Chomsky on the Death of Osama bin Laden.

Noam Chomsky believes American power is a uniquely evil force in that it is incapable of having any other motivating factor but the lowest available to the imagination of Noam Chomsky.

ONE of the more annoying reactions to the news of Osama bin Laden’s death has been the warning that Al Qaeda will now certainly seek revenge. No, no, no. The Navy SEAL attack which killed bin Laden was revenge, thank you. Another annoying reaction has been unease at how Obama’s aggressive order hews uncomfortably close to Bush-era mentalities regarding terror. Noam Chomsky mostly sticks to the latter in his excruciating commentary on the assassination of OBL. (Read Hitchens’ response to the Chomsky article here.)

Chomsky goes unhinged in the very first sentence, declaring OBL’s sprawling concrete fortress as “unprotected”. True, the SEALS were on the unfriendly side of the 18ft defense walls of world’s most wanted terrorist’s fortress, deep into the territory of a terror-state and a stones-throw from that state’s terror-sympathizing military. But they were shot at only once, making it less of a ultra-elite-covert-operation and more of a troubled-teen-checking-in-with-his-parole-officer type thing.

He then takes on the assassination itself, criticizing (or, more accurately, quoting those who criticized) the extralegal pretense of invading Pakistan. Chomsky quotes, and obviously agrees with, the Atlantic’s veteran Middle East correspondent Yochi Dreazen:

“The decision to kill bin Laden outright was the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama administration’s counter terror policy. The Bush administration captured thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast, has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take them alive.”

Unilateral killings of high level terror targets inside sovereign nations who refuse/are incapable of action was a signature campaign promise from candidate Obama. Believing it to be a gaffe, the GOP even pounced on it in the run up to the 2008 primaries. Mitt Romney declared that the Senator from Illinois had gone from “Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week”. In any case, Chomsky rejects this policy in a tone which suggests he finds it even less just than the mass indefinite detention policy under Bush. It may be. It does seem, however, that the targeted killings aren’t as politically damaging for the United States as was indefinite detention. Perhaps it is because major powers, including the US, have been engaging in clandestine murders since forever and that people simply expect it, whereas getting preachy about the sanctity of your values with one side of your mouth while defending the purgatory camp at Guantanamo Bay with the other side is to take hubris and hypocrisy to the breach.

Speaking of hubris, Chomsky goes on to assert that not only did George W. Bush commit crimes “vastly exceeding” those of OBL, but that this “uncontroversial” opinion can only be opposed by “ardent supporters” of the former President. Now, I worked damn hard as a grassroots organizer in 2004 to defeat President Bush, and that November I proudly watched the ballot box click to “000001″ as I cast both the first presidential vote of my precinct and of my life. So as an active “non-supporter” of the Bush Presidency, I respectfully disagree.

Chomsky’s moral relativism is such that he argues that since Imperial Japan and Hitler believed that what they were doing was good, we are in no position to say otherwise. Likewise, Osama bin Laden no doubt thought his franchise idea, to submit large portions of the human race to a misogynistic, homophobic, imperialistic, chauvinistic, fatalistic, backward state of credulity, was a good thing too. Who’s to say? As it happens, the dependable thing about totalitarian values is that their versions of heaven and hell are indistinguishable: homogeneity, endless praise, conformity, and obedience. Even the rosiest-totalitarian assessment leaves one with plenty of filth with which to be repelled. Contrast this to women’s rights, sexual liberation, religious liberty, and the freedoms of speech and association. Failure to admit that the bin Laden vision would have been a tremendously worse fate for our Arab brothers and sisters than team-Bush’s ambition of spreading Jeffersonian democracy is to choose to stroke an emotional attachment to America-hate at reason’s expense. That American energy firms stood to gain from the spreading of democracy changes nothing: one’s disdain for murderous oppression should be greater than their disdain for corporate profiteering, no matter how obscene.

Chomsky then goes on a bizarre tangent, whereby he accuses the US of cruelly naming it’s military weapons after peoples it has vanquished, citing “Apache”, “Tomahawk”, “Black Hawk”, and the operation to kill OBL “Geronimo”, specifically. This, he writes, would be like the Luftwaffe calling its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy”. In this Chomsky manages to be simultaneously ignorant and too-clever-by-half. Apache, Tomahawk, and Black Hawk do have something in common: they are all symbols of ferocity, intimidation, and bravery. A tomahawk is an actual weapon, not a person. Geronimo may have been an actual person, but to virtually every American, “Geronimo” is an interjection commonly exclaimed immediately before one does something dangerous. It’s use was entirely appropriate.

Chomsky was one of the first intellectuals I ever admired, and I’ll always have a soft spot for him. But the less time I spend studying politics, and the more I spend on evolutionary biology and primatology, the less I see the world’s problems as a function of American design in specific, than of human design in general. Noam Chomsky, on the other hand, sees American design everywhere, and it is always malicious, always corrupt. Noam Chomsky believes American power is a uniquely evil force in that it is incapable of having any other motivating factor but the lowest available to the imagination of Noam Chomsky.

I would have liked to see OBL go to trial. I would have liked to watched as the world’s best legal minds confronted him with his crimes and explain to the human race how he has blasphemed his species and why he must die. But dead he is, and on the list of things I should be outraged over, the particulars of his assassination are way, way, down.