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one of the few places where the other side of the case could be found; and intelligent patriotism entails knowing the arguments you have to answer. And, outlandish as it may seem to most Americans today, it is possible that, if the United States goes the way of nineteenth-century Britain, Chomsky's interpretation will be the standard among historians a hundred years from now.

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question-and-answer format. 'People are coming in every day, asking, `What can I read that can give me some understanding of what's happening?' ' said Virginia Harabin, the floor manager at the Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington. 'This is the one I recommend.

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book will be very useful in the months to come. Yet "9-11" just scratches the surface. For those who want more depth, many superb Chomsky books are available -- including the classic study Manufacturing Consent (co-authored with Edward S. Herman), "Profit Over People" and "The New Military Humanism," as well as volumes of interviews conducted by David Barsamian. In 9-11, Chomsky speaks without evasion: "We should recognize that in much of the world the U.S. is regarded as a leading terrorist state, and with good reason." Chomsky cites many examples of U.S. actions that resulted in the killing of several million civilians during the past few decades. A partial list of nations where those deaths have occurred includes Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, East Timor, Sudan, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. All in the past? Chomsky rips into the scam of wiping the U.S. government's slate clean. "If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion," he said. "Or we can look at recent history, at the institutional structures that remain essentially unchanged, at the plans that are being announced -- and answer the questions accordingly. I know of no reason to suppose that there has been a sudden change in long-standing motivations or policy goals, apart from tactical adjustments to changing circumstances." Chomsky added wryly: "We should also remember that one exalted task of intellectuals is to proclaim every few years that we have 'changed course,' the past is behind us and can be forgotten as we march on towards a glorious future. That is a highly convenient stance, though hardly an admirable or sensible one." For those whose window on the world is mostly confined to mainstream U.S. media, some of Chomsky's statements may seem odd or absolutely wrong. But you can't make an informed judgment based on a few quotes. Read a couple of Chomsky's books and decide for yourself. Noam Chomsky is not a lone ranger or ivory tower intellectual. For decades, he has worked closely with grassroots activists. "Understanding doesn't come free," he commented a few years ago. "It's true that the task is somewhere between awfully difficult and utterly hopeless for an isolated individual. But it's feasible for anyone who is part of a cooperative community." And, he added, understanding the world "doesn't help anyone else, or oneself very much either for that matter, unless it leads to action."

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The mass media, with few exceptions, has been a willing participant in a practice designed to swing public support behind the United States and justify its attack on Afghanistan as necessary to rid the world of terror and terrorists.

Then along comes Noam Chomsky, internationally respected political analyst, linguist and radical intellectual, to transcend the emotion evoked by the attack and offer a more realistic perspective.

His latest book, 9-11--comprising a collection of transcripts of interviews Chomsky gave to journalists from various countries after the attacks--attempts to understand the thinking of the perpetrators and the role of the United States in the realm of world terrorism. In 9-11, Chomsky makes some bold statements condemning the United States, its politicians and policies, supporting his claims with well-publicized examples that are difficult to refute, but which have somehow disappeared from public consciousness.

Chomsky, himself an American, refers to the United States as a "leading terrorist state," using as an example the Reagan administration's invasion of Nicaragua in the 1980s and the subsequent "devastating economic war" in that country. Though the invasion was condemned by the World Court, the United States responded by ignoring the ruling and escalating its attack on the country, killing thousands of people in the process.

Also discussed in detail is the Clinton administration's bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in August 1988, which destroyed much of Sudan's medical-supply capabilities and denied necessary and affordable pharmaceutical products to the Sudanese people, resulting in large numbers of deaths from easily treatable diseases.

Both examples could only be considered acts of terrorism if viewed from the side of the victims.

Chomsky points out that if the United States were subjected to an act resulting in the starvation of a large number of U.S. citizens, it would be difficult to imagine that act being regarded as anything other than terrorism. But that is essentially what happened in Afghanistan after the United States demanded that Pakistan seal its borders with the country and cut off food aid to the Afghan people before the start of the U.S. bombing campaign.

While Chomsky in no way condones the Sept. 11 attack, calling for the perpetrators to be brought to justice in accordance with international law, he ruthlessly exposes what he sees as inaccurate reporting about the incident. An article by Michael Walzer published in The New York Times on Sept. 21 that included a call for an "ideological campaign to engage all the arguments and excuses for terrorism and reject them" really got Chomsky's blood boiling for its refusal to examine reasons for terrorist acts.

At the same time, Chomsky is willing to praise insightful discourse. He makes several favorable references to the work of journalist Robert Fisk, whose articles regularly appear in The Daily Yomiuri's Independent supplement on Sunday.

He also lauds Indian activist Arundhati Roy for accurately describing the human catastrophe in Afghanistan resulting from the Bush administration's Operation Infinite Justice (later renamed Operation Enduring Freedom) in an article in The Guardian. "Witness the infinite justice of the new century. Civilians starving to death while they're waiting to be killed," Roy wrote.

9-11 contains several repetitive responses to similar questions. But as Chomsky told the book's editor: "These facts have been completely removed from history. One has to practically scream them from the rooftops."

The book is possibly the most accessible of Chomsky's works, given the topic's newsworthiness, public interest and international import. It also provides the reader with an arsenal of facts to negate the arguments of the most hawkish proponent of the U.S. response to Sept. 11.

If you find 9-11 enlightening and would like to delve further into Chomsky's political postulations, check out any of the more than 20 books he has written and the numerous Web sites devoted to his work.

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Delia Smith for bombers", crows the Observer's Mary Riddell, demonstrating due respect for the untold numbers of civilian victims incinerated by U.S. bombs and starving to death in the frozen hills of Afghanistan. But, once again, history will not end here. And, as Noam Chomsky makes clear in this tiny, essential book of interviews, history is sure to swallow the vapid cries of 'Victory!' in its vast and bloody maw. The folly of the course on which we are set is hidden from the public by years of suppression and omission of embarrassing truth. First, there is the sheer scale and depth of the hatred ranged against the United States and its allies. In mid-1979, President Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski began secret support for Mujahadin - later to become the bin Laden network - fighting against the government of Afghanistan. The objective was to draw the Soviet Union into an "Afghan trap", Brzezinski boasts. The U.S. and its allies assembled a huge mercenary force, 100,000 or more, powerfully armed by the CIA, and drawn from the most militant sectors of radical Islamists. By 1989 these radical Islamists had succeeded in their Holy War against the Russians, only to turn with equal ferocity on the establishment of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia (seen by them as comparable to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). In 1983 they had already attacked the Americans in Lebanon. In 1997 they murdered 60 tourists in Egypt. They are now active in North Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, western China, Southeast Asia and the U.S. This, Chomsky points out, is +one+ group. There are many others. "It's entirely possible that bin Laden's telling the truth when he says he didn't know about the operation..." Chomsky suggests. "Even if bin Laden is killed - maybe even more so if he is killed - a slaughter of innocents would only intensify the feelings of anger, desperation and frustration that are rampant in the region, and mobilise others to his horrendous cause." An easy 'victory' in disbanding the Taliban in Afghanistan may yet prove to be a terrible defeat for peace and security in the world. So what would Chomsky do? Well, he asks, what was the right thing for Britain to do when IRA bombs exploded in London? "One choice would have been to send the RAF to bomb the source of their finances, places like Boston, or to infiltrate commandos to capture those suspected of involvement in such financing and kill them or spirit them to London to face trial." But that, Chomsky notes, would obviously have been "criminal idiocy". Similarly, bombing Sicily would be an absurd way of dealing with the Mafia. Another possibility, the sane course, would be "to consider realistically the background concerns and grievances, and try to remedy them, while at the same time following the rule of law to punish criminals". But different standards apply when dealing with the Third World. Chomsky identifies a hidden and deeply disturbing truth about mainstream commentators: "It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that at some deep level, however they may deny it to themselves, they regard our crimes against the weak to be as normal as the air we breathe." This being one of the profound effects of "several hundred years of imperial violence on the intellectual and moral culture of the West". There is a high price to pay for this moral degradation. The New York Times locates anti-U.S. sentiments in "hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage". It matters not that bin Laden and others are clear that they are fighting a Holy War against the corrupt, repressive, "un-Islamist" regimes of the region; that they are fighting against the devastation of Iraqi civil society by Western sanctions, and against the ruthless Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. Because we are morally blind to the horrors for which we are responsible, we cannot understand the depth of the hatred our policies have generated, and so we call inflicting yet more violence on that already suppurating wound, 'victory'. Thus Chomsky was lambasted far and wide for comparing the atrocities of 9-11 with Clinton's August 1998 cruise missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. The attack was considered trivial in the West and has been long forgotten. And yet half the pharmaceutical production capacity of Sudan was destroyed by those missiles: "Tens of thousands of people - many of them children - have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases", Jonathan Belke of the Boston Globe writes. The German Ambassador to Sudan reports: "It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a consequence of the destruction... but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess." Tens of thousands of dead and next to nobody knows or cares in a society where such crimes are indeed "as normal as the air we breathe". The media consensus may now be that the campaign in Afghanistan has been a resounding success. But Chomsky reminds us that in 1914 the soldiers on both sides marched off to the slaughter with enormous exuberance, encouraged by the intellectual classes and a public mobilised in support of the war: "We should not underestimate the capacity of well-run propaganda systems to drive people to irrational, murderous, and suicidal behaviour." Another defeat in 'victory' could prove to be the emboldening and entrenchment of dangerous reactionary forces in society. George Bush's administration is deeply rooted in militarism and big business, particularly the oil industry. Perceived success in "the war on terrorism" could lend even more, and perhaps terminal, strength to centres of power that are successfully opposing action on climate change. How should social activists react to the horrible events of 9-11 and thereafter? If we want to escalate the cycle of violence and increase the likelihood of worse horror to come, then we should curb our criticisms and disengage from involvement in these issues, Chomsky says. On the other hand, if we want to reverse the current, insane strategy we should intensify our efforts: "It is important not to be intimidated by hysterical ranting and lies and to keep as closely as one can to the course of truth and honesty and concern for the human consequences of what one does, or fails to do. All truisms, but worth bearing in mind." David Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens. Sign up for free Media Alerts at www.medialens.org.