Noam Chomsky's 9-11 is a slim volume for the concerned citizen; it can be found near the counter in trendy, Bobo bookstores like the one where I picked it up. Made up of email interviews with the aging leftist linguist, it sets out Chomsky's case against the war on terror.

I wish it was better. There's something disturbing about near-unanimity of support for all aspects of a government policy even where, as here, our government's ends are legitimate, and the case for total inaction is quite weak. There's something even more disturbing when an important slice of the political spectrum loses the ability to distinguish good arguments from bad.

Chomsky indicts the war against the Taliban by comparing that approach with other British and American reactions to terrorist attacks:

"When IRA bombs were set off in London, there was no call to bomb West Belfast... When a federal building was blown up in Oklahoma City... [and the source of the bombing] was found to be domestic, with links to the ultra-right militias, there was no call to obliterate Montana and Idaho."

Well, yes. That's because, you see, Northern Ireland is part of the U.K. and the Royal Ulster Constabulary and other local authorities were actively working to locate the perpetrators. Similarly, the state governments of Montana and Idaho did not support terrorism against federal targets and were not engaged in shielding right-wing terrorists. In contrast, the Taliban permitted Al Qaeda to operate terrorist camps on Afghan territory, and shielded Al Qaeda operatives from U.S. authorities after 9/11. The situations are not remotely comparable and it's patently stupid to compare them.

Chomsky makes a comparison between 9/11 on Clinton's 1998 bombing of Sudan that's similarly provocative and similarly unintelligent. He makes a convincing case that destroying the region's lone pharmaceutical plant on the pretext that it was manufacturing nerve gas killed led to thousands of deaths from treatable diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. But criminal culpability is not simply a matter of tallying up numbers. The law distinguishes between negligence and recklessness on the one hand, and premeditation on the other. Clinton's motivation in bombing the plant was to distract the media from his inability to keep his pants up and the disastrous failure of his televised nonapology for the Lewinsky affair. He didn't want to kill thousands of Sudanese, and I doubt he fully realized the consequences of blowing up the plant. I think he should be jailed as a war criminal, but putting him in the same category as Bin Laden is like comparing a drunk driver to Ted Bundy.