Somehow I missed the earthshaking news that Noam Chomsky’s new book about the September 11 attacks was released in October. Here’s a withering review at the Philadelphia Inquirer (via Jason Soon).

In this volume, which went to press Oct. 15, he rails at America’s supposed demand that Pakistan cut off food aid to Afghanistan, as if that meant eliminating food to ordinary Afghans rather than to Taliban members likely to steal it. According to Chomsky, our policy is essentially, “OK, let’s proceed to kill unknown numbers, maybe millions, of starving Afghans who are victims of the Taliban.”

This is the “silent genocide” canard Chomsky has been peddling around the world like a fucking ghoul, beating his drum of anti-Americanism in the very areas that spawned the 9/11 hijackers. Johnny “The Rat” Walker may be a traitor, but he’s just one guy. Catch him and the threat is finished. Chomsky’s brand of treason is more insidious and pervasive because it disguises itself as rational scholarship.

As fellow top linguist George Lakoff once told the New York Times, “He’s a genius, and he fights dirty when he argues.”

That’s why the news from Afghanistan that there will be no famine this winter is so wonderful. Primarily because a humanitarian catastrophe has been averted, of course, but also because one of the main tenets of the anti-war “platform” has now been shown to be false beyond any doubt.

Our purpose in Afghanistan was not to solve their hunger problem; we were acting out of sheer self-preservation, wiping out a regime that allowed their country to be used as a base for monsters. But achieving this goal had the side effect of making food distribution much safer and easier—another sign we’re doing the right thing.

And someone should ask the relief officials—who’ve been demanding a stop to the bombing right from the start—how many Afghans would have died of starvation this winter if the Taliban were still in charge?