Chalmers Johnson, New York: Henry Holt, 2000, 268 pp.
On the eve of the new bombing campaign against Iraq, President Bush
said the United States had done nothing to deserve Iraqi hostility.
This book begs to differ.
The author is a specialist on Japan and Asia, and a professor emeritus
at the University of California. He states that the United States is
committed to maintaining a global empire, one eliciting “resentments
our policies have built up” eventuating in “economic and political
retribution that, particularly in Asia, may be their harvest in the
twenty-first century (p. ix).” A little later, he says again, “I
believe it is past time for… Americans to consider why we have created
an empire – a word from which we shy away – and what the consequences
of our imperial stance may be for the rest of the world and for
ourselves (p. 5).”
The
book’s title is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-invented term that
“refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept
secret from the American people.” He continues: “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 (p. 8).” The book gives the detail to this
contention. It is, Johnson states, another way of saying a nation reaps
what it sows. But Americans generally are unaware of the covert
operations of the CIA the world over, and thus of policies eliciting
blowback. Johnson also declares a profound symmetry between the Soviet
and American post-War empires.
Johnson states arrestingly: “Terrorism by definition strikes at the
innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable.
The innocent of the twenty-first century are going to harvest
unexpected blowback disasters from the imperialist escapades of recent
decades (p. 33).”
To illustrate his case, Johnson turns first to in-depth analysis of
East Asia, beginning with Okinawa, essentially an American military
colony “used to project American power throughout Asia in the service
of a de facto U.S. grand strategy to perpetuate or increase American
hegemonic power… (p. 64).” He continues with a discussion of “stealth
imperialism”, including the refusal to endorse establishment of an
international court that would indict individuals charged with war
crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. But American foreign
policy denied any possibility of charging any of the 200,000 troops
permanently stationed in 40 countries worldwide. Similarly, they
refused to sign the 1997 Ottawa Accord that banned the use, production,
or shipment of antipersonnel landmines. Between 60 and 100 million
landmines are deployed in 60 countries that kill 26,000 persons a year
– more deaths than all weapons of mass destruction combined. They also
authorized a Joint Combined Exchange Training program (JCET) that has
trained “counterinsurgency” forces in 110 countries, including Turkey
against the Kurds, of whom 22,000 have been killed, in all Latin
American countries, and Indonesia, where huge loss of civilian life has
been incurred by the respective militaries. This amounts to
“instruction in state terrorism”.
Monumental military spending is another instance. The United States
accounted in 1998 for 32% ($278 billion) of world military spending
($864 billion). In 1995 almost 50% of global arms sales was accounted
for by the United States, to 140 countries, 90% of which were not
democracies or were human rights abusers. It has cost the United States
$5.5 trillion to build and maintain its nuclear arsenal.
South and North Korea, China and Taiwan, are then spotlighted in
several chapters. The author also discusses Japan. The presentations
become very detailed, but in essence, self-serving U.S. economic
interests control all aspects of relating to these countries` Johnson
argues. He uses the term “overstretch” to describe inappropriate U.S.
military and economic expansionism. He concludes: “The duties of ‘lone
superpower’ produced military overstretch; globalization led to
economic overstretch; and both are contributing to an endemic crisis of
blowback (p. 215).” In 1997, economic “meltdown” occurred, consequence
of American economic policies on East Asia.
In the final chapter, the author begins by stating, “American officials
and the media talk a great deal about ‘rogue states’ like Iraq and
North Korea, but we must ask ourselves whether the United States has
itself become a rogue superpower (p. 216).” This is of course the
contention of the 2000 publication by William Blum, Rogue State. Over
against an American self-image of honourable and virtuous foreign
policy, Johnson contends: “But the evidence is building up that in the
decade following the end of the Cold War, the United States largely
abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and
multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and
resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial
manipulation (p. 217).”
The author warns of an inevitable “imperial overextension” that will
generate multiple forms of blowback. Johnson recommends a list of first
steps that would generally reduce American imperialism in favour of
multilateralism. At book’s end, he predicts that “World politics in the
twenty-first century 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 (p.
229).”
The author is obviously well-informed; non-ideological; and balanced in
what he calls for. In light of the second bombing campaign against
Iraq, obviously, American foreign policy has a long way to go to
embrace Johnson’s sober vision.
When Blowback first appeared, it sold better outside the United States,
until September 11, 2001. It immediately went through several
printings, so prophetic it turned out to be.
Johnson has since (2004) published The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,
Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, a sequel of sorts to Blowback. He
described these sorrows thus: “I think four sorrows inevitably
accompany our current path. First is endless war… As it stands right
now, since 9/11, Articles 4 and 6 of the Bill of Rights are dead
letters. They are over… Second, imperial overstretch… The third
thing is a tremendous rise in lying and deceit… The difficulty to
believe anything that the government says any longer because they are
now systematically lying to us on almost every issue. The fourth is
bankruptcy. Attempting to dominate the world militarily is a very
expensive proposition… The United States, for the last 15 years, has
had trade deficits running at 5 percent every year. We are on the edge…
I do not find it easy at all that any successor to George Bush would
make any difference… That leads me to the conclusion that we are
probably going to reap what we have sown. That is blowback.”
He ends the book with these chilling words: “Nemesis, the goddess of
retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits
impatiently for her meeting with us.”
Christians might rather quote Psalm 2:
“Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of
the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the
LORD and against his Anointed One. ‘Let us break their chains,’ they
say, ‘and throw off their fetters.’ The One enthroned in heaven laughs;
the Lord scoffs at them.”
rsd