The question of why a marketable writer like Chomsky (his controversial book 9-11 was a runaway bestseller) is not marketed in the mainstream American press is taken up in the book's preface, written by Peter Hart, "activism director" at FAIR, the national media watchdog group. Since FAIR's conception two decades ago, it has documented scores of mainstream newspapers that have axed their liberal voices while providing a sort of tenure to right-wing and centrist columnists. In the US, archconservatives flourish among the top most-circulated columnists, including James Dobson, Cal Thomas and Robert Novak, while liberal commentators, such as Chomsky, are few and far between. Hart insists that, as in other arenas of political discourse, the parameters of acceptable debate have been deliberately hedged in the opinion pages in adherence to the status quo of corporate interests. All of this, of course, seems to echo Chomsky's own criticism of the American media as a tool for corporate and political elites.

At the center of Interventions lie the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that Chomsky, unsurprisingly, sees as a continuation of America's quest for global dominance rather than as a sincere effort to stamp out global terrorism. As in previous books, Chomsky here strips the American foreign policy doctrine of its veneer as a torchbearer of freedom. In actuality, he argues, US foreign policy is itself one of the leading causes of terrorism in the world. Fighting terrorism, therefore, is as simple as not participating in it.

"September 11," writes Chomsky in his first essay "9/11: Lessons Unlearned," "shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the US government does in the world and how it is perceived." This sentiment was at the heart of the controversy surrounding Chomsky's first post-9/11 book, 9-11, a work motivated in part by a hatred of US foreign policy.

It is unlikely that a terror-begets-terror analysis ever appealed to the general public — in some quarters such a viewpoint is tantamount to an insidious justification of terror — but if it had, it quickly lost its flavor following the horrendous attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. America was looking for Captain America, not a dissident intellectual from MIT, and it was much easier for a grieving nation to hearken to Bush's announcement that we were attacked because "they hate our freedoms."

To their shared credit and discredit, both the Bush and Chomsky theories seem to suffer from the flaw of half-truth. Chomsky is correct when he implies that Bin Laden and his minions were in part motivated by real grievances against US foreign policy — our unilateral support of Israel, our bombings and sanctions against Iraq, and our overall military presence in the Middle East — but his tendency to talk about terrorism against the US only in order to malign American interventions makes the 9/11 attacks sound like a knee-tendon reflex. Bush is also probably correct when he says that Al Qaeda hates America for its freedoms, but if that were all there was to Al Qaeda then Scandinavia — a region that seems to enjoy more freedom than we do — should have been attacked by now.

Nevertheless, it is safe to surmise whose opinion was more popular immediately following 9/11. As the Bush administration's popularity soared, it was given unprecedented leverage by Congress to carry out its own agenda. First, they forged a new US National Security Strategy of "pre-emptive war," or "preventive" war, as Chomsky calls it, against Iraq and then consistently used the terrorist threat to distract Americans from socioeconomic issues at home, including jobs, healthcare and pensions.

Chomsky argues that both wars were disastrous mistakes and clear violations of the UN Charter, which "bars the threat or use of force unless authorized by the UN Security Council," the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg principles. Moreover, Chomsky does not believe that these wars were carried out to fight terror, to neutralize WMDs in Iraq or to spread democracy throughout the Middle East (as evinced by Washington's reluctance to allow Iraq to hold direct elections and ignoring of democratic elections when they don't like the outcome). They were the actualization, says Chomsky, of "long-standing plans to take control of Iraq's immense oil wealth, a central component of the Persian Gulf resources that the State Department, in 1945, described as a 'stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.'"

The outcome, as most will concede, turned out to be disastrous. Iraq is presently caught up in sectarian strife that could be described as a full-fledged civil war, global terrorist networks have grown and nations already hostile to the US, notably Iran and North Korea, have grown more so. Even relations with Russia have soured as our supposed ally has "sharply increased its offensive military forces ..." writes Chomsky. In one 2003 essay, he forewarns of one of the grimmer possibilities: a "destabilization in Pakistan" which could lead to a "turnover of 'loose nukes' to the global network of terrorist groups" — a prospect scarily realistic in light of current events.

Chomsky's hyper-cynical lens shows us a Washington that was prepared to risk this terrorist-spawning fall-out to gain economic and strategic control of the Middle East — a critical advantage, argues Chomsky in a June, 2004 op-ed titled "Who Is to Run the World and How," against our growing competitors in Europe and Northeast Asia.

On other subjects, Chomsky does not abandon his umbrella thesis that the US government is making the world a more dangerous place, both at home and abroad. Hurricane Katrina was preceded by "a long-gathering storm of misguided policies and priorities" that exacerbated the tragedy. Citing a pre-9/11 FEMA report, Chomsky shows that a major hurricane striking New Orleans was listed as one of the top three most likely catastrophes to affect this country. Despite this, FEMA was relegated to a branch of the Department of Homeland Security and had to face budget-cuts to make room for more war funds, leaving the agency unable to adequately function when the threat became a reality

As in Chomsky's last book, Failed States, the US is described as one of the leading 'failed states,' that is, a nation which fails "to provide security for the population, to guarantee rights at home or abroad, or to maintain functioning (not merely formal) democratic institutions." Despite surveys that show that Americans favor cuts in military spending and increased spending for social programs such as education and health care, the Bush administration has continued the legacy of previous administrations by denying what Paula Dobriansky, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, called the "myth [that] economic and social rights constitute human rights." In this spirit, says Chomsky, the government naturally tried to concoct a non-crisis over social security to dismantle it while ignoring a real one like the perilous state of healthcare.

In between critiques of US policy, there is commentary on Latin America and its trend (as in Europe and Asia) toward regional independence. After decades of being the stomping ground for Cold War tensions and a guinea pig for economic experiments, Latin America has begun to move away from US influence, with leftist governments cropping up in Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil. Chomsky sees this democratic flourish as a positive trend. What's more, he suggests that the US could learn a thing or two from the developments down south. For example, the last presidential election (2005) in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, put the US equivalent to shame. Bolivian voters were not only familiar with the issues but with the ones that mattered, such as domestic control over natural gas and other resources while for American voters, says Chomsky, "issues were removed from the electoral agenda" and candidates were "packaged and sold like toothpaste and cars."

Chomsky paints a very pitiful picture of the American democratic process, but he almost treats Americans like automatons, incapable of glancing beyond the flash and glow of staged campaigns to the meat-and-potatoes issues. In addition, his treatment of Latin America appears highly selective: President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez doesn't have the best record on free speech and human rights, yet Chomsky only quotes sources that lavish praise on the controversial leader.

Nevertheless, much of Chomsky's criticism of the democratic process in the US is indisputable. Few would deny that public officials too often pay more attention to the rolls of money being stuffed into their pockets than the will of the people. How, then, can the average American alter the surroundings shaped by powerful multinational bricklayers? Chomsky here trumpets the trademark liberal ideal that things can be altered, even at the grassroots level. Major strides for civil rights came about in the 1960s through the banding-together of regular people to form popular movements. These movements have not died, says Chomsky, as exemplified by the popular protests against the invasion of Iraq. "By contrast," wrote Chomsky in March just days after the invasion began, "forty-one years ago this month, when the Kennedy administration launched a direct attack against South Vietnam, protest was almost nonexistent. It did not reach any meaningful level for several years, when several hundred thousand troops were in South Vietnam, which had been devastated, and the US had extended war to the North."

Even as limited as the democratic process is in the US, Chomsky insists that the average citizens's power to vote should not be taken for granted, even if elections are limited to two mainstream parties. Shortly before the 2004 presidential election, he wrote: "If you are in a swing state, you should vote to keep the worst guys out" and argued that even the smallest differences between candidates can have dramatically different outcomes. And political participation doesn't stop with the cast of a vote ever couple years; Chomsky argues that for each citizen to make a real impact the "main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome." Here again, he points to the political activism of the '60s that advanced the causes of social equality.

This reviewer believes that Chomsky is right. Average Americans can shape the system. Manufacturing Consent, after all, is not an infallible form of coercion. It is much easier to impel people to obey at the barrel of a gun than it is with distortions and distractions. Chomsky does not deny this, though at times it seems as if he should be more strident in putting the onus on the American public for their government's failures. Chomsky's reasonable antipathy toward the US government is never tempered by a reasonable antipathy toward US citizens. President George W. Bush didn't win the 2004 election by stealth alone; he had the help of an unusually uncritical electorate. (He did, after all, tell the public shortly before the election that he was "a war president" and never portrayed himself as an intelligent, thoughtful leader — a feat perhaps beyond his powers.)

And maybe Chomsky's faith in "the people" is the only thing steering this rook of justice against the kings of oppression. That can't be a bad thing.

"The world has good reason to watch what is happening in Washington with fear and trepidation," writes Chomsky. "It cannot be stressed too often that the people who are best placed to relieve those fears are the people of the United States, who are fortunate in that they can do more than anyone else to shape the future, thanks to the power of their own state and the freedom and privilege they enjoy, very high by comparative standards."

There lies the rub. Are Americans willing to rise to the occasion?

— Jeremy Carlos Foster (jcarlosfoster at gmail dot com)