Imperialism

Imperialism, in Noam Chomsky’s analysis, is not only a history of conquest and intervention; it is also a structure of unequal moral and political judgment. The September 11 attacks mattered historically, he argues, because violence that powerful states had repeatedly inflicted elsewhere was now directed at the United States on its own territory. The attacks did not erase the older system of power: they exposed its asymmetry and, in Chomsky’s account, gave the U.S. government an opportunity to expand military influence and advance domestic political objectives.

Conquest and the Reversal of Direction

Chomsky places the attacks in a long history of U.S. expansion and violence. He contrasts the country’s experience of September 11 with its earlier destruction of Indigenous populations, conquest of half of Mexico, interventions across neighboring regions, and conquest of Hawaii and the Philippines, where hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were killed. For much of the preceding century, he argues, U.S. power had been used across most regions of the world, with an immense toll on its victims. The attacks were therefore a dramatic reversal in direction: for the first time, he writes, the guns were pointed the other way.

He makes a parallel argument about Europe. European societies suffered devastating wars, but, in his account, these were chiefly internal conflicts, while European powers were conquering much of the world with extreme brutality. Their former subjects rarely attacked the imperial centers in return. Chomsky invokes India and England, the Congo and Belgium, Ethiopia and Italy, and Algeria and France to illustrate this uneven history. In that context, Europe’s shock at the September 11 crimes was understandable, but the novelty lay in the target and direction of violence, not in its scale.

The comparison with Pearl Harbor, Chomsky contends, obscures this distinction. The 1941 attack struck military bases on two U.S. colonies, not the national territory itself, which he says had never been threatened. He likewise notes that the attacks were not unprecedented in scale or character. Their historical importance came from the fact that the United States experienced atrocities on its own soil resembling those it had often inflicted abroad.

Imperial Power and the Language of Terrorism

Chomsky’s critique turns on applying definitions consistently. He accepts the U.S. government’s stated definition of terrorism as the calculated use or threat of violence for political, religious, or ideological ends, including through intimidation, coercion, or fear. Under that definition, he says, the September 11 attacks were unquestionably a terrible terrorist crime. His objection is to the political convention that reserves the label for enemies and their allies, while describing comparable violence by powerful states as something else.

He links this double standard to official doctrines of state action. The United States formally conducts what is called low-intensity warfare, a doctrine whose conventional definitions, he argues, closely resemble the official U.S. definition of terrorism: coercive measures directed against civilian populations to achieve political or other aims. Terrorism, in this reading, is not simply an “weapon of the weak” but can be a component of state policy. He argues that the distinction is maintained less by the nature of the violence than by who employs it: force used by a great power is conventionally described as coercive diplomacy, even when the same tactics would be called terrorism if used by someone else.

The political usefulness of the word “war” follows from this problem of classification. Chomsky argues that calling the response a “war on terrorism” becomes propaganda if the campaign does not actually target terrorism according to the government’s own definitions. Consistent application of those definitions, he says, would raise uncomfortable questions about U.S. conduct and that of its clients. A criminal investigation and prosecution, by contrast, would require identifying perpetrators, establishing responsibility, and presenting tangible evidence—an approach he notes was advocated by the Vatican and others. He suggests that the vagueness of “war” helps avoid the questions such legal scrutiny would bring.

Imperial Violence and Its Consequences

Chomsky supports his broader comparison with cases of U.S. violence or support for violence by allies. He points to the 1985 Beirut bombing outside a mosque, an attack aimed at a Muslim cleric who survived; it killed eighty people and wounded 250. He also cites Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which killed about 18,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, and subsequent military operations in 1993 and 1996 that had firm U.S. support. International reaction after the 1996 Qana massacre, he says, compelled Bill Clinton to retreat. He estimates that Lebanon’s civilian death toll since 1982 was probably 20,000.

His account also connects material support to the scale and duration of repression. In the 1990s, the United States supplied 80 percent of the weapons used by Turkey in its counteroffensive against Kurds in the country’s southeast. Chomsky reports tens of thousands killed, two to three million people displaced, and 3,500 villages destroyed. U.S. arms deliveries rose sharply in 1984, when Turkey launched its attacks, and did not return to their earlier level until 1999, by which time, he argues, Turkey’s aims had been achieved. These examples extend his argument beyond direct U.S. action: imperial power also operates through the support given to allied governments and their campaigns.

Chomsky’s discussion of September 11 also resists treating the attackers’ network as a wholly external phenomenon. He says that the network led in part by Osama bin Laden was very likely implicated, whether or not bin Laden himself was directly involved, and describes it as a force the United States and its allies had built and supported when it served their interests. Personifying evil in a single enemy, he warns, makes it easier to ignore the history and political conditions behind the crimes. His emphasis is not that this history excuses the attacks, which he unequivocally condemns, but that a response which omits it cannot explain the forces involved or reduce the risk of further violence.

From Historical Shock to Strategic Opportunity

In the book’s account, the attacks did not create U.S. strategic aims from nothing. Chomsky describes a longstanding policy, reaffirmed under Bill Clinton in 1993 as acting multilaterally when possible and unilaterally when necessary. Madeleine Albright and Defense Secretary William Cohen reiterated the position; Cohen described reliance on unilateral military power to defend U.S. interests, including access to essential markets, energy, and strategic resources. Chomsky distinguishes George W. Bush’s more forceful approach from this continuity: the sudden need to build a coalition might soften the rhetoric, he argues, without changing the underlying policy. Coalition members were expected to support the United States quietly rather than participate in deciding its actions, while Washington continued to reserve the right to act as it chose.

The strategic geography he describes centers on energy and military access. The world’s principal energy reserves lie especially in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, with significant resources in Central Asia as well. Afghanistan was, in his account, a relatively minor piece of this larger contest, although proposed pipelines through the country had been discussed for years as a means of helping the United States exert influence over Central Asian resources. Before the war in Afghanistan, Chomsky identifies Diego Garcia as the most secure U.S. base for targeting the Gulf. The establishment of major U.S. bases in Central Asia after the attacks, he argues, strengthened the surrounding military network and made forceful intervention easier.

He interprets the Afghanistan bombing as a possible signal about the consequences of defying U.S. power, while explicitly acknowledging that the relevant classified documents were unavailable and that this strategic explanation was an inference. He compares the proposed signaling function with the NATO bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had justified in terms of maintaining NATO’s credibility. In Chomsky’s reading, such arguments often concern the credibility of the United States and its principal arms client rather than the credibility of every alliance member. The comparison connects military action to the maintenance of imperial authority: intervention can serve not only its announced immediate purpose but also the demonstration of what the dominant power can do.

Domestic Power and the Aftermath

Chomsky also treats the consequences of the attacks as internal to the imperial system. He predicts that the U.S. government would use the crisis to promote militarization, including missile defense and the militarization of space; weaken social-democratic programs; divert public attention from globalization’s harms, environmental problems, and health insurance; and transfer more wealth to a small number of people, including through the removal of corporate obligations. He further anticipates efforts to subordinate society by suppressing public debate and dissent. These are presented as political uses of the crisis, not as new aims created by it.

In the postscript, he argues that the attacks and the ensuing war helped bring about a major change in U.S. military deployment: for the first time, the United States established substantial bases in Central Asia. He connects them to multinational corporate power, control of regional resources, and a wider network surrounding the Gulf’s energy reserves, extending from the Pacific to the Azores. He also describes the Bush administration’s new phase of the War on Terror as a means of consolidating an already overwhelming military advantage and promoting global dominance.

The consequences, in Chomsky’s account, include a broader reach abroad and greater discipline at home. He says democratic societies such as the United States used fear and demands for patriotism to justify measures disciplining their populations and instituting unpopular laws. The Bush administration, he argues, seized the opportunity to advance the interests of major corporations that dominated it, at the expense of much of the population and future generations. His final distinction is therefore between a historical rupture and political continuity: September 11 changed the circumstances and extended U.S. military reach, but the fundamental problems of international power largely remained. Imperialism is the frame that ties those changes together, linking conquest abroad, selective definitions of violence, strategic control of resources, and the use of crisis to narrow debate at home.