Et Tu, Jacques?

From ABC News Online:

President Jacques Chirac has for the first time raised the threat of a nuclear strike on any state that launches 'terrorist' attacks against France.

He also said France's doctrine of nuclear deterrence has been extended to protect the country's 'strategic supplies', taken to mean oil.

The problem with this sort of aggressive language is that, almost by definition, the hysteria immediately overwhelms any possibility of reasonable debate.

By contrast, the Annual Amnesty International Lecture by Noam Chomsky, also focussed on this strange war on "terror", seems far more civilised...

Since facts matter, it matters that the War was not declared by George W. Bush on 9/11, but by the Reagan administration 20 years earlier. They came into office declaring that their foreign policy would confront what the President called “the evil scourge of terrorism,” a plague spread by “depraved opponents of civilization itself” in “a return to barbarism in the modern age" (Secretary of State George Shultz). The campaign was directed to a particularly virulent form of the plague: state-directed international terrorism. The main focus was Central America and the Middle East, but it reached to southern Africa and Southeast Asia and beyond.

A second fact is that the war was declared and implemented by pretty much the same people who are conducting the re-declared war on terrorism. The civilian component of the re-declared War on Terror is led by John Negroponte, appointed last year to supervise all counterterror operations. As Ambassador in Honduras, he was the hands-on director of the major operation of the first War on Terror, the contra war against Nicaragua launched mainly from US bases in Honduras. I’ll return to some of his tasks. The military component of the re-declared War led by Donald Rumsfeld. During the first phase of the War on Terror, Rumsfeld was Reagan’s special representative to the Middle East. There, his main task was to establish close relations with Saddam Hussein...

Some good weekend reading right there, folks.