Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.

Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000); 268 pp.; $26.00 cloth.

On the day that a bomb ripped into the U.S. destroyer Cole as it was refueling in Aden, Yemen, there were two related events that went virtually unnoticed by most U.S. citizens. Terrorists threw a bomb into the British Embassy in Sana, the Yemeni capital. After a few initial reports in the U.S. media, the story of the incident virtually disappeared. But a communique issued in London, taking responsibility for both blasts in the name of the Islamic Army of Aden-Abyen, had a different fate. Although references to Arabs, terrorists, and Islam were common in subsequent reports, no coherent analysis connected the events, the victims, and the perpetrators.

In Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Chalmers Johnson both forecasts attacks like that on the Cole and gives a coherent explanation of why such attacks happen and will continue to occur. During the second half of the twentieth century, the United States' "imperial course," according to Johnson, created sources of blowback throughout the world that will strike again and again throughout the new century. The term blowback refers to the unintended consequences of U.S. foreign policies, often kept secret and certainly not widely known to or understood by most U.S. citizens. Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and professor emeritus at the University of California at San Diego, lays out a dismayingly long catalog of operations that have already produced disasters or that threaten to do so in the future. In the case of the Cole, where seventeen sailors died, the consequences of U.S. policies often come back in the form of "terrorist" retaliation against innocent U.S. citizens.

The CIA coined the term blowback in the wake of decisions by the Carter and Reagan administrations to have the agency arm every volunteer in the Afghanistan conflict, hoping to ensure that the Soviet Union would have its own Vietnam-like experience. Not many years later, some of these "freedom fighters" bombed the World Trade Center in New York City; murdered several CIA employees in Virginia and some U.S. businessmen in Pakistan; gave support to Osama bin Laden, the former CIA "asset" who's now at the top of the terrorist hit list; and are now implicated in the bombing of the Cole. As for Afghanistan, Johnson notes that U.S. policy "helped bring to power the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic movement whose policies toward women, education, justice, and economic well-being resemble not so much those of the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran as those of Pol Pot's Cambodia." (The Taliban's extremism resulted earlier this year in the destruction of centuries-old religious statuary, despite worldwide outcry and pleas from the United Nations.)

Johnson argues convincingly that all around the world today blowback, in its many guises, is spiraling out of control. Although in Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country and the largest Islamic nation, U.S. citizens have not yet been affected, this is unlikely to last as that country emerges from its present trauma and starts to assess what happened to it and who is responsible. The U.S. government focused on maintaining control there by massive backing of a military that, with no external enemies, periodically conducted bloodbaths on its own people in the name of "internal security." The U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund addressed Indonesia's 1997 financial crisis with the promise of huge loans, contingent on restructuring the economy. The result was a huge increase in poverty, serious ethnic violence, and severe political instability.

During the Gulf War, 177 million pounds of bombs--the most concentrated aerial onslaught in history up to that time--fell on the people of Iraq. U.S. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger boasted at the time that the blockade that followed was "unprecedented for its severity in the whole of world history." Yet this combination hasn't brought down Saddam Hussein. It has, however, contributed to the deaths of perhaps a million civilians, including thousands of children each month due to disease, malnutrition, and inadequate medical care. Some survivors no doubt harbor a smoldering grudge against the United States and its citizens.

The hubris of the imperial course is nowhere more strikingly illustrated than in Korea. As north and south moved recently toward reduced tensions (and the north built bridges to close U.S. allies, gaining recognition by Italy and Australia), Washington reacted with disdain rather than relief. The Departments of Defense and State reiterated and underscored intentions to keep troops in the south indefinitely. And despite test failures, the Bush administration has reasserted its determination to develop an expensive ballistic missile defense system targeting that theater because of North Korea's alleged threat to South Korea and Japan, not to mention the United States itself--despite the United States' 7,000 deployed warheads and the nearby Seventh Fleet. (North Korea, by contrast, has tested only four missiles in its history.)

Such tensions are more than just residual Cold War antagonism between the United States and communist North Korea. Johnson reports on how the long-smoldering resentment in South Korea has surfaced as emerging democracy replaced a long series of repressive puppet regimes. Complaints about the 37,000 U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea have grown, propelled by a string of incidents that occurred long after No Gun Ri. Among them are crimes by U.S. military personnel and the infringement on South Korean sovereignty during subsequent legal proceedings; a dispute over a coastal bombing range, considered dangerous and noisy by nearby residents; and military dumping of deadly formaldehyde into the Han River, a source of drinking water for Seoul. As Johnson might have predicted, the blow-back from these events has resulted in "strike squads" of irate South Koreans, making it necessary for U.S. personnel traveling off-post to use the "buddy system" and to resort to a "civil disobedience hotline" if trouble strikes.

Innocent people in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iraq, and Korea are only some of the victims of overt and covert U.S. military adventures. Johnson documents how in 1991 Congress gave the military's special forces a green light to penetrate into virtually every country on Earth. By 1998, the Special Forces Command had established missions in 110 nations. During that year alone, Johnson reports, the command carried out operations in each of nineteen countries in Latin America and nine Caribbean nations. A DOD manual describes the main activity of these forces as giving instruction in "internal defense"--that is, actions against a nation's own people.

Decades of manipulating smaller nations as part of Cold War rivalry, followed by an even freer hand as the only superpower, have mobilized enemies of the U.S. around the world. Johnson rightly predicts that the payback will be frequent, expensive, and extremely painful. And even where unintended consequences strike only at other peoples, there is a corrosive effect on the United States. As news of these consequences seep out, cynicism spreads, debasing political discourse and diminishing respect for fundamental institutions and principles. The revelations about No Gun Ri, for example, only further embitter an already demoralized U.S. public.

Johnson offers a prescription that is an essential first step toward recasting this grim future. "The United States today desperately needs a new analysis of its role in a post-Cold War world," he writes. The perception prevails that the Cold War is over and that the United States won an unconditional, unlimited victory. It seems more likely that meaningful victory is possible only if the expansion of empire that underlies present U.S. policy is abandoned in favor of democratic and humanitarian principles too long given only lip service. That reversal will be a triumph for people in the United States and throughout the world.

Albert L. Huebner has taught physics for more than twenty years at California State University at Northridge and was appointed contributing writer for Toward Freedom in 1995. His articles have appeared in a number of periodicals and major dailies.