The legitimacy of these claims

by Sammyloccs

In this interview from 2003 Noam Chomsky claims that every president since WWII has committed crimes that should have got them indited.

  1. Eisenhower overthrew the conservative nationalist government of Iran with a military coup. He also overthrew the first democratic government in Guatemala. https://youtu.be/5BXtgq0Nhsc

  2. Kennedy invaded South Vietnam, using chemical weapons to destroy food crops and authorized napalm. He also lead massive campaigns of international terror against Cuba. https://youtu.be/5BXtgq0Nhsc?t=1m39s

  3. Johnson expanded the war in Indo China leaving millions dead. He also invaded the Dominican Republic to block a potential democratic revolution. https://youtu.be/5BXtgq0Nhsc?t=3m2s

He doesn’t even bother going over Nixon for obvious reasons.

  1. Ford endorsed the Indonesian invasion of East Timor which basically became genocide. He goes into some details about how Ford publicly denounced the actions of Indonesia, but secretly supported it. https://youtu.be/5BXtgq0Nhsc?t=3m36s

  2. Carter increased the flow of weapons to Indonesia, he arranged through Mondale, the vice president of Israel, to get Israel to send us Skyhawks to Indonesia. He also claims the Camp David agreement, which Carter had won the Nobel peace prize for, was a complete catastrophe. https://youtu.be/5BXtgq0Nhsc?t=5m12s

  3. Reagan was the first president to have been condemned by the International Court of Justice for what they called the unlawful use of force meaning (international terrorism) in the war against Nicaragua. https://youtu.be/5BXtgq0Nhsc?t=7m20s

  4. Bush Sr. The invasion of Panama killed ~3000 people but has never been investigated so it could be more. The invasion was to kidnap Noriega, who up till then had been on the U.S. payroll. His administration also refused to come to peace agreements in Iraq, even though there were plenty of opportunities. His methods of attaching would be considered criminal under the laws of war, like attacking infrastructure. https://youtu.be/5BXtgq0Nhsc?t=7m45s

  5. Clinton sent cruise missiles to Sudan to destroy what they knew to be a pharmaceutical plant. He also claimed that Clinton decided past UN resolutions obsolete and anachronistic, so he basically got rid of the international law. After that, the U.S. continued to fund extreme Israeli actions. https://youtu.be/5BXtgq0Nhsc?t=9m46s

Of course, these are just small summaries of what he said about each president, and he does go into greater details in the interview.

Thanks in advance!

ghostofherzl

Part 1

Eisenhower overthrew the conservative nationalist government of Iran with a military coup. He also overthrew the first democratic government in Guatemala. https://youtu.be/5BXtgq0Nhsc

I'm not qualified to discuss Guatemala. Eisenhower's actions regarding Iran and the military coup are well-known, generally speaking. The CIA participated in a coup that most historians argue was a primarily MI6-led operation that overthrew Mossadegh, the Prime Minister of Iran, and reasserted the control of the Shah in Iran. Mossadegh, who was a member of the Iranian Parliament and democratically elected, had been attempting to break some power away from the Shah, who still held power in Iran over various government functions, and had also been undertaking radical land reform and government reform policies with the use of emergency powers granted him by the Parliament. This was opposed by the British, and he had also nationalized the Iranian oil industry, which cut into British control of the Iranian oil industry. As a result, the coup was launched using existing discontent. Eisenhower's administration saw Mossadegh as a threat to Western interests and also as a potential leader who would move Iran towards the Soviet orbit, and as a result worked towards his ouster. It's a long story, but on the legal front, it's unclear why this would lead to indictment. Assuming the President can even be indicted criminally, particularly for foreign policy actions, while in office, it's unclear what "law" was violated that would be prosecutable and that a prosecutor would seek to indict for. Later on, the Office of Legal Counsel, the executive branch's legal authority of sorts, essentially concluded that no sitting President could be indicted, which is an opinion that likely would've been come to much earlier had the question been raised, so it would've required impeachment first. And again, it's not clear how this could've been an indictable offense to me. That runs through the rest of this as well. We could run through international indictments, but the International Criminal Court is pretty much the only body that could prosecute such crimes, and the US is not a party. Given that the Court didn't exist until 1998, and crimes committed after 2002 are the only ones it has jurisdiction over, it's impossible to apply that retroactively. Furthermore, the ICC would lack subject-matter jurisdiction, because Iran did not constitute genocide, war crimes (under the definition of prosecutable offenses that could've been committed by Eisenhower's administration), and the court would lack territorial jurisdiction because of neither Iran nor the US ever joined the Court or accepted its authority.

Carter increased the flow of weapons to Indonesia, he arranged through Mondale, the vice president of Israel, to get Israel to send us Skyhawks to Indonesia. He also claims the Camp David agreement, which Carter had won the Nobel peace prize for, was a complete catastrophe. https://youtu.be/5BXtgq0Nhsc?t=5m12s

I can speak to the Israel issues. The idea that the Camp David agreement was a catastrophe seems incredibly strange to argue. The Accords sought to create a peace agreement between Egypt, then the most powerful Arab state unequivocally, and Israel, with which it had fought at least 3 large wars and multiple other more elongated/smaller conflicts, like the War of Attrition, and which it had seen tit-for-tat strikes with for decades. Chomsky claims that Egypt's 1971 offer was accepted at Camp David. This is incorrect, flatly. Egypt's 1971 "offer" rejected demilitarization or limits in the Sinai, which were a key part of the Accords; Israel retains some measure of control over Egyptian military deployments in that area under the agreement. Further, Sadat reportedly insisted Israel withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank as well, which the Camp David Accords did not force Israel to do. The US did not reject the deal either as Chomsky asserts, but had instead sought to reach an accommodation; it was Israel that made decisions on rejecting the Egyptian positions. The US served as an intermediary. It was sympathetic to Israel's positions, but did not ultimately change its views towards the final accord. He claims Israel used the aid to attack Lebanon in 1982, but aid to Israel was largely consistently rising and had reached higher levels at various points during the Ford administration prior to Camp David ($1.5 billion in military aid in 1976 for example). Camp David was the pretext under which aid to Israel became more consistently large, however. The 1978 fighting took place as a result of a massacre of Israelis by Fatah forces, which (under the Palestine Liberation Organization) was being housed by Lebanon as it launched rockets and cross-border terrorist attacks into Israel. This was the same reason Israel gave for its decision to invade in 1982, though the casus belli claim there was far, far weaker for the level of response. Tying this to Camp David seems excessive and confusing, particularly given the Camp David Accords came about near the end of the year in 1978, while the Lebanon operation was a weeklong operation in March 1978. Sadat spoke of peace in 1977, and this launched the peace effort that culminated in an agreement, but I fail to see how the agreement or allocation of aid could have caused the 1978 war, or the direct connection to the 1982 war; it was clear Israel was willing to act even before it had a concrete and binding agreement with Egypt, and the aid allocation increase seems disjointed from actual fighting. It's also unclear how preventing further bloodshed between the region's most powerful states militarily is a "catastrophe". Even presupposing that we ignore Israel's potential use of nuclear weapons in 1973, which would have easily been more devastating to the region had another war come about that led to actual use (and removing Egypt from the conflict via treaty helped prevent that), the Lebanon War of 1982 led to roughly 3-4,000 deaths. The Yom Kippur War of 1973, a repeat of which could easily have occurred without such a peace treaty, led to over 10,000 deaths. I think it's incredibly hard to call this a catastrophe, crime, or indictable offense...

ghostofherzl

Part 2

Clinton sent cruise missiles to Sudan to destroy what they knew to be a pharmaceutical plant. He also claimed that Clinton decided past UN resolutions obsolete and anachronistic, so he basically got rid of the international law

I don't see how this holds any historical weight. I can't speak to the Clinton Sudan strike, because I'm not qualified there (and I've skipped the other points you raised that I am similarly not qualified on). The claim that Clinton called UN resolutions "obsolete and anachronistic" is flatly false. This statement was made in reference to resolutions like General Assembly Resolution 194, which was both nonbinding (and therefore not international law at all). Clinton stated this was the case due to the Oslo Peace Process, which (at the time) was expected to lead to a peace agreement, and therefore the resolutions would no longer be relevant to an ended conflict, and which (while nonbinding) had long been unfavorable to Israeli positions due to fairly long-standing bias at the UN against Israel, numerically observable due to the prevalence of resolutions regularly condemning Israel's right to exist at all, and declaring for example in 1975 that "Zionism is racism", thereby arguing that the right of Jews to statehood is "racist". Chomsky argues that during the peace process, Israeli settlements continued to expand. This is true. Israel continued to build homes in the West Bank and Gaza during this period in contentious areas. This was not, however, "supported by the US taxpayer" and defended by the US military. The US does not contribute directly via troops to Israel. Aid has been discussed and was indeed given during this time; one could perhaps argue that the aid to Israel is "fungible", and therefore provided Israel with more money for the building of homes, but it seems rather unlikely that the loss of this military aid would have seriously deterred the homebuilding. Nor is it clear to me how this is a crime any President could be indicted for. Chomsky, unfortunately, leaves out that settlements were tolerated because, while homes were being built, at the same time the Palestinian leadership was encouraging terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and providing funding to it. In October 1993 for example, an Israeli civilian was kidnapped, murdered, and his body burned. The attack was perpetrated by Fatah members. Fatah is the party of the Palestinian leaders who were engaged in the peace process. There were significantly more attacks carried out by Hamas, unaffiliated with Fatah (though some argue they coordinated during this period), during this period. Israeli settlements were tolerated during this period because the domestic political cost was judged to be too high if they were forced to stop them; the same calculation was made with regards to Palestinian incitement and terrorism. Praise by Fatah's leadership for Hamas and for terror attacks generally organized by Hamas was also tolerated. In short, it is not only the Israeli actions that were ignored for the sake of advancing a process meant to lead to a cessation of both settlements and terrorism alike, and Chomsky's unfortunate exclusion of this calculus thus distorts the picture. Clinton himself wrote his awareness of the issue and the dichotomy he was forced to confront. In his memoir, My Life, he noted that "Every Israeli concession that failed to bring an end to terror and a formal Palestinian recognition that the conflict was over was a death by a thousand cuts." He was quite aware that Israeli settlers were able to use these events domestically to try and stymie a peace process; just as on the Palestinian side, settlement housing was used by Palestinian constituencies to stymie the process. To leave out this dichotomy, or to paint this as an indictable offense, seems...rather absurd. Chomsky then claims that Clinton's last year was the highest for settlements since 1992. This is false. The number of settlers population-wise (in percentage terms) grew less in 2000 than in 1993, 1994, and 1997. It was quite close to 1995 and 1998. It's unclear what metric he's using, but this seems flatly false. Furthermore, his statement on the "cantonization" of the territories is likewise a distortion of the facts. Gaza remained wholly intact, and as a result of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority assumed civil and security control (subject to Israeli sovereignty and oversight in the meantime of course) in Gaza, as well as in parts of the West Bank, known as Areas A and B (in B, there was joint security control). This was the first measure of self-government in Palestinian history, and was meant to build on and prepare Palestinian leaders for full sovereignty and control; given that most Palestinians would live under Palestinian civil and security primacy as a result of the Oslo Accords, a transfer to Palestinian sovereignty would be eased via this process. This was the goal, not "cantonization". There was no measurable, serious difference during this period in the quality or form of Israeli building during this period that I've heard of, so it's also hard to see how Clinton would be at fault for the actions, or, again, how this could be "indictable". And while Israel added homes to existing settlements, Chomsky's assertion of "new settlements" is false. This is more accurately referred to as new homes. If you're curious, the number of actual new communities founded, which would be actual new foundations for division of the West Bank, went drastically down in the 1990s. Between 1967-69, 5 were founded. 17 in 1970-75. 34 from 76-80. 56 from 81-85. 9 from 86-90. Only 1 new settlement was founded from 1991-95, and only 2 from 1996-99. It would appear that while Israel took actions to entrench some existing settlements in anticipation of a peace agreement, seeking to have more favorable terms for any deal, it is incredibly hard to argue that Clinton oversaw the founding of new settlements designed to split the West Bank any more than existing settlements already did. Interestingly, Chomsky makes the claim that the establishment of settlements in any other occupied territory would be regarded a crime that would be criticized by the United States. However, history has not bourne this out. While there is dispute over the use of the term occupation for this situation, the United States has long said that it does not recognize the Western Sahara as part of Morocco's territory, meaning the US at least believes that Morocco is occupying the area. However, the United States (and wider world) has not condemned (to my knowledge) settlements by Morocco in the area. Similarly, the Turkish invasion and occupation of Northern Cyprus, and setting up of an unrecognized state there, has not led to condemnation of Turkish settlements in the area. The list can continue, but it seems unclear to me that if it was "anyone else", the United States would issue condemnations of settlements as violating international law if it sought to further a peace process wherein such condemnations might lead to difficulty in the process.