Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
Chalmers Johnson
“The 1990s were kind to the ‘indispensable nation,’ as Madeline Albright has called it. But, as Chalmers Johnson argues in this vital and engaging book, the halcyon days of American ascendancy cannot last: sooner or later, the stock market will fall, a counterbalancing force will emerge, or Washington will be unable to win a war without committing masses of ground troops, something for which the American body politic is utterly unprepared. Then all the latent contradictions in the American global position will emerge. When that happens—and it will—this honest, deeply learned, courageous, provocative, and witty man, Chalmers Johnson, will be your guide. Get hold of this prescient book and keep it for that rainy day.”
—Bruce Cumings, author of The Origins of the Korean War
“This eye-opening account of U.S. imperialist relations in Asia is stunning, disturbing, and very important. Chalmers Johnson warns that our present national security arrangements are mobilizing enemies around the world.”
—Richard J. Barnet, coauthor of Global Dreams
“Blowback is a powerful warning that the ‘only superpower’ complex is driving the United States into increasingly dangerous conflict with key countries throughout the world. Demolishing the argument that the United States is drifting into a new isolationism, Chalmers Johnson shows that American foreign policy is, in reality, more committed than ever to military intervention abroad and to the perpetuation of obsolete military alliances on terms incompatible with U.S. economic interests. This is original, hard-hitting ‘must’ reading for all those interested in the future U.S. global role.”
—Selig S. Harrison, author of The Widening Gulf: Asian
Nationalism and American Policy
“This brilliant dissection of the security, political, and economic relationships between the United States and Asia offers indispensable reading for anyone interested in the political economy of America’s role in world affairs in the twenty-first century.”
—Glen S. Fukushima, president, American Chamber of Commerce in Japan
“Chalmers Johnson, the brilliant and iconoclastic scholar of China, Japan and the rest of East Asia, has in Blowback written a brilliant and iconoclastic assault on American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.”
—Anthony Day, Los Angeles Times
“Johnson is on to something. . . . It is indeed a new post-Cold War ballgame, and Johnson’s warning of blowback, if it were heeded in Washington, would help keep America safe from the temptation of untrammeled power.”
—James P. Pinkerton, Newsday
Also by Chalmers Johnson
Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power:
The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945
Revolution and the Social System
An Instance of Treason:
Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring
Revolutionary Change
Change in Communist Systems
(editor and contributor)
Conspiracy at Matsukawa
Ideology and Politics in Contemporary China
(editor)
Autopsy on People’s War
Japan’s Public Policy Companies
MITI and the Japanse Miracle:
The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975
The Industrial Policy Debate
(editor and contributor)
Politics and Productivity:
How Japan’s Development Strategy Works
(with Laura Tyson and John Zysman)
Japan: Who Governs?
The Rise of the Developmental State
BLOWBACK
BLOWBACK
THE
COSTS AND
CONSEQUENCES
OF AMERICAN
EMPIRE
CHALMERS JOHNSON
A Holt Paperback
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company New York
Holt Paperbacks
Henry Holt and Company LLC,
Publishers since 1866
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10010
www.henryholt.com
A Holt Paperback® and ® are registered trademarks of
Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Copyright © 2000 by Chalmers Johnson
Introduction copyright © 2004 by Chalmers Johnson
All rights reserved.
Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Chalmers A.
Blowback : the costs and consequences of American empire/
Chalmers Johnson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7559-5
ISBN-10: 0-8050-7559-3
1. United States—Foreign relations-1989– 2. United States—Military policy. 3. United States—Foreign relations—Asia. 4. Asia—Foreign relations—United States. 5. Intervention (International law) 6. Imperialism—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.
E840.J63 2000
99-047713
327.73—dc21
Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums.
For details contact: Director, Special Markets.
Originally published in hardcover in 2000 by Metropolitan Books
First Holt Paperbacks Edition 2001
Reissued 2004
Designed by Michelle McMillian
Printed in the United States of America
9 10 8
CONTENTS
Introduction: After 9/11
Prologue: A Spear-Carrier for Empire
1. Blowback
2. Okinawa: Asia’s Last Colony
3. Stealth Imperialism
4. South Korea: Legacy of the Cold War
5. North Korea: Endgame of the Cold War
6. China: The State of the Revolution
7. China: Foreign Policy, Human Rights, and Trade
8. Japan and the Economics of the American Empire
9. Meltdown
10. The Consequences of Empire
Further Reading
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION:
AFTER 9/11
In a speech to Congress on September 20, 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, President George W. Bush posed this question: “Why do they hate us?” His answer: “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote.” He commented later that he was amazed “that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. . . . I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.”
But how “good” are we, really? If we’re so good, why do we inspire such hatred abroad? What have we done to bring so much “blowback” upon ourselves?
This book is a guide to some of the policies during and after the Cold War that generated, and continue to generate, blowback—a term the CIA invented to describe the likelihood that our covert operations in other people’s countries would result in retaliations against Americans, civilian and military, at home and abroad. Blowback was first published in the spring of 2000, some eighteen months before 9/11. My intention in writing it was to warn my fellow Americans about the nature and conduct of U.S. foreign policy over the previous half-century, focusing particularly on the period after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. I argued that many aspects of what the American gover
nment had done around the world virtually invited retaliatory attacks from nations and peoples on the receiving end. I did not predict the events of 9/11, but I did clearly state that acts of retaliation were coming and should be anticipated. “World politics in the twenty-first century,” I wrote, “will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century—that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post–Cold War world.”
During the first year after its publication, Blowback was largely ignored in the United States. Few of the mainstream book reviews took any notice of it, and the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs, wrote that “Blowback reads like a comic book.”1 Not surprisingly perhaps, the response elsewhere in the world was somewhat different. The book was quickly translated into German, Italian, and Japanese, and the foreign news editor of Der Spiegel even flew to California to interview me about it.2
Domestic lack of interest changed dramatically after September 11, 2001. The book was reprinted eight times in less than two months and became an underground bestseller among Americans suddenly sensitized to, or at least desperate to know about, some of the realities of the world in which they lived. The catastrophic events of the first year of the new millennium not only threw an unusual light on the self-proclaimed role of the United States as “indispensable nation” and “last remaining superpower,” but also posed serious questions and new dangers for other governments that were suddenly asked whether they were for or against our “war on terror.” The term “blowback” went from being an esoteric term of CIA tradecraft to virtually a household word, cropping up in discussions of the multiple disasters that were beginning to assail the United States—from anthrax attacks on senators, the media, and other targets to Congress’s gutting the Bill of Rights through passage of the Patriot Act (by votes of 76 to 1 in the Senate and 337 to 79 in the House). There was also a widespread sense around the world that America had it coming.
Blowback
Actions that generate blowback are normally kept totally secret from the American public and from most of their representatives in Congress. This means that when innocent civilians become victims of a retaliatory strike, they are at first unable to put it in context or to understand the sequence of events that led up to it. In its most rigorous definition, blowback does not mean mere reactions to historical events but rather to clandestine operations carried out by the U.S. government that are aimed at overthrowing foreign regimes, or seeking the execution of people the United States wants eliminated by “friendly” foreign armies, or helping launch state terrorist operations against overseas target populations. The American people may not know what is done in their name, but those on the receiving end surely do—including the people of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959 to the present), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Laos (1961-73), Cambodia (1961-73), Greece (1967-74), Chile (1973), Afghanistan (1979 to the present), El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua (1980s), and Iraq (1991 to the present), to name only the most obvious cases.
In a broader sense, blowback is another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although individuals usually know what they have sown, they rarely have the same knowledge on a national level, especially since so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret. As a concept, blowback is obviously most easily grasped in its straightforward manifestations. The unintended consequences of American policies and acts in country X lead to a bomb at an American embassy in country Y or a dead American in country Z. Certainly, any number of Americans have been killed in that fashion, from Catholic nuns in El Salvador to tourists in Uganda who just happened to wander into hidden imperial scenarios about which they knew nothing.
But blowback is hardly restricted to such reasonably straightforward examples. In its extended sense, it also includes the decline of key American industries because of the export-led economic policies of our satellites, the militarism and arrogance of power that inevitably conflict with our democratic structure of government, and the distortions to our culture and basic values as we are increasingly required to try to justify our imperialism.
The term “blowback” first appeared in a classified government document in the CIA’s post-action report on the secret overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953. In 2000, James Risen of the New York Times explained: “When the Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh as Iran’s prime minister in 1953, ensuring another 25 years of rule for Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the CIA was already figuring that its first effort to topple a foreign government would not be its last. The CIA, then just six years old and deeply committed to winning the cold war, viewed its covert action in Iran as a blueprint for coup plots elsewhere around the world, and so commissioned a secret history to detail for future generations of CIA operatives how it had been done. . . . Amid the sometimes curious argot of the spy world—‘safebases’ and ‘assets’ and the like—the CIA warns of the possibilities of ‘blowback.’ The word . . . has since come into use as shorthand for the unintended consequences of covert operations.”3
The attacks of September 11 descend in a direct line from events in 1979, the year in which the CIA, with full presidential authority, began carrying out its largest ever clandestine operation—the secret arming of Afghan freedom fighters (mujahideen) to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union, which involved the recruitment and training of militants from all over the Islamic world. Various members of the current Bush cabinet were complicit in generating the blowback of 9/11. Former general Colin Powell certainly knows why “they” might hate us. He was Ronald Reagan’s last national security adviser and then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the George H. W. Bush administration. Others include former secretary of defense Dick Cheney, former National Security Council staff official Condoleezza Rice, former Reagan confidant and emissary to Saddam Hussein Donald Rumsfeld, former Pentagon official in both the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations Paul Wolfowitz, and many more. Throughout the 1980s, these officials designed and implemented the secret war in Afghanistan and then, after the Soviet Union’s withdrawal, made the decision to abandon America’s Islamic agents.
The USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan was deliberately provoked. In his 1996 memoirs, former CIA director Robert Gates writes that the American intelligence services actually began to aid the mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan not after the Soviet invasion of that country, but six months before it.4 And in a 1998 interview with the French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, former president Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, unambiguously confirmed Gates’s assertion.5
“According to the official version of history,” Brzezinski told the Nouvel Observateur, “CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”
When asked whether he regretted these actions, Brzezinski replied:
“Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.’”
Nouvel Observateur: “And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?”
Brzezinski: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central
Europe and the end of the cold war?”
Brzezinski, Carter, and their successors in the Reagan administration, including George H. W. Bush, Gates, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Armitage, and Powell—none of whom has come forward to draw attention to this history—all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land mines that followed from their decisions, as well as the “collateral damage” that befell New York City in September 2001 from an organization they helped create during the years of anti-Soviet Afghan resistance.
The CIA supported Osama bin Laden, like so many other extreme fundamentalists among the mujahideen in Afghanistan, from at least 1984 on. In 1986 it built for him the training complex and weapons storage tunnels around the Afghan city of Khost where he trained many of the 35,000 “Arab Afghans.” Bin Laden’s men constituted a sort of Islamic Abraham Lincoln Brigade of young volunteers from around the Muslim world who wanted to fight on the side of the Afghans against the Soviet Union. In August 1998, on President Bill Clinton’s orders, the Khost complex was hit with cruise missiles, in retaliation for bin Laden’s attacks that month on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. For once the CIA knew exactly where the targets were, since it had built them.
Osama bin Laden, the well-connected, rich young Saudi (he was born around 1957), was well positioned to become a close ally with other friends of the CIA: Prince Turki Bin Faisal, the head of Istakhbarat, the Saudi Intelligence Service, and Lieutenant General Hameed Gul, head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which America used to funnel money and weapons to the mujahideen in order to maintain a facade of deniability with the Soviet Union. Since 1982, the ISI also took the lead in recruiting radical Muslims to come to Pakistan, receive training, and fight on the Afghan side.
Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire Page 1
