Alongside of the military component there were also political arrangements. The British implemented a plan to construct what they called an 'Arab facade': weak pliable states which would administer the local populations, under ultimate British control in case things got out of hand.

After the Second World War the US took over the British framework. The basic principle is that the West must control what happens there. Furthermore the wealth of the region must flow to the West. That means to the US and Britain primarily: their energy corporations, investors, exporters, construction firms, and so on. That's the basic principle.

That raises all sorts of problems. One problem is that the people of the region are 'backward' and 'uneducated' and have never been able to comprehend the logic of these arrangements or their essential justice. They can't seem to get it through their heads somehow that the wealth of the region should flow to the West, not to poor and suffering people right there. And it continually takes force to make them understand these simple and obvious principles; a constant problem with 'backward' people.

A conservative nationalist government tried to extricate Iran from the system in 1953. That was quickly reversed with a military coup sponsored by the US and Britain which restored the Shah. Right after that, the leader of Egypt, Nasser, became an influential figure and was soon considered a major threat. Then, in 1967, Israel performed a major service to the United States - namely, it destroyed Nasser and smashed up the Arab armies and left US power in the ascendance.

In 1979, another problem occurred: Iran fell under the grip of independent nationalism. The Carter administration immediately tried to sponsor a military coup to restore the Shah. But the plans didn't work. So the United States backed an Iraqi invasion of Iran to try to reverse the disaster of an independent oil-producing state.

US support for the Iraqi invasion was taken extremely seriously. It was not just the support for Saddam Hussein throughout all the major atrocities, but much beyond that. So the United States began sending military vessels to patrol the Gulf to ensure that Iran would not be able to block Iraqi oil shipping. And then in 1988, a US destroyer shot down an Iranian commercial airliner killing 290 people.

In the same decade the US was carrying out terrorism elsewhere: to cite one example, the car-bombing in Beirut in 1985 outside a Mosque, timed to kill the maximum number of civilians, with 80 dead and 200 casualties, aimed at a Muslim Sheikh, who escaped. And it supported much worse terror: for example, Israel's invasion of Lebanon that killed some 18,000 civilians - and the subsequent invasions of 1993 and 1996, both strongly supported by the US. The post-1982 toll in Lebanon alone is probably another 20,000 civilians.

In the 1990s, the US provided 80% of the arms for Turkey's vicious counterinsurgency campaign against Kurds in its southeast region, killing tens of thousands, driving 2-3 million out of their homes, leaving 3500 villages destroyed (ten times Kosovo under NATO bombs), and with every imaginable atrocity. Then in 1998 Clinton's cruise missiles destroyed half the pharmaceutical supplies in Sudan and the facilities for replenishing them, with a casualty toll that must be enormous, though no one knows, because the US blocked a UN inquiry.

Meanwhile sanctions have devastated Iraqi society, with about one million killed, over half of them young children - "a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it," as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explained on prime time TV a few years ago.

Before the Gulf war, Iraq was using - however horrendous the regime may be - the fact of the matter was that it was using its resources for substantial social and economic development, and that's not the way the system's supposed to work - the wealth is supposed to flow to the West. But that is over now. The effect of the war and particularly the sanctions has been essentially to reverse these departures from good form. One might argue about whether that's part of the purpose of the sanctions, but it's likely to be the consequence.

Afghanistan was another major target of US intervention. According to Carter’s advisor, Brzezinski, the US support for the Afghani mojahedin began 6 months before Russia invaded in 1979, drawing the Russians into, in his words, 'an Afghan trap'. The US, Britain and others developed this terrific mercenary army, bringing together the best killers, who were radical Islamist fanatics from around the world. The US intervention was not helping the Afghans. In fact, it helped destroy the country and many analysts believe that it probably delayed the Russian withdrawal because they were trying to get out of it.

After 20 years of war there were 7 to 8 million people in Afghanistan on the verge of starvation before September 11th. They were surviving on international aid. On September 16th the United States demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the supplies. In October aid resumed but at a lower pace while aid agencies leveled scathing condemnations of US airdrops. By the arithmetic of the United Nations there will soon be 7.5 million Afghans in acute need of even a loaf of bread and there are only a few weeks left before the harsh winter will make deliveries to many areas totally impossible - but with bombs falling the delivery rate is down to half of what is needed. Which tells us that Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of 3-4 million people. Looks like what's happening is some sort of silent genocide. Well that's what's happening now.

****** This article consists of slightly rewritten extracts from several talks by Noam Chomsky. These and many other interesting writings on the present war can be found at www.zmag.org