"The message is that the Bush administration intends its National Security Strategy to be taken seriously, as the "test case" [Iraq] illustrates. It intends to dominate the world by force, the one dimension in which it rules supreme, and to do so permanently. A more specific message, illustrated dramatically by the Iraq-North Korea case, is that if you want to fend off a US attack, you had better have a credible deterrent. It's widely assumed in elite circles that the likely consequence is proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terror, in various forms, based on fear and loathing for the US administration, which was regarded as the greatest threat to world peace even before the invasion. That's no small matter these days. Questions of peace shade quickly into questions of survival for the species, given the case of means of violence."
Noam Chomsky will be on the Amsterdam Forum at Radio Netherlands May 27
