Chomsky and Ian Williams Engage in a Battle Royale
September 14th, 2009 § 1 Comment
It looks like Chomsky and Ian Williams have been having a tiff. At the words “Chomsky” and “tiff,” the first question is: what’s the body count? The expected has occurred, but Williams has opted for a peculiar sort of posterity. Call it the walking dead. Like most zombies, Williams’s mental capabilities aren’t so keen—but in his case it’s a state he’s been in since 1999, when Tony Blair and Bill Clinton claimed that we could save Kosovo by bombing it. Williams notoriously signed on, his integrity and mental faculties swiftly collapsed, and he’s been a bit of a mess ever since.
Anyway, here’s the deal. Chomsky said something perfectly sensible about the R2P [Responsibility to Protect] doctrine, pointing out that “A…principle is that virtually every use of force in international affairs has been justified in terms of R2P, including the worst monsters.” Referring to what is frequently described as an exception to a pretty uniformly crummy historical record—the NATO assault on Yugoslavia, described by Blair as the fight “for a world where dictators are no longer able to visit horrific punishments on their own peoples” under the legend “A New Generation Draws the Line,” Chomsky added the following:
The NATO bombing did not end the atrocities [in Kosovo] but rather precipitated by far the worst of them, as had been anticipated by the NATO command and the White House. The conclusions that are so richly documented by the Western records are reinforced by the indictment of Miloševic, issued by the International Tribunal at the height of the bombing. With a single exception, the crimes charged follow the bombing.
The states of the global South, having a bit of experience with imperial violence, roundly condemned the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as illegal and having no justification in international law. It’s a bit obvious to point out, but Chomsky didn’t write that all interventions are a priori wrong, noting that some regions of the world would benefit from R2P: the Gaza strip, for example. More generally, he observed that “R2P can be a valuable tool.”
All of this is perfectly true and utterly sensible. What does Ian Williams say in response? He resorts to casuistic and verbose hyper-ventilation: noting of Chomsky that “he claimed that the NATO air raids on Serbia actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo. This latter claim isn’t only untrue but morally unpalatable in its spurious causality.” Now Williams can craft a beautiful copy of a drink-sodden Christopher Hitchens, no doubt about that. But is that something to aspire to? [We all remember what happened when Hitchens picked a fight with Chomsky].
Chomsky responded thusly:
There is massive evidence about Kosovo in impeccable Western sources, never questioned. That includes two compilations of documents by the State Department, detailed reports of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe Kosovo Verification Mission monitors, a British parliamentary inquiry, reports of NATO, the UN, and more. As I wrote in the paper on R2P to which Williams refers, the results are unequivocal: The worst atrocities began as the bombing started (to be precise, there was a slight increase a few days earlier when the monitors were withdrawn, over Serbian objections, in preparation for the bombings). On March 27, NATO Commander General Wesley Clark informed the press that the vicious Serbian reaction was “entirely predictable.” He added shortly after that the sharp escalation of atrocities had been “fully anticipated” and was “not in any way” a concern of the political leadership.
Chomsky is correct: the OSCE-KVM reports as well as the State Department compilations find that the period from the end of December 1998 to March 19 1999 was marked by a relative lull in hostilities and concomitant atrocities, with the exception of the massacre at Racak, about which the facts as they were then known were somewhat murky, anyway. Williams, unwisely—by this juncture insensately—responds: “One hesitates to teach logic, let alone linguistics, to the distinguished professor, but his use of the world ‘precipitate’ shifts the blame for the massacres and mass deportations that he admits took place from the actual perpetrators to those who were trying to stop them.”
One can quibble that Williams scarcely hesitates to teach Chomsky logic, although one can quibble further that in fact Williams isn’t teaching “logic” to the professor, but rather exemplifying illogic. A note to Williams: responsibility and blame can be shared. Williams also seems to make pretty frequent trips to the thesaurus, so dictionary.com would be a good diversion to learn what “teach,” “logic,” and “precipitate” mean. The massive refugee flows and massacres were predicted not only by Clark but by Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, who informed President Clinton of the possibility of “300,000 to 400,000 refugees passing into Albania” if NATO started bombing. In the most general terms, according to the Washington Post, “policymakers considered the possibility that bombing would spur Serb forces to harsher violence on the ground.”
Chomsky’s response?
In responding, Williams ignores..[the relevant facts] completely and instead haughtily affirms exactly what I wrote: that the Serbian crimes followed the bombing. Throughout, he pretends not to understand the difference between “perpetrate” and “precipitate” (my accurate paraphrase of Clark’s warning). He writes that the bombing provided “an opportunity” for which Milosevic had been waiting. Perhaps true, but if so that clearly reinforces the conclusion of General Clark and the White House that the NATO bombing would precipitate these crimes, as it did.
It is at this point that a surgical team waiting to extract organs would be eagerly waiting for the next retort. Its presence could signal that Ian Williams is brain-dead; its absence, a more ambiguous sign. Williams decides that bluster is the best response:
I look hard but fail to see a moral or logical compass in Chomsky’s fast and loose recital of dates and deaths. In the end, his argument reduces to two basic principles. If someone other than the United States commits mass murder they did so with American encouragement, and so the guilt is ultimately Washington’s.
And then adding with characteristic élan,
More to the point, Chomsky is once again evading the issue. A linguist should know better. I can indeed tell the difference between perpetrating and precipitating. His use of “precipitating” in this context is an outstanding example of the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc: after this, so because of it. Hence, all the atrocities that followed the bombing are to be attributed to the bombing. Once again, he is faulty both in logic and in fact.
One would be hard-pressed to find textual evidence supporting the first statement in Chomsky’s work. As for the second, the evidence Williams adduces—atrocities in 1998, post hoc contingency plans for mass-slaughter—are irrelevant marginalia, while Chomsky’s point is rather that intelligence and military analysts and government officials knew well what the consequences of the bombing would be and are thus partially responsible for the consequences of the bombing. One could add that imminent threats of bombing in late March 1999 led to the withdrawal of the OSCE-KVM human-rights monitors, or that the US dithered in putting the monitors in Kosovo in the first place—they were supposed to have arrived immediately after the Oct. 13 1998 ceasefire, while they in fact arrived over a month later, while the Kosovo Liberation Army built up its forces, fueling the cycle of violence.
But Williams doesn’t want to spend his time scribbling away about such stuff. Maybe he thinks it’s obvious, or irrelevant. Indeed, there are real issues at hand: he points out in his latest ascent to the podium that Chomsky “still has not suggested how Milosevic’s crimes might have been stopped, or indeed whether they should have been.” The podium may be the wrong metaphor: the latter accusation lets us know that Williams is frolicking in the gutter, while I suspect Chomsky’s next response will be to point out that one doesn’t stop crimes against humanity by making them worse. Obvious? Sure. Will Williams get it? Something makes me doubt it.
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