US linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky said on Tuesday that President George W. Bush will have to ‘‘manufacture’’ another threat to American security to win reelection in 2004 after the US failure in occupying Iraq. Chomsky, attending a Latin American social sciences conference in Cuba, said that since the September 11 attacks on the United States, the Bush administration had redefined US national security policy to include the use of force abroad, with or without UN approval. US Senators set deadline for CIA Iraq documents Washington: Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee have demanded that CIA produce all documents for the panel’s assessment of prewar intelligence on Iraq by Friday noon. In a letter to CIA Director George Tenet, two senators said the CIA had not yet provided an explanation of ‘‘the disconnects and inconsistencies in the assessments concerning the Niger uranium issue’’. (Reuters) ‘‘It is a frightened country and it is easy to conjure up an imminent threat,’’ Chomsky said at the launching of a Cuban edition of a book of interviews published by the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, when asked how Bush could get reelected. ‘‘They have a card that they can play . terrify the population with some invented threat, and that is not very hard to do,’’ he said. After the ‘‘disaster’’ of the US invasion of Iraq, Bush could turn his sights on Communist-run Cuba, which his administration officials have charged with developing a biological weapons research programme, the Massachusetts IT Professor of Linguistics said. Chomsky said the military occupation of Iraq, to topple a ‘‘horrible monster running it but not a threat to anyone’’, was a failure. ‘‘The country had been devastated by sanctions. The invasion ended sanctions. The tyrant is gone and there is no outside support for domestic dissidence,’’ he said. ‘‘It takes real talent to fail in this endeavour.’’ Chomsky said it was reasonable to assume the Bush administration would try to ‘‘manufacture a short-term improvement in the economy’’ by incurring in enormous federal government debt and ‘‘imposing burdens on future generations’’. Chomsky, a Leftist icon who is better known for his critique of US foreign policy than for his theory of syntax and grammar in the 1960s, gave a lecture on the US politics of domination on Tuesday night that was attended by Cuban leader Fidel Castro. (Reuters)
