Not a bad op-ed for someone who used to be a Cold Warrior.
Michael Pugliese
Thursday, May 4, 2000, Los Angeles Times
Americans Feeling the Effects of 'Blowback'
Osama bin Laden's network is only one of many
unintended consequences of our actions abroad.
By CHALMERS JOHNSON
Our intelligence agencies--the CIA and its rivals
in the Pentagon--have a history of creating neologisms
to describe our world that cover up more than they
reveal. There have been lofty coinages like
"host-nation support," meaning foreign countries pay
to base our troops on their soil, and military jargon
like "low-intensity warfare" that repackages the most
brutal strife in antiseptic language.
Every now and then, however, a useful new word
emerges from the labyrinth of our secret services. The
American media recently started to use the term
"blowback." Central Intelligence Agency officials
coined it for internal use in the wake of decisions by
the Carter and Reagan administrations to plunge the
agency deep into the civil war in Afghanistan. It
wasn't long before the CIA was secretly arming every
moujahedeen volunteer in sight, without considering
who they were or what their politics might be--all in
the name of ensuring that the Soviet Union had its own
Vietnam-like experience.
Not so many years later, these "freedom fighters"
began to turn up in unexpected places. They bombed the
World Trade Center in New York City, murdered several
CIA employees in Virginia and some American
businessmen in Pakistan and gave support to Osama bin
Laden, a prime CIA "asset" back when our national
security advisors had no qualms about giving guns to
religious fundamentalists.
In this context, "blowback" came to be shorthand
for the unintended consequences of U.S. policies kept
secret from the American people. In fact, to CIA
officials and an increasing number of American
pundits, blowback has become a term of art
acknowledging that the unconstrained, often illegal,
secret acts of the United States in other countries
can result in retaliation against innocent American
citizens. The dirty tricks agencies are at pains never
to draw the connection between what they do and what
sometimes happens to those who pay their salaries.
So we are supposed to believe that the bombings
of American embassies in East Africa in 1998, the
proliferation of sophisticated weapons, not to mention
devices of mass murder, around the world, or the crack
cocaine epidemic in American cities are simply
examples of terrorism, the work of unscrupulous arms
dealers, drug lords, ancient hatreds, rogue states;
anything unconnected to America's global policies.
Perhaps the term "blowback" can help us to
re-link certain violent acts against Americans to the
policies from which they secretly--as far as most
Americans are concerned--sprang. From refugee flows
across our southern borders from countries where
U.S.-supported repression has created hopeless
conditions, to U.S.-supported economic policies that
have led to unimaginable misery, blowback reintroduces
us to a world of cause and effect.
We also might consider widening the word's
application to take in the unintended consequences
U.S. policies may have for others. For example, even
if the policies that our government fostered and that
produced the economic collapse of Indonesia in 1997
never blow back to the U.S., the unintended
consequences for Indonesians have been staggering.
They include poverty, serious ethnic violence and
perhaps political disintegration. Similarly, our
"dirty hands" in overthrowing President Salvador
Allende in Chile and installing Gen. Augusto Pinochet,
who subsequently killed thousands of his own citizens,
are just now coming fully into the open. Even when
blowback from our policies mainly strikes other
peoples, it has a corrosive effect on us, debasing
political discourse and making us feel duped when the
news finally emerges.
The United States likes to think of itself as the
winner of the Cold War. In all probability, to those
looking back at blowback a century hence, neither side
will appear to have won, particularly if the United
States maintains its present imperial course.
- - -
Chalmers Johnson Is President of the Japan Policy
Research Institute and Author of "Blowback: the Costs
and Consequences of American Empire" (Metropolitan
Books, 2000)
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