- "It is a frightened country and it is easy to conjure
up an imminent threat," Chomsky said - when asked how Bush could get
reelected - "They have a card that they can play - terrify the population
with some invented threat, and that is not very hard to do," he said.
- U.S. Dissident Says Bush Needs Fear for Reelection
-
- HAVANA (Reuters) - U.S. linguist
and political dissident Noam Chomsky said on Wednesday that President Bush
will have to "manufacture" another threat to American security
to win reelection in 2004 after U.S failure in occupying Iraq.
-
- Chomsky, attending a Latin American social sciences conference
in Cuba, said that since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, the
Bush administration had redefined U.S. national security policy to include
the use of force abroad, with or without U.N. approval.
-
- "It is a frightened country and it is easy to conjure
up an imminent threat," Chomsky said at the launching of a Cuban edition
of a book of interviews published by the Mexican newspaper La Jornada,
when asked how Bush could get reelected.
-
- "They have a card that they can play ... terrify
the population with some invented threat, and that is not very hard to
do," he said.
-
- After the "disaster" of the U.S. invasion of
Iraq, Bush could turn his sights on Communist-run Cuba, which his administration
officials have charged with developing a biological weapons research program,
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of linguistics said.
-
- Chomsky said the military occupation of Iraq, to topple
a "horrible monster running it but not a threat to anyone," was
a failure.
-
- "The country had been devastated by sanctions. The
invasion ended sanctions. The tyrant is gone and there is no outside support
for domestic dissidence," he said. "It takes real talent to fail
in this endeavor."
-
- Chomsky said it was reasonable to assume the Bush administration
would try to "manufacture a short-term improvement in the economy"
by incurring in enormous federal government debt and "imposing burdens
on future generations."
-
- The Bush administration was a continuation of the Ronald
Reagan presidency that declared a national emergency over the threat posed
by Nicaragua's leftist government in the 1980s, he said.
-
- "The same people were able to present Grenada as
a threat to survival of the United States the last time they were in office,"
Chomsky said, in reference to the U.S. invasion of the Caribbean island
in 1983 to thwart Cuban influence.
-
- Chomsky, a leftist icon who is better known today for
his critique of U.S. foreign policy that for his revolutionary theory of
syntax and grammar in the 1960s, gave a lecture on the U.S politics of
domination on Tuesday night that was attended by Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
-
- The author of "Language and mind," "Manufacturing
Consent," "Profit Over People" and "9-11" said
the Bush administration was out to dominate the world by the use of military
force if need be, and Iraq was the first test.
-
- Chomsky criticized Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria
Aznar for backing the United States and Britain in invading Iraq under
a false pretext that the Arab country possessed weapons of mass destruction.
-
- Chomsky praised Cuba's defiance of U.S. hostility and
trade sanctions for four decades. But he also criticized the jailing of
75 Cuban dissidents earlier this year by Castro's government.
-
- "Yes, I have criticized them for that," he
said in an interview on August 28 with Radio Havana. "I think it was
a mistake."
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