Free 9-11 by Noam Chomsky Page A

case El Salvador, against similar General Assembly resolutions). The terrorist war expanded in accordance with the official policy of attacking “soft targets”—undefended civilian targets, like agricultural collectives and health clinics—instead of engaging the Nicaraguan army. The terrorists were able to carry out these instructions, thanks to the complete control of Nicaraguan air space by the U.S. and the advanced communications equipment provided to them by their supervisors.
    It should also be recognized that these terrorist actions were widely approved. One prominent commentator, Michael Kinsley, at the liberal extreme of the mainstream,argued that we should not simply dismiss State Department justifications for terrorist attacks on “soft targets”: a “sensible policy” must “meet the test of cost-benefit analysis,” he wrote, an analysis of “the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end”—“democracy” as the U.S. understands the term, an interpretation illustrated quite clearly in the region. It is taken for granted that U.S. elites have the right to conduct the analysis and pursue the project if it passes their tests.
    Even more dramatically, the idea that Nicaragua should have the right to defend itself was considered outrageous across the mainstream political spectrum in the United States. The U.S. pressured allies to stop providing Nicaragua with arms, hoping that it would turn to Russia, as it did; that provides the right propaganda images. The Reagan administration repeatedly floated rumors that Nicaragua was receiving jet fighters from Russia—to protect its airspace, as everyone knew, and to prevent U.S. terrorist attacks against “soft targets.” The rumors were false, but the reaction was instructive. The doves questioned the rumors, but said that if they are true, of course we must bomb Nicaragua, because it will be a threat to our security. Database searches revealed that there was scarcely a hint that Nicaragua had the right to defend itself. That tells us quite a lot about the deep-seated “culture of terrorism” that prevails in Western civilization.
    This is by no means the most extreme example; I mention it because it is uncontroversial, given the World Court decision, and because the failed efforts of Nicaragua to pursuelawful means, instead of setting off bombs in Washington, provide a model for today, not the only one. Nicaragua was only one component of Washington’s terrorist wars in Central America in that terrible decade, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and four countries in ruins.
    During the same years the U.S. was carrying out large-scale terrorism elsewhere, including the Middle East: to cite one example, the car bombing in Beirut in 1985 outside a mosque, timed to kill the maximum number of civilians, with 80 dead and 250 casualties, aimed at a Muslim sheikh, who escaped. And it supported much worse terror: for example, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that killed some 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, not in self-defense, as was conceded at once; and the vicious “iron fist” atrocities of the years that followed, directed against “terrorist villagers,” as Israel put it. And the subsequent invasions of 1993 and 1996, both strongly supported by the U.S. (until the international reaction to the Qana massacre in 1996, which caused Clinton to draw back). The post-1982 toll in Lebanon alone is probably another 20,000 civilians.
    In the 1990s, the U.S. provided 80 percent of the arms for Turkey’s counterinsurgency campaign against Kurds in its southeast region, killing tens of thousands, driving 2-3 million out of their homes, leaving 3,500 villages destroyed (7 times Kosovo under NATO bombs), and with every imaginable atrocity. The arms flow had increased sharply in 1984 as Turkey launched its terrorist attack and began to decline to previous levels only in 1999, when the