Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

MAN: Professor Chomsky, in light of all this I’m wondering, do you think there has ever been such a thing as a humanitarian intervention by the U.S.? Take what we were supposed to have been doing in Somalia, for example: that was framed as a humanitarian action here—do you think that was all image, or was there also some reality to it too? Well, states are not moral agents; they are vehicles of power, which operate in the interests of the particular internal power structures of their societies. So anybody who intervenes in another country, except maybe Luxembourg or something, is going to be intervening for their own purposes—that’s always been true in history. And the Somalia operation, to take the case you mention, certainly was not humanitarian. I mean, the U.S. waited very carefully until the famine there was pretty much over and the major international aid organizations, like the Red Cross and Save the Children and so on, were getting about eighty percent of their aid into the country (using Somalis to do most of the work, it turns out) before it decided to move in.81 So if the U.S. government had had any humanitarian feelings with regard to Somalia, it had plenty of time to show it—in fact, it could have shown it from 1978 through 1990, when the U.S. was the chief supporter of Siad Barre, the Somali warlord who destroyed the country and killed maybe fifty or sixty thousand people with U.S. assistance, long before the famine.82