United States–Sudan Relations

United States–Sudan Relations, as presented by Noam Chomsky, are defined by a stark reversal: Sudan offered cooperation and information on Osama bin Laden, but Washington rejected its approaches; after the United States bombed Sudan’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in 1998, Sudan released two suspects it had been holding, and the rejected intelligence offers became central to Chomsky’s account of the failures preceding the September 11 attacks. The relationship thus links military action, intelligence decisions and their human consequences, while exposing the distance between a government’s public security rationale and the choices through which it exercises power.

The Al-Shifa bombing and its human cost

Chomsky describes the destruction of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory as an instance of U.S. state terrorism that was quickly reduced to a footnote. The comparison he draws is deliberately unequal: if a network associated with Osama bin Laden had destroyed half of the United States’ pharmaceutical reserves and the facilities needed to replenish them, the reaction would be unimaginable. For Sudan, he argues, the event was instead treated as a regrettable but insignificant mistake, despite consequences he considers far more severe for the Sudanese population.

The scale of the harm is uncertain in the evidence Chomsky discusses. Sudan sought a United Nations inquiry into the justification for the bombing, but Washington blocked the investigation, and few people appeared to pursue it further. Chomsky insists that an assessment of casualties cannot stop at those killed immediately by cruise missiles in Khartoum: it must also include people who died later as a consequence of the act. On that basis, he argues that the bombing’s total human toll cannot be responsibly assessed with the information available, while observing that estimates of immediate Sudanese deaths were probably in the tens of thousands.

For Chomsky, the dispute is not only about counting deaths; it is also about applying a consistent standard of responsibility. He compares how crimes attributed to official enemies are assessed with the tendency to excuse harm caused by one’s own government as an error or as the ordinary result of institutional policy. He rejects personal speculation about Bill Clinton as a way of diminishing responsibility, just as he rejects using lack of intent to dismiss deaths caused by institutional decisions. His argument is that the consequences of the Al-Shifa attack should be judged by the same standards used for other states, not placed outside moral accounting because the United States carried it out.

Rejected cooperation and the release of suspects

Immediately 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 Sudan had offered cooperation. The United States rejected that offer; after the missile attack, Sudan released the suspects in anger. They were subsequently identified as agents of Osama bin Laden.

Accounts later reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation added a departmental dimension to the episode. According to those reports, the Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted the men extradited, but the United States Department of State refused. Chomsky therefore describes the suspects’ release not simply as a reaction to the bombing, but as the outcome of both the rejection of Sudanese cooperation and a refusal within the U.S. government to accept extradition.

The disputed decision acquired a larger significance after the September 11 attacks. A source from the leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency characterized the refusal to extradite the men, together with Washington’s rejection of other Sudanese offers, as the gravest intelligence failure in the entire affair. The same source called the rejected Sudanese information the key to what followed, citing evidence that Sudan had repeatedly offered extensive intelligence on Osama bin Laden. These are reported assessments, not a demonstrated claim that accepting the offers would certainly have prevented the attacks; Chomsky presents them as evidence that the opportunities to learn more were real and repeatedly declined.

Intelligence offered and refused

Among the proposals Sudan reportedly made to Washington was a substantial database on Osama bin Laden and more than two hundred senior members of Al-Qaeda, covering the years before the September 11 attacks. The offers included large files, photographs, detailed biographies of numerous leading figures and significant information about Al-Qaeda’s financial interests in multiple regions. Chomsky emphasizes the specificity of these materials to show what rejection meant: Sudan was not merely offering general diplomatic assurances, but information that U.S. officials later considered potentially valuable.

The Central Intelligence Agency source quoted in Chomsky’s account concluded that possession of the material would have given the United States a better chance of preventing the attacks. That is a qualified counterfactual, not proof that the database would have stopped them. Even so, it sharpens the relationship’s central contradiction: Washington had rejected cooperation from the country it then struck, and the same rejection was later described by a U.S. intelligence source as having serious consequences for the country’s ability to understand the threat.

Chomsky attributes the repeated refusals to what the intelligence source called the Clinton administration’s irrational hatred of Sudan, which had itself become a target of U.S. missiles. His account thus draws a direct line between political hostility, institutional choices and the loss of information. It does not supply a complete explanation of each decision or establish every link in that causal chain independently; rather, it brings together official confirmations, reported intelligence findings and the source’s own stark judgment to argue that the rejected offers deserve sustained scrutiny.

Strategic context and political interpretation

In a broader discussion of U.S. policy, Chomsky argues that governments often respond to crises by advancing existing agendas. He describes a proposed program of militarization, including missile defense and the militarization of space, alongside efforts to weaken social programs, redirect public concern away from globalization and environmental or health-care problems, transfer more wealth to a smaller number of people and constrain public debate. This is his account of the political uses of crisis, not a Sudan-specific explanation of the 1998 bombing; it places the episode within his wider criticism of how power and domestic priorities shape foreign policy.

Chomsky also situates U.S. military activity in a geography shaped by energy and strategic access. He notes that major energy reserves lie principally in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, with significant resources in Central Asia as well. Afghanistan, in this analysis, is a lesser piece on a larger strategic board: pipelines had been discussed for years as a means of helping the United States maneuver around Central Asian resources. He links the United States’ postwar establishment of major military bases in Central Asia to the region’s resources and to a broader effort to reinforce U.S. military reach around the Gulf. Diego Garcia had been the most secure base in the system directed toward the Gulf before the war in Afghanistan; Chomsky argues that the expanded presence improved the conditions for possible intervention.

These strategic claims provide context for Chomsky’s interpretation of U.S. action, but they do not by themselves establish the motive for the Al-Shifa bombing. He distinguishes, at least implicitly, between an observable pattern of military reach and his proposed account of the purposes it serves. Elsewhere, he argues that governments can use coalitions to soften their rhetoric without changing policy, and that partners may be expected to remain quiet and compliant rather than participate in decisions. His broader criticism is that official security language can obscure both the unequal consequences of force and the strategic interests surrounding it.

Responsibility, memory and the relationship’s significance

The aftermath of the Al-Shifa bombing carries a further consequence in Chomsky’s account: Sudanese cooperation was rejected, the suspects were released, and the United States later confronted intelligence failures that an agency source connected to those earlier refusals. At the same time, Sudan’s request for a United Nations inquiry was blocked. The combination leaves the public record incomplete: the bombing’s full consequences remain estimates, while the investigation that might have addressed its justification did not proceed.

Chomsky’s treatment of United States–Sudan Relations is therefore not a comprehensive diplomatic history. It is a focused argument about the relationship between coercion, information and accountability. The bombing is presented not as an isolated episode whose costs ended when the missiles struck, but as an act with possible downstream effects: human losses that must include indirect consequences, a breakdown in cooperation that ended with the suspects’ release, and intelligence offers whose rejection was later described as consequential. The book’s final emphasis is on the standard used to remember such actions. If responsibility is measured broadly for the crimes of official enemies, Chomsky argues, it must also encompass the effects of U.S. policy and the consequences of allowing those effects to recede into selective memory.