Noam Chomsky on America: ‘This is a very racist society’

Noam Chomsky talks complete shit on Syria. A sad day. The major force fighting ISIS has been the Free Syrian Army, which Patrick Cockburn has spent several years pretending does not exist. Turkey has not been attacking the PKK's allies in Syria. Iran's sectarian gangs which have massacred Sunni Muslims in both Iraq and Syria have driven people into the arms of ISIS. Co-operation with Iran has not been ruled out, the US has been doing its best to get de facto co-operation in Iraq, while leaving the Iranians to do their own thing in Syria. Chomsky goes on to say that people are angry about the American bombing, ignoring the major reason that they are angry is that Syrian rebel groups rather than Assad are being bombed. And what to do about Assad is not complex, give the Syrian people the means to get rid of him, and the attraction of ISIS as an alternative will fade like the stars at dawn. But the Syrians fighting Assad appear only as a proxy for American intervention to Chomsky, so when he cites a report from the New York Times showing that American interventions don't work, it doesn't occur that because those were terrorist interventions against popular movements, they have no bearing on whether support for a popular movement against state terrorism would be effective.

"The correspondent who's followed this most closely, and has been right all along, Patrick Cockburn, simply describes it as an Alice in Wonderland strategy. The major ground forces who are fighting ISIS, are apparently the PKK, and its allies in Syria, a similar group, they're barred because we call them a terrorist group. So they're under attack, our ally Turkey attacks them, and we bar them support. They're apparently the ones who saved the Yazidi, and blocked the ISIS attack on Iraqi Kurdistan. So they're out. The major regional force, state, that could confront ISIS, is Iran. In fact, they could probably wipe them out, and they are influential in Iraq, in fact they were the victors of the Iraq war. They're out, for ideological reasons. A more complex case, that Dr. Cockburn's talked about, is what to do about Assad, and that has all sorts of complexities, anyway, they're out."