Generally I think it's a waste of time and a nonargument to label someone a racist, or anti-American, or the like. Collect all the suspicious-sounding Pat Buchanan quotes you like, but once you've compiled your "portrait of an anti-semite" dossier, you haven't done anything to prove Buchanan's wrong about U.S. aid to Israel. Go ahead and convince me that Al Sharpton hates whitey (it wouldn't be hard), but that's not any kind of an argument against his position on slave reparations.

But Chomsky really makes it hard to resist the temptation to descend into ad hominem. If he wants to avoid the "anti-American" label--and he should, if only to avoid distraction from the thrust of his argument--then he could do better than to start out the book by noting that:

"During the past several hundred years the U.S. annihilated the indigenous population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico (in fact, the territories of indigenous peoples, but that is another matter), intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Phillipenes (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos) and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. That is a dramatic change."

And one from which it's apparent that the author draws some satisfaction. About time we got our comeuppance, huh? This is as nutty in its own way as Bin Laden invoking "the tragedy of Andalusia" as a justification for jihad. Really, what does any of that have to do with the receptionists, stockbrokers, and IT help desk jockeys who got incinerated in the World Trade Center?

I wouldn't go so far as to say, as Glenn Reynolds does, that "Chomsky is an America-hating anti-Semite whose sole organizing intellectual principle seems to be siding with genocidal cretins." I can't look into the guy's soul. But whatever demons are motivating him, they've caused him to lose the ability to argue effectively. He treats almost every question about our current predicament as a jumping off point to sputter on about U.S. war crimes in Nicaragua.

There are serious people making serious arguments about the events that led up to 9/11, about the relationship between foreign policy interventionism and terror, and about the difficulties of asymmetrical warfare in an age of weapons of mass destruction. Chomsky's not one of them.