September 11 attacks

The September 11 attacks were, in Noam Chomsky’s account, historically significant not because of their scale but because of their targets: for the first time in modern history, the United States faced atrocities on its own soil resembling violence it had repeatedly inflicted elsewhere. Chomsky calls the attacks an unequivocal terrorist crime under the official U.S. definition, while arguing that their aftermath exposed how selectively governments apply the word “terrorism” and how readily the attacks could be made to serve existing political agendas.

Historical Rupture and the Question of Targets

Chomsky distinguishes the attacks from earlier episodes often offered as comparisons. He rejects Pearl Harbor as an exact analogy: the 1941 attack struck military bases on U.S. colonies, he argues, not the national territory itself. He places September 11 against a much longer history of U.S. violence, including the destruction of Indigenous populations, the conquest of territory taken from Mexico, interventions across neighboring regions, and the conquest of Hawaii and the Philippines. Against that history, he describes the attacks as a reversal of the customary direction of force: for once, the guns were pointed the other way.

The postface widens this argument beyond the United States. European powers had suffered devastating internal wars while conquering and ruling much of the world; with few exceptions, their former victims had not attacked them in return. Chomsky therefore treats the shock in the United States and Europe as inseparable from the disruption of a familiar geopolitical pattern. New technologies, he observes, had already made it likely that industrial powers would lose their near-monopoly on violence, even while retaining overwhelming superiority. The precise form of that change could not have been predicted, but the attacks made the possibility real.

Terrorism and the Unequal Use of Definitions

Chomsky calls the attacks terrorism according to the official U.S. definition: the calculated use or threat of violence for political, religious, or ideological ends, including intimidation, coercion, or the creation of fear. On that definition, he says, the classification is clear. His criticism is not that the attacks fall outside the term, but that official usage often reserves “terrorism” for violence by enemies against the United States or its allies.

He contrasts that selective convention with the official doctrine of “low-intensity warfare.” The stated definition of terrorism—coercion directed against civilian populations for political or other purposes—closely resembles definitions of low-intensity conflict, he argues. Terrorism, in this analysis, is not simply an instrument of the weak: it can be part of state policy. Chomsky further points to postwar U.S. counterinsurgency programs, which he says drew on the Nazi model, consulting Wehrmacht officers and using their manuals. The example supports his broader claim that the identities assigned to “terrorists” and “freedom fighters” can change when governments’ political alignments change, even when the actions and actors remain much the same.

That distinction shapes his response to the proposed “war on terrorism.” Chomsky argues that the phrase becomes propaganda if the campaign does not actually target terrorism according to the government’s own definitions. Consistently applying those standards to Western powers, he says, would implicate the United States and its client states. He recalls that in 1986 the International Court of Justice condemned the United States for the unlawful use of force, which he characterizes as international terrorism; the United States then vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law. For Chomsky, the difficulty is not a lack of definitions but the political consequences of applying them evenly.

From Attack to Political Opportunity

In the postface, Chomsky argues that the attacks accelerated trends already underway. Governments used them as an opportunity to introduce or intensify repressive policies. Russia joined the counterterrorism coalition in the hope of gaining permission to continue its campaign in Chechnya, he writes, and was not disappointed. China also joined for similar reasons. Turkey, the first country to offer troops for the new phase of the U.S. war, presented its offer as recognition of American support during its campaign against the Kurdish population. Chomsky notes the contrast between Turkey’s record of repression and its subsequent role as a force presented as protecting Kabul from terrorism.

He also describes the domestic consequences. In more democratic societies, including the United States, governments invoked the danger and an atmosphere of fear and patriotism to impose restrictive measures and unpopular laws. Chomsky argues that the Bush administration used the moment to advance policies against much of the U.S. population, including future generations, in the service of the narrow interests of large corporations. In his account, the language of emergency helped turn a foreign attack into authorization for wider domestic discipline.

The attacks also accompanied an expansion of U.S. military reach. The United States established major military bases in Central Asia for the first time, which Chomsky connects to control of regional resources, the contemporary “Great Game,” and the wider effort to surround the world’s major energy resources in the Persian Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, he identifies Diego Garcia as the most secure base in the system directed toward the Gulf; the new position, he argues, made intervention easier.

Chomsky interprets the Bush administration’s new phase of the war on terrorism as a way to consolidate U.S. military predominance and promote global dominance. During a visit to the United States, Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urged the administration to take more seriously Arab responses to U.S. support for Israeli repression. Chomsky recounts that the response dismissed those concerns and emphasized the greater force demonstrated in Afghanistan. He reads that exchange as an assertion of power directed beyond the immediate conflict: a warning about what the United States could do to states that refused to follow its rules.

Uneven Attention to the Consequences of Violence

The book’s wider argument about state violence also draws attention to consequences that are less visible than the attacks themselves. Chomsky cites the 1998 U.S. bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan as an example of how public attention can privilege the justification for an operation over its human consequences. Reports he discusses say that the factory produced a large share of Sudan’s medicines; one account put the figure at 90 percent of the country’s most commonly used medicines. Its destruction left the country without an adequate supply of chloroquine, the standard treatment for malaria, while sanctions restricted the import of replacement pharmaceuticals.

The effects described in those reports were delayed and cumulative: people with treatable malaria and tuberculosis lost access to affordable medicines, and the factory’s veterinary products had served a largely pastoral country. Chomsky cites a report estimating that more than one hundred thousand tuberculosis patients depended on medicines produced there, with imported alternatives beyond the reach of many. He uses this example not to equate separate events, but to insist that judgments about political violence must include those who suffer its wider consequences, not only those killed at the moment of attack.

Historical Significance and Aftermath

Chomsky does not deny the attacks’ exceptional importance. He argues that their historical significance lies in the violent break they made in traditional patterns, and that their repercussions would be far-reaching. At the same time, he challenges the claim that they created an entirely new age of terror: the attacks made visible a change in who could inflict violence on the territory of an industrial power, while the surrounding response intensified military and political tendencies that predated them.

The aftermath thus sharpens the book’s central comparison. The attacks are unequivocally terrorism by the official definition, yet the proclaimed campaign against terrorism, Chomsky argues, cannot be understood apart from the state violence it excludes, the allies it accommodates, and the domestic powers it expands. The event’s lasting significance in his account rests both on the rupture of a historic pattern and on the political uses made of that rupture.