Politics: Noam Chomsky's article in The Guardian

Noam Chomsky , eternal critic of the North-American administration under Bush, has written an interesting article in THe Guardian to the title: "Their view of the world is through a bombsight"... which already tells a lot.

According to Chomsky, American support for Israel's "unwinnable aim of destroying Hizbullah only boosts its support in Lebanon and beyond".

He writes that:
"In Lebanon, a little-honoured truce remains in effect - yet another in a decades-long series of ceasefires between Israel and its adversaries in a cycle that, as if inevitably, returns to warfare, carnage and human misery. Let's describe the current crisis for what it is: a US-Israeli invasion of Lebanon, with only a cynical pretence to legitimacy. Amid all the charges and (...)."

"This is hardly the first time that Israel has invaded Lebanon to eliminate an alleged threat. The most important of the US-backed Israeli invasions of Lebanon, in 1982, was widely described in Israel as a war for the West Bank. It was undertaken to end the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's annoying calls for a diplomatic settlement. Despite many different circumstances, the July invasion falls into the same pattern. (…)"

"Israeli writer Uri Avnery observed that the Israeli chief of staff Dan Halutz, a former air force commander, "views the world below through a bombsight". Much the same is true of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice and other top Bush administration planners. As history reveals, that view of the world is not uncommon among those who wield most of the means of violence (…)".

"The core issue - the Israel-Palestine conflict - can be settled by diplomacy, if the US and Israel abandon their rejectionist commitments. Other outstanding problems in the region are also susceptible to negotiation and diplomacy. Their success can never be guaranteed. But we can be reasonably confident that viewing the world through a bombsight will bring further misery and suffering, perhaps even in "apocalyptic terms"."

Noam Chomsky's most recent book is "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy"; he is professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the USA.