[wordup] Harsh words from "The Nation"

[Adam Shand]

Via: Daniel Hasenstaub <danielh at spack.org>
From: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011015&s=johnson

Blowback
by CHALMERS JOHNSON
October 15, 2001

For Americans who can bear to think about it, those tragic pictures from
New York of women holding up photos of their husbands, sons and daughters
and asking if anyone knows anything about them look familiar. They are
similar to scenes we have seen from Buenos Aires and Santiago. There, too,
starting in the 1970s, women held up photos of their loved ones, asking
for information. Since it was far too dangerous then to say aloud what
they thought had happened to them--that they had been tortured and
murdered by US-backed military juntas--the women coined a new word for
them, los desaparecidos--"the disappeareds." Our government has never been
honest about its own role in the 1973 overthrow of the elected government
of Salvador Allende in Chile or its backing, through "Operation Condor,"
of what the State Department has recently called "extrajudicial killings"
in Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. But we now
have several thousand of our own disappeareds, and we are badly mistaken
if we think that we in the United States are entirely blameless for what
happened to them.

The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not "attack America," as
our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked
American foreign policy. Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed
innocent bystanders who then became enemies only because they had already
become victims. Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order
to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable. The United States
deploys such overwhelming military force globally that for its militarized
opponents only an "asymmetric strategy," in the jargon of the Pentagon,
has any chance of success. When it does succeed, as it did spectacularly
on September 11, it renders our massive military machine worthless: The
terrorists offer it no targets. On the day of the disaster, President
George W. Bush told the American people that we were attacked because we
are "a beacon for freedom" and because the attackers were "evil." In his
address to Congress on September 20, he said, "This is civilization's
fight." This attempt to define difficult-to-grasp events as only a
conflict over abstract values--as a "clash of civilizations," in current
post-cold war American jargon--is not only disingenuous but also a way of
evading responsibility for the "blowback" that America's imperial projects
have generated.

"Blowback" is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently
declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of
Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended
consequences of the US government's international activities that have
been kept secret from the American people. The CIA's fears that there
might ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the
affairs of Iran were well founded. Installing the Shah in power brought
twenty-five years of tyranny and repression to the Iranian people and
elicited the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution. The staff of the American
embassy in Teheran was held hostage for more than a year. This misguided
"covert operation" of the US government helped convince many capable
people throughout the Islamic world that the United States was an
implacable enemy.

 The pattern has become all too familiar. Osama bin Laden, the leading
suspect as mastermind behind the carnage of September 11, is no more (or
less) "evil" than his fellow creations of our CIA: Manuel Noriega, former
commander of the Panama Defense Forces until George Bush pe`re in late
1989 invaded his country and kidnapped him, or Iraq's Saddam Hussein, whom
we armed and backed so long as he was at war with Khomeini's Iran and
whose people we have bombed and starved for a decade in an incompetent
effort to get rid of him. These men were once listed as "assets" of our
clandestine services organization.

Osama bin Laden joined our call for resistance to the Soviet Union's 1979
invasion of Afghanistan and accepted our military training and equipment
along with countless other mujahedeen "freedom fighters." It was only
after the Russians bombed Afghanistan back into the stone age and suffered
a Vietnam-like defeat, and we turned our backs on the death and
destruction we had helped cause, that he turned against us. The last straw
as far as bin Laden was concerned was that, after the Gulf War, we based
"infidel" American troops in Saudi Arabia to prop up its decadent,
fiercely authoritarian regime. Ever since, bin Laden has been attempting
to bring the things the CIA taught him home to the teachers. On September
11, he appears to have returned to his deadly project with a vengeance.

There are today, ten years after the demise of the Soviet Union, some 800
Defense Department installations located in other countries. The people of
the United States make up perhaps 4 percent of the world's population but
consume 40 percent of its resources. They exercise hegemony over the world
directly through overwhelming military might and indirectly through
secretive organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund and the World Trade Organization. Though largely dominated by the US
government, these are formally international organizations and therefore
beyond Congressional oversight.

As the American-inspired process of "globalization" inexorably enlarges
the gap between the rich and the poor, a popular movement against it has
gained strength, advancing from its first demonstrations in Seattle in
1999 through protests in Washington, DC; Melbourne; Prague; Seoul; Nice;
Barcelona; Quebec City; Go"teborg; and on to its violent confrontations in
Genoa earlier this year. Ironically, though American leaders are deaf to
the desires of the protesters, the Defense Department has actually adopted
the movement's main premise--that current global economic arrangements
mean more wealth for the "West" and more misery for the "rest"--as a
reason why the United States should place weapons in space. The US Space
Command's pamphlet "Vision for 2020" argues that "the globalization of the
world economy will also continue, with a widening between the 'haves' and
the 'have-nots,'" and that we have a mission to "dominate the space
dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investments"
in an increasingly dangerous and implicitly anti-American world.
Unfortunately, while the eyes of military planners were firmly focused on
the "control and domination" of space and "denying other countries access
to space," a very different kind of space was suddenly occupied.

On the day after the September 11 attack, Democratic Senator Zell Miller
of Georgia declared, "I say, bomb the hell out of them. If there's
collateral damage, so be it." "Collateral damage" is another of those
hateful euphemisms invented by our military to prettify its killing of the
defenseless. It is the term Pentagon spokesmen use to refer to the Serb
and Iraqi civilians who were killed or maimed by bombs from high-flying
American warplanes in our campaigns against Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam
Hussein. It is the kind of word our new ambassador to the United Nations,
John Negroponte, might have used in the 1980s to explain the slaughter of
peasants, Indians and church workers by American-backed right-wing death
squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua while he was
ambassador to Honduras. These activities made the Reagan years the worst
decade for Central America since the Spanish conquest.

Massive military retaliation with its inevitable "collateral damage" will,
of course, create more desperate and embittered childless parents and
parentless children, and so recruit more maddened people to the
terrorists' cause. In fact, mindless bombing is surely one of the
responses their grisly strategy hopes to elicit. Moreover, a major crisis
in the Middle East will inescapably cause a rise in global oil prices,
with, from the assassins' point of view, desirable destabilizing effects
on all the economies of the advanced industrial nations.

What should we do? The following is a start on what, in a better world, we
might modestly think about doing. But let me concede at the outset that
none of this is going to happen. The people in Washington who run our
government believe that they can now get all the things they wanted before
the trade towers came down: more money for the military, ballistic missile
defenses, more freedom for the intelligence services and removal of the
last modest restrictions (no assassinations, less domestic snooping, fewer
lists given to "friendly" foreign police of people we want executed) that
the Vietnam era placed on our leaders. An inevitable consequence of big
"blowback" events like this one is that, the causes having been largely
kept from American eyes (if not Islamic or Latin American ones), people
cannot make the necessary connections for an explanation. Popular support
for Washington is thus, at least for a while, staggeringly high.

Nonetheless, what we should do is to make a serious analytical effort to
determine what overseas military commitments make sense and where we
should pull in our horns. Although we intend to continue supporting
Israel, our new policy should be to urge the dismantling of West Bank
Israeli settlements as fast as possible. In Saudi Arabia, we should
withdraw our troops, since they do nothing for our oil security, which we
can maintain by other means. Beyond the Middle East, in Okinawa, where we
have thirty-eight US military bases in the midst of 1.3 million civilians,
we should start by bringing home the Third Marine Division and
demobilizing it. It is understrength, has no armor and is not up to the
standards of the domestically based First and Second Marine Divisions. It
has no deterrent value but is, without question, an unwanted burden we
force the people of this unlucky island to bear.

A particular obscenity crying out for elimination is the US Army's School
of the Americas, founded in Panama in 1946 and moved to Fort Benning,
Georgia, in 1984 after Panamanian President Jorge Illueca called it "the
biggest base for destabilization in Latin America" and evicted it. Its
curriculum includes counterinsurgency, military intelligence,
interrogation techniques, sniper fire, infantry and commando tactics,
psychological warfare and jungle operations. Although a few members of
Congress have long tried to shut it down, the Pentagon and the White House
have always found ways to keep it in the budget. In May 2000 the Clinton
Administration sought to provide new camouflage for the school by renaming
it the "Defense Institute for Hemispheric Security Cooperation" and
transferring authority over it from the Army Department to the Defense
Department.

 The school has trained more than 60,000 military and police officers from
Latin American and Caribbean countries. Among SOA's most illustrious
graduates are the dictators Manuel Noriega (now serving a forty-year
sentence in an American jail for drug trafficking) and Omar Torrijos of
Panama; Guillermo Rodrigues of Ecuador; Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru;
Leopoldo Galtieri, former head of Argentina's junta; and Hugo Banzer
Suarez of Bolivia. More recently, Peru's Vladimiro Montesinos, SOA class
of 1965, surfaced as a CIA asset and former President Alberto Fujimori's
closest adviser.

More difficult than these fairly simple reforms would be to bring our
rampant militarism under control. From George Washington's "farewell
address" to Dwight Eisenhower's invention of the phrase
"military-industrial complex," American leaders have warned about the
dangers of a bloated, permanent, expensive military establishment that has
lost its relationship to the country because service in it is no longer an
obligation of citizenship. Our military operates the biggest arms sales
operation on earth; it rapes girls, women and schoolchildren in Okinawa;
it cuts ski-lift cables in Italy, killing twenty vacationers, and
dismisses what its insubordinate pilots have done as a "training
accident"; it allows its nuclear attack submarines to be used for joy
rides for wealthy civilian supporters and then covers up the negligence
that caused the sinking of a Japanese high school training ship; it
propagandizes the nation with Hollywood films glorifying military service
(Pearl Harbor ); and it manipulates the political process to get more
carrier task forces, antimissile missiles, nuclear weapons, stealth
bombers and other expensive gadgets for which we have no conceivable use.
Two of the most influential federal institutions are not in Washington but
on the south side of the Potomac River--the Defense Department and the
Central Intelligence Agency. Given their influence today, one must
conclude that the government outlined in the Constitution of 1787 no
longer bears much relationship to the government that actually rules from
Washington. Until that is corrected, we should probably stop talking about
"democracy" and "human rights."

Once we have done the analysis, brought home most of our "forward
deployed" troops, refurbished our diplomatic capabilities, reassured the
world that we are not unilateralists who walk away from treaty commitments
and reintroduced into government the kinds of idealistic policies we once
pioneered (e.g., the Marshall Plan), then we might assess what we can do
against "terrorism." We could reduce our transportation and information
vulnerabilities by building into our systems more of what engineers call
redundancy: different ways of doing the same things--airlines and
railroads, wireless and optical fiber communications, automatic computer
backup programs, land routes around bridges. It is absurd that our
railroads do not even begin to compare with those in Western Europe or
Japan, and their inadequacies have made us overly dependent on aviation in
travel between US cities. It may well be that some public utilities should
be nationalized, just as safety aboard airliners should become a federal
function. Flight decks need to be made genuinely inaccessible from the
passenger compartments, as they are on El Al. In what might seem a radical
change, we could even hire intelligence analysts at the CIA who can read
the languages of the countries they are assigned to and have actually
visited the places they write about (neither of these conditions is even
slightly usual at the present time).

If we do these things, the crisis will recede. If we play into the hands
of the terrorists, we will see more collateral damage among our own
citizens. Ten years ago, the other so-called superpower, the former Soviet
Union, disappeared almost overnight because of internal contradictions,
imperial overstretch and an inability to reform. We have always been
richer, so it might well take longer for similar contradictions to afflict
our society. But it is nowhere written that the United States, in its
guise as an empire dominating the world, must go on forever.