1998 U.S. Bombing of the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Factory

The 1998 U.S. Bombing of the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Factory is treated in Noam Chomsky’s argument not as a brief episode of military action but as a chain of consequences: the loss of a major Sudanese medicine producer, interrupted relief work, damage to a possible peace process, and the rejection of information about Osama bin Laden that might have helped prevent later attacks. The factory’s destruction, he argues, belongs in any serious account of state violence precisely because its effects continued after the missiles had struck and because the United States’ own conduct should be judged by the standards it applies to official enemies.

The strike and the question of responsibility

Chomsky places the bombing within a broader critique of political language and selective accountability. He contrasts the language used for different acts of force: the 1991 Gulf War was called a war, while NATO’s bombing of Serbia was presented as a humanitarian intervention. He argues that humanitarian claims cannot be established by passionate declarations alone, since governments routinely invoke them to justify force. Against that background, the Al-Shifa attack appears in his account as a largely forgotten item in the record of state terrorism, rather than as a consequence-free episode that can be set aside once the military action ends.

The book stresses that the consequences of destroying the factory cannot be measured only by counting people killed in Khartoum by cruise missiles. The Sudanese government sought a United Nations inquiry into the justifications for the bombing, but Washington blocked the inquiry, and Chomsky says few appeared to pursue it further. He insists that a serious assessment must include people who later died because the factory no longer supplied medicines, just as assessments of crimes attributed to official enemies count deaths resulting from an act rather than only deaths at the moment of attack. In his view, the normal operation of institutions or the absence of a personal intention to cause every later death does not remove responsibility for foreseeable consequences.

Chomsky also objects to the asymmetry he sees in public responses. He asks readers to imagine the reaction if an attack had destroyed half of the United States’ pharmaceutical reserves and the facilities needed to replace them. The comparison, he cautions, is not equivalent: the consequences for Sudan were far more severe. Yet he argues that Sudan’s losses were readily dismissed as regrettable and unimportant, while an attack on the United States, Israel, or the United Kingdom would have provoked a very different response. The gap between those reactions, he suggests, reveals how easily harms imposed on the weak can be treated as ordinary and forgotten.

Medicines and delayed human costs

The factory’s importance is made concrete through figures and accounts cited in the book. A year after the attack, a report in the Boston Globe described a rising death toll as Sudan went without vital medicines produced at the destroyed facility. Tens of thousands of people, most of them children, were reported to be suffering or dying from malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable illnesses. Al-Shifa had supplied affordable medicines and veterinary products throughout Sudan, and had produced 90 percent of the medicines most commonly used in the country.

The consequences were compounded by sanctions against Sudan, which prevented the country from importing enough pharmaceutical products to make up for the factory’s loss. The account therefore traces a specific chain: the bombing removed a major domestic source of common medicines; sanctions constrained replacement supplies; and the resulting shortage continued to affect the population long after the attack. Chomsky cites a technical manager familiar with the plant describing its loss as a tragedy for rural communities dependent on its medicines. The record he assembles frames the damage not as an abstract economic setback but as a continuing public-health crisis.

The evidence remains incomplete. Chomsky acknowledges that the total consequences of the destruction can only be estimated, not definitively counted. He nevertheless argues that uncertainty is not a reason to exclude delayed deaths from the account. The distinction he draws is between uncertainty about the precise total and certainty that the factory supplied essential medicines whose loss, under conditions that restricted imports, had serious human consequences.

Relief work and Sudan’s political prospects

The bombing’s reported effects also reached beyond the pharmaceutical supply. According to an immediate Human Rights Watch report cited by Chomsky, United Nations agencies based in Khartoum evacuated their American personnel, and other relief organizations also withdrew. Many aid efforts were delayed indefinitely. Among them was a major U.S.-directed project of the International Rescue Committee in a government-held town where more than fifty people from southern Sudan were dying each day. The United Nations estimated that 2.4 million people in parts of southern Sudan faced the risk of starvation, and warned that interruption of relief to populations already devastated by conflict could produce a grave crisis.

Chomsky further cites a Financial Times account that the attack appeared to halt tentative movement toward compromise among Sudan’s warring parties. That process might have led to a peace treaty ending a civil war that had killed 1.5 million people since 1981, and could have had wider implications for peace in Uganda and the Nile basin. The same report described the bombing as undoing benefits expected from a shift within Sudan’s Islamist government toward pragmatic engagement with the outside world, attempts to resolve internal crises, an end to support for terrorism, and a reduction in the influence of radical Islamists. These were reported possibilities, not outcomes the text establishes with certainty; Chomsky uses them to show how a military strike could carry political consequences beyond its immediate target.

Rejected cooperation and the September 11 attacks

Chomsky’s most consequential connection between the bombing and later events concerns Sudanese offers to cooperate against Osama bin Laden. Just before the 1998 missile attack, Sudan held two men suspected of bombing U.S. embassies in East Africa and notified Washington. U.S. officials later confirmed that the offer had been made. The United States rejected Sudan’s cooperation; after the missile attack, Sudan released the suspects in anger. They were later identified as agents of bin Laden.

Accounts cited from the FBI and other sources added another dimension: the FBI reportedly wanted the suspects extradited, but the State Department refused. A CIA senior source described that refusal, together with the rejection of other Sudanese offers, as the gravest intelligence failure in the wider story of September 11, and called it central to what happened afterward. Sudan had offered information about bin Laden, including a substantial database concerning him and more than two hundred senior members of his network, with photographs, biographies, and information about Al-Qaeda’s financial interests in multiple regions. Washington rejected those materials as well. The source argued that access to the data would have improved the chances of preventing the attacks; Chomsky presents this as a serious, attributed claim, not as proof that the later attacks would certainly have been prevented.

The juxtaposition is central to the episode’s significance in the book. Sudan was a target of U.S. missiles, yet, according to the accounts Chomsky cites, it had offered information and cooperation that Washington refused. The bombing thus appears both as a source of lasting harm to Sudanese civilians and as part of a policy relationship that obstructed possible counterterrorism cooperation. Chomsky argues that these consequences belong in the same reckoning, rather than being separated into unrelated stories.

Strategic interpretations and the standard of judgment

Chomsky presents his interpretation of the bombing’s wider strategic setting as an argument, not as a conclusion established by confidential records. He says that the United States’ later military bases in Central Asia strengthened its ability to project force and to influence a region rich in resources, while complementing a network positioned around the Persian Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, he identifies Diego Garcia as the most secure base in that network; he argues that the new bases made intervention easier. He places this development within a broader effort by the Bush administration to consolidate U.S. military dominance, while explicitly acknowledging that the public does not possess classified documents proving that such consequences were the principal aim of the Afghanistan bombings.

In this account, the Al-Shifa bombing is also part of a larger problem of how governments name and evaluate violence. Chomsky argues that official justifications, including claims of humanitarian purpose or security, should be distinguished from observable consequences and strategic interpretations. His judgment is that the strike’s full cost includes not only immediate casualties but medicine shortages, delayed relief, damage to political possibilities, and the refusal of intelligence offers. The episode’s lasting force in his argument lies in that expanded measure of responsibility—and in the demand that the same standard be applied to powerful states as to their enemies.