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The
September 11 Blowback
By
Chalmers
Johnson
The
author is the known critique of the American foreign policy and is
widely known for his critically acclaimed book, Blowback: Costs
& Consequences of the American Empire. Written
before the September 11 incident, he
examines the reasons behind his success in the post September 11
scenario.
Blowback was
finished in 1999. My
intention was to warn my fellow Americans about the nature and
conduct of U.S. foreign policy over the previous half-century,
focussing particularly on the decade after the demise of the Soviet
Union in 1991. The book appeared in the early spring of 2000. I
argued that many aspects of what the American government had done
abroad virtually invited retaliatory attacks from nations and
peoples who had been victimized. I did not predict the events of
September 11, 2001—Saudi Arabian and Egyptian hijackers diving
airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York
and the Pentagon in the suburbs of Washington DC. But I did clearly
state that acts of this sort were coming and should be anticipated:
“World politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood
be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the
twentieth century—that is, from the unintended consequences of the
Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War
posture in a post-Cold War world.”
For the first year after its
publication, Blowback was
largely ignored in the United States. Few of the mainstream book
review sections took any notice of it, and a former member of the
first President Bush's national security staff, Philip Zelikow,
wrote in the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations that
“Blowback reads like a
comic book.” Not surprisingly perhaps, the response elsewhere
in the world was somewhat different. It
was quickly translated into German, Italian, and Japanese, and the
foreign news editor of Der
Spiegel even flew to
California to interview me about it.
Domestic lack of interest
changed dramatically after September 11, 2001. The book was
reprinted seven times in less than two months and became something
of an underground bestseller among Americans suddenly sensitized to,
or at least desperate to know about, some of the realities of the world they lived
in. The catastrophic events of the first year of the new millennium
not only threw a new light on the
United States's self-proclaimed roles as “indispensable nation” and
“last remaining superpower” but also posed serious questions and new
dangers for other governments that were suddenly asked whether they
were “for” or “against” the U.S.'s “war on
terror.”
The Nature of Political
Terrorism
The suicidal assassins of September
11, 2001, did not “attack America,” as political leaders and news
media in the United States have tried to maintain; they attacked
American foreign policy. Employing the strategy of the weak, they
killed innocent bystanders (at least in the case of the New York
office workers) who became “enemies” only because they had already
become victims. It was probably the most striking instance in the
history of international relations of the use of political terrorism
to influence events.
Political terrorism is usually
defined by its strategic objectives. Its first goal is normally to
attempt to turn those domestic or international conditions
terrorists perceive to be unjust into unstable revolutionary
situations. To a wavering population they are intended to
demonstrate that the monopoly of force
exercised by incumbent authorities can be broken. The essential idea is to
disorient the mass of the population “by demonstrating through
apparently indiscriminate violence that the existing regime cannot
protect the people nominally under its authority. The effect on the
individual is supposedly not only anxiety, but withdrawal from the
relationships making up the established order of
society.”
Of course, such a strategy
rarely works as intended: indeed, it usually has the opposite effect
of calling people's attention to the seriousness of a situation and
encouraging them to support any strong reassertion of authority.
That was indeed what happened within the United States following the
attacks of September 11, but not necessarily throughout the Islamic
world, where the terrorists' objectives of displaying the
vulnerabilities of the United States and destabilizing the world of
the advanced capitalist nations seemed to have a real
effect.
A second strategic objective
of revolutionary terrorism is to provoke ruling elites into
disastrous overreaction, thereby creating widespread resentment
against them. This is a classic strategy, and when it works its
impact on a potentially revolutionary situation can be devastating.
Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian guerrilla leader whose writings
influenced many political terrorists of the 1960s's and 1970's,
explains its rationale as follows: “It is necessary to turn
political crisis into armed conflict by performing violent actions
that will force those in power to transform the political situation
of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the
masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the
police and blame them for this state of things.” Of course,
in Marighella's case, it proved devastating to Brazilian society
(and to him) but hardly in the way he hoped. The Israeli-Palestinian struggle during the
so-called Second Intifada of 2000 and 2001 illustrates this goal:
terrorist attacks elicited powerful and disproportionate Israeli
military reactions that led to an escalating cycle of more attacks
and more retaliation, completely militarizing relations between the
two groups.
In our globalizing world, the masses alienated by such overreactions may be anything but
“domestic.” The bombing of Afghanistan
that the U.S. launched on October 7, 2001, inflicted great misery on
many innocent Afghanis, which has been the pattern in other American
bombing campaigns of recent decades in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Serbia, and
Kosovo. It will almost certainly produce unintended negative
consequences throughout the Islamic and underdeveloped worlds.
Previously vacillating supporters of terrorists will be drawn into
militant organizations. Moderate Muslim governments, especially in
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, will almost certainly face
growing internal dissent and may even be overthrown. Although the
United States set out to track down and capture Osama bin Laden,
alleged to be the supreme commander of the terrorists of September
11, it quickly turned out that the only tool the U.S. had at its
disposal, its high-tech military apparatus, was next-to-useless if
the only goal was capturing a criminal. Therefore, the Bush
administration chose a more accessible objective—overthrowing by
military force the repressive Taliban regime, which was harboring
bin Laden. In most of the world, the spectacle of the world's
richest and most heavily armed country attacking one of the world's
poorest quickly eroded the moral high ground accorded to the United
States as the victim of the September 11
attacks.
It is too early to say how the
Afghan episode will be recorded in the history books, but the
American reaction has some ominous precedents. Perhaps the prime
example of terrorism succeeding in its goals was the Philippeville
massacre of August 20, 1955. There, Algerian revolutionaries killed
a hundred and twenty-three French colonials. A conscious act of
terrorism carried out by revolutionaries who until then had enjoyed
only slight popular backing, the Philippeville massacre resulted in
a massive and bloody retaliation by the French. The French crackdown
eliminated most of the moderates on the Muslim side and caused
influential French citizens back home to turn against their
country's policies. This chain of events ultimately provoked a
French army mutiny, brought Gen. Charles de Gaulle back to power as
the savior of the nation, and caused a French withdrawal from
Algeria. Franco-Algerian relations are still strained
today.
Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to
draw attention to the sins of the seemingly invulnerable. The United States
deploys such overwhelming military force globally that for its
opponents only an “asymmetric strategy,” to use the jargon of the
Pentagon, has any chance of success. Like judo, it depends on
unbalancing the enemy and using his strengths against him. When it
does “succeed,” as it did spectacularly on September 11, it renders
the massive American military machine at least for a time virtually
worthless: the terrorists offer no comparable
targets.
On the day of the disaster, President George W. Bush told the
American people that the country was attacked because it is “a
beacon of freedom” and because the attackers were motiveless
“evil-doers.” In his address to the U.S. Congress on September 20,
he said, “This is civilization's fight.” The president's attempt to
define difficult to grasp events as 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. For if it is
acknowledged that blowback played a part in the September 11
calamity, then some people holding high elected, appointive, or
administrative office in the U.S. are at least partly implicated in
the deaths of several thousand of their fellow
citizens.
Retaliation for Covert
Operations
For the CIA to carry out a covert
action, the president must sign off on a document, called a
“finding,” authorizing it. Findings are among the American
government's most secret papers. In its narrowest sense, “blowback”
means the unintended and unexpected negative consequences of covert
special operations that have been kept secret from the American
people and, in most cases, from their elected representatives. It
does not mean mere reactions to historical events but rather to
ill-conceived, short-term, invariably illegal U.S. clandestine
operations aimed at overthrowing foreign governments or helping
launch state terrorist operations against target populations. The
American people may not know what was done in their name, but those
on the receiving end surely do—including the people of Iran (1953),
Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959-60), Congo (1960), Brazil (1964),
Indonesia (1965), Vietnam (1961-73), Laos (1961-73), Cambodia
(1961-73), Chile (1973), El Salvador and Nicaragua (1980s), Iraq
(1991 to the present), and very probably Greece (1967), to name only
the most obvious cases.
The term “blowback” was originally
used in relationto poison-gas warfare to refer to the likelihood of
battlefield gasses unexpectedly blowing back on the forces that
released them. It first appeared in its political sense in the CIA's
post-action report on the secret overthrow of the Iranian government
in 1953. In 2000, James Risen of the New York Times explained:
“When the Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow Mohammed
Mossadegh as Iran's prime minister in 1953, ensuring another 25
years of rule for Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, the CIA was already
figuring that its first effort to topple a foreign government would
not be its last. The CIA, then just six years old and deeply
committed to winning the cold war, viewed its covert action in Iran
as a blueprint for coup plots elsewhere around the world, and so
commissioned a secret history to detail for future generations of
CIA operatives how it had been done. The history, which remains
classified, was recently obtained by the New York Times. . . . Amid
the sometimes curious argot of the spy world—'safebases' and
`assets' and the like—the CIA warns of the possibilities of
`blowback.' The word . . . has since come into use as shorthand for
the unintended consequences of covert operations. The CIA's covert
action in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which led to the empowerment of
anti-Western Islamic fundamentalists there in the 1990s, saw to
that.”
Actually, there's more to the
blowback from that older intervention by the United States in
Afghanistan than just the empowerment of anti-Western Islamic
fundamentalists. The attacks of September 11 are blowback in a
direct line of descent from events in 1979, the year in which the
consequences of the CIA's 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government
came due. In 1979, the Iranians took the entire staff of the
American embassy in Teheran hostage and threw out the Pahlevi regime
the U.S. had installed. The succeeding Iranian revolution ushered in
the fundamentalism of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Reagan
administration's adventurism that led to the Iran-Contra scandal. At
that very moment in 1979, the United States was also deliberately
provoking the former Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan. In From the Shadows: The Ultimate
Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold
War, the 1996 memoirs of former CIA director Robert Gates, he
writes that the American intelligence services actually began to aid
the mujahideen guerrillas
in Afghanistan not after the Soviet invasion of that country,
but six months before
it.6 Two years later, in an interview with the French
weekly magazine Nouvel
Observateur, President Carter's National Security Adviser,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, unambiguously confirmed Gates's
assertion.
In its interview, the Nouvel Observateur asked
Brzezinski, “Is Gates's account correct?” He replied, “Yes.
According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during
1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on
December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is
completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President
Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of
the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to
the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this
aid was going to induce a Soviet military
intervention.”
The Nouvel Observateur's interview continues. “You don't regret any
of this today?”
Brzezinski: “Regret what? That
secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing
the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The
day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to
President Carter, essentially: `We now have the opportunity of
giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.'”
The Nouvel Observateur: “And
neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which
has given arms and advice to future terrorists?” Brzezinski: “What
is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of
the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of
Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
Unless Brzezinski has been utterly
misquoted, he, Carter, and their successors in the Reagan
administration, including Gates—all of whom are alive but have kept
not come forward to draw attention to these matters following the
September 11 killings—have some responsibility for the 1.8 million
Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees, and ten million land mines
left in the ground there that followed from their decision, as well
as the “collateral damage” that befell New York City in September
2001 from an organization they helped create during the years of
anti-Soviet Afghan resistance.
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 the U.S. government, Manuel A. Noriega, former
commander of the Panama Defense Forces until George Bush père in late 1989 invaded
his country and kidnapped him, or Saddam Hussein, the president of
Iraq, whom the Reagan administration armed and backed so long as he
was at war with Khomeini's Iran and whose people the U.S. has bombed
and starved for a decade in an incompetent effort to get rid of him.
All of these men were once listed as “assets” in the secret
computers of America's primary clandestine services
organization.
The CIA supported Osama bin Laden
like so many other extreme fundamentalists among the mujahideen in Afghanistan
from at least 1984, including building in
1986 the training complex and weapons storage tunnels around the
Afghan city of Khost where bin Laden trained many of the 35,000
“Arab Afghans.” They constituted a sort of Islamic Abraham
Lincoln Brigade of young volunteers from around the Muslim world who
wanted to become mujahideen
and fight on the side of the Afghans against the Soviet Union.
Bin Laden's Khost complex was the one that at President Bill
Clinton's orders was hit on August 20, 1998, with cruise missiles in
retaliation for bin Laden's attacks of August 7, 1998, on the
American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. For once the CIA knew
where the targets were since it had built
them.
It is true that the CIA used a formal cut-out to make
deliveries of money and weapons to the “freedom fighters.” It did so
to maintain a façade of deniability with
the Soviet Union. All American money was funneled through Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which had taken the lead
since 1982 in recruiting radical Muslims to come to Pakistan,
receive training, and fight on the Afghan side. In Peshawar,
Pakistan, the gateway to the Khyber Pass and Kabul, Osama bin Laden,
the well-connected, rich young Saudi (he was born around 1957),
became close friends with Prince Turki Bin Faisal, the head of the
Istakhbarat, the Saudi Intelligence Service, and Lt. Gen. Hameed
Gul, head of the ISI, all of whom joined in common cause with the
CIA to defeat the Soviet Union.
It was only after the Russians had bombed Afghanistan back
into the stone age and suffered a Vietnam-like defeat, and the U.S.
had walked away from the death and
destruction the CIA had helped cause, that Osama bin Laden turned
against his American supporters. The last straw as far as he was
concerned was the way that the U.S. based “infidel” American troops
in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War to prop up that decadent,
fiercely authoritarian regime. As I wrote in Blowback, two years before
the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, “Since the Gulf War the
United States has maintained around thirty-five thousand troops in
Saudi Arabia. Devoutly Muslim citizens of that kingdom see their
presence as a humiliation to the country and an affront to their
religion. Dissident Saudis have launched attacks against Americans
and against the Saudi regime itself. After the June 1996 bombing of
the Khobar Towers apartments near Dhahran killed nineteen American
airmen, the international relations commentator William Pfaff
offered the reasonable prediction, `Within 15 years at most, if
present American and Saudi Arabian policies are pursued, the Saudi
monarchy will be overturned and a radical and anti-American
government will take power in Riyadh.' Yet American foreign policy
remains on autopilot, instead of withdrawing from a place where a
U.S. presence is only making a dangerous situation
worse”.
In my opinion, the U.S. government's reaction to September 11 has similarly made an
already terrible situation worse. The use of the U.S. Air Force
against a poor country like Afghanistan is surely producing
terrorists faster than young American men are volunteering for the
armed forces and much faster than the FBI can find and catch them.
The proper reaction to terrorism is patient, thorough police work,
good intelligence, and cooperation with friendly police agencies.
The terrorists should be apprehended, brought before a properly
constituted international tribunal, and evidence presented to
convict them—as was done in the case of the terrorists who bombed
Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The attacks on
Afghanistan may satisfy a popular American demand for revenge and
triumph, but in the long run they will worsen the threats to
American security at home and abroad.
The blowback from the second half of
the twentieth century has only just begun. It is probable that the
United States can weather the attacks of September 11 if it
restricts its retaliation to Afghanistan and gets out quickly. But
blowback is not restricted just to CIA provocations and the
reactions of terrorists. In a sense, blowback is simply another way
of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually
know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is
seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers
of the American empire have sown has been kept
secret.
As a concept, blowback is obviously
most easily grasped in its straightforward manifestations. The
unintended consequences of American policies and acts in country X
lead to a bomb at an American embassy in country Y or a dead
American in country Z. Certainly any number of Americans have been
killed in that fashion, from Catholic nuns in El Salvador to
tourists in Uganda who just happened to wander into hidden imperial
scenarios about which they knew nothing.
But blowback is hardly restricted to
such reasonably straightforward examples. In its extended sense it
also includes the hollowing out of key American industries because
of the export-led economic policies of our satellites, the
militarism and arrogance of power that inevitably accompany the role
of global hegemon, and the distortions to our culture and basic
values as we are increasingly required to glorify warrior roles. The
danger I foresee is that we are embarked on a path not so dissimilar
to that of the former Soviet Union a decade ago. It collapsed for
three reasons—internal economic contradictions, imperial
overstretch, and an inability to reform. In every sense, we were by
far the wealthier of the two Cold War superpowers, so it will
certainly take longer for similar afflictions to do their work. But
it is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an
empire dominating the world, must go on forever.
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