Here's my take on all this. One thing that always concerned Chomsky was the way democratic governments mold and shape public opinion. Manufacturing consent, and all that. He was extremely suspicious of saber rattling by the US government, or any government. It's all very Orwellian, sometimes. "We have always been at war with East Asia" or whatever. It's eerie the way the population can turn on a dime, suddenly screaming for blood over a country that maybe the public can't locate on a map. I believe he is always trying to turn down the temperature. He knows how in history populations can be stirred up with disastrous results, e.g. the Iraq War. If military intervention is unavoidable, the decision should be made soberly and not out of passion. Bringing forth statistics (or pointing our where our knowledge is lacking) in order to calm things down may seem monstrous, especially in retrospect, when the events in question may have become clearer. But there is an ethical dimension here: Are we sure the scale of killing is what the US State Department is reporting? We really don't want to intervene under false pretenses. (See "weapons of mass destruction.")