What Does Blowback Mean in Politics? Chalmers Johnson on the American Empire (2000)
Blowback is unintended consequences of a covert operation that are suffered by the civil population of the aggressor government. To the civilians suffering the blowback of covert operations, the effect typically manifests itself as "random" acts of political violence without a discernible, direct cause; because the public—in whose name the intelligence agency acted—are ignorant of the effected secret attacks that provoked revenge (counter-attack) against them.
Originally, blowback was
CIA internal coinage denoting the unintended, harmful consequences—to friendly populations and military forces—when a given weapon is used beyond its purpose as intended by the party supplying it. Examples include anti-Western religious figures (e.g.
Osama bin Laden) who, in due course, attack foe and sponsor; right-wing counter-revolutionaries who sell drugs to their sponsor's civil populace (see CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US); and banana republic juntas (see
Salvadoran Civil War) who kill
American reporters or nuns (e.g.
Dorothy Kazel).[citation needed]
In formal, print usage, the term blowback first appeared in the
Clandestine Service History—
Overthrow of
Premier Mossadeq of
Iran—November 1952--August
1953, the CIA internal history of the US's
1953 Iranian coup d'état, published in
March 1954.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_(intelligence)
Johnson believed that the enforcement of
American hegemony over the world constitutes a new form of global empire. Whereas traditional empires maintained control over subject peoples via colonies, since
World War II the US has developed a vast system of hundreds of military bases around the world where it has strategic interests. A long-time
Cold Warrior, he applauded the dissolution of the
Soviet Union: "I was a cold warrior. There's no doubt about that. I believed the Soviet Union was a genuine menace. I still think so."[9] At the same time, however, he experienced a political awakening after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, noting that instead of demobilizing its armed forces, the US accelerated its reliance on military solutions to problems both economic and political. The result of this militarism (as distinct from actual domestic defense) is more terrorism against the
U.S. and its allies, the loss of core democratic values at home, and an eventual disaster for the
American economy. Of four books he wrote on this topic, the first three are referred to as The Blowback
Trilogy:
Blowback: The
Costs and
Consequences of
American Empire
Chalmers Johnson summarized the intent of Blowback in the final chapter of
Nemesis.
"In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world. The concept "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes -- as it did so spectacularly on
September 11, 2001 -- the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback
. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried to provide some of the historical background for understanding the dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on
Asia -- the area of my academic training -- than on the
Middle East."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalmers_Johnson