Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky Page A

contagion,” in Henry Kissinger’s thoughtful phrase, referring to Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist Chile.
    Reagan’s murderous assault on Central America was not limited to Guatemala, of course. In most of the region the agencies of terror were government security forces that had been armed and trained by Washington.
    One country was different: Nicaragua. It had an army to defend its population. Reagan therefore had to organize right-wing guerrilla forces to wage the fight.
    In 1986, the World Court, in N ICARAGUA V . U NITED S TATES , condemned the U.S. for “unlawful use of force” in Nicaragua and ordered the payment of reparations. The United States’ response to the court’s decree was to escalate the proxy war.
    The U.S. Southern Command ordered the guerrillas to attack virtually defenseless civilian targets, not to “duke it out” with the Nicaraguan army, according to Southcom’s General John Gavin testimony to Congress in 1987.
    Rights organizations (the same ones that were giving a bad rap to genocidaire Ríos Montt) had condemned the war in Nicaragua all along but vehemently protested Southcom’s “soft-target” tactics.
    The American commentator Michael Kinsley reprimandedthe rights organizations for departing from good form. He explained that a “sensible policy” must “meet the test of cost-benefit analysis,” evaluating “the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end.”
    Naturally, we Americans have the right to conduct the analysis—thanks, presumably, to our inherent nobility and stellar record ever since the days when the continent was cleared of the native scourge.
    The nature of the “democracy that will emerge” was hardly obscure. It is accurately described by the leading scholar of “democracy promotion,” Thomas Carothers, who worked on such projects in the Reagan State Department.
    Carothers concludes, regretfully, that U.S. influence was inversely proportional to democratic progress in Latin America, because Washington would only tolerate “limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied (in) quite undemocratic societies.”
    There has been no change since.
    In 1999, President Clinton apologized for American crimes in Guatemala, but no action was taken.
    There are countries that rise to a higher level than idle apology without action. Guatemala, despite its continuing travails, has carried out the unprecedented act of bringing a former head of state to trial for his crimes, something we might remember on the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
    Also perhaps unprecedented is an article in the N EW Y ORK T IMES by Elisabeth Malkin, headlined “Trial on Guatemalan Civil War Carnage Leaves Out U.S. Role.” Even acknowledgment of one’s own crimes is very rare.
    Rare to nonexistent are actions that could alleviate someof the crimes’ horrendous consequences—for example, for the United States to pay the reparations to Nicaragua ordered by the World Court. The absence of such actions provides one measure of the chasm that separates us from where a civilized society ought to be.

WHO OWNS THE EARTH?
    July 4, 2013
T HIS ARTICLE IS ADAPTED FROM A COMMENCEMENT SPEECH BY N OAM C HOMSKY ON J UNE 14, 2013, AT THE A MERICAN U NIVERSITY OF B EIRUT .
    With wrenching tragedies only a few miles away, and still worse catastrophes perhaps not far removed, it may seem wrong, perhaps even cruel, to shift attention to other prospects that, although abstract and uncertain, might offer a path to a better world—and not in the remote future.
    I’ve visited Lebanon several times and witnessed moments of great hope, and of despair, that were tinged with the Lebanese people’s remarkable determination to overcome and to move forward.
    The first time I visited—if that’s the right word—was