Blowback*

I've been working my way through an "inadvertent trilogy" by Chalmers Johnson. After a few years in the Navy he became a scholar of Japan and all of Asia at UC San Diego. In 2000 he published a book called "Blowback," because after decades of studying the region, he became convinced that US imperialist behavior in Asia was going to keep coming back to haunt us. Nobody really paid much attention to that book, but after 9/11 it became a best seller. He felt the need to write 2 more books over the last 6 years, expanding on those works both geographically, discussing mainly the Middle East and South America, and thematically, elaborating on our militarism and imperialism and the "sorrows" it has brought and will continue to bring. His calls for changes are obviously going unanswered.

He devoted a few paragraphs to Diego Garcia in one of the books, which was noteworthy for me because my father did a few months of Navy duty there when I was a kid. I didn't know that it was actually a British island on a 50-year lease to the US (at no charge). Apparently the American military boasts that the base at Diego Garcia is invulnerable to local politics, and the reason is that there are no local politics because the British moved the entire population of the island to some other island, where they now live in extreme poverty and face constant ethnic prejudice. The natives have been fighting that relocation in British courts for decades, where a judge has already ruled their forced relocation illegal.

Think about how those natives much feel about the British and Americans.

The Pentagon officially acknowledges about 800 bases in ~130 countries around the world, and likely has another few hundred kept secret for various reasons. Every one of those bases causes some kind of local tension, from frustration with forced displacement, to epidemics of drunk driving and sexual assault by America military around our bases (which cannot be prosecuted in local courts because the military quickly whisks the criminals back to the US), to official violent military action against defenseless civilian populations. That tension leads to resentment, leading to hatred, leading to "blowback."

Bin Laden made his issues with America very well known: (1) objection to American military presence in Saudi Arabia, a Muslim holy land, where we have numerous semi-secret bases and support a corrupt a brutal theocratic regime (while at the same time hypocritically pretending that we care about spreading democracy to the Middle East), (2) American support of Israel (a long mess of a story unto itself), and (3) American/British sanctions against Iraq, which we enforced by violating international law, which led to the death of millions of innocent civilians who couldn't obtain basic necessities (all of that was before we invaded again in 2003).

9/11 was a classic case of blowback, violent reaction to US militarism and imperialism, and yet our politicians refuse to acknowledge it. We hear nonsense about how "they hate us for our freedom" and when a rare honest moment happens where a politician actually acknowledges the reality of the situation (Ron Paul), he gets attacked by Giuliani and the rest of the pundit class as some kind of America-hater or terrorist sympathizer or just a lunatic. The Republicans lead this willfully ignorant suicidal charge, the Democrats refuse to fight it, essentially making them enablers, and the press gleefully reports the whole thing without criticism or question. And so like 35% of the American public still believes the outright falsehood spread by the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein was directly involved with planning the 9/11 attacks, and we're spending $2 billion per week to occupy Iraq and police a civil war hellhole that we needlessly created.




* Yes, Dave, you probably heard this term on The Simpsons before Chalmers Johnson claims to have popularized it. He doesn't claim to have invented it. It was a CIA term, and obviously The Simpsons makes all kinds of obscure references. I don't think this takes away from the scholarship of the books.