Blowback by Chalmers Johnson
Blowback, according to author Chalmers Johnson, is a term invented by the CIA to “describe the likelihood that our covert operations in other people’s countries could result in retaliation against Americans, civilian and military, at home and abroad.” At another point, he notes that “blowback is another way of saying that a nation sows what it reaps.”
To back some of his theories Johnson uses examples. One such example is seen on page xiv that states that it was “only after the Russians had bombed Afghanistan back to the stone age … that the United States walked away from the death and destruction the CIA had helped cause by providing assistance to the Afghan resistance with one of the beneficiaries being Osama bin Laden.” This in turn resulted in what Johnson considers blowback from al Qaeda. In this hard-hitting analysis, Chalmers Johnson explains the goals and the hidden (from its inhabitants) functioning of the US hegemony: an empire based on military power and the use of US capital and markets to force global economic integration on US terms no matter what it might cost others. Even for the American citizenry it appears the US military establishment appears close to becoming an autonomous system, whose colossal budget is only controlled by vested ideological and financial interests.
This book clearly shows that US presidents, like Carter or Clinton, did not have the power to oppose the Pentagon’s designs which were to perpetuate and develop the Cold War structures in order to consolidate its power. It is also obvious to the reader that Johnson believes that the government’s philosophy is that the ends justify the means as seen through many military interventions in the world that have sponsored dictatorships, genocidal campaigns, war crimes, state terrorism and paramilitary death-squads and sadly 90 % of all US weapons were sold to human right abusers. Additionally Johnson shows how US globalization, promoting the purchasing of weapons which are a profligate economic waste, provoked economic disasters in South-Asia and South-America, throwing millions of people into poverty. He further claims that the US and its population need an industrial not a military policy, because a new rival hegemony China, is waiting to emerge as the superpower of the 21st century.
In the concluding section, he concludes that the end result of America’s abandonment of diplomacy and its new reliance on military force has resulted in making the world a more dangerous place to live. In his argument he also purports that the United States has become an empire and is in danger of “imperial overreach.”
In a world of hypocritical and gagged media, Chalmers Johnson’s much needed voice proposes human solutions for the world’s problems: `bring most overseas land-based forces home and reorient foreign policy to stress leadership through example, economic aid, international law, multilateral institutions and diplomacy, instead of military intervention, economic bullying or financial manipulation.’ With its surprising comparisons, Chalmers Johnson sets a solid warning to the actual US establishment that a nation reaps what its sows and that the blowback could be horrendous. In effect his book is a major foreign policy critique that is well documented, well reasoned, and well written. The next President of the United States, be he/she a Republican or Democrat, would be well advised to read this book.
