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In their new book, Perilous Power, Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar discuss the current state of the Middle East and its ongoing tumultuous relationship with the US. The book is written as a conversation between the two men, who decided that it would work best if the discussion was fuelled by questions from a third party – so they asked Professor Stephen R. Shalom, from William Paterson University, to develop a list of questions to provoke conversation topics. In this extract, Chomsky and Achcar are posed the question: What can be done about terrorism?
Reduce the reasons for it. Take, say, al-Qaeda. They were carrying out terrorist acts in the Soviet Union, from Afghanistan, in the 1980s. These were pretty serious. In fact, at one point, they almost led to a war between the Soviet Union and Pakistan. After the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan, the terrorism stopped. Of course, they're still carrying out terrorist acts from Chechnya, but not from Afghanistan. Whatever you think of these people – Osama bin Laden and the rest – their positions are pretty straightforward. And their words and their deeds are pretty much in accord. As far as I know, the specialists on the topic agree with this; bin Laden and others see themselves as defending Muslim lands from attack. So, if you stop attacking Muslim lands, you'll reduce the threat of terror. Same with other kinds of terror.
And there's an economic aspect to this as well, because there is a very obvious correlation between the neoliberal turn of the last quarter century and the increase in those forms of violence labeled as terrorism, or even urban violence in general. Neoliberal globalization has brought the disintegration of the social fabric and of social safety nets. People are more and more experiencing a state of disarray and social anxiety, and this leads to forms of violent assertions of 'identity', extremism or fanaticism, whether religious or political or whatever.
There are regular projections of the National Intelligence Council, the collective of US intelligence agencies, that say the process of what they call globalization 'will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide... Regions, countries, and groups feeling left behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. They will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it.' The military projections say the same thing. Likewise, if you look at the Clinton-era studies of the space command, they say we're going to need to militarize space because – same thing – the economic processes around the world, globalization, are creating a sharper and sharper divide between the haves and the have-nots. And the have-nots may even be able to develop nuclear weapons and other such means, and we're going to need new weapons to protect ourselves from the predictable effects of the international measures that are being taken. So, again, you undertake the measures knowing what the consequences are going to be, and then you develop more brutal and violent means to suppress them. But if you actually want to suppress terrorism, then don't carry out measures that are going to devastate societies.
And more generally, I would say the antidote to terrorism is definitely not the so-called war on terror. Rather, it is justice: political justice, the rule of law, social justice, economic justice. This is the only real antidote to terrorism.
And ending repression. In the case of Islamic terrorism, a lot of it is just – you're attacking us, so we're going to defend ourselves.
 Perilous Power by Noam Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar is out now in Hamish Hamilton hardback Read more
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