Fri, Dec 08, 2000 page13

• Blowback: America's imperial overstretch and its costs

  `Blowback' has become a term of art acknowledging that the unrestrained, often illegal, secret acts of the last remaining superpower in other countries can result in retaliation against innocent American citizens

  • By Chalmers Johnson
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  America's intelligence agencies, the CIA and its rivals in the Pentagon, have a history of creating neologisms to describe our world that cover up more than they reveal. There have been lofty coinages such as "host-nation support," meaning that foreign countries pay for our troops based on their soil; scientific sounding phrases such as "exo-atmospheric kill vehicle," which, in plainer English, describe weapons that have never killed anything but are unimaginably expensive; and military jargon like "low-intensity warfare" that repackages the most brutal strife in the antiseptic language of the global strategist.

  The Pentagon says it trains the armed forces of our client regimes in "foreign internal defense," but this often amounts to little more than state terrorism against their own people. Among the most assiduous recent graduates of such American training programs were the armed forces of Indonesia, which over the past two years managed to oust a president, rape or kill a thousand Chinese shopkeepers in Jakarta, and give democracy a truly bad name in East Timor. We were training them up until Sept. 9, 1999, even as they were killing their own unarmed citizens.

  

  Illustration: Mountain People

  New word

  Every now and then, however, a new word emerges from the labyrinth of our secret services for which we might be thankful. The American press has recently started to use the term "blowback." Central Intelligence Agency officials coined it for internal use in the wake of decisions by the Carter and Reagan administrations to plunge the agency deep into the civil war in Afghanistan. It wasn't long before the agency was secretly arming every mujahideen volunteer in sight, without considering who they were or what their politics might be -- all in the name of ensuring that the Soviet Union had its own Vietnam-like experience. The US public may believe that the destabilization of the Soviet Union was worth the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, the 2.6 million refugees, and the 10 million land mines left in the ground there-but it does not yet know about all the "blowback" its Afghan adventure has unleashed.

  Not so many years later, these Afghan "freedom fighters" began to turn up in unexpected places. They bombed the World Trade Center in New York City, murdered several CIA employees on their way to work in Virginia as well as some American businessmen in Pakistan who just happened to become symbolic targets, and gave support to Osama bin Laden, a prime CIA "asset" back when our national security advisers thought giving guns to religious fundamentalists was a great idea.

  In this context, "blowback" came to be shorthand for the unintended consequences of American policies kept secret from the American people. In fact, to CIA officials and an increasing number of American international relations pundits, "blowback" has become a term of art acknowledging that the unconstrained, often illegal, invariably secret acts of the "last remaining superpower" in other people's countries can result in retaliation against innocent American citizens. The dirty tricks agencies are at pains never to draw this connection between what they do and what sometimes happens to the people who ultimately pay their salaries. So we are supposed to believe that the bombings of American embassies in East Africa in 1998, the proliferation of sophisticated weapons around the world, or the crack cocaine epidemic in American cities are simply examples of "terrorism," the work of "unscrupulous arms dealers," "drug lords," "ancient hatreds," "rogue states" -- anything unconnected to America's global policies.

  Perhaps the term "blowback" can help us to relink certain violent acts against Americans to the policies from which they secretly sprang.

  Unimaginable misery

  From the hollowing out of key American industries due to the export-led economic policies of America's satellites in East Asia to refugee flows across our southern borders from countries where US-supported repression has created hopeless conditions or US-supported economic policies have led to unimaginable misery, blowback reveals to us a longer history of American imperial hubris.

  We might also consider widening the word's application to take in the unintended consequences American policies may have for others. For example, even if the American policies that our government fostered and that produced the economic collapse of Indonesia in 1997 never blow back to the US, the unintended consequences for Indonesians have been staggering. They include not only poverty and loss of hope in the world's largest Islamic country but serious ethnic violence and perhaps political disintegration. Our "dirty hands" in overthrowing President Allende in Chile and installing General Pinochet, who subsequently killed at least 4,000 of his own citizens, are just now coming fully into the open. When blowback from our policies mainly strikes other peoples, it has a corrosive effect, debasing political discourse and making us feel duped.

  Professor David Calleo has observed: "The international system breaks down not only because unbalanced and aggressive new powers seek to dominate their neighbors, but also because declining powers, rather than adjusting and accommodating, try to cement their slipping preeminence into an exploitative hegemony." I believe the US at the end of the 20th century fits this description. The American people believe that their role in the world is virtuous -- that their actions have been for the good of others as well as themselves -- and they insist that even when their country's actions have led to disaster their motives were still honorable. But the evidence is building up that in the decade following the end of the Cold War, the US seriously misread the nature of the world and the role of the US in it. Instead of leading through diplomacy and attempting to set a good example, it has resorted most of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation.

  On the economic front, through an excess of hubris and imprudence, the US in the 1990s set out to compel all the economies on earth to remodel themselves to look like the US. This ignorant project not only failed, it brought discredit to the very idea of free trade (as the Seattle riots suggest) and raised serious questions about the motives of the US in the world economy. The world is still poised on the edge of a possible global recession caused by the US, even though the US itself has thus far been the least affected by the world economic crisis. Even if a collapse of global demand is avoided, these misguided American economic policies have set back 30 years of economic progress in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia, and laid the foundation for future economic, political, and military retaliation against the US by the devastated nations.

  Negative role

  In Feb. 1998, the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, defending the use of cruise missiles against Iraq, said that, "if we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther into the future" (New Republic, May 25, 1998). The evidence suggests pre3cisely the opposite. I believe this negative American role grew out of the structural characteristics of the Cold War and the strategies the US pursued, particularly in East Asia, to achieve what it thought were its interests during that period. The US created satellites in East Asia for the identical same reasons that the former Soviet Union created satellites in East Europe. During the course of the Cold War, the USSR intervened militarily to try to hold its empire together in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The US intervened militarily to try to hold its empire together in Korea and Vietnam. The US, incidentally, killed a great many more people in its two losing interventions than the USSR did in its two winning interventions.

  The richest prize in the Soviet empire was former East Germany; the richest prize in the American empire remains Japan. Japan today, much like East Germany before the wall came down, is a rigged economy brought into being and maintained by the Cold War. Japan's people are tired of the half-century of American troops on their soil and the gray single-party regime that presides in Tokyo. Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker appear as dynamic modern leaders when compared to most of the prime ministers Japan's Liberal Democratic Party has put in office since 1955. Raymond Aron once described the Soviet Union's lieutenants in East Europe as "shameless mediocrities," which fairly well also characterizes the US's lieutenants in Japan.

  Just as the two satraps of the German Democratic Republic faithfully followed every order they ever received from Moscow, each and every Japanese prime minister once in office gets on an airplane and reports to Washington.

  And just as in the former East Germany, Japanese voters long ago discovered that nothing they do ever seems to change their political system so long as they are allied with the US. Serious Japanese have learned to avoid politics like the plague, voting only in local elections, where they often vote Communist because at least that party is competent and honest and Communism itself is no longer relevant to any country in East Asia. Japanese political idealists tend to become nihilists, not unlike their German brethren before 1989.

  The Soviet Union started setting up its satellites largely because it could not compete with the largesse of the US in the Marshall Plan. (This of course reflected a major outcome of World War II: the Soviet Union had been severely damaged by the war whereas the US emerged essentially unscathed.) The USSR recognized that in the conflict between democracy and totalitarianism that was developing in postwar Europe, it was on the less popular side. In Eastern Europe it could not bring its supporters to power through the ballot box and it therefore ruthlessly ousted local democrats. In the Czech coup of February, 1948, and elsewhere it imported Stalinism, claiming it was merely a version of socialism. The Soviet Union also had a national security need to try to secure its Western approaches. By contrast, after Japan's defeat, the US was never directly threatened by any regime in East Asia, least of all China, which had been devastated by war and revolution. We therefore built our system of satellites for more genuinely imperialist reasons, although the US government argued that Sino-Soviet Communism and the "domino theory" made our efforts necessary.

  Satellite creation

  The US's decision to create satellites in East Asia followed from two sets of events. The first was the Communist revolution in China, which meant that American plans for a new postwar international order in East Asia based on an alliance with China were no longer viable. We were unwilling to go to war against the popular forces of Chinese Communism in order to prop up Chiang Kai-shek. We therefore reversed ourselves in our policies for the occupation of Japan, giving up on efforts to democratize the country and committing ourselves instead to making Japan our "unsinkable aircraft carrier" (fuchin kubo) in East Asia. Japan replaced China as America's primary East Asian ally. American policy devoted itself to defending Japan and making it an alternative to the appeals of the Chinese revolution in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia.

  We did not try to roll back the Chinese revolution, but as a result of Truman's intervention in the Chinese civil war-that is, his order to the Seventh Fleet to defend Taiwan and police the Taiwan Strait-and MacArthur's excesses in Korea, we still ensured Chinese hostility for at least two decades. Needless to say, the US did not consult the Japanese people about these decisions any more than Stalin consulted the Czechs about his installing Klement Gottwald as his puppet. We cultivated and installed in power remnants of the Japanese wartime establishment and the neofascist right because they were unquestionably anticommunist. Our reliance on old war criminals in Japan-for example, former Minister of Munitions Nobusuke Kishi in Tojo's wartime cabinet became Japanese prime minister between 1957 and 1960-and a CIA-financed single-party regime from 1949 to 1993 were the mirror image of Soviet policies in the former German Democratic Republic. These policies actually led to a Japanese revolt against the US in 1960. In the largest mass demonstrations in postwar Japanese history, protestors surrounded the parliament building and demanded that lawmakers not ratify the Japanese-American Security Treaty. The situation became so tense that President Eisenhower was forced to cancel his proposed visit to Japan.

  The first sitting American president ever to visit Tokyo, 15 years later, was Gerald Ford. Using its rigged majority, the Japanese conservative party forced through ratification of the treaty keeping American troops in Japan, but Japanese politics never again regained the trust of the public. Newly elected President Kennedy then sent Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer and his Japanese-born wife to paper over the differences, and from these efforts there emerged an American ideology reinterpreting Japan as a misunderstood democracy. Even the war years emerged from this reinterpretation as a brief, aberrant interlude. Domestically, Japan's Liberal Democratic Party turned over foreign policy to its US masters and the revival of the economy to its dirigiste state bureaucracy. By the end of the 1990s Japan was the world's second richest country but with a government remarkably similar to that of the former East Germany.

  The second reason why the Americans decided to build military satellites in East Asia was an unintended consequence of our concern that in the face of the USSR's efforts the rest of Europe might "go Communist." In order to support Britain, France, and Holland, the US abandoned its World War II promises to help liberate these nations' Asian colonies. Instead, as these colonies fought to free themselves from their defeated overlords, the US replaced the former imperialists. This meant that in East Asia, except for our own colony of the Philippines, we wound up on the wrong side of history. Even in the Philippines, which we granted formal independence on July 4, 1946, we kept our largest military bases until the Filipinos expelled us in 1992. However, the main Cold War conflicts in East and Southeast Asia were not between democracy and totalitarianism, as they were in Europe, but between European colonialism and national independence.

  Liberation wars

  The reluctance of the main European powers to give up their colonies led to wars of national liberation in Indochina against the French, in Malaya against the British, and in Indonesia against the Dutch, in all of which the US either vacillated or supported the side of imperialism. After the Dutch were driven from Indonesia, the British fought a decade-long war against insurgents in Malaya, finally acquiescing in Malaya becoming Malaysia and Singapore. After the French were defeated militarily in Vietnam, the US fought an incredibly bloody and prolonged conflict before it was also forced to abandon its imperial role there.

  We also supported a long counterinsurgency in the Philippines against guerrillas who considered the post-independence Filipino government a creature of the US.

  Only after our defeat in Vietnam did we begin to adjust to the idea that East Asia was different from Europe.

  Nixon's opening to China was the first sign that some understanding of East Asian history was finally starting to penetrate Washington minds.

  Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. Part two of his article continues tomorrow.
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