doesn’t get involved in discussion of Syria because the debate is too heated online. He says this half-jokingly, but I think it would deny a moral obligation to discuss heated issues. It’s much worse what Syrians are facing than being flamed online.
Thanks for your time,
Michael Fantauzzo
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From Noam Chomsky: (emphases mine)
Don’t understand what is unclear. The few US troops in the area are a deterrent to a Turkish assault that could be murderous and destructive. Since I don’t enjoy seeing Kurds massacred once again, the way they are being massacred right now in southeast Turkey, I think it makes sense to keep these small forces as a deterrent. There is no other potential deterrent. The goal should [be] a holding action until, with luck, some diplomatic procedure can lead to the least worst outcome. I don’t think there is an ideal endgame. Any likely outcome I can think of is ugly.
Yes, logical fallacies should be rooted out, and the anti-imperialist doesn’t stop being a human being, one who recognizes that generally valid principles can’t be applied mechanically without considering circumstances.
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Michael Fantauzzo Follow-up:
Thank you for your response. I think what is unclear to some on the anti-imperialist left is whether there should be an absolute commitment to have no US troops stationed anywhere abroad. For lack of a better word, some are isolationists in that they want no foreign commitments until conditions are better at home. Others may be genuinely opposed to rise of the Military Industrial complex and see withdrawing all troops as paramount to confronting it. There are also Constitutional concerns.
Then you filter it through Trump and the mainstream media, and how people are bound to make strange bedfellows on the issue no matter where they stand. Do people want to side with Trump, or do they side with the Blob? Of course politics is about strategy and conditional circumstances. It’s very unclear what if anything will happen, whether US troops would be pulled out of Syria totally, which seems doubtful. So I find myself wondering if we need to pull out of Afghanistan, Iraq, the rest of Syria etc. but not Rojava specifically.
The holding pattern question seems to be a tough one too, considering that it could be a pretext for the maintenance of an unfair status quo, as you describe with Israel claiming to only be holding onto territory in anticipation of deal that they know (and make sure) isn’t coming. Popular attitude could reach the point where people want to rip the proverbial band-aid and leave. Colin Powell talked about the pottery barn rule: “you break it you own it” before the Iraq invasion, so there could be some obligation to stay in that sense, if we were wanted and trusted to do the job. The people of Rojava may want US forces to stay, but the the people of the US may not have the confidence that staying there is worth it.
One last thing is that you mention there is no alternative deterrent; a scholar named Kamran Matin shared on the Emergency Committee For Rojava Facebook page that “France have said they will not withdraw their own forces and that this episode shows the need for an independent European army and foreign policy.”
So perhaps there is some hope for an alternative to US troops. But somebody has to have troops there one way or another I suppose.
I do appreciate your cool logic in these and all circumstances. I hope you will let me share this exchange. Happy holidays!
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Michael Fantauzzo, 2L at George Washington University Law School
