University of Virginia Library

Dulce Et Decorum Non Est ... Noam Chomsky

SPECIAL TO THE CAVALIER DAILY

NOAM CHOMSKY, one of America's leading
linguists, has devoted much of his time since 1965 to
opposing the Vietnam War. Two of his books. At War
With Asia and America Power and the New Mandarins,
comprise a valuable critique of U.S. imperialism in the
Pacific.

Since November, 1970, when Mr. Chomsky was
interviewed in his office at M.I.T. by Harvard Crimson
reporters David N. Hollander and Garrett Epps. B-52
bombers from bases in Thailand and Okinawa have
attacked North Vietnam, Cambodia, and during the past
week, American and South Vietnamese troops invaded
Laos under cover of heavy American air support.

In spite of the speed with which events have occurred,
the interview retains its force as an important statement
on this growing war, and we are indebted to The Crimson
for permission to reprint it here. Ed.

Do you think the U.S. will escalate the war soon?

Well, it depends how you define escalation. There's
one component of the war that has been reduced, that is
the number of ground combat troops in South Vietnam.
But if you consider the areas of Indochina that are under
saturation bombing, that has already been escalated
under Nixon. Just take the bombing statistics alone, the
plain cold statistics the Pentagon gives out. Up to
August, 1970 40 per cent of the ordnance expended in
the entire war is under Nixon. In fact, the peak months
of bombing were early 1969, after Nixon got in, when it
reached the level of 130,000 tons a month—which is just
something beyond belief.

From what we understand, that kind of bombing does
very little to stop supplies from coming down. Does the
White House realize that the main effect of this bombing
is genocide?

I suppose. They more or less say so. Did you look at
the report of the Kennedy subcommittee on refugees
that came out on September 28? The report is written by
two young guys who didn't sign their names. They have
long sections with this material incorporated in it, and
it's very accurate. They point out that the purpose of the
bombing in Laos is two-fold: first, to destroy the
socio-economic structure of the Pathet Lao, and second,
to stop the North Vietnamese infiltration. It has some
marginal effect on the second but on the first is
extremely effective. In most of the country it's true that
the socio-economic structure-everything in other
words—has been destroyed. They don't call it genocide,
but it's another word for the same sort of thing.

In fact, they estimate that in Cambodia alone there
are about a million refugees already. That means refugees
from the American bombardment, since there's nothing
else for people to flee from. That's in addition to half a
million Vietnamese refugees in Cambodia, so a million
and a half in six months of war in a population of six and
a half million.

Robert Anson from Time magazine, who was
captured in Cambodia Time hasn't printed any of his
stuff on his captivity says that where he was there were
B-52 bombings regularly. He doesn't want to identify the
place, but it was central Cambodia not far from Pnom
Penh.

Most of that bombing now comes from Thailand, doesn't
it?

For years the bombing of Laos has been almost all
from Thailand.

How close do you think the U.S. is to winning in
Vietnam and Indochina — in other words, reducing the
NFL and other groups to a level where they'd just have
to be quiescent for a long time?

Well, as I understand it, for the last couple of years
the main American policy has been to try to destroy the
rural structures that were the basis for Vietnamese
revolution. And the same in Laos and I suppose the same
in Thailand and Cambodia. And they have succeeded in
that to a significant extent the destruction of rural
society is very extensive and you can see it just in the
refugee figures. The fact that Saigon has three and a half
million people instead of the 500,000 that it had 10
years ago is an indication of the success of this policy.
But this is a kind of tricky thing. They may very well
destroy the social base of the Viet Cong in Vietnam, or
the Pathet Lao in Laos, but that doesn't necessarily mean
that they win the ground war.

In Laos, the long run effect is that the Communists
are stronger on the ground than ever. The CIA mercenary
army in Laos, which is the main fighting force for the
Americans there is virtually destroyed. It's mainly the
Meo army, and the Kennedy report estimates that the
total population of the Meo is now down to about
200,000 from 400,000 a decade ago. The Dispatch
News Service correspondent in Vientiane who has
recently been investigating the Meo says that 12-year-old
boys are drafted into their army immediately and he'd
seen kids as young as eight in the Meo army.

That's the CIA mercenary army.

Yes, the CIA mercenary army. Everyone admits that
the Meo are virtually decimated. There are two CIA bases
in northern Laos. One called Long Cheng is probably the
last in Laos that is still occupied, and most people there
think that it may fall in the dry season offensive. If it
does, then that's the end of the Meos as an organized
community because then they'll have been entirely
driven out of the mountain areas and they'll have to go
to the other side as many of the Lao have done—which
means to live under the constant bombardment. Nobody
seems to think that they could survive in the lowland
areas, as an organized community at least.

In Vietnam, I would tend to believe the American
military reports that they have, in a sense, won a military
success in the countryside as a result of the bombing, the
sweeps, and the general destructive policy. But they're
left with fantastic chaos on their hands in the cities.
They've got millions of refugees in these teeming urban
slums.

In the cities themselves there is a recognition on the
part of a rather substantial part of the urban
population—even the urban elite, for the first time—that
unless they get the Americans out of there pretty quickly
they're going to bomb the country into the South China
Sea. And for that reason everyone says that there's a
tremendous upsurge of anti-Americanism in the cities.
Don Luce, for example, has written that it's unlike
anything before really deep seated anti-Americanism.

And the students, who were pretty quiescent a couple
of years ago, are apparently quite radical and organized
now. The schools were all closed down last spring. I
don't know if they've opened yet; I doubt it. There's a
tremendous amount of student action. There are war
veterans demonstrations. There's no doubt that the NLF
is very active there. A CIA report issued a couple of
weeks ago said that the NLF has about 30,000 agents in
the government. Probably something like that's right.

So they've sort of driven the population into these
urban centers where they're supposed to be controlled,
but then that raises the question of whether they can do
anything with this chaos they have created or whether is
will explode in the urban centers—which may very well
happen.

[OMITTED]

To what extend to you think people like Sam
Huntington are responsible for the policy of driving
people into the urban centers?

I don't know any reason to think that they're
responsible—I think he's commented on it accurately
Nobody can know from the outside just what
policy-making function these people have. They claim
that they're just doing research, but I've read the minutes
of one meeting of the Vietnam Studies Committee of
SEADAG [Southeast Asia Development Advisory
Group] the thing that Huntington headed, which
purports to be just a scholarly outfit where people come
do research on Southeast Asia.

But the minutes of the meeting I read were all
concerned with how to deal with the situation I just
described—that is, if the United States is driven into
elections, how they can manage to control them or
manipulate them, given the fact that the NLF is the most
powerful politically-organized force in the country,
which everybody concedes.

He has a paper which he presented to this
meeting—it's an interesting paper—study of how to
manipulate, cheat, and coerce in such a way that you can
win the elections even though you don't have any
popular force on your side, and the minutes of the
meeting are really quite amusing. Most of the people are
sort of skeptical whether we can do it and they suggest
other way.

So I don't know there are government
representatives present at these meetings and they clearly
have a policy-making orientation. Whether that has any
effect on policy I can't judge.

Do you think the U.S. has finally found a
counterinsurgency strategy that they think will work,
that they think they can use everywhere? There used to
be theorizing about such things as counter guerrilla
groups, now they have this theory of just bombing the
hell out of everything.

This is obviously an outsider's impression—I have no
access to anything but public documents—but reading
the reports of the Senate hearings and other things of
that sort you get the impression that everyone agrees
that Vietnam has been a disaster.

They say you can't learn anything from it except not
to do it that way, but that Laos has been very successful,
and that that ought to be the kind of model that we
ought to follow.

Continued