SOURCE: “The Politics of Adolescence,” in The New Republic, Vol. 186, No. 12, March 24, 1982, pp. 37-9.

In the following review of Towards the New Cold War, Laqueur finds serious flaws in Chomsky's factual distortions and political idealism, despite crediting Chomsky as an interesting and impassioned intellectual.

There are, roughly speaking, two ways to review Mr. Chomsky's book [Towards the New Cold War]. One is to look for a particularly absurd statement or factual mistake (not necessarily of great relevance) early on in the book—for instance, the bomb explosion at the Munich Octoberfest in 1980, to which the author refers more than once. According to him, this was the second largest terrorist incident in Europe, killing fifty-three people. However, the number killed was in fact thirteen (even on the rare occasions when Mr. Chomsky is dealing with facts and not with fantasies, he exaggerates by a factor of, plus or minus...