Imperial Ambitions: Conversations with Noam Chomsky on the Post-9/11 World is a 2005 Metropolitan Books American Empire Project publication of interviews with American linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky conducted and edited by award-winning journalist David Barsamian of Alternative Radio.
In the interviews Chomsky offers his opinions on such topics as the occupation of Iraq, the doctrine of pre-emptive attack, and the threat to international peace posed by the U.S. drive for global domination, in which, according to Deirdre Fernand, writing in The Times, "He lambasts all forms of American colonisation."
This is the 6th volume is a series of interviews between Barsamian and Chomsky that began with the 1992 Common Courage Press publication Chronicles of Dissent and was preceded by the 2001 South End Press publication Propaganda and the Public Mind; it is the first collection of interviews with Chomsky since the 2001 Seven Stories Press publication 9-11.
The interviews in this volume were conducted between March 22, 2003, and February 8, 2005, for the most part in Chomsky's office at M.I.T. and had previously been published in part in International Socialist Review, Monthly Review, The Progressive, The Sun and Z Magazine.
Contents
Introduction
In his introduction, written in Boulder, Colorado in July 2005, Barsamian discusses what it is like to interview Chomsky, after having done so for the past 20 years, and states that, "It's to be in the presence of someone who insists that it's not so complicated to understand the truth or to know how to act." He goes on to conclude that, "it is my hope that the conversations in this book will spark thought, discussion, and, most of all, activism."
One: Imperial Ambitions
In this interview conducted in Cambridge, Massachusetts on March 22, 2003, Chomsky begins by stating that the 2003 invasion of Iraq demonstrates a new doctrine he defines as preventative war where the U.S. moves to destroy any perceived challenge to its domination and in order to create this norm Saddam Hussein was falsely portrayed to the American people as a threat to their existence. If the establishment of a new regime in Iraq is successful he postulates that the U.S. will target other nations such as Venezuela or Iran in order to establish control over oil production and that the build-up to a U.S.-Turkish-Israeli invasion of Iran is already underway with the Israeli airforce flying reconnaissance missions from U.S. bases in Turkey and attempts to stir-up Azeri nationalist forces over the border. He adds however that this attack will only go ahead if Iran is perceived as unable to fight back and that this has encouraged Iran to undertake the development of nuclear weapons just as Iraq was encouraged to do so by the Israeli bombing of the Osirak reactor in 1981. He concludes by stating that anti-war protestors should not lose hope but prepare for the long haul like the abolitionist and civil rights movements did before.
Two: Collateral Language
In this interview conducted in Boulder, Colorado on April 5, 2003, Chomsky begins by musing on the progress of co-ordinated propaganda efforts first used by the British government and later U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to gain the backing of the American public for joining the First World War, then by Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann in the 1920s to turn the on-job control of Taylorism into the off-job control, and in the elitist policies of Harold Laswell in the 1930s that had their origins in the Madisonian Model and would re-appear in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, before moving largely into the private sector with the abolition of U.S. President Ronald Reagan's Office of Public Diplomacy in the 1980s. He sees Karl Rove as the inheritor of this legacy with the instigation of a campaign to instil fear in the American populace with false claims about Iraq and portray George W. Bush as their saviour, so that they will accept a domestic policy that goes against their own interests. He postulates that there is a propensity for fear particular to U.S. culture, possibly related to the country's history, that makes the American people especially susceptible to this form of propaganda and that it is necessary for them to develop an attitude of critical examination in order to overcome this.