For Reasons of State
Noam Chomsky
440 pages, including index and notes
published in 1973

For Reasons of State looked the most interesting of the Chomsky books available in the politics - United States section of the Amsterdam public library, which is why I took it out for making my long overdue acquaintance with Chomsky. In the end it turned out not to be the best choice I could've made, but it was by no means an unpleasant experience. For Reasons of State is a collection of essays which had already been published elsewhere, some of which have been reworked for this collection. The original edition, which I read, had been published in 1973; new edition with a foreword by Arundhati Roy was published in 2002.

Though this is a collection of essays published earlier, some care was undertaken to integrate them into a coherent whole, which was only partially succesful. The trouble is that there is a coherent theme running through the book, an examination of the war in Indochina, which is however abandoned in the last third of the book. It is as if the publishers decided the book was too short and persuaded Chomsky to bulk it up with unrelated articles. Not only is there an introduction to anarchism, but also an extended article on the politics of B. F. Skinner's behavioural science (a reworked book review) as well as an article on linguistics I speed read through...

Despite these misgivings, this is still an interesting book, the meat of which is provided by Chomsky's detailed dissection of the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers was the name given to the leaked, United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1971, which focused on the internal planning and decision making within the US government. Written by Pentagon bureaucrats it provided an incredible honest, if limited look at how the US government took decisions on matters of war.

Chomsky goes to town on this material, discussing not just what was controversial in these documents, what the writers thought was important, but also showing that the things that were not or barely discussed, which were not controversial to the Pentagon Papers' authors, were just as revealing of the mindset of the "best and brightest". In particular he concentrates on showing how much the decision to bomb North Vietnam was agonised over, at a time when the US airforce was already laying waste to much of the South Vietnam countryside, which had barely warranted discussion.

From this, Chomsky moves on to the wider war, analysing the way the war was extended into Laos and Cambodia and how the reasons given for this did not make sense. Officially, the bombings in Laos and Cambodia were in response to Vietnamese National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese excursions into these countries. Chomsky shows this is nonsense and that instead these bombings happened for the same reasons the bombings in South Vietnam happened: to destroy the rural society of those countries, as it was this that supported the communist insurgencies in all three.

Chomsky then looks at the anti-war movement in the United States, talking about the limits of civil disobedience and the role of the university in modern society. While these suibjects still follow logically from the subjects Chomsky started the book with, the remaining chapters, as said before, have little to no relevance to anything else in it. These are not bad essays on their own, but they feel out of place within the broader context of the book.

You may question the relevance of a book now more than three decades old, about a war long since over, but in fact reading this made a lot of things clear that had been bothering me about the war on terror and the American invasion of Iraq. The way Chomsky dissects the lies about Vietnam, it is easy to see how the same sort of lies are used now.