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"The term 'blowback,' which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own internal use, is starting to circulate among students of international relations. It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of 'terrorists' or 'drug lords' or 'rogue states' or 'illegal arms merchants' often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations."
In the context of Johnson's book, what possible actions "kept secret from the American people" brought about this horrible disaster?
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The thesis of Johnson's book is straightforward: "I believe the profligate waste of our resources on irrelevant weapons systems and the Asian economic meltdown, as well as the continuous trail of military 'accidents' and of terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies, are all portents of a twenty-first century crisis in America's empire, an empire based on the projection of military power to every corner of the world and on the use of American capital and markets to force global economic integration on our terms, at whatever costs to others."
Beyond the tragedy of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, what other examples of blowback can we trace?
"It is now widely recognized, for example, that the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which resulted in the deaths of 259 passengers and 11 people on the ground, was retaliation for a 1986 Reagan administration aerial raid on Libya that killed president Muammar Khadaffi's stepdaughter."
As Johnson illustrates, for decades United States leaders have supported dictators in national struggles for independence:
Another factor which is more than likely to produce blowback is the economic policy which American leaders pursued in Asia.
"To base a capitalist economy mainly on export sales rather than domestic demand, however, ultimately subverts the function of the unfettered world market to reconcile and bring into balance supply and demand. Instead of producing what the people of a particular economy can actually use, East Asian export regimes thrived on foreign demand artificially engineered by an imperialist power. In East Asia during the Cold War, the strategy worked so long as the American economy remained overwhelmingly larger than the economies of its dependencies and so long as only Japan and perhaps one or two smaller countries pursued this strategy.
But by the 1980s the Japanese economy had become twice the size of both Germanies.
Anything it did affected not just the American but the global economy.
Moreover, virtually everyone else in East Asia (and potentially every underdeveloped country on earth) had some knowledge of how to create such a miracle economy and many were trying to duplicate Japanese-style high-speed growth. |
"The economic crisis at the end of the century had its origins in an American project to open up and make over the economies of its satellites and dependencies in East Asia. Its purpose was both to diminish them as competitors and to assert the primacy of the United States as the globe's hegemonic power. Superficially it can be said to have succeeded. The globalization campaign significantly reduced the
economic power and capitalist independence of at least some of the United States' 'tiger' competitors-even if, as with Russia and Brazil, the crisis could not be kept within the bounds of East Asia. This was, from a rather narrow point of view, a major American imperial success."Despite such immediate results, however, the campaign against Asian-style capitalism (and the possibility that America's satellite states in the area might gain independent political clout as well) was ill-founded and included serious blowback consequences. The United States failed to acknowledge that East Asian success had depended to a considerable extent on preferential, Cold War-based exports to the American market. By cloaking its campaign in the rhetoric of market opening and deregulation instead of the need to reform outdated Cold War arrangements, the United States both destroyed the credibility of its economic ideology and betrayed its Cold War supporters.
The impoverishment and humiliation of huge populations from Indonesia to South Korea was itself blowback enough, even if the blowback for the time being spared ordinary Americans. But if and when the stricken economies recover, they will almost certainly start to seek leadership elsewhere than from the United States. At a bare minimum, they will try to protect themselves from ever again being smothered by the American embrace. In short, by refusing to reform its Cold War structures and instead insisting that other peoples emulate the American way, the United States gave itself an unnecessary, possibly terminal case of imperial overstretch. Instead of forestalling global instability, it helped make such instability inevitable."
We must not become programmed by leaders who may try to turn us into unthinking, unreasoning pawns in a world war, indoctrinated dupes reacting to recent events in heedless retaliation. It has now become necessary that we recognize and act on our solidarity with reasonable, freedom-loving people throughout the world.
It's clear that actions taken by our leaders have led to this horrible blowback situation of common people becoming victims in a war we didn't realize had been going on for decades. People in other countries were being murdered in this ongoing terrorist war that our leaders were carrying out, but it took people dying in the United States before we woke up to the reality of what was happening.
We should be encouraged by the fact that in this time when a variety of people are reacting in a deranged manner, many cool heads and reasonable voices are being heard.
One of the first things we must do to protect against further blowback is to regain our democracy, to make sure that this crisis is not used as the excuse to destroy or limit essential civil liberties. Already, some disturbing actions have taken place to suppress our rights:
Fortunately there are some sane voices who realize how important it is to keep our liberties intact. Senator (Bob) Graham seemed to capture in his statement [Sept. 12] precisely the proper tone — that if we sacrifice basic rights and liberties for security, then the terrorists will truly have prevailed. Acknowledging that the enormity of this disaster makes for an extraordinary time, we must keep First Amendment rights in focus.
Robert O'Neil, founding director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, in Charlottesville, Va., put it another way: "The dilemma is balancing, on one hand, the undoubted need for better and more sophisticated intelligence gathering, against the imperative to preserve civil liberties despite the heightened threats of terrorism."
O'Neil predicts government action on "potential threats that were simmering before Tuesday and on which the heat may now be turned up, especially in view of Senator Lott's comment about civil liberties at risk in time of war. Those include," he said, "possible revival of the 'classified leaks' bill, renewed interest in installing Carnivore-like devices and maybe a new round of Clipper Chip," the encryption technology for digital telephones developed secretly with a "back door" key by the National Security Agency in 1993.
"The concern we have in the media [is that] as we demand information, we'll be accused of being subversive for the very process of interviewing, associating with or learning about those who would explain terrorism," O'Neil said. "The person who has their First Amendment credentials — The New York Times, The Washington Post — around their neck is probably OK," he added. "But someone seeking information and asking questions for a book or a free-lance article, for example, will be guilty by association," Armstrong said. "It becomes very insidious. What happens when reporters start asking about that intelligence failure … asking for proof that the people targeted are the right people? Somewhere in there, it's going to be considered disloyal."
Civil liberties groups are already beginning to gather their forces, the Los Angeles Times reported. The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California has started a telephone hotline to monitor violations of civil liberties, particularly racial profiling. And the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights met on September 13 in San Francisco to discuss the risks to civil liberties and plan a possible response.
Contrary to some of the extremists now trying to scare America into a lunatic reaction to its crisis, a time of tragedy is precisely the time to place renewed emphasis on civil liberties.
This horrific calamity which has befallen us can be a genuine wake-up call, making us aware of the necessity that we retake control of our government so that such catastrophes do not recur.
To protect ourselves from further catastrophic blowback, we must arouse ourselves to become once again an informed citizenry. We must demand that our executive and legislative leaders actually carry out due diligence in assuring that the people's interests are being served. No longer can we allow our leaders to act in ways which threaten our nation, our way of life, and our very lives.
September 16, 2001
Dr. Norman D. Livergood
Updates
