Book Review by Regis T. Sabol
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
By Chalmers Johnson Metropolitan Books, 268 pages, 2000
As the Bush Administration amasses hundreds of thousands of American troops on Iraq’s borders, pushes the Filipino government for permission to send more than two thousand American troops to fight Islamic guerrillas on an obscure island in the Philippines, and prepares for a nuclear showdown with North Korea, reading Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson is both a revelatory and disturbing experience.
In simple terms, Blowback argues that what goes around comes around. And, according to Johnson, that is a frightening prospect.
Blowback is a term invented by the Central Intelligence Agency ((CIA). “It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people,” says Johnson. “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.”
The primary objective of these operations, he argues, is to maintain a global American empire held together by military and financial domination of other countries and, more critically, their markets. In short, we want to own the world.
The Bush Administration, by word and deed, has made it abundantly clear that it envisions a world dominated by one power, the United States, that will enforce a “Pax Americana.” The Administration declared its intentions in the National Security Strategy released Sept. 20, 2001. The policy was actually formulated in 1992 in the last year of the Bush I administration by Donald Rumsfield, who is now Secretary of Defense; Paul Wolfowitz, who is now Assistant Secretary of Defense; and Richard Perle, a national security advisor; among others.
This strategy dismisses deterrence or containment, a policy successfully used against the former Soviet Union” as a relic of the Cold War. Instead, it favors “convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities.” Naturally, Washington will determine what those “sovereign responsibilities” are.
The Bush Doctrine of American Hegemony
At the core of this doctrine is the concept of the pre-emptive strike. As George Bush explained to the nation in his most recent State of the Union address, the United States has the right to attack any country it perceives as being a threat to our security or interests. These countries do not actually have to be an immediate threat; they need only be perceived as one.
“In essence,” explains Jay Bookman of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “(the National Security Strategy) lays out a plan for permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence.”
“The United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia,” the document warns, “as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. troops.”
Wolfowitz, in the 1992 draft of Defense Planning Guidance, enunciated the number one objective of U.S. post-Cold War political and military strategy.
“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is the dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.”
Wolfowitz went onto to identify three additional aspects of American hegemony.
“First the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
Even though Johnson’s book was published before George Bush took over the White House, Blowback essentially argues that such a strategy is a formula for disaster that will blow back on America with terrible consequences. In fact, it already has. In one chilling passage, Chalmers obliquely suggests that Osama bin Laden would retaliate against the United States for our missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998; “…the spiral of blowback…is not at an end in the case of bin Laden,” he warns. The term 9/11 had not yet entered the national consciousness.
“Government spokesmen continue to justify these attacks as ‘deterring’ terrorism even if the targets proved to be irrelevant to any damage done to facilities of the United States. In this way, future blowback possibilities are seeded into the world,” explains Johnson.
The author of Blowback is no left-wing academe or wild-eyed radical. Johnson is an economist, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He has written several books on Japan and Asia, including MITI and the Japanese Miracle and Japan: Who Governs?
Nor is he a point man for the Democratic Party. Johnson cites the actions of the Clinton Administration, in particular, as examples of all that is wrong with American foreign policy. While his critique is withering, Johnson points out that Clinton’s actions were in step with those of his Republican and Democratic predecessors.
Does America Need to Maintain an Empire?
Although Blowback focuses on our relations with Japan, South Korea, North Korea, and China, Johnson shows how the pattern of relations with these countries holds true in all our international dealings. For example, the book opens, not with East Asia, but in northern Italy where, in 1998, a Marine Corps jet fighter, flying well below minimum altitude, sliced through a ski-lift cable, plunging 20 people to their deaths. “A court-martial held not in Italy but in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, exonerated everyone involved, calling it a ‘training accident.’” Even though President Clinton promised compensation to the families of the victims, Congress dropped the provision because of opposition in the House of Representatives and from the Pentagon.
“This was hardly the only such incident in which American service personnel victimized foreign civilians in the post-Cold War world,” Johnson reports. “From Germany and Turkey to Okinawa and South Korea, similar incidents have been common—as has been their usual denouement.” He supports that claim by citing a shameful number of specific incidents, many of them involving rape.
Johnson goes on to ask the obvious question that none dare ask: Why does the United States maintain military bases in Italy, Germany, Indonesia, Spain, and Japan, among other countries? It is past time to discuss that question, he argues, “and what the consequences of our imperial stance may be for the rest of the world and ourselves.”
Military actions are not the only cause of blowback, according to Johnson. Economic policies can be just as devastating. He points to the economic disasters that swept across Southeast Asia in 1997 and eventually engulfed Russia and Brazil as examples. These disasters resulted from our insistence on a “one-size-fits-all” free trade policy, this economist argues. To expect governments, cultures, and societies to follow our concept of capitalism to the letter is arrogant and doomed to failure.
Yet the Bush Administration, like the Clinton Administration before it, insists that “globalization” is the panacea for all the world’s economic ills. Far from being a cure, globalization is a policy that ignores the needs of individual countries and the working men and women who live in them. Moreover, globalization has been a disaster for American workers who have lost their jobs to cheap foreign labor markets. Johnson cites the now non-existent American steel industry as one victim of globalization.
Johnson sees a clear parallel between the postwar policies of the Soviet Union and the United States. “The USSR in Eastern Europe and the United States in East Asia created their satellite systems for essentially the same reasons,” he contends. Just as the USSR intervened militarily to hold its empire together in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the U.S. intervened militarily to hold its empire together in Korea and Vietnam.
East Asia: A Model for American Hegemony
Japan, according to Johnson, is the lynchpin of our East Asian Empire. It is the wellspring of our policies toward the two Koreas and China, including our fuzzy military/economic support of Taiwan. While the United States has nurtured economic growth in Japan, South Korea, and even China, we have done so only to maintain our own military and economic dominance in the region. Thus, while we are willing to trade with China, we still follow a policy of containment that attempts to stunt the growth of the largest and eventually the dominant economic power in East Asia.
This policy of containment provides insight into the crisis we now face with North Korea, even though the Bush Administration pretends the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula is not a crisis. To more clearly understand the roots of the current standoff, we need to rethink our perceptions of the Korean War.
Americans have always accepted the notion that the Korean War started when Communist North Korea, a sovereign state, invaded Democratic South Korea, another sovereign state, in 1950. Johnson doesn’t see it that way.
In the first place, the partitioning of Korea was decided by the United States and the Soviet Union; Koreans had no say in the matter. Secondly, South Korea was not a democracy but an authoritarian regime established by the United States and composed primarily of former Japanese collaborators while the dogmatic Communist regime in the North was established by the Soviet Union and composed of guerillas who had fought the Japanese occupation. In short, the Korean War was, in fact, a civil war, argues Johnson.
Because the United States had committed itself to stopping Communist aggression, President Harry S. Truman committed U.S. troops to an Asian country’s civil war. The nature of that conflict changed when China, goaded by Douglas McArthur’s foolhardy march to the Yalu River, entered the war. It then became a war between China and the United States, which was fought to a bloody stalemate before ending in a truce in 1953.
That truce was signed by the United States and China. Since then, the border between North and South Korea remains a no-man’s land with North Korean forces on one side and American and South Korean forces on the other. Since then, not only has the U.S. established diplomatic ties with China, China has established diplomatic and economic ties with South Korea. North Korea, on the other hand, remains frozen out of the picture.
What the North Koreans most fear is an attack by the United States. Recent actions by the Bush Administration have given them no reason to believe otherwise. One of Bush’s first actions when he took office was to cut off an ongoing dialogue with North Korea. Two years later, he lumped North Korea with Iraq and Iran into an “Axis of Evil.” He also ordered a drastic reduction of desperately needed oil supplies to the country.
Enter blowback. Now North Korea, in an attempt to gain some leverage with Washington, has reactivated its nuclear processing plans, withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Pact, and kicked out U.N. inspectors. Last week, the North Koreans fired a missile into the Sea of Japan.
What the North Koreans want is direct talks with the United States leading to a non-aggression treaty that will ensure their security. While the government of Japan and the newly elected government of North Korea are pushing for negotiation and accommodation with the North, Bush has dug in his Texas boot heels.
The Bush Administration says it will talk with North Korea but it will not be “blackmailed” into negotiations. Ari Fleischer reiterated that position in a press briefing Thursday and White House sources reaffirmed it Saturday. The Administration insists it will not enter into bi-lateral talks with North Korea but will only negotiate within the context of a multilevel coalition of nations.
A legitimate question arises here: Just who is blackmailing whom? Wouldn’t we be better off to negotiate a treaty with North Korea that guarantees nonaggression by either side and establishes security on the Korean peninsula, thus eliminating a dangerous flashpoint for potential nuclear catastrophe? Unfortunately, such a solution does not fit in with the Bush Administration’s ambition to maintain a worldwide empire. Consequently, we may face blowback of catastrophic proportions.
The War against Iraq: Consequences and Dangers of Blowback
Our all-but-inevitable war with Iraq, of course, is the most glaring example of the consequences of blowback from previous policies and the dangers of blowback that will result from the war. Citing statistics from the government’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Johnson notes that, by 1995, the U.S. provided 49 percent of all global arms exports to 140 odd countries, “90 percent of which were either not democracies or were human rights abusers.” And we often arm opponents in ongoing conflicts—Iran and Iraq, Greece and Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, China and Taiwan.
“Saddam Hussein of Iraq,” he points out, “the number-one ‘rogue’ leader of the 1990s (and still number one in 2003, according to Bush), was during the 1980s simply an outstanding customer with an almost limitless line of credit because of his country’s oil reserves.” In fact, the U.S., under Ronald Reagan, provided Saddam with the much-ballyhooed Weapons of Mass Destruction that are Bush’s excuse for going to war today. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield was a key player in those deals. And, as we all know, Halliburton Corp., with Vice President Dick Cheney as CEO, did a multi-billion dollar business with Iraq after the Gulf War.
In the aftermath of that war, George I urged Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south to rebel against Saddam’s rule with sincere promises of U.S. military assistance. Alas, for the Kurds and the Shiites, Bush wasn’t true to his word and Saddam’s Republican Guard slaughtered them by the thousands. Now the Shiites have said they will fight to defend Iraqi sovereignty before they’ll trust the Americans again. That’s blowback.
In the north, Bush II has offered Turkey $26 billion to allow 60,000 U.S. troops to invade Iraq from the north. Bush has also assured the Turks they can follow American troops into Iraq and take control of valuable oil fields that the Kurds of northern Iraq also covet. In doing so, the Bush team seems to be oblivious to the deep enmity that exists between the Turks and the Kurds. As Johnson points out:
“The Kurds constitute fifteen million people in a Turkish population estimated at fifty-eight million. Another five million Kurds live largely within reach of Turkey’s borders in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The Turks have discriminated against the Kurds for the past seventy years and have conducted an intense genocidal campaign against them since 1992, in the process destroying some three thousand Kurdish villages and hamlets in the backward southeastern part of the country.”
It comes as no surprise then that the Kurds have announced they will not accept any Turkish presence inside the Iraqi territory they now control. Thus the stage is set for a war between Turkey and the de facto nation of Kurdistan, both armed to the teeth with arms supplied by the United States. No wonder, then, that the Turkish Parliament thought twice about allowing 62,000 American troops use Turkey as a springboard into Iraq. Blowback again.
Iran: A Tangled Web of Blowback
Meanwhile, in Iran, the third member of Bush’s Axis of Evil, U.N. inspectors have discovered a network of sophisticated machinery for processing enriched uranium, a crucial step toward developing nuclear weapons. And where did the Iranians acquire the technology to develop this machinery? From our new friend and ally, Pakistan. Pakistan became our friend and ally because it helped us attack Afghanistan and defeat the hated Taliban. Before then, Pakistan was also a “rogue” state while the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and other Afghani tribal warlords were our allies in their guerilla war against the Soviet Union. Now, with thousands of American troops still in Afghanistan, at least one Afghani warlord has called for a “jihad” against the American occupiers. Yet another example of blowback.
For those with a short memory, the Iranians hate us because the CIA deposed a democratically elected government in 1954 and installed and propped up with money and arms the Shah, whom they deposed in 1979 in favor of the fanatical fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini. Again, we have blowback.
Thus, while the United States stands on the precipice of war with Iraq to keep that nation from developing nuclear weapons, North Korea already has them and Iran is close to possessing them. How then to stop this nuclear madness?
The Obvious Solution: America Must Lead by Example
For Johnson, the answer is obvious. The United States must lead by example. “There can be little question that a serious policy of nuclear disarmament led by the United States would have been far more effective in halting or even reversing the nuclearization of the world than the continuing policy of forward deployment of nuclear-armed troops combined with further research on ever more advanced nuclear weaponry at America’s weapon’s laboratories,” he declares.
Lest we forget, a key element of the Bush Doctrine is that we reserve the right to first strike use of nuclear weapons. This represents a radical departure from the established doctrine of nuclear deterrence.
Finally, there’s the matter of those two thousand American troops who might soon be slogging through the jungles of the Philippines in a search and destroy mission against a small band of Muslim extremists said to have ties to Al Qaeda. Once again, the Bush Administration has displayed a deplorable ignorance of history or, at the very least, a short memory.
After United States defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States ignored previous promises of independence for the island chain and created an American colony there. During the guerilla war Filipinos fought against American forces to gain their independence, American Gen. John (Black Jack) Pershing led American troops onto the island of Jolo, where 65 percent of the population followed Islam. Pershing’s troops killed thousands of islanders, including women and children. It’s not likely that the island descendents of those people want to see American troops set foot on their island again.
More recently, the Philippine government banished the U.S. military from the Subic Bay Naval Base. As far as most Filipinos are concerned, we’re not welcome there.
Johnson makes a number of concrete recommendations to avoid what he calls “an impending crisis of empire.” The Bush Administration has already done the opposite of all of them. “More generally,” Johnson says, “the United States should seek to lead through diplomacy and example rather than through military force and economic bullying. Such an agenda is neither unrealistic nor revolutionary.”
For the Bush Administration marching under the banners of globalization, unilateralism, and American hegemony, that agenda is not only unrealistic; it’s unthinkable.
Regis T. Sabol is a senior editor of Intervention Magazine. He is also editor of A New Deal: an online magazine of political, social, and cultural thought.
Book Review by Regis T. Sabol
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
By Chalmers Johnson Metropolitan Books, 268 pages, 2000
As the Bush Administration amasses hundreds of thousands of American troops on Iraq’s borders, pushes the Filipino government for permission to send more than two thousand American troops to fight Islamic guerrillas on an obscure island in the Philippines, and prepares for a nuclear showdown with North Korea, reading Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson is both a revelatory and disturbing experience.
In simple terms, Blowback argues that what goes around comes around. And, according to Johnson, that is a frightening prospect.
Blowback is a term invented by the Central Intelligence Agency ((CIA). “It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people,” says Johnson. “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.”
The primary objective of these operations, he argues, is to maintain a global American empire held together by military and financial domination of other countries and, more critically, their markets. In short, we want to own the world.
The Bush Administration, by word and deed, has made it abundantly clear that it envisions a world dominated by one power, the United States, that will enforce a “Pax Americana.” The Administration declared its intentions in the National Security Strategy released Sept. 20, 2001. The policy was actually formulated in 1992 in the last year of the Bush I administration by Donald Rumsfield, who is now Secretary of Defense; Paul Wolfowitz, who is now Assistant Secretary of Defense; and Richard Perle, a national security advisor; among others.
This strategy dismisses deterrence or containment, a policy successfully used against the former Soviet Union” as a relic of the Cold War. Instead, it favors “convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities.” Naturally, Washington will determine what those “sovereign responsibilities” are.
The Bush Doctrine of American Hegemony
At the core of this doctrine is the concept of the pre-emptive strike. As George Bush explained to the nation in his most recent State of the Union address, the United States has the right to attack any country it perceives as being a threat to our security or interests. These countries do not actually have to be an immediate threat; they need only be perceived as one.
“In essence,” explains Jay Bookman of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “(the National Security Strategy) lays out a plan for permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence.”
“The United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia,” the document warns, “as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. troops.”
Wolfowitz, in the 1992 draft of Defense Planning Guidance, enunciated the number one objective of U.S. post-Cold War political and military strategy.
“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival. This is the dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.”
Wolfowitz went onto to identify three additional aspects of American hegemony.
“First the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests. Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
Even though Johnson’s book was published before George Bush took over the White House, Blowback essentially argues that such a strategy is a formula for disaster that will blow back on America with terrible consequences. In fact, it already has. In one chilling passage, Chalmers obliquely suggests that Osama bin Laden would retaliate against the United States for our missile attack on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998; “…the spiral of blowback…is not at an end in the case of bin Laden,” he warns. The term 9/11 had not yet entered the national consciousness.
“Government spokesmen continue to justify these attacks as ‘deterring’ terrorism even if the targets proved to be irrelevant to any damage done to facilities of the United States. In this way, future blowback possibilities are seeded into the world,” explains Johnson.
The author of Blowback is no left-wing academe or wild-eyed radical. Johnson is an economist, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He has written several books on Japan and Asia, including MITI and the Japanese Miracle and Japan: Who Governs?
Nor is he a point man for the Democratic Party. Johnson cites the actions of the Clinton Administration, in particular, as examples of all that is wrong with American foreign policy. While his critique is withering, Johnson points out that Clinton’s actions were in step with those of his Republican and Democratic predecessors.
Does America Need to Maintain an Empire?
Although Blowback focuses on our relations with Japan, South Korea, North Korea, and China, Johnson shows how the pattern of relations with these countries holds true in all our international dealings. For example, the book opens, not with East Asia, but in northern Italy where, in 1998, a Marine Corps jet fighter, flying well below minimum altitude, sliced through a ski-lift cable, plunging 20 people to their deaths. “A court-martial held not in Italy but in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, exonerated everyone involved, calling it a ‘training accident.’” Even though President Clinton promised compensation to the families of the victims, Congress dropped the provision because of opposition in the House of Representatives and from the Pentagon.
“This was hardly the only such incident in which American service personnel victimized foreign civilians in the post-Cold War world,” Johnson reports. “From Germany and Turkey to Okinawa and South Korea, similar incidents have been common—as has been their usual denouement.” He supports that claim by citing a shameful number of specific incidents, many of them involving rape.
Johnson goes on to ask the obvious question that none dare ask: Why does the United States maintain military bases in Italy, Germany, Indonesia, Spain, and Japan, among other countries? It is past time to discuss that question, he argues, “and what the consequences of our imperial stance may be for the rest of the world and ourselves.”
Military actions are not the only cause of blowback, according to Johnson. Economic policies can be just as devastating. He points to the economic disasters that swept across Southeast Asia in 1997 and eventually engulfed Russia and Brazil as examples. These disasters resulted from our insistence on a “one-size-fits-all” free trade policy, this economist argues. To expect governments, cultures, and societies to follow our concept of capitalism to the letter is arrogant and doomed to failure.
Yet the Bush Administration, like the Clinton Administration before it, insists that “globalization” is the panacea for all the world’s economic ills. Far from being a cure, globalization is a policy that ignores the needs of individual countries and the working men and women who live in them. Moreover, globalization has been a disaster for American workers who have lost their jobs to cheap foreign labor markets. Johnson cites the now non-existent American steel industry as one victim of globalization.
Johnson sees a clear parallel between the postwar policies of the Soviet Union and the United States. “The USSR in Eastern Europe and the United States in East Asia created their satellite systems for essentially the same reasons,” he contends. Just as the USSR intervened militarily to hold its empire together in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the U.S. intervened militarily to hold its empire together in Korea and Vietnam.
East Asia: A Model for American Hegemony
Japan, according to Johnson, is the lynchpin of our East Asian Empire. It is the wellspring of our policies toward the two Koreas and China, including our fuzzy military/economic support of Taiwan. While the United States has nurtured economic growth in Japan, South Korea, and even China, we have done so only to maintain our own military and economic dominance in the region. Thus, while we are willing to trade with China, we still follow a policy of containment that attempts to stunt the growth of the largest and eventually the dominant economic power in East Asia.
This policy of containment provides insight into the crisis we now face with North Korea, even though the Bush Administration pretends the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula is not a crisis. To more clearly understand the roots of the current standoff, we need to rethink our perceptions of the Korean War.
Americans have always accepted the notion that the Korean War started when Communist North Korea, a sovereign state, invaded Democratic South Korea, another sovereign state, in 1950. Johnson doesn’t see it that way.
In the first place, the partitioning of Korea was decided by the United States and the Soviet Union; Koreans had no say in the matter. Secondly, South Korea was not a democracy but an authoritarian regime established by the United States and composed primarily of former Japanese collaborators while the dogmatic Communist regime in the North was established by the Soviet Union and composed of guerillas who had fought the Japanese occupation. In short, the Korean War was, in fact, a civil war, argues Johnson.
Because the United States had committed itself to stopping Communist aggression, President Harry S. Truman committed U.S. troops to an Asian country’s civil war. The nature of that conflict changed when China, goaded by Douglas McArthur’s foolhardy march to the Yalu River, entered the war. It then became a war between China and the United States, which was fought to a bloody stalemate before ending in a truce in 1953.
That truce was signed by the United States and China. Since then, the border between North and South Korea remains a no-man’s land with North Korean forces on one side and American and South Korean forces on the other. Since then, not only has the U.S. established diplomatic ties with China, China has established diplomatic and economic ties with South Korea. North Korea, on the other hand, remains frozen out of the picture.
What the North Koreans most fear is an attack by the United States. Recent actions by the Bush Administration have given them no reason to believe otherwise. One of Bush’s first actions when he took office was to cut off an ongoing dialogue with North Korea. Two years later, he lumped North Korea with Iraq and Iran into an “Axis of Evil.” He also ordered a drastic reduction of desperately needed oil supplies to the country.
Enter blowback. Now North Korea, in an attempt to gain some leverage with Washington, has reactivated its nuclear processing plans, withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Pact, and kicked out U.N. inspectors. Last week, the North Koreans fired a missile into the Sea of Japan.
What the North Koreans want is direct talks with the United States leading to a non-aggression treaty that will ensure their security. While the government of Japan and the newly elected government of North Korea are pushing for negotiation and accommodation with the North, Bush has dug in his Texas boot heels.
The Bush Administration says it will talk with North Korea but it will not be “blackmailed” into negotiations. Ari Fleischer reiterated that position in a press briefing Thursday and White House sources reaffirmed it Saturday. The Administration insists it will not enter into bi-lateral talks with North Korea but will only negotiate within the context of a multilevel coalition of nations.
A legitimate question arises here: Just who is blackmailing whom? Wouldn’t we be better off to negotiate a treaty with North Korea that guarantees nonaggression by either side and establishes security on the Korean peninsula, thus eliminating a dangerous flashpoint for potential nuclear catastrophe? Unfortunately, such a solution does not fit in with the Bush Administration’s ambition to maintain a worldwide empire. Consequently, we may face blowback of catastrophic proportions.
The War against Iraq: Consequences and Dangers of Blowback
Our all-but-inevitable war with Iraq, of course, is the most glaring example of the consequences of blowback from previous policies and the dangers of blowback that will result from the war. Citing statistics from the government’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Johnson notes that, by 1995, the U.S. provided 49 percent of all global arms exports to 140 odd countries, “90 percent of which were either not democracies or were human rights abusers.” And we often arm opponents in ongoing conflicts—Iran and Iraq, Greece and Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, China and Taiwan.
“Saddam Hussein of Iraq,” he points out, “the number-one ‘rogue’ leader of the 1990s (and still number one in 2003, according to Bush), was during the 1980s simply an outstanding customer with an almost limitless line of credit because of his country’s oil reserves.” In fact, the U.S., under Ronald Reagan, provided Saddam with the much-ballyhooed Weapons of Mass Destruction that are Bush’s excuse for going to war today. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield was a key player in those deals. And, as we all know, Halliburton Corp., with Vice President Dick Cheney as CEO, did a multi-billion dollar business with Iraq after the Gulf War.
In the aftermath of that war, George I urged Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south to rebel against Saddam’s rule with sincere promises of U.S. military assistance. Alas, for the Kurds and the Shiites, Bush wasn’t true to his word and Saddam’s Republican Guard slaughtered them by the thousands. Now the Shiites have said they will fight to defend Iraqi sovereignty before they’ll trust the Americans again. That’s blowback.
In the north, Bush II has offered Turkey $26 billion to allow 60,000 U.S. troops to invade Iraq from the north. Bush has also assured the Turks they can follow American troops into Iraq and take control of valuable oil fields that the Kurds of northern Iraq also covet. In doing so, the Bush team seems to be oblivious to the deep enmity that exists between the Turks and the Kurds. As Johnson points out:
“The Kurds constitute fifteen million people in a Turkish population estimated at fifty-eight million. Another five million Kurds live largely within reach of Turkey’s borders in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The Turks have discriminated against the Kurds for the past seventy years and have conducted an intense genocidal campaign against them since 1992, in the process destroying some three thousand Kurdish villages and hamlets in the backward southeastern part of the country.”
It comes as no surprise then that the Kurds have announced they will not accept any Turkish presence inside the Iraqi territory they now control. Thus the stage is set for a war between Turkey and the de facto nation of Kurdistan, both armed to the teeth with arms supplied by the United States. No wonder, then, that the Turkish Parliament thought twice about allowing 62,000 American troops use Turkey as a springboard into Iraq. Blowback again.
Iran: A Tangled Web of Blowback
Meanwhile, in Iran, the third member of Bush’s Axis of Evil, U.N. inspectors have discovered a network of sophisticated machinery for processing enriched uranium, a crucial step toward developing nuclear weapons. And where did the Iranians acquire the technology to develop this machinery? From our new friend and ally, Pakistan. Pakistan became our friend and ally because it helped us attack Afghanistan and defeat the hated Taliban. Before then, Pakistan was also a “rogue” state while the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and other Afghani tribal warlords were our allies in their guerilla war against the Soviet Union. Now, with thousands of American troops still in Afghanistan, at least one Afghani warlord has called for a “jihad” against the American occupiers. Yet another example of blowback.
For those with a short memory, the Iranians hate us because the CIA deposed a democratically elected government in 1954 and installed and propped up with money and arms the Shah, whom they deposed in 1979 in favor of the fanatical fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini. Again, we have blowback.
Thus, while the United States stands on the precipice of war with Iraq to keep that nation from developing nuclear weapons, North Korea already has them and Iran is close to possessing them. How then to stop this nuclear madness?
The Obvious Solution: America Must Lead by Example
For Johnson, the answer is obvious. The United States must lead by example. “There can be little question that a serious policy of nuclear disarmament led by the United States would have been far more effective in halting or even reversing the nuclearization of the world than the continuing policy of forward deployment of nuclear-armed troops combined with further research on ever more advanced nuclear weaponry at America’s weapon’s laboratories,” he declares.
Lest we forget, a key element of the Bush Doctrine is that we reserve the right to first strike use of nuclear weapons. This represents a radical departure from the established doctrine of nuclear deterrence.
Finally, there’s the matter of those two thousand American troops who might soon be slogging through the jungles of the Philippines in a search and destroy mission against a small band of Muslim extremists said to have ties to Al Qaeda. Once again, the Bush Administration has displayed a deplorable ignorance of history or, at the very least, a short memory.
After United States defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States ignored previous promises of independence for the island chain and created an American colony there. During the guerilla war Filipinos fought against American forces to gain their independence, American Gen. John (Black Jack) Pershing led American troops onto the island of Jolo, where 65 percent of the population followed Islam. Pershing’s troops killed thousands of islanders, including women and children. It’s not likely that the island descendents of those people want to see American troops set foot on their island again.
More recently, the Philippine government banished the U.S. military from the Subic Bay Naval Base. As far as most Filipinos are concerned, we’re not welcome there.
Johnson makes a number of concrete recommendations to avoid what he calls “an impending crisis of empire.” The Bush Administration has already done the opposite of all of them. “More generally,” Johnson says, “the United States should seek to lead through diplomacy and example rather than through military force and economic bullying. Such an agenda is neither unrealistic nor revolutionary.”
For the Bush Administration marching under the banners of globalization, unilateralism, and American hegemony, that agenda is not only unrealistic; it’s unthinkable.
Regis T. Sabol is a senior editor of Intervention Magazine. He is also editor of A New Deal: an online magazine of political, social, and cultural thought.
