11 septembre 2001

In Noam Chomsky’s postscript to 11 septembre 2001, the date marks a historical rupture whose importance lies not, he argues, in the scale of the attacks but in the targets and the reversal of a long-standing pattern: the United States was struck on its own soil by atrocities resembling those it had repeatedly inflicted elsewhere. Chomsky considers the consequences not a wholly new world order but an acceleration of existing military and political tendencies, as the attacks became grounds for foreign intervention, expanded global military reach, and tighter domestic control.

A rupture in the pattern of violence

Chomsky rejects the suggestion that the attacks were unprecedented because of their scale or character. Their historical distinction, in his account, was that the United States’ national territory had been attacked or threatened for the first time since the War of 1812. He finds the common comparison with the Attack on Pearl Harbor misleading: the attacked military bases were on territories he describes as colonies, not on the national territory of the United States, which he argues had not itself been threatened.

The rupture becomes sharper against the longer history he sketches. The United States had destroyed Indigenous populations, conquered territory that had belonged to Indigenous peoples, intervened violently across surrounding regions, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines, and used force across much of the world. Chomsky emphasizes the scale of the resulting toll before describing the reversal as the moment when the guns were pointed the other way. The point is not that the attacks ceased to be crimes, but that the country accustomed to projecting violence abroad had now suffered a form of violence at home.

In the postscript, Chomsky places this change within the spread of new technologies. Industrial powers, he says, had already been expected to lose some of their near-monopoly on violence, though they would retain overwhelming preponderance. No one could have anticipated the precise form that shift would take, but the attacks made it real. He therefore treats 11 septembre 2001 as historically important because it broke traditional patterns and was likely to have far-reaching repercussions—not because it initiated every underlying international problem anew.

Defining terrorism and assigning responsibility

Chomsky insists on applying the United States’ own official definition of terrorism consistently. In that definition, terrorism is the calculated use or threat of violence to pursue political, religious, or ideological aims, including through intimidation, coercion, or the creation of fear. By this standard, he says, the attacks on the United States were unquestionably a horrific terrorist crime. His condemnation of them is explicit; his argument concerns what happens when the same standard is not applied to violence by powerful states.

He distinguishes this literal definition from a familiar propagandistic usage in which terrorism means violence committed by enemies against the speaker or its allies. In that usage, governments condemn terrorism while describing their own comparable actions as counterterrorism, coercive diplomacy, or other forms of state policy. Chomsky argues that terrorism is therefore not simply an “weapon of the weak”: according to the official definitions he examines, the coercion of civilian populations for political purposes is also part of state action.

That distinction shapes his account of the “war on terrorism.” He calls the name propaganda unless the campaign actually targets terrorism according to the definitions its sponsors profess. The difficulty, in his analysis, is that Western powers could not apply those definitions consistently to their own conduct and that of their clients without exposing the contradiction. His examples include postwar United States counterinsurgency programs, which he says drew on Nazi models and manuals, and the changing labels applied to the Kosovo Liberation Army. The organization was officially condemned by the United States as terrorist in 1998; when United States and British policy shifted toward attacking Serbia, the same fighters were recast as freedom fighters, only to be described again as criminals and terrorists after the war. For Chomsky, these reversals reveal how political alignment can alter a label even when the underlying actions remain comparable.

Human costs beyond the immediate attack

Chomsky’s account of the attacks’ aftermath extends from political language to the consequences of military action for civilian survival. He points to the destruction of Sudan’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in 1998 as a precedent for following harm beyond the immediate act. He cites reports that the plant had produced a large share of Sudan’s medicines, including affordable treatments for malaria and tuberculosis, as well as veterinary medicines. One report put its share at 90 percent of the country’s most-used drugs; another said the loss left Sudan without a reserve of chloroquine, the usual malaria treatment.

The loss mattered in a country already facing disease, poverty, limited infrastructure, and sanctions that restricted pharmaceutical imports. Chomsky draws on reports estimating that tens of thousands of people, mostly children, suffered or died from treatable diseases after the factory’s destruction. He presents that figure as an estimate, not a definitive count, and stresses the indirect character of the harm: the factory’s destruction removed an affordable source of medicines, while sanctions obstructed replacement supplies. In this account, consequences that unfold through health systems and material shortages belong in any assessment of political violence.

He applies the same attention to the crisis in Afghanistan after the attacks. The World Food Programme had moved hundreds of tons of food into the country in early October, but estimated that this would meet no more than 15 percent of need. International staff withdrawals and a three-week interruption in deliveries had already worsened access; after airstrikes began on October 7, the Programme suspended its convoys and food distributions by local teams. United Nations representatives warned that 7.5 million Afghans lacked food and faced famine, while humanitarian agencies criticized the publicity surrounding American airdrops as an ineffective substitute for truck deliveries disrupted by the bombing.

Chomsky argues, on the basis of these reports, that the combination of airstrikes and food airdrops had immediately and significantly reduced the food reaching a hungry population, at least for the time being. He contrasts the visible presentation of airdropped rations with the interruption of the larger delivery system on which aid depended. As winter approached, the question was not only what the bombing intended but what happened to the people whose food supply was being cut off. His treatment makes such indirect and accumulating consequences part of the history of the response to 11 septembre 2001.

Political and military consequences

In his account of the longer term, the attacks accelerated trends already under way, including the Bush Doctrine and governments’ efforts to justify severe or repressive policies through counterterrorism. Russia joined the coalition against terrorism in the hope of securing room to continue its actions in Chechnya, Chomsky writes, and China acted similarly. Turkey was the first country to offer troops for the new phase of the United States’ war on terrorism. Its prime minister connected that offer to American support for Turkey’s campaign against its Kurdish population, which had depended on substantial supplies of United States weapons. Chomsky presents this alignment as an instance of a government implicated in repression being treated as a partner in a campaign against terrorism.

He also describes the effect on Israel’s policies toward Palestinians: Israel, he says, recognized that it could act with greater brutality under stronger American support. Within the United States, the post-attack climate of fear and demands for patriotism supplied the setting for measures to discipline the population and enact laws Chomsky characterizes as anti-popular. He argues that the Bush administration used the opportunity to pursue policies against the majority of the population, including future generations, while serving the interests of major corporations with unusual force. His conclusion that the initial predictions were amply confirmed refers to this widening use of the attacks as political authorization, abroad as well as at home.

The military map also changed. For the first time, the United States established major bases in Central Asia. Chomsky links them to the projection of American power over the region’s resources and to a wider strategic system directed toward the Persian Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, he says, Diego Garcia had been the most secure base in that system, which stretched from the Pacific to the Azores. The new Central Asian position, in his analysis, made intervention easier and furthered the United States’ capacity to influence energy resources and the regional balance of power.

Chomsky interprets the new phase of the “war on terrorism” as an opportunity for the Bush administration to consolidate its already overwhelming military superiority and promote global dominance. He points to an exchange during Prince Abdullah’s visit to the United States in April: Abdullah urged the administration to pay greater attention to Arab reactions to its strong support for Israeli repression, but a senior official reportedly replied that the United States did not care what he or other Arabs thought. A senior official also described the force used in Afghanistan as ten times that of Operation Desert Storm, and a former military official expressed the expectation that this display of firmness would command respect. For Chomsky, the exchange makes explicit a doctrine of power rather than a promise to address the political grievances raised.

He suggests that the consequences of the Afghanistan bombings may have been calculated partly to warn the world of what the United States could do when others did not follow its rules. He compares this interpretation with the NATO bombings in Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had explained in terms of maintaining NATO’s credibility. Chomsky emphasizes that the credibility at issue was not that of Norway or Italy, but of the United States and its principal arms client. The parallel connects the post-attack campaign to a familiar logic of international power: military action could serve as a demonstration of resolve as well as an answer to an immediate security claim.

An altered world, not a wholly new one

Chomsky does not conclude that the basic international problems had all changed. Rather, the attacks introduced changes whose consequences would in some cases be significant and unpleasant, while accelerating established patterns of military predominance, repression, and selective moral judgment. The book’s historical argument therefore holds two ideas together: 11 septembre 2001 was a genuine rupture because violence reached the national territory of a power accustomed to projecting it elsewhere, yet the political response largely intensified structures already in place.

That tension also informs the entry’s recurring distinction between condemnation and consistency. The attacks remain, in Chomsky’s account, an atrocious crime under the official definition of terrorism. But the aftermath cannot be understood by applying that definition only to enemies. It must also be applied to state policies, their partners, and the indirect consequences borne by civilians—from the loss of medicine in Sudan to disrupted food deliveries in Afghanistan. The date’s significance thus lies not only in the event itself, but in the new scope and justification it gave to military power and domestic control.