United Nations General Assembly

The United Nations General Assembly is presented as both a collective forum for opposing terrorism and a venue where the meaning of that opposition is contested. In Noam Chomsky’s account, its resolutions show that international condemnation of terrorism can coexist with recognition of peoples’ rights to self-determination and resistance to foreign domination; the United States’ rejection of those principles, he argues, exposes the unequal application of international law.

Nicaragua’s appeal to international institutions

Chomsky uses Nicaragua’s case to illustrate a legal alternative to retaliation. After the United States attacked Nicaragua during the 1980s, causing tens of thousands of deaths and devastating the country, Nicaragua took its complaint to the International Court of Justice. The court ruled in Nicaragua’s favor, ordered the United States to end its actions and pay substantial reparations, and was met with contempt: the United States rejected the judgment and intensified its attacks.

Nicaragua then brought the dispute to the United Nations Security Council. When the Council proposed a resolution calling on states to respect international law, the United States alone vetoed it. Nicaragua turned next to the United Nations General Assembly, which adopted a similar resolution by a majority vote. The United States and Israel voted against it for two consecutive years; El Salvador joined them once. For Chomsky, this sequence makes the Assembly a record of both Nicaragua’s resort to international procedures and the limits imposed on those procedures by a powerful state’s veto and refusal to comply.

Condemning terrorism while protecting self-determination

Chomsky also recalls the General Assembly’s December 1987 resolution on international terrorism. Adopted when concern about international terrorism was especially intense, it condemned the phenomenon in strong terms and called on all nations to act vigorously against it. The vote was 153 in favor and two against, with one abstention: the United States and Israel opposed the resolution, while Honduras abstained.

The disputed passage qualified the condemnation by stating that the resolution could not prejudice the rights to self-determination, freedom, and independence grounded in the United Nations Charter. It addressed peoples forcibly deprived of those rights, particularly under colonial or racist regimes, foreign occupation, or other forms of colonial domination, and preserved their right to struggle to end such conditions and to seek and accept support, subject to the Charter and other principles of international law. The resolution therefore did not treat every struggle described as resistance as equivalent to terrorism; it placed the condemnation within a framework that also recognized political rights and legal constraints.

Selective readings of the law

Chomsky argues that the United States and Israel did not accept the rights affirmed in the 1987 resolution. He points to Washington’s designation of the African National Congress as a terrorist organization, while South Africa was not classified alongside Cuba and other states as a terrorist nation. In his account, the United States’ interpretation prevailed in practice, with grave human consequences. The contrast is central to his critique: institutional language may condemn terrorism broadly, but its application can still distinguish between the violence of adversaries and that of favored states or their allies.

This criticism also informs Chomsky’s wider argument about the proper response to attacks. He rejects the idea that an attacked country should answer in kind: under the postwar legal order, the use of force is generally excluded except in self-defense against an armed attack, pending action by the Security Council, and reprisals are prohibited. He argues that the United States could pursue evidence, arrest, and trial through international institutions rather than treat the September 11 attacks as grounds for retaliation. The General Assembly’s role in the Nicaragua episode supplies a concrete part of that argument: states can seek collective condemnation and legal redress, even when the outcome reveals how difficult it is to hold a powerful country to the same rules it invokes against others.

The Assembly in the post-September 11 argument

Chomsky says that nearly the whole world was asking the United States for evidence of Osama bin Laden’s involvement in the September 11 attacks. If such evidence were assembled, he argues, an international operation under United Nations auspices to arrest and try bin Laden and his associates could attract broad support. He adds that diplomatic means might have been available, noting that the Taliban had made proposals that the United States rejected in favor of force. The passage does not describe a new General Assembly resolution on those attacks; instead, the Assembly’s earlier record helps frame the choice between collective legal action and unilateral military response.

That choice, in Chomsky’s analysis, had consequences beyond the immediate response. He describes governments using the attacks to intensify repressive policies, while the Bush administration used the atmosphere of fear and patriotism to advance measures against the public and to consolidate military predominance. The United States also established major military bases in Central Asia for the first time, which Chomsky links to strategic access to regional resources and to the wider network of bases surrounding the Persian Gulf. Against this account of expanding power, the General Assembly’s resolutions stand as evidence of an available, if politically constrained, alternative: collective procedures and legal standards that apply to states as well as to their enemies.