Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book couldn't come at a better time. I've read other works by Chomsky, but I appreciated the brevity and cutting edge analysis that is needed to help see through the fog of distortions, propaganda, and lack of historical analysis that is used to gain support for what Chomsky calls a terrorist attack on the innocent people of Afghanistan. Though Chomsky repeaditaly states that the 9/11 attack is unjustfied, he rightly argues that if we fail to understand the context of such an attack, then we're doom, like the state of Isreal, to live without any hope of peace and justice. Throughout the various interviews reproduced in this book, he maintains that "we should recognize that in much of the world the U.S. is regarded as a leading terrorist state, and with good reason. We might bear in mind, for example, that in 1986 the U.S. was condemned by the World Court for 'unlawful use of force' (international terrorism) and then vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states (meaning the U.S.) to ahdhere to international law." What the U.S. has done or supported in Vietnam, Granada, Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Sudan, El Salvador, Chile, occupied Palestine, etc. constitute a recent history of political terrorist repression, whereby hundreds of thousands of innocent people, especially women and children, have been killed primarily to protect the political and economic (e.g. oil, coffee) interests of the United States. Chomsky reminds us that the current war is nothing new or partisan. The attack on Afghanistan is/will be 10 times as devistating as Clinton's attack on the Sudan in which the "death toll from the bombing has continued, quietly, to rise...Thus, tens of thousands of people--many of them children--have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases..." And this attack as we must remember was done based on the same current erroneous reasons given for the current attack on the people of Afghanistan and Irag--all three in persuit of a despotic leader. Not a supporter of the Islamic fundementalist bin Landen, Chomsky does remind readers of the history of the U.S. in Afghanistan whereby in the 1980s, the U.S. trained and funded networks to committ a "holy war against the Russian occupiers....By 1989, they [the Mujahidin, in which bin Landen was a principle leader] succeeded in their Holy War in Afghanistan. As soon as the U.S. established a permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia, bin Landen and the rest announced that from their point of view, that was comparable to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and they turned their guns on the Americans, as had already happened in 1983 when the U.S. had military forces in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia is a major enemy of the bin Laden network, just as Egypt is. That's what they want to overthrow, what they call the un-Islamic governements of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, other states of the Middles East, and North Africa. And it continued." This type of history and analysis provides us with the context for 9/11--one that we simply will not get from watching or reading the dominant media. While many may argue with Chomsky's analysis, he nevertheless provides the necessary rebuttal to what, in my view, is the perfect war for someone like the unelected president of this country. Finally, the only problem I have with this book is that Chomsky or the editor should have provided documentation for the many "reports" refered to in this work. Without identifying specific sources, Chomsky weakens many of his arguments, for we simply don't know where he's getting his information.