Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is presented as a linguist and internationally renowned public intellectual whose work joins the histories of decolonization, the Cold War’s end, economic globalization, corporate power, media, and intellectual life. In interviews conducted in September 2001 and a later postscript, he applies that broad historical perspective to the September 11 attacks and their aftermath. His central challenge is to resist a moral vocabulary that condemns violence by adversaries while exempting powerful states from the same scrutiny.

Identity and Political Perspective

The editor introduces Chomsky as a thinker of decolonization and its continuing consequences, including ill-defined borders, separated peoples, and endemic poverty. The introduction also places him among the critics of U.S.-led economic projects, multinational corporations, media power, and the role of intellectuals. This framing matters to the interviews: the attacks are not treated as an isolated rupture, but as an event that must be considered alongside the longer history of violence and the systems through which it is described.

Chomsky distinguishes the attacks’ historical significance from claims about their scale or character. In his account, their defining novelty was the choice of targets: for the first time since the War of 1812, the United States had experienced an attack on, or threat to, its national territory. He rejects a simple Pearl Harbor analogy, noting that the military bases struck in 1941 were on U.S. colonies outside the national territory. The distinction directs attention away from familiar patriotic shorthand and toward the political meanings assigned to vulnerability and violence.

Naming Violence and Applying Standards

Chomsky scrutinizes the language used for military action. He contrasts the Gulf War, openly called a war, with the NATO bombing of Serbia, described as a “humanitarian intervention,” and with the initial use of “crusade” after September 11, a term quickly dropped because it would obstruct efforts to enlist allies in the Islamic world. In his view, labels such as humanitarianism can disguise force rather than explain it; declarations of benevolent intent are not evidence that an intervention is humanitarian.

He argues that calling the new campaign a “war against terrorism” risks turning a political slogan into a substitute for a consistent definition. If official U.S. or military definitions of terrorism were applied equally to Western powers and their clients, he says, the result would expose their own involvement in state terror. He also points to the legal alternative of treating atrocities as crimes: identify the perpetrators, establish responsibility, and bring evidence. That approach, however, raises questions about earlier acts of international terrorism condemned by the International Court of Justice. In his analysis, the vagueness of “war” is politically useful precisely because it can avoid those questions.

The same demand for consistency shapes his response to the question of whether terrorism can be defeated. Chomsky recalls the International Court of Justice’s 1986 condemnation of the United States for unlawful use of force and the U.S. veto of a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law. He presents this as one example of why many people regard the United States as a terrorist power, while insisting that the issue cannot be addressed honestly if state violence is excluded by definition.

For violence by non-state actors, he favors pursuing suspects and addressing causes rather than punishing populations. When IRA bombs exploded in London, he notes, there were no calls to bomb West Belfast or Boston, where much of the movement’s funding came from. After the Oklahoma City bombing, investigators found the perpetrators in far-right militia circles within the United States; the response was to identify, try, and convict those responsible, not to erase Montana or Idaho from the map. Chomsky uses these contrasts to argue that crimes should be investigated as crimes, while grievances that help motivate them should be examined rather than converted into justification for collective retaliation.

Media, Dissent, and the Limits of Information

Chomsky’s account of media coverage resists the idea that U.S. opinion was uniform. He cites reporting that New Yorkers’ views differed from the impression conveyed by national outlets: around a memorial to the victims, calls for peace reportedly exceeded demands for punishment, even as the public broadly wanted the perpetrators found and punished. He distinguishes that desire for accountability from opposition to an indiscriminate attack that would kill many innocent people.

At the same time, he describes a recurring crisis-time pattern: major media and intellectual classes rally behind state power and encourage the public to mobilize in support. He says the pattern was especially intense during the bombing of Serbia and also appeared during the Gulf War. The contrast between dissent in public and conformity among influential institutions is central to his account of how consensus is made—not necessarily by eliminating every opposing view, but by narrowing which views receive authority and attention.

Chomsky criticizes explanations that attribute hostility toward the United States chiefly to globalization or cultural dominance. He argues that such explanations can absolve Western intellectuals of responsibility for specific policies. Reporting cited in the interviews described affluent, pro-American Egyptians and other privileged Middle Easterners criticizing U.S. policy for concrete political reasons; for Chomsky, their objections undermine the claim that resentment is mainly about consumer culture. He likewise challenges the comforting account that the attackers acted from hatred of Western values alone, warning that ignoring U.S. actions can help increase the risk of further atrocities.

His discussion of Al Jazeera makes the struggle over information concrete. He describes the Qatar-based satellite channel as a widely watched, uncensored source for the Arabic-speaking world, with live debates and a broad range of opinion. It maintained reporters in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, showed the destruction of Buddhist statues, and broadcast interviews with Osama bin Laden that were translated and rebroadcast by the BBC. Chomsky notes that the channel’s coverage of dissent and human-rights abuses also angered Middle Eastern governments.

He cites reports that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell pressed Qatar’s emir to persuade Al Jazeera to soften its reporting. The emir confirmed that Washington, under both the current and previous administrations, had made such requests. Chomsky further observes that the channel’s interviews and reporting were little used despite their potential value for understanding bin Laden’s stated reasoning. After it aired a video of bin Laden that proved useful to Western propaganda, U.S. press coverage praised Al Jazeera as a pioneering, round-the-clock Arabic news channel, even though American politicians had been troubled by its interviews, critical analysts, and callers speaking freely on air. The sequence illustrates how an outlet could be condemned or courted according to the immediate political use of its content.

Aftermath and Political Consequences

In the postscript, Chomsky acknowledges the attacks as an event of major historical importance because innocent people were targeted. He connects that importance to a broader change already anticipated: new technologies could weaken industrial powers’ near-monopoly on violence, even while leaving their military preponderance overwhelming. The precise form of the change could not have been predicted, but the attacks made that vulnerability visible on U.S. soil.

Chomsky argues that governments used the attacks to intensify existing coercive policies. Russia joined the “coalition against terrorism” in the hope of securing room to continue its violence in Chechnya, and, in his account, was not disappointed; China also joined for comparable reasons. Turkey offered troops for the new phase of the U.S. campaign, with its prime minister citing U.S. support during Turkey’s brutal repression of Kurds. Israel, Chomsky says, saw an opportunity to intensify its treatment of Palestinians with stronger U.S. backing. These examples support his warning that a campaign presented as universal opposition to terrorism could provide cover for state violence elsewhere.

He also describes a domestic consequence: democratic societies, including the United States, adopted measures to discipline their populations and enacted laws he characterizes as anti-popular, under cover of counterterrorism, fear, and demands for patriotism. Chomsky argues that the Bush administration used the moment to pursue policies against much of the U.S. population, including future generations, in service of the narrow interests of large corporations. His claim links the emergency’s language to the political and economic interests that, in the editor’s framing, run through the book.

Finally, he points to the establishment of major U.S. military bases in Central Asia as a strategic consequence of the war in Afghanistan. He connects those bases to the influence of U.S.-dominated multinationals, control of regional resources, and the wider effort to encircle the world’s most important energy resources in the Persian Gulf. Before the war, he notes, Diego Garcia was the safest base in the system directed toward the Gulf; the new Central Asian position, in his analysis, made intervention easier. The postscript closes this line of argument by saying that the initial predictions had been amply confirmed: the attacks had not only prompted a military response, but accelerated trends in military reach, domestic control, and the political use of fear.