Noam Chomsky: MIT professor, writer and activist
The Guardian, February 4, 2003

There's never been a time that I can think of when there's been such massive opposition to a war before it was even started. And the closer you get to the region, the higher the opposition appears to be. In Turkey polls indicated close to 90% opposition, in Europe it's quite substantial.
In the United States the figures you see in polls, however, are quite misleading because since September there's been a drumbeat of propaganda trying to bludgeon people into the belief that not only is Saddam a terrible person but in fact he's going to come after us tomorrow unless we stop him today. And that reaches people.

They have to terrify the population to feel there's some enormous threat to their existence and carry out a miraculous, decisive and rapid victory over this enormous foe and march on to the next one.

Remember the people now running the show in Washington are mostly recycled Reaganites, essentially reliving the script of the 1980s. So one year it was an airbase in Grenada which the Russians were going to use to bomb the US. Nicaragua was "two days marching time from Texas". Nicaragua might conquer us on its way to conquer the hemisphere. A national emergency was called because of the threat posed to national security by Nicaragua. [...]
- posted by ARYABHATT @ 4:04 pm