Bush administration

The Bush administration appears in Noam Chomsky’s analysis as an executive government that used the shock of the September 11 attacks to accelerate an existing political program, while the record of intelligence failures complicates any picture of the state as simply powerful and informed. Chomsky connects its domestic agenda to militarization and corporate interests, and its international posture to the projection of U.S. military dominance; he also emphasizes that the United States had turned away Sudanese offers of information and cooperation that might have helped counter Al-Qaeda.

Crisis and Domestic Agenda

Chomsky argues that the U.S. government answers to powerful domestic centers of influence, even as popular currents also shape policy. In the wake of the attacks, he expected the administration to use the crisis to push an agenda that included expanded militarization, especially missile defense and the militarization of space; weakening social-democratic programs; diverting public concern from globalization’s effects, environmental problems, and health insurance; and transferring more wealth to a smaller number of people, including by removing corporate obligations. He also identified the subordination of society and the suppression of public debate and dissent as part of this program.

He later described the attacks as an opportunity seized by the Bush administration to impose measures disciplining the U.S. population and to advance laws he characterized as unpopular. Fear and demands for patriotism supplied cover for silencing dissent, in his account. He argued that the administration’s actions served the narrow interests of large corporations that dominated it, at a cost borne by most of the population, including future generations. This is Chomsky’s interpretation of the administration’s beneficiaries and motives, not a neutral description of an established decision-making record.

Military Power and International Policy

Chomsky places the administration’s response within a longer U.S. pursuit of military primacy. He argues that it treated the new phase of the war on terror as a chance to consolidate an already overwhelming military advantage and promote global dominance. In his account, the September 11 attacks also accelerated pre-existing trends: governments including Russia and China used the counterterrorism climate to intensify repressive policies, while Turkey joined the U.S.-led campaign after years of U.S. support for its repression of Kurds. He also cites Israel’s expectation that U.S. backing would permit still harsher action against Palestinians.

The administration’s posture toward Saudi Arabia illustrates, for Chomsky, its indifference to objections from regional partners. During Prince Abdullah’s visit to the United States, Abdullah urged the administration to pay attention to Arab reactions to U.S. support for Israeli repression. Chomsky recounts that American officials answered that they did not care what he or other Arabs thought. He presents the exchange, alongside remarks about the force demonstrated in Afghanistan, as evidence that the administration sought respect through displays of military strength rather than accommodation.

Chomsky further interprets the bombing of Afghanistan as a warning to other states about the consequences of defying U.S. rules, while acknowledging that this strategic purpose is an inference rather than something established by secret documents. He compares that reading with the NATO bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had publicly associated with preserving NATO’s credibility. In this argument, the administration’s military response carried a message about U.S. power beyond its immediate operational aims.

Intelligence Failure and the Sudanese Offers

The administration’s capacity to use the crisis coexisted with serious failures of intelligence and coordination. Chomsky notes that international intelligence services and surveillance systems such as Echelon had not anticipated the attacks, despite awareness of an Islamist terrorist network. He describes the network associated with Osama bin Laden as decentralized, lacking a clear hierarchy, and dispersed across much of the world, making it difficult to penetrate. He doubts that simply increasing intelligence resources would address the underlying threat, arguing instead for attention to its causes.

A more specific failure concerned Sudan. Immediately before the 1998 missile attack on Sudan, the Sudanese government held two men suspected of bombing U.S. embassies in East Africa and had informed Washington. U.S. officials rejected Sudan’s offer of cooperation; after the missile attack, Sudan angrily released the suspects, who were later identified as Al-Qaeda operatives. Chomsky cites reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted the men extradited but the State Department refused. The episode therefore appears not merely as a failure to foresee an attack, but as a rejection of information and cooperation already offered by a government holding relevant suspects.

According to accounts Chomsky draws from investigative reporting, Sudan also offered extensive records on Osama bin Laden and more than two hundred Al-Qaeda leaders, including photographs, biographies, and information on the organization’s financial interests around the world. A source described as senior within the CIA called the rejection of these offers the gravest intelligence failure in the September 11 affair and said the information could have improved the chances of preventing the attacks. Chomsky connects the refusal to what that source called the Clinton administration’s irrational hostility toward Sudan, a target of the U.S. missile strike. The evidence he presents thus implicates decisions across U.S. agencies and administrations; it does not attribute every refusal solely to the Bush administration.

The Limits of the Account

Chomsky does not treat expanded surveillance as an adequate answer to the attacks. He points to the repeated failures of intelligence systems, including against easier targets, and distinguishes the difficulty of penetrating a dispersed network from the possibility of addressing the conditions that foster such violence. He also argues that a massive military retaliation would serve Osama bin Laden’s hopes and risk perpetuating a cycle of violence, while legal and constructive methods remained available.

His account consequently holds two claims together: the Bush administration could exploit public fear to advance domestic and strategic priorities, yet the broader U.S. state had failed to use available intelligence and cooperation effectively. The rejected Sudanese offers give that institutional critique concrete form; the later expansion of military influence and coercive policy supplies its political aftermath. The resulting portrait is not of a government that lacked power, but of power directed, in Chomsky’s analysis, toward dominance and narrow interests while essential opportunities for prevention were squandered.