Comment Re:Does Chomsky misrepresent his sources? (Score 2, Informative) 826
The problem with Chomsky is not that he misquotes or even misrepresents facts, but rather that he ommits al sorts of facts that undermine his conclusions.
The original UN mission in Somalia was entirely unarmed except for some very basic security, only after various warlords started stealing food shipments did they become armed. So even though there might be some strong evidence pointint to U.S. oil interests factoring as a motivation for intervention, it was clearly not the original intent of the mission. Maybe the U.S. took advantage of a convenient situation, but to deny a strong humanitarian motivation in that mission is to ignore some pretty basic facts.
While a U.S. presence in Somalia was inherited by Clinton from Bush, Clinton greatly expaneded it as part of a vision he had for the U.S. as the worlds policeman. If the primary goal was to secure oil for U.S. corporations one could safely bet that Washington would have provided a great deal more fire power to the regional commanders. As it stood, they recieved very little, indicating that the mission was of minor "political" importance (ie humanitarian).
Chomsky's often well founded distaste for the American government causes him to employ analysis that deny's many dominant factors. A problem that most revisionists fall into.
The original UN mission in Somalia was entirely unarmed except for some very basic security, only after various warlords started stealing food shipments did they become armed. So even though there might be some strong evidence pointint to U.S. oil interests factoring as a motivation for intervention, it was clearly not the original intent of the mission. Maybe the U.S. took advantage of a convenient situation, but to deny a strong humanitarian motivation in that mission is to ignore some pretty basic facts.
While a U.S. presence in Somalia was inherited by Clinton from Bush, Clinton greatly expaneded it as part of a vision he had for the U.S. as the worlds policeman. If the primary goal was to secure oil for U.S. corporations one could safely bet that Washington would have provided a great deal more fire power to the regional commanders. As it stood, they recieved very little, indicating that the mission was of minor "political" importance (ie humanitarian).
Chomsky's often well founded distaste for the American government causes him to employ analysis that deny's many dominant factors. A problem that most revisionists fall into.
