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Mr. and Mrs.President

See How They Ran

THESE are confusing times. America needs thoughtful critics who can challenge basic assumptions and help steer the public conversation constructively. Sadly, too much modern political debate is polarized, more suited to the theatrics of "Crossfire" than the logic of a classroom.

Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival?" offers unhappy confirmation of this trend. A linguistics professor at MIT with a second career as one of America's most passionate critics, Chomsky here offers more accusations than analysis. While condemning a one-sided approach to the debate, he offers his own unbalanced spin.

"After eight years, more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush I administration regained political power in the contested 2000 election," Chomsky writes, using the Florida fiasco to undermine President Bush. "They recognized that the 9/11 atrocities provided them with an opportunity to pursue long-standing goals with even greater intensity, closely following the script of their earlier tenure in office."

This stunningly simplistic conspiratorial worldview contradicts much evidence. It ignores the differences in tone and tactics between the Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush administrations. It overlooks George W. Bush's desire to avoid complicated foreign adventures prior to 9/11, and his transformation after Osama bin Laden's murder spree.

Chomsky caricatures American foreign policy as driven by an insatiable drive for power, rather than as a reaction to world challenges.

To prove his case, he throws the label of "terrorist" back at the victim, labelling many actions by America and its allies as "terrorist." He drowns the reader in a cascade of quotations, but doesn't provide much context for evaluating the sources' authority or claims.

Chomsky argues that the ever-expanding, violent, "terrorist" American empire threatens itself and the rest of the world. He does not bother probing U.S. motives beyond asserting a blind desire for "hegemony" - Cambridge-speak for power.

His bias is apparent in a 28-page chapter on the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Chomsky waits 23 pages before mentioning the "terrible crimes against Israeli civilians during the al-Aqsa Intifada that broke out at the end of September 2000."

The master linguist's language is telling. The troubles "break out" like a natural phenomenon, with no Palestinians identified and thus blamed. This comes after repeated denunciations of Israel as motivated by bloodlust and a compulsion to please America.

The only chapter which rises above the predictable is "Terrorism and Justice: Some Useful Truisms." In it, the sensitivity to language which shaped Chomsky's academic work yields a nuanced analysis about American inconsistencies and "filters" in viewing the world and thinking about terrorism.

Yet here, too, Chomsky oversteps. Emphasizing "violence" in defining terrorism, rather than its immoral targeting of civilians, he broadens it to the point of absurdity. By this definition, it's easy to call American and Israeli military actions "terrorist" regardless of the target, even as he rationalizes Palestinian terror by distinguishing between "terror" and "resistance."

Americans need to become more sensitive to language. Americans need to think about our "filters," about the blindspots that make us stumble. Yet simply caricaturing the United States as a power-hungry imperial behemoth does not help.

The climate of vigorous, good-natured dissent, so essential for circulating new ideas, suffers from these unnecessarily bleak stormclouds, leading too many Americans to shut their windows ever tighter.

Gil Troy is professor of History at McGill University.