The Attentats du 11 septembre 2001 are presented as a grave terrorist crime and as a turning point in the political use of the language of counterterrorism. The book argues that the attacks did not resolve the deeper problems of international politics: they accelerated existing tendencies, furnished governments with grounds for harsher policies, and helped the United States extend its military reach into Central Asia.

Definition and Political Language

The author applies the U.S. government’s own definition of terrorism: the calculated use or threatened use of violence to pursue political, religious, or ideological aims, including through intimidation, coercion, or fear. By that standard, the attacks against the United States were plainly an act of terrorism and an appalling terrorist crime. The book distinguishes this literal definition from a conventional propaganda usage, in which terrorism names violence committed by enemies against oneself or one’s allies.

That distinction frames the attacks within a broader criticism of political labels. The author argues that terrorism, as officially defined, is also a component of state action, not merely an “weapon of the weak.” The United States, he says, officially conducts low-intensity warfare, whose usual definitions closely resemble the official definition of terrorism: coercive methods directed against civilian populations for political, religious, or other purposes. The attacks are condemned without qualification, but the same standard, in the author’s argument, must also be applied to state violence.

The book illustrates the instability of these labels through the changing treatment of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The United States officially condemned it as a terrorist force in 1998, citing attacks on Serbian police and civilians. After U.S. and British policy shifted toward attacking Serbia in 1999, the group was recast as a force for freedom; after the war, it and its allies were again described as terrorists, criminals, and outlaws. This example supports the author’s contention that political alignment can change the names attached to actors and actions without a corresponding change in their conduct.

Political Uses and Immediate Aftermath

In the book’s account, governments used the attacks to intensify or establish repressive policies. Russia joined the counterterrorism coalition in hopes of securing permission to continue its actions in Chechnya, and the author says it was not disappointed. China likewise used the new climate for reasons he compares to Russia’s. Turkey offered troops for the next phase of the U.S. campaign; its prime minister linked that offer to U.S. support for Turkey’s campaign against its Kurdish population, including the supply of substantial quantities of American arms.

The author describes a similar consequence for Israel’s treatment of Palestinians: Israel recognized that it could act with still greater force under strengthened U.S. support. In this reading, the attacks became a political opportunity for governments whose existing campaigns of repression could now be folded into a global counterterrorism framework.

The domestic consequences were also central to the argument. The book says that more democratic societies, including the United States, introduced measures to discipline their own populations and enacted laws the author characterizes as anti-popular. These measures drew on public fear and demands for patriotism, narrowing room for dissent while allowing governments to pursue their agendas more forcefully. The Bush administration, he argues, used the moment to advance policies serving the narrow interests of large corporations that dominated the administration, at a scale exceeding what he describes as usual.

Military Expansion and Strategic Reach

The author identifies the establishment of major U.S. military bases in Central Asia as one of the most consequential changes after the attacks. He presents the bases as serving several connected strategic purposes: supporting multinational corporations under U.S. dominance, advancing a new version of the “Great Game” over the region’s substantial resources, and complementing the encirclement of major energy resources in the Persian Gulf.

Before the war in Afghanistan, the author writes, Diego Garcia was the safest base in the U.S. system directed toward the Gulf. The new Central Asian presence improved the strategic position and made forceful intervention easier if the United States judged it appropriate. The attacks thus appear in the book not only as the stated occasion for military action, but as part of a change in the geography from which the United States could project power.

The Bush administration’s new phase of the war on terror is also described as a repetition, in important respects, of the Reagan administration’s campaign two decades earlier. Its wider purpose, in the author’s interpretation, was to consolidate an already overwhelming U.S. military advantage and promote global dominance. He presents the attacks as accelerating that project rather than creating it from nothing.

Regional Consequences and the Enduring Argument

The book connects the expanded military posture to a message of coercive strength. During a visit by Saudi Prince Abdullah, he urged the U.S. administration to pay greater attention to Arab reactions to its strong support for Israeli repression. The response, as recounted in the text, was that the United States did not care what he or other Arabs thought. A senior official described the United States as being ten times more forceful than during Operation Desert Storm; a former military official added that others would respect this firmness and stop causing trouble. The exchange is used to show how military action could be understood as a demonstration of capacity and resolve, not solely as a response to terrorism.

The author says it is reasonable to imagine that such effects were calculated and that warning the world about the consequences of defying U.S. rules was a principal aim of the bombing of Afghanistan. He compares this interpretation with the NATO bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had explained in terms of maintaining NATO’s credibility. In his analysis, that language referred principally to the credibility of the United States and its leading arms client, rather than to the standing of individual NATO members.

The book’s conclusion is deliberately qualified: most underlying international problems remained much as they had been, but the attacks did introduce changes with significant and often unpleasant consequences. The destruction of Al-Shifa offers an earlier example of the kind of indirect human cost the author wants readers to count. After the 1998 bombing, Sudan lost a major producer of affordable medicines; the plant had produced 90 percent of the country’s most-used medicines according to one cited account, while another reported that its destruction left Sudan without its usual chloroquine supply. Under sanctions that obstructed replacement imports, the loss was linked to rising deaths from curable diseases, including malaria and tuberculosis. The author uses this comparison to insist that the consequences of political violence must be judged across affected populations, not only by the immediate event or its declared purpose.

The attacks therefore serve as both a crime to be condemned under a consistent definition and a catalyst through which the book examines selective naming, state power, domestic restrictions, and military expansion. Its closing emphasis is not that nothing changed, but that the changes followed and intensified older patterns whose consequences extend beyond the event itself.