MK: As you happen to be reading an article about Chomsky we might as well start with him. What do you make of him?

NC: You get this pattern throughout his career. He has got two very simple ideas. One, that capitalism or America is responsible for all the evil in the world or if they are not directly responsible for the evil it is an understandable reaction to America. Therefore he has got a gigantic problem with autonomous movements – particularly the far-right. He has a huge problem with the far-right like the Nazis where it is quite clearly not a response.

So throughout his career – he had this sort of epiphany when he was very young when the Americans dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and then everyone was cheering and he goes into the forest and wants to be alone – quite rightly. So there comes his second idea – why do people go along with it? It’s because the media lies to them.

Two ideas – a grain of truth in both of them. So all the time you find him not quite on the far-right but skirting around the fringes like the boy at the edge of a crowd of bullies who hasn’t quite got the guts to go in there himself. So you find him very early on defending Holocaust deniers – not just their freedom of speech either, which I would support.

And later it was Pol Pot – diminishing his crimes. Both of them were probably just mistakes – but interesting mistakes. But on Bosnia it’s just amazing what he has done and he just keeps going on and on and on – supporting people who deny the Srebenica massacre, saying the West want to destroy Yugoslavia, it’s ludicrous. I mean Douglas Hurd, John Major and George Bush Snr kept refusing all the time to intervene in Bosnia while the worse massacres were going on.

So there is this very interesting thing you get with the death of the left – it mutates because the old left, whatever it was like, even Communists believed in something and if you were an Iraqi today and you turned to them and said, “How should we run our society? Go on, tell us, we’ll do it,” they would say, “Do this, nationalize that etc.”

No-one believes us anymore but in a funny way, and the reason why Chomsky and people like him are so popular, is, of course, he ideally suits the consumer age, he actually suits the consumer age because he says, “You don’t have to make commitments to anyone”. You don’t have to think carefully and talk to the Iraqi Communists, for instance, and support them – because Iraqi Communists will say, we don’t like the Americans, but actually they are trying to work with the Americans to build a better future for Iraq.

You don’t have to do that anymore – you don’t have to have any comrades at all, you don’t believe in anything. You can just pick and choose like a shopper taking a faulty good back. You don’t have to worry about hard the working day is and that kind of business. You don’t have to suggest a better way of producing washing machines or whatever. Chomsky is fascinating because Chomsky is influential – pop bands they all love him, they all think he is really principled. But actually he has been driven mad by the failure of the ideas he has believed in and will now go along with anything.

MK: What do you think of his anarchism? He calls it “libertarian socialism”…

NC: Well I don’t think its real anarchism. Real anarchists would certainly not make excuses for Slobadan Milosevic. Real anarchists were as opposed to doctrinaire socialism as capitalism. Chomsky doesn’t really believe in that. You can’t really be an anarchist in the sense of an ordered plan of society – I don’t think you ever could, actually. But Chomsky has gone and people like him, like Said…

Like Pinter – and this is just how bizarre it got – he wrote his last great poem called “Mountain Language” about the Kurds. And he sees no contradiction at all between opposing Saddam Hussein when he was gassing the Kurds and Turkey where terrorizing them, and then supporting Milosevic who was trying to commit genocide against other Muslims. Because what matters to them is that they are anti-American. When Saddam committed the genocide in 1987 he was a sort of ally of Americas – not much, nowhere near as much as people make – America supplied literally no weapons to Iraq or did Britain, it all came from France and Russia and places like that.

If you point the contradiction out to them they don’t see it because all they have got left is their anti-Americanism which is often for very good reasons. But there is no hope or positive program how to go forward. There is that wonderful phrase: “The man who thinks any stick will do, will pick up a boomerang.” They think anything will do against America and they’ve just mired themselves deeper and deeper into disgrace.

MK: But in terms of Iraq their argument would be that even though they abhor Saddam…

NC: Do you they abhor Saddam?

MK: I’m sure they are not fans of his….

NC: That goes back to my point – they can’t actually believe this… They are not fans… If you can show me…

MK: But I don’t think it logically makes you a fan of someone if you don’t want America to attack them…

NC: No, no… This is what I’m trying to say. The old left actually believed in things – even at their most disgraceful. Members of my family supported Stalin, believed in Stalin and would if they were here argue the case for Stalin. The new left because it doesn’t believe in or have a coherent plan and hope for the world, it is sort of free. It doesn’t support Saddam Hussein but it doesn’t oppose him either. You can look from 1991 onwards – when Saddam becomes an American enemy when he invades Kuwait – you can see through the writings of Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk, all these people – it is not that they are supporting him – but there are some elements of the left that support him – it’s not that they support him but they don’t have any contact or fraternal relations with the opposition. The Kurds who they were all over one minute are dropped just like that. Iraqi socialists like Kanan Makiya who wrote the great book on Saddam’s Iraq who was their friend are dropped just like that, overnight.

In this society you don’t have to make commitments anymore. You didn’t have to say, “If Saddam’s Iraq was a terrible place when America when was his ally, it was still a terrible place when America was his enemy.”

MK: But what about someone like me – I’d definitely say I was on the left, but I didn’t have faith in what the Americans and the British would do there… That is what they would say…

NC: Well, no, no, no. You cannot be on the left and not have comrades. You can have total contempt for the Americans and Britain but you cannot be on the left and not support anyone in Iraq who says they are on the left. You know, you have to support someone whether it is the Kurdish socialists or the Iraqi Communists. You can’t have a left without comrades – it means you are left with just ideas – it’s ridiculous. Well, if they say, “I oppose Saddam” – well they sort of do, only a bit – and then they go on to say, “But I’m on the left and I don’t like the American’s and the British” – fine again. You say you’re on the left, who are you supporting in Iraq? Who are you arguing for? And when you get down to it what they want is for the Baath Party and al-Qaeda – forces of the extreme right – to win. They don’t quite want them to win in the old way of positively supporting them…

MK: But people like Pilger and Ali support the resistance….

NC: So they have actually gone over way to the far-right. But only the far-right when it is anti-American. They would probably in all sincerity oppose the BNP in Britain; they just don’t see the contradiction anymore because they no longer have any universal values. You simply can’t be a socialist anymore in the sense of an old-fashion socialist – as much a member of Atlee’s government as a Communist, who could say, “I believe in nationalization, I believe in an entirely transformed socialist society.” It’s just impossible – it’s been killed mainly by the kind of Communists we had and also the world just hasn’t turned out like that…

MK: What do you think of the left’s supposed alliance with Islamic fundamentalism?

NC: Well that’s the point: there is no left.

MK: Well you said they have no comrades but they do have comrades but you are saying they are Muslims.

NC: Therefore you have to say, well, their comrades are on the far-right – they are in relativist sense on the far-right – they are not on the far-right with white, they are on the far-right with brown-skin. It’s impossible to have a left-wing – or any kind of politics – aside from extreme forms of nationalism, it’s impossible to do is by universal ideals. So if your universal ideal is that you would rather support homophobes, misogynists, anti-Semites, theocrats – alright, that’s you, then.

MK: So why do you think the anti-war movement was so powerful among the left? It was huge, after all…

NC: It was powerful because it expressed an extreme form of liberal opinion – ordinary mainstream liberal opinion, which is in its own way is just as confused and in as much of a mess as the far-left. The world hasn’t turned out the way it thought. Classic liberals fought for more education, greater welfare – people will be reading Shakespeare and reading Sonnets – you couldn’t expect anything like we’ve got now. They’ve been driven mad by Bush for very good reasons – I mean I’m not supportive of Bush. But people like Chomsky and Galloway are them in an extreme form.

MK: Do you put them on the same platform, Chomsky and Galloway? A lot of people would differentiate between those two…

NC: Yeah, maybe not. That is somewhat unfair to Chomsky. I would like Chomsky to go to address an audience of Iraqi Kurds.

MK: He does a lot for the Turkish Kurds…

NC: Only because the Turkish are members of NATO. Come on, if Turkey would get out of NATO and become anti-Western, Chomsky would drop the Turkish Kurds like that. These people pick up people in the Third World just as debating points, no as real people. It’s all about America – it’s not about there.

MK: But his argument is that he more responsibility to expose regimes that America support. I’ve heard him say, “During the Cold War there is no point me arguing about the crimes of the Soviet Union in America.”

NC: OK take the example of Bosnia. America had sat on its hands for four years – let Milosevic walk all over the place – was he standing out and arguing for the rights of Bosnian Muslims? No, because the only possible way to do it was with international intervention which had to be led by America, so he shut up. And then he goes into Holocaust denial.

Take the classic case of East Timor which Chomsky quite rightly says was sanctioned by Gerald Ford/ Henry Kissinger and it was an international outrage. He and people like him – people like John Pilger – have gone on about it for years – and quite rightly. But suddenly when there is an international force they suddenly shut up. And then there is Australian troops stopping the massacre in East Timor, not a word from them. They don’t actually support real people – nothing is real with them.

The EU is using its economic muscle to force the Turkish to treat the Kurds better. Does Chomsky go and give argument for it? No. He doesn’t believe in the EU because of the corporations. If you’re in the Third World, you cannot rely on these people – they don’t talk to you as equals and ask your concerns and create strategies. If Israel was to go anti-American you can guarantee the Palestinians would be dropped, just as the Iraqis were in 1991.

MK: Would you term yourself a neoconservative in terms of foreign policy?

NC: I’m a socialist. I’m not a neoconservative because I’m not a conservative.

MK: But in terms of foreign policy which believes in spreading democracy through the military. That is really the so-called doctrine.

NC: Well, Kanan Makayi is saying that the neoconservatives are doing the lefts job. I wouldn’t call myself a neoconservative because I ally with real people in Iraq who don’t call themselves neoconservatives, they call themselves Communists and socialists.

MK: So you think Bush and Blair are doing the lefts job?

NC: Oh yeah, massively more moral and honourable than the left. The left had a choice – and the liberals at well – you could have absolutely opposed Bush and Blair for reasons you said: classic reason would be – you haven’t thought this through – very good reason not to support anything. But we will offer absolute solidarity to the victims of fascism in Iraq and we will work them – with both of them criticizing Britain and America for they way are they implementing things.

But they chose – and it’s not just the far-left, it’s not Chomsky’s way, way move to the right of politics – they chose to say, “No, we oppose them and that’s that.”

MK: So did a lot of the right give support?

NC: Well and the left. There are exceptions – trade union movements all around the world have been fantastic – utterly opposed the war but given huge help to the Iraqi trade union movement to help rebuilding. You would never see that in the liberal media or the BBC or anything like that.

MK: So in terms of that doctrine: Helping trade union movements living under right-wing dictatorships around the world. Would you support the extension of the war around to other countries, places like North Korea.

NC: Well no, but Iraq was a really, really weird case: It had broken just about every international law, it invaded two countries – Kuwait and Iran, it bombed, it gave sanctuary to Abu Nidal who made the first attack on the World Trade Centre, it had broken UN resolutions, it had started one of the great ecological disasters with the Marsh Arabs. The sanctions weren’t working – they were falling apart. Sanctions were Chomsky’s big thing. So Chomsky condemns the sanctions, condemns the invasion… well, what’s left? There are three foreign policy options: 1. There’s war. 2. There’s sanctions. 3. Or you leave it alone.

MK: Or get rid of the sanctions…

NC: Well Chomsky’s against the war, he’s against the sanctions… what’s left.

MK: Well get rid of the sanctions without war.

NC: Yeah.

MK: And then hoping that the people rise up.

NC: The Baath have been in power in Iraq since 1968. They are a totalitarian regime – people have tried in Iraq time and again to rise up and every time they were crushed. You can’t overthrow totalitarian regimes like that.

MK: But in 1991 they nearly did it…

NC: But would Chomsky have supported if the Americans had gone in?

MK: He might have. I don’t know I can’t speak for him.

NC: Of course he wouldn’t. They’d already by that stage ditched the Iraqi left, people like Chomsky, certainly people like Tariq Ali. If you think the West going to war is wrong, if you think the West imposing sanctions is wrong – alright, what are you left with? You are left with, you have to leave it alone…

MK: Or you fight for the end of sanctions…

NC: Yes, no, sorry… You don’t have war, that’s wrong; you don’t have sanctions so they are gone… I mean, what are you left with?

I mean it’s not quite that Chomsky is saying, “I support Saddam,” but you notice people everywhere – they don’t actually support anyone. In some ways it’s better than it was in the 1930s with people on the right supporting Hitler and on the left supporting Stalin. Rationally, I know it’s better. But this feels worse – this freefloating, evasive, lack of commitment.

But that is like being a modern consumer – to say to Chomsky or any of these people, “Sorry, you people supported the people of Iraq in the 1980s and you dropped them now,” they would look at you as if you as mad as saying, “You used to have an Apple Mac and now you are going over the Microsoft,” – where’s your loyalty to Apple Mac? In a rather bizarre way nothing has proven the triumph of globalisation so much as the people who claim to resist it.

MK: But the people in “anti-globalisation” movement say that it’s a propaganda term. They are not “anti-globalisation” etc.

NC: Well I mean anti-capitalist, then.

MK: What do you think of that movement?

NC: Well, I think they have some very good points and some good things. But then it is like Chomsky – you will find dead silence on the African case, on Zimbabwe, on the Sudan. All they do is attack the hypocrisy of the people who condemn it. Everyone in politics accuses the other side of hypocrisy – always has done. But when you have a genuinely hopeful philosophy you get more than that – you don’t just say, “This is hypocritical,” you say, “It would be better if we did this and we could do that,” and they don’t say that in the anti-globalisation movement. Again there is dead silence about anything which can’t be blamed on the West – Zimbabwe and the genocide in Darfur recently. Which is a bit of problem for them because their main concern is meant to be Africa and in Africa it’s actually very hard to blame much on the West.

MK: The Bush administration was a bit slow with the Darfur situation, wasn’t it?

NC: Well, a damn-sight faster than all the fuckers on the left, wasn’t he? Where were their demonstrations? Where are a million people marching through London while there is mass rape and mass murder going on in Darfur saying, “Not In My Name”. Where were the picketers at the Sudanese Embassy?

MK: How do you rate the Bush administrations handling of the Iraq war?

NC: Well obviously a disaster. But I would say in one sense I was genuinely surprised because I thought, look, they will do what America always used to do in the Cold War – they’ll just install their own dictator, a nice dictator.

MK: You supported it thinking that was going to happen?

NC: That was my worry. Well, I couldn’t oppose it because I was talking to asylum seekers the whole time – they were all from Saddam’s Iraq most of them, there were Kurds etc. Four million refugees from Saddam’s Iraq – that’s the population of Birmingham. I knew the Iraqi opposition, I knew Kanan Makiya, I knew the Iraq Communist Party – the Iraqi Communist Party were formally against.

MK: Am I right in saying that the Iraqi CP made a tactical alliance with Saddam?

NC: In 1963, there was an alliance – it was a brief alliance. Actually after Saddam… Saddam followed the classic Hitlerian passage – first of all he killed the Jews and then he killed the Communists. There was some vague support. Saddam was a mixture of Nazism and Communism. There was a lot of sort of anticapitalist rhetoric. He modeled himself on Stalin. Look, the graveyards of Iraq are full of Iraqi Communists. I mean, it’s this desperate way that they will grab anything rather than make a commitment.

I’m quite pleasantly surprised about the resulting democracy. I had my doubts and so did most Iraqis.

MK: People like Chomsky have said that is merely a victory for popular resistance.

NC: There maybe something in that. On the other hand, Chomsky can’t have it both ways. Neoconservatives do believe in democracy – they genuinely believe that democracy produces a good society. Now, they think that a good society is thriving private enterprise, big business etc. But they do believe it. Chomsky doubts their sincerity – well, give me some examples – where is America not supporting democracy?

MK: Uzbekistan.

NC: Well, no. In Uzbekistan they’ve been thrown out.

MK: America has?

NC: Yes and the America would rather go out. It’s foreign policy idealism rather than foreign policy realism from the Americans. It could be wrong – I mean, it could be horribly wrong and it all ends disastrously.

MK: Hitchens honestly believes that neoconservatives want to export Jeffersonian-type democracy?

NC: Well they do!

MK: You think they do?

NC: Yes.

MK: So you are not skeptical of their motives at all?

NC: Well I was before but I was saying that Iraq rather changed my mind about that. You have to remember that the neoconservatives are just a small group in Washington. But they are not that big and they are not that powerful and most of them are out of office. So I had this very funny thing. I used to have these Iraqi socialists coming back from Washington saying to me, “Nick it’s really weird” – because the CIA are meant to be civilians, the State Department are civilians, but they wanted a coup with a military leader put in power in Iraq. Whereas the Pentagon wanted democracy. So I get these Iraqi Kurds coming back and saying, “Nick, it’s really weird in Washington – the military want the civilians and the civilians want the military.”

MK: I wanted to talk more about history. You wrote a lot during the Cold War about how the US installed military dictatorships in Latin America. I talked to Andrew Roberts yesterday and we discussed this. We talked about the case of Allende and Chile and he defended it by saying that someone like Pinochet was vital in stopping the descent into barbarism around the world. Eh?

NC: Well, first of all America has never been very good at Empire. But you’ve got to understand the great change that happened in the 1980s. The 1980s was the most extraordinary decade. Everyone thinking about the Berlin Wall and freedom coming to the Eastern bloc. But it also in Latin America, democracy – all the tyrannical – I don’t know if you can call them fascist, but certainly extreme right-wing dictatorships – fell. And the contrast between then and now is Chavez. Now, if Kissinger and the realists had been in power and the Cold War was still going on the US would simply not allow Chavez to live – he’d be dead.

MK: They did attempt a coup against him in 2002.

NC: Right. The fact of the matter is, he’s still there.

MK: So times have changed?

NC: Well what happened was the world-historical events of the defeat of Communism. First of all there was the defeat of capitalism and then the defeat of Communism. These are huge, huge events which are taking a long time to sink in. But the fact of the matter was that in the Cold War, American foreign policy effectively ran on the policy: “I don’t care if he’s a bastard as long as he’s our bastard.” But now it doesn’t

MK: Sonofabitch….

NC: Oh yeah, sonofabitch, that’s it. Now it doesn’t. The problem for the left is this: The left – in theory, though it’s not true in fact – in theory, there was a hierarchy when you were on the left. The best type of society was some kind of socialism, always undefined and hotly contested. The next rung down was mixed economies, democracies like ours, like America. The bottom of the heap was fascists/ racists/ extreme right-wing states. Now that hierarchy seems to have completely collapsed.

And not just in Chomsky’s writings… Chomsky in some ways is better than an awful lot of other people, a lot of post-modernists. A lot of post-modernists, Ali, New Left Review crowd, the French, really and the Germans – that hierarchy no longer holds. They will now attach themselves to anything as long as it is anti-American – as long as it is anti-American anything goes.

Which is why you have got this bizarre spectacle: You can guarantee now that if you read someone making excuses for the execution of homosexuals, or for Saddam Hussein, or for Al-Qaeda – you can guarantee pretty much now they won’t be from the right of the spectrum, they will be from left.

MK: Where should left leaning people go then, in your opinion?

NC: Well I think they’ve got to be taken on. There is a very weird thing on the left because there is a great deal of conformity. My grandfather was a Communist. Why is it that I’m not ashamed he was a Communist, but I would be ashamed if he was a Nazi? Why am I not ashamed of that? Lots of reasons and some are good. 1. Communist is not quite an evil doctrine – in principle it’s quite a good doctrine, morally. 2. Communists outside Communist countries are often very good people – they work hard, they organise trade unions and so on. 3. The left do not like to admit the fact that they are the greatest crimes of the twentieth century – quite possibly the greatest crimes in history – have been done in the name of the left. The left needs its moral certainty, its sense of moral goodness because that’s all it’s got left in a funny way.

And it does work because if you think about it, in America and Britain the left had all these expectations, Thatcher and Reagan shouldn’t have happened according to normal center-left views. But what works is the sense of moral goodness. The critique of Thatcherism that she was brutal and nasty and vicious which came from a left-wing argument completely ignored the fact that she got a huge amount of support from the trade unions, from the unemployed and all of that. It has worked in the end – the Tories are seen as the “nasty party”. So the people on the left who start looking find there are dark corners and mass graves on their side of the fence it destroys that certainty. And having arguments destroys that as well. The sense of goodness is the last thing we’ve got left and the need to conserve that and the conformity is all the more important because we lose a lot. Organisations which are on the losing side of history place great emphasis on discipline, on order, on not giving anything away; whereas say the right in America today or in Britain in the 1980s has huge splits, very public arguments because they think they are going to win so what matters is having a huge argument about what we are going to do. The left always got less different views.

MK: Although in Latin America things are changing… The power in moving to the left….

NC: Yeah, but look at Lula in Brazil… What are they going to do?

MK: What about Galloway, uniting behind him is patently not uniting behind goodness…

NC: Well you try saying that around here… You would have thought for decent liberal opinion… Obviously if you are marching against the war in Iraq, you were marching to keep Saddam in power – you would have thought, “Shit, it’s sad but that’s the way politics goes. We think what will happen if there is a war will be worse, perfectly good answer.” Why then, do you accept as a leader an open friend of Saddam Hussein – OK you didn’t have a choice to organise a demo – it’s organised by a bunch of demented far-left Trots – OK why don’t you condemn it? Why don’t you criticise it? Where were you when you could have said something and it would have mattered – all you nice liberal people?

MK: The argument is that he is one of the lone anti-war voices around…

NC: He wasn’t! Half the bloody country was!

MK: No I mean in the media….

NC: The whole Guardian, the whole Independent, half the Observer, most of the BBC… The Mail, the Mirror… Yeah, quite a lot…

MK: OK, then why? Where is his appeal?

NC: It’s partly because there isn’t… It’s building up again now – I’m quite heavily involved with it – a strong democratic left which retain left-wing politics and is very internationalist and knows that… Have you ever interviewed Paul Berman?

MK: No.

NC: He said something that the great mistake that happens again and again on the left – it’s happened for years – the liberal middle-classes get radicalized and they shift to the left and the poor untutored little dears don’t know the difference between a left and a totalitarian left. They think the far-left is like the left – more so, more pure, more committed, more serious than they are – so they follow them. They don’t understand the difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian left is the difference between civilization and barbarism. The democratic left and the totalitarian left have nothing in common because the democratic left believes in the democracy and the totalitarian left does not. You have to have very tough minded, democratic socialists around who say, “You just do not go near those people because they will bring ignomany and disgrace on you,” – as they have done on the liberals of today.

MK: What do you think of someone like Castro?

NC: I don’t know, a sort of smelly old Brezhnev dictator. I mean I do find this cult of Castro a bit bonkers. The best was my actually… she’s very old left… my mum went to Cuba on a long holiday and I said, “Look mum, do be careful – don’t get put in prison, there is no freedom of speech etc.” She said, “Nick you are so right-wing, they have the most marvelous health service!” Well my poor old mum is nearly 70 – the first day there, she gets the most appalling stomach bug – diarrohea, sickness, the lot – and in the end she has to be flown home because the Cuban health service can’t treat it.

MK: There is a great health service there.

NC: Why are people suddenly Communist? In the 1930s liberals said, “The Soviet Union has big iron production etc.” – but that was all made up.

MK: The argument that people like Chomsky would make is that he wouldn’t support a totalitarian regime, but when Nicaragua had the Sandinistas and they were democratic they got crushed by the US…

NC: In deference to poor old demented and really quite vicious Noam, if I were an American I would drop the sanctions on Cuba tomorrow because Cuba doesn’t threaten anymore. Saddam’s Iraq was a restless rolling program of war and genocide. Saddam assumes total power in 1979 – there is a mass purge of the Baath – reached levels of ingenuity and cruelty that even Osama wouldn’t think of. That’s over, he launches a war against Iran in which one million people die, he uses chemical gas. That’s over, he launches a genocide against the Kurds. As soon as that stops he invades Kuwait. I mean there were good reasons for having sanctions and there were good reasons for invading it.

MK: There are good reasons for invading other Middle Eastern countries…

NC: Not really, no. Iran?

MK: Syria?

NC: Syria? No. Syria has never invaded anyone, it does support terrorist groups all over the world but that will probably collapse. Iran’s a problem if it gets the bomb, Israel is a problem if it holds on to the West Bank. But there is nothing on the scale of Saddam. And that has all been sort of missed.

MK: But there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction there. You are talking about it as a threat to the surrounding area.

NC: Well that’s tough. Look in 1991 when he invaded Kuwait and was thrown out all the intelligence services were saying that he was months away from getting the bomb. Why the silly old bastard didn’t wait until he got the bomb to invade Kuwait I don’t know but he’s mad. In 1996 the CIA was convinced they had a plot to assassinate him – it infiltrated from the start… Saddam just used it to draw more and more people in and then wound it all up and killed about 500 officers. Intelligence about Iraq has always been wrong partly because it is very, very difficult to get intelligence in a totalitarian regime where if you are even suspected of talking out of turn, your wife is raped in front of you and your baby is dropped in a sack of starving cats. You know, it is difficult.

He didn’t have Weapons of Mass Destruction but the sanctions were falling apart, we now know he was running a global corruption campaign. If you are on the left, what do you do? Do you just say to the Iraqis, “You carry on”, or once it all falls apart and al-Qaeda start killing everyone, do you not support people who support your beliefs? You don’t because you don’t have anything, there is nothing there.

MK: What do you think of the argument that invading Iraq, in terms of terrorism, made the situation worse….

NC: There probably is a bit of truth in that.

MK: I think there is a lot of truth in that.

NC: A bit. But on the other hand you have to remember that 9/11 happened before then. The Iranian revolution happened before then. People don’t look at Islamists as a global effect starting in March 1979 Iranian revolution and they are very touchy people. You know, Iraq is something else. Imagine this, a little thought experiment –someone let off a bomb, do you think that anyone from the BBC through to Noam Chomsky; anyone would actually blame the people who let the bombs off? Guess what – within days, you will have people from all over the world, from the New York Times, BBC producing people saying it was a result of the headscarf bans in French schools. Where do you stop with all this?

MK: Rationalising terror you mean?

NC: I would recommend Paul Berman’s book ‘Terror and Liberalism’ for that. He has a long chapter on what happened to the French left in the 1930s. The anti-war part of the French left – how they ended up supporting Hitler. For two reasons, through rationalism. Rationalists suppose there’s got to be a rational reason for everything – we’ve got to understand the root causes. So they have a huge problem when confronted with mass psychopathic movement – such as Baathism, such as Al-Qaeda, such as Nazism. So the French socialists looked across the line and saw Hitler and thought,

“Can we really believe that millions of Germans have lost their mind so they would support Hitler? Who is telling us this anyway? It’s the corporate media owned by the men who are in the arms industry. Now Hitler’s going on and on about the Jews, well obviously we don’t believe in racism, we are liberal-minded, rational people – it’s undoubtedly true that there are lots and lots of Jews is positions of power and our own leader who wants war is a Jew… And he wants to make weapons, well it’s true isn’t it, the Treaty of Versailles was a terrible thing.”

And they rationalize and rationalize until in the end when the Nazism invaded France an awful lot of socialists joined the Vichy government.

MK: But understanding is different to justifying…

NC: Well… Up to a point. As long as you understand there are some things you can’t understand. As long as you understand that when you get to the heart of the argument – people who are prepared to crash a plane into a tower block or throw acid in a women’s face – it will be something so dark rational terms will not be able to explain it. You are talking about the power of ideology, you are talking about the power of mania – you are talking more about psychology, than about political argument. I mean, it shouldn’t be that difficult to understand after the 20th century. We’ve had mass psychopathic movements that have killed hundreds of millions of people – would you blame Hitler on the Treaty of Versaille – that’s a rational cause and it’s our fault again. The other point which Berman doesn’t make but is a very interesting point is this: It’s sort of racist or egotist because you think that everything is our fault so 1. You feel safe, because if it is our fault we can remedy it. 2. You deny autonomy – in a funny way you think everything turns around what we do.

MK: In a sense because of the power that we do wield, we do have much more power to change the world than people in the Third World, surely?

NC: Depends what people in the Third World do, doesn’t it? You know, we’ve no power over North Korea, it’s a slave state, utterly impoverished state. If it gets the bomb you’ve got to take notice. Frankly, most businesses on earth don’t give a damn about North Korea – it’s not part of the global market – they would happily not think about it at all but they have to.

MK: Do you support invading North Korea?

NC: No because it couldn’t be done.

MK: That’s the other argument: The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq basically sent a message out to the rest of world….

NC: Look Saddam was trying to get the bomb as early as 1981. North Korea has had it for years. Iran’s been trying since the Iranian Revolution. Listen, psychopathic regimes want the best weapons systems available.

MK: And eventually it will happen though won’t it….

NC: Eventually a nuke will go off.

MK: You are a pessimist.

NC: Oh, my views are always pretty grim.

MK: I think most peoples are these day. You don’t put faith in the anti-globalisation movement as an alternative?

NC: They are not so bad – some of the things they say are alright. They have had an affect on global businesses, the IMF and things like that. But it has no positive plans. I don’t really hate them the way I hate the far-left.

MK: You wouldn’t call them the far-left?

NC: Well, they are no anything really, are they? They are far-left, greens, anarchists, deep greens, French farmers, nutcases…. It’s alright – it’s well meant.

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