[iwar] [fc:Blowback:.US.actions.abroad.have.repeatedly.led.to.unintended,.indefensible.consequences]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-05 06:26:32
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Blowback:.US.actions.abroad.have.repeatedly.led.to.unintended,.indefensible.consequences]
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The Nation
October 15, 2001
Blowback: US actions abroad have repeatedly led to unintended, indefensible consequences
By Chalmers Johnson 

For Americans who can bear to think about it, those tragic pictures from New
York of women holding up photos of their husbands, sons and daughters and
asking if anyone knows anything about them look familiar. They are similar
to scenes we have seen from Buenos Aires and Santiago. There, too, starting
in the 1970s, women held up photos of their loved ones, asking for
information. Since it was far too dangerous then to say aloud what they
thought had happened to them--that they had been tortured and murdered by
US-backed military juntas--the women coined a new word for them, los
desaparecidos--"the disappeareds." Our government has never been honest
about its own role in the 1973 overthrow of the elected government of
Salvador Allende in Chile or its backing, through "Operation Condor," of
what the State Department has recently called "extrajudicial killings" in
Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. But we now have
several thousand of our own disappeareds, and we are badly mistaken if we
think that we in the United States are entirely blameless for what happened
to them. 

The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not "attack America," as
our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked
American foreign policy. Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed
innocent bystanders who then became enemies only because they had already
become victims. Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to
draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable. The United States deploys
such overwhelming military force globally that for its militarized opponents
only an "asymmetric strategy," in the jargon of the Pentagon, has any chance
of success. When it does succeed, as it did spectacularly on September 11,
it renders our massive military machine worthless: The terrorists offer it
no targets. On the day of the disaster, President George W. Bush told the
American people that we were attacked because we are "a beacon for freedom"
and because the attackers were "evil." In his address to Congress on
September 20, he said, "This is civilization's fight." This attempt to
define difficult-to-grasp events as only a conflict over abstract values--as
a "clash of civilizations," in current post-cold war American jargon--is not
only disingenuous but also a way of evading responsibility for the
"blowback" that America's imperial projects have generated. 

"Blowback" is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified
report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed
Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the
US government's international activities that have been kept secret from the
American people. The CIA's fears that there might ultimately be some
blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of Iran were well
founded. Installing the Shah in power brought twenty-five years of tyranny
and repression to the Iranian people and elicited the Ayatollah Khomeini's
revolution. The staff of the American embassy in Teheran was held hostage
for more than a year. This misguided "covert operation" of the US government
helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world that the
United States was an implacable enemy. 

The pattern has become all too familiar. Osama bin Laden, the leading
suspect as mastermind behind the carnage of September 11, is no more (or
less) "evil" than his fellow creations of our CIA: Manuel Noriega, former
commander of the Panama Defense Forces until George Bush père in late 1989
invaded his country and kidnapped him, or Iraq's Saddam Hussein, whom we
armed and backed so long as he was at war with Khomeini's Iran and whose
people we have bombed and starved for a decade in an incompetent effort to
get rid of him. These men were once listed as "assets" of our clandestine
services organization. 

Osama bin Laden joined our call for resistance to the Soviet Union's 1979
invasion of Afghanistan and accepted our military training and equipment
along with countless other mujahedeen "freedom fighters." It was only after
the Russians bombed Afghanistan back into the stone age and suffered a
Vietnam-like defeat, and we turned our backs on the death and destruction we
had helped cause, that he turned against us. The last straw as far as bin
Laden was concerned was that, after the Gulf War, we based "infidel"
American troops in Saudi Arabia to prop up its decadent, fiercely
authoritarian regime. Ever since, bin Laden has been attempting to bring the
things the CIA taught him home to the teachers. On September 11, he appears
to have returned to his deadly project with a vengeance. 

There are today, ten years after the demise of the Soviet Union, some 800
Defense Department installations located in other countries. The people of
the United States make up perhaps 4 percent of the world's population but
consume 40 percent of its resources. They exercise hegemony over the world
directly through overwhelming military might and indirectly through
secretive organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund
and the World Trade Organization. Though largely dominated by the US
government, these are formally international organizations and therefore
beyond Congressional oversight. 

As the American-inspired process of "globalization" inexorably enlarges the
gap between the rich and the poor, a popular movement against it has gained
strength, advancing from its first demonstrations in Seattle in 1999 through
protests in Washington, DC; Melbourne; Prague; Seoul; Nice; Barcelona;
Quebec City; Göteborg; and on to its violent confrontations in Genoa earlier
this year. Ironically, though American leaders are deaf to the desires of
the protesters, the Defense Department has actually adopted the movement's
main premise--that current global economic arrangements mean more wealth for
the "West" and more misery for the "rest"--as a reason why the United States
should place weapons in space. The US Space Command's pamphlet "Vision for
2020" argues that "the globalization of the world economy will also
continue, with a widening between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots,'" and that
we have a mission to "dominate the space dimension of military operations to
protect US interests and investments" in an increasingly dangerous and
implicitly anti-American world. Unfortunately, while the eyes of military
planners were firmly focused on the "control and domination" of space and
"denying other countries access to space," a very different kind of space
was suddenly occupied. 

On the day after the September 11 attack, Democratic Senator Zell Miller of
Georgia declared, "I say, bomb the hell out of them. If there's collateral
damage, so be it." "Collateral damage" is another of those hateful
euphemisms invented by our military to prettify its killing of the
defenseless. It is the term Pentagon spokesmen use to refer to the Serb and
Iraqi civilians who were killed or maimed by bombs from high-flying American
warplanes in our campaigns against Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. It
is the kind of word our new ambassador to the United Nations, John
Negroponte, might have used in the 1980s to explain the slaughter of
peasants, Indians and church workers by American-backed right-wing death
squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua while he was
ambassador to Honduras. These activities made the Reagan years the worst
decade for Central America since the Spanish conquest.

Massive military retaliation with its inevitable "collateral damage" will,
of course, create more desperate and embittered childless parents and
parentless children, and so recruit more maddened people to the terrorists'
cause. In fact, mindless bombing is surely one of the responses their grisly
strategy hopes to elicit. Moreover, a major crisis in the Middle East will
inescapably cause a rise in global oil prices, with, from the assassins'
point of view, desirable destabilizing effects on all the economies of the
advanced industrial nations. 

What should we do? The following is a start on what, in a better world, we
might modestly think about doing. But let me concede at the outset that none
of this is going to happen. The people in Washington who run our government
believe that they can now get all the things they wanted before the trade
towers came down: more money for the military, ballistic missile defenses,
more freedom for the intelligence services and removal of the last modest
restrictions (no assassinations, less domestic snooping, fewer lists given
to "friendly" foreign police of people we want executed) that the Vietnam
era placed on our leaders. An inevitable consequence of big "blowback"
events like this one is that, the causes having been largely kept from
American eyes (if not Islamic or Latin American ones), people cannot make
the necessary connections for an explanation. Popular support for Washington
is thus, at least for a while, staggeringly high. 

Nonetheless, what we should do is to make a serious analytical effort to
determine what overseas military commitments make sense and where we should
pull in our horns. Although we intend to continue supporting Israel, our new
policy should be to urge the dismantling of West Bank Israeli settlements as
fast as possible. In Saudi Arabia, we should withdraw our troops, since they
do nothing for our oil security, which we can maintain by other means.
Beyond the Middle East, in Okinawa, where we have thirty-eight US military
bases in the midst of 1.3 million civilians, we should start by bringing
home the Third Marine Division and demobilizing it. It is understrength, has
no armor and is not up to the standards of the domestically based First and
Second Marine Divisions. It has no deterrent value but is, without question,
an unwanted burden we force the people of this unlucky island to bear. 
A particular obscenity crying out for elimination is the US Army's School of
the Americas, founded in Panama in 1946 and moved to Fort Benning, Georgia,
in 1984 after Panamanian President Jorge Illueca called it "the biggest base
for destabilization in Latin America" and evicted it. Its curriculum
includes counterinsurgency, military intelligence, interrogation techniques,
sniper fire, infantry and commando tactics, psychological warfare and jungle
operations. Although a few members of Congress have long tried to shut it
down, the Pentagon and the White House have always found ways to keep it in
the budget. In May 2000 the Clinton Administration sought to provide new
camouflage for the school by renaming it the "Defense Institute for
Hemispheric Security Cooperation" and transferring authority over it from
the Army Department to the Defense Department. 

The school has trained more than 60,000 military and police officers from
Latin American and Caribbean countries. Among SOA's most illustrious
graduates are the dictators Manuel Noriega (now serving a forty-year
sentence in an American jail for drug trafficking) and Omar Torrijos of
Panama; Guillermo Rodrigues of Ecuador; Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru;
Leopoldo Galtieri, former head of Argentina's junta; and Hugo Banzer Suarez
of Bolivia. More recently, Peru's Vladimiro Montesinos, SOA class of 1965,
surfaced as a CIA asset and former President Alberto Fujimori's closest
adviser. 

More difficult than these fairly simple reforms would be to bring our
rampant militarism under control. From George Washington's "farewell
address" to Dwight Eisenhower's invention of the phrase "military-industrial
complex," American leaders have warned about the dangers of a bloated,
permanent, expensive military establishment that has lost its relationship
to the country because service in it is no longer an obligation of
citizenship. Our military operates the biggest arms sales operation on
earth; it rapes girls, women and schoolchildren in Okinawa; it cuts ski-lift
cables in Italy, killing twenty vacationers, and dismisses what its
insubordinate pilots have done as a "training accident"; it allows its
nuclear attack submarines to be used for joy rides for wealthy civilian
supporters and then covers up the negligence that caused the sinking of a
Japanese high school training ship; it propagandizes the nation with
Hollywood films glorifying military service (Pearl Harbor); and it
manipulates the political process to get more carrier task forces,
antimissile missiles, nuclear weapons, stealth bombers and other expensive
gadgets for which we have no conceivable use. Two of the most influential
federal institutions are not in Washington but on the south side of the
Potomac River--the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Given their influence today, one must conclude that the government outlined
in the Constitution of 1787 no longer bears much relationship to the
government that actually rules from Washington. Until that is corrected, we
should probably stop talking about "democracy" and "human rights." 

Once we have done the analysis, brought home most of our "forward deployed"
troops, refurbished our diplomatic capabilities, reassured the world that we
are not unilateralists who walk away from treaty commitments and
reintroduced into government the kinds of idealistic policies we once
pioneered (e.g., the Marshall Plan), then we might assess what we can do
against "terrorism." We could reduce our transportation and information
vulnerabilities by building into our systems more of what engineers call
redundancy: different ways of doing the same things--airlines and railroads,
wireless and optical fiber communications, automatic computer backup
programs, land routes around bridges. It is absurd that our railroads do not
even begin to compare with those in Western Europe or Japan, and their
inadequacies have made us overly dependent on aviation in travel between US
cities. It may well be that some public utilities should be nationalized,
just as safety aboard airliners should become a federal function. Flight
decks need to be made genuinely inaccessible from the passenger
compartments, as they are on El Al. In what might seem a radical change, we
could even hire intelligence analysts at the CIA who can read the languages
of the countries they are assigned to and have actually visited the places
they write about (neither of these conditions is even slightly usual at the
present time). 

If we do these things, the crisis will recede. If we play into the hands of
the terrorists, we will see more collateral damage among our own citizens.
Ten years ago, the other so-called superpower, the former Soviet Union,
disappeared almost overnight because of internal contradictions, imperial
overstretch and an inability to reform. We have always been richer, so it
might well take longer for similar contradictions to afflict our society.
But it is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire
dominating the world, must go on forever.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of a dozen books concerning East Asia and
political violence, including Revolutionary Change (Stanford). His latest is
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Holt/Owl).

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