Pentagon

The Pentagon appears in Noam Chomsky’s discussion of the September 11 attacks as a target with a significance distinct from that of the World Trade Center: it was not merely a symbol, but an institution whose role gave the attack a political meaning. Chomsky argues that the crime would have remained terrible even with far fewer victims, and uses the choice of targets to question how the United States interprets violence and mobilizes its aftermath.

Target and Significance

Chomsky considers a hypothetical in which the attacks occurred at night, when few people were in the World Trade Center. He doubts that a much lower death toll would have substantially changed the United States government’s response. In this comparison, the number of victims matters to the scale of the human loss, but does not exhaust the political meaning of the targets.

He distinguishes the Pentagon from the World Trade Center by insisting that the Pentagon is more than a symbol. The passage does not elaborate on the institution’s functions; instead, it treats its significance as sufficiently evident that it needs no further explanation. The contrast places the Pentagon within a political reading of the attacks, rather than presenting it simply as one of two prominent buildings struck.

Terrorism and Political Framing

Chomsky calls the September 11 attacks a terrible terrorist crime, applying a definition he attributes to official U.S. documents: calculated violence, or the threat of violence, used to pursue political, religious, or ideological aims through intimidation, coercion, or fear. Under that definition, the attacks plainly qualify as terrorism. His argument is not that the term should be withheld from the attackers, but that it should be applied consistently.

He contrasts this literal definition with the propagandistic convention of using “terrorism” for violence committed by enemies against the United States or its allies. In his account, the same actions can be described differently as political alignments change: he points to U.S. counterinsurgency programs and to the shifting labels applied to armed groups in Kosovo as examples of this flexibility. The Pentagon’s place in the attacks thus sits within a wider critique of how a target’s identity and the perpetrator’s identity shape public descriptions of violence.

Aftermath and the Uses of the Attacks

Chomsky argues that the attacks accelerated existing political trends. He describes governments including Russia, China, and Turkey as using the counterterrorism coalition to advance or intensify repressive policies, and says Israel expected stronger U.S. support for its actions against Palestinians. In the United States, he argues, fear and demands for patriotism helped justify domestic restrictions and policies serving powerful corporate interests.

He also presents the military response as an opportunity for the Bush administration to reinforce U.S. global dominance. The attacks and the subsequent war, in this analysis, were not only framed as a response to terrorism but also became part of a broader effort to demonstrate military capacity and influence. The Pentagon therefore has a double significance in the discussion: it was a target in the crime, and its selection helped anchor a political narrative whose consequences reached far beyond the site of the attack.

Interpretive Limits

Chomsky cautions against treating the attackers’ choice of the World Trade Center as proof that they were motivated by opposition to globalization, economic imperialism, or cultural values. He says those subjects were foreign to Osama bin Laden and his associates, and to other radical Islamists he mentions. He also stresses that the attackers’ atrocities had caused suffering among poor and oppressed populations in the Muslim world and elsewhere, and that such suffering continued after September 11.

This distinction keeps the Pentagon’s symbolic and political weight from becoming a complete explanation of the event. Chomsky recognizes the attack as terrorism and the crime as terrible, while directing attention to the unequal standards by which violence is named and to the policies advanced in its aftermath.