In today's Times, movie reviewer A.O. Scott says that the Muslim terrorist attacks on the west of the last few years are "blowback" to the U.S.'s involvement in the Afghan-Soviet war of the '80s that is the setting for the film, "Charlie Wilson's War." This isn't accurate. Here is Chalmers Johnson's definition of "blowback" from the Nation:
"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.
We were the good guys in the Afghan mess. The blowback has come from other activities, including our support for the brutal Israeli occupation.
(Thanks to John OKeeffe for making this point first, in an email to me.)
That's right, everything is always the Jews fault, including the Soviet-Afghan war. And the fact that my car is leaking radiator fluid. Oh, and the fact that Phil can't get an erection.
More generally blowback is the result of unintended consequences, as in what Ron Paul told Rudi G on that one debate wherein Rudi acted as if he never heard of proximate and\or indirect cause.
I disagree with Philip on this one. The Taliban and the Islamic radicals which flourished there are a direct result of our bargaining and funding of them to encourage them to fight the Soviets. The US decided that the enemy (Islamic radicals) of my enemy (the Soviets) were my friends. That wasn't the case.
Thus 9/11 is better defined as blowback from our and the Saudi Arabian funding of the Islamic radicals in Afghanistan that it is because of Israel's brutal oppression. While I would like it the other way around because it makes for more powerful argument the end the occupation, I don't think it is as reflective of reality.
The Islamic movements are not caused by the US.
They are what they are, independantly.
Blowback is just irony, not a predictive or causitive principle.
I agree with Chris, who disagrees with Phil. The Soviets intervened in Afghanistan primarily because of their fear of the consequences for their own Muslim republics if the Islamic fanatics won in Afghanistan. We chose to finance and arm those same fanatics, in fact most of the arms and money went to the most fanatical anticommunists, who were also the most fanatical anti-Western. We've been paying the price ever since. Not only was this certainly blowback, it was the Mother of All Blowback.
This is not merely hindsight. I was teaching American foreign policy during those events, and I repeatedly argued that the Soviets were a declining and spent force, essentially a status quo power and certainly not fanatical, whereas the al-Qaeda/Taliban bunch, already visible in the 1980s, would come back to haunt us.
Disagree somewhat.
The whole Al Kaida organization was born in Pakistan in the 1980's. The Pakistani ISI and American CIA were training the volunteer Arabs in the craft.
Who taught the al Kaida how to organize themselves in cells in enemy territory, how to set up training camps, how to become guerrillas, bombers? The ISI and CIA that's
who.
You have to realize that the most radicalized Arabs were in Palestine, and all Arab terror before al Kaida was anti Israel only.
The whole jyhadi organization was and is used by Pakistan in its undeclared war on its Indian border, as well as, after the crucible of Afghanistan, is now spread worldwide, for example, in the Phylippines.
Pardon me Chalmers, but what does Mr. Weiss' erection have to do with anything?
Hanging around a middle school and watching too much My super sweet 16 on MTV there, Chalmers?
If the Islamic movements are not caused by the US, does that mean American foreign policy has absolutely no consequences?
And, so Islamic movements always rise due to an independant intervening cause? And if Blowback is just irony, not a predictive or causitive principle, what is described? Not even the possible proximate cause or even an indirect cause?
I guess I'm the only one who actually saw this film. The vague implication is that 9/11 may be blowback for not having assisted in the reconstruction of Afghanistan. I saw a similar claim being made on a History Channel documentary about the "Ghost Wars" in Afghanistan. If only we had sustained our intervention and better assisted with the nation building and reconstruction of Afghanistan we might have escaped 9/11. That argument is hogwash.
The fact is 9/11 was blowback for intervention in the Middle East that is hostile to Islamist interests. This includes American support for Israel but also extends to the basing of military forces in Saudi Arabia, propping up our favorite satraps throught the Middle East, and the merciless bombing of Iraq.
Al Qaeda may have been better armed and funded because of our "ghost war" in Afghanistan, but the notion that 9/11 is payback for having assisted the Afghan resistance or for not having assisted enough is utter nonsense. They want us out of there. They do not want us to serve a better, more benevolent "parent" to the Muslim diaspora.
Mike Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's OBL unit has written extensively about this and you can hear an archive of MP3 interviews here: link to scotthortonshow.com
Remember hearing news reports of the shocking fundamentalist text books filled with depictions of violence, arms and war used by the Taliban in Afghanistan's schools to brainwash and indoctrinate Afghanistan's young minds in the way of jihad along with hatred of non-Muslims and foreigners etc.?
Turns out millions were spent over a period of some twenty years financing the printing, shipping and distribution of those jihad preaching school text books by none other than the US government. This fact was reported on by the Washington Post (but only once), after that the matter was dropped and it was a non-issue as far as the rest of the US media was concerned.
The Jihad Schoolbook Scandal
by Jared Israel
SNIP
Washington Post investigators report that during the past twenty years the US has spent millions of dollars producing fanatical schoolbooks, which were then distributed in Afghanistan.
"The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then [i.e., since the violent destruction of the Afghan secular government in the early 1990s] as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books…" — Washington Post, 23 March 2002 (1)
According to the Post the U.S. is now "…wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism."
So the books made up the core curriculum in Afghan schools. And what were the unintended consequences? The Post reports that according to unnamed officials the schoolbooks "steeped a generation in [Islamist] violence."
How could this result have been unintended? Did they expect that giving fundamentalist schoolbooks to schoolchildren would make them moderate Muslims?
Continued at:
Five years ago, Congress and President Bush made the most consequential and, as now seems more likely than not, unfortunate decision of this country's still young century. On October 16, 2002, Bush signed a resolution authorizing the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Should war supporters apologize?
Democrats certainly think so. In the five years since then, many of them have said "I told you so" — many more, in fact, than told us so. In a recent paper, Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California (San Diego), unearthed figures suggesting that some Democrats have edited their memories. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 46 percent of them favored the war, according to an average of a dozen surveys. In 2006, only 21 percent of them said they had favored the war. Hmm. Do the math.
Those 25 percent of Democrats who were for the war until they had always been against it were probably not dissembling. They were just being human. "Memory is a self-justifying historian," says Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and a co-author (with Elliot Aronson) of the recent book Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. "Our memories are a better indication of what we believe and how we see ourselves today than of what actually happened."
I believe her, because I was not above a little memory repair myself. Recently, after a book review of mine appeared in The Washington Post, an angry reader wrote, "It will come as no surprise that Rauch was an advocate of invading Iraq." Who, me? I recalled myself as an agonized fence-sitter, more anti-anti-war than pro-war (an important distinction, you understand), maybe marginally in favor but more worried than convinced.
Just double-checking, I reread my columns from the period and promptly found one, from February 2004, in which I described myself as an, er, "advocate of the war." Gee. Imagine that.
So let me say for the record: I was wrong. Like most Americans, I have long since come to believe that the Iraq war was a strategic mistake — with luck. (Without luck, it will be a strategic calamity.) But let me also say what I was wrong about.
In that February 2004 article, I called the war a "justified mistake." When a cop shoots a robber who has murdered in the past and who brandishes what looks like a gun, we blame the robber, not the cop — even if it turns out that the robber was brandishing a toy or a cellphone. The robber was asking for it, and so was Saddam Hussein.
That answer, although still reasonable, no longer seems as convincing. Since 2004, it has become clearer that the Bush administration's prewar hype portrayed the intelligence on Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction as solider and starker than it really was. Not enough people, including people in the media, asked enough hard questions. I should have been more skeptical of the WMD hard sell. That was mistake No. 1.
Mistake No. 2 was forgetting the difference between experts and poseurs. Over the past few years, it has become clearer that the hazards of the U.S. occupation of Iraq were not unforeseeable. In fact, quite a few people foresaw them. And warned about them. And went unheeded. Partly that was because the Bush administration wasn't interested, but partly it was because a lot of us in the media gave a lot of ink and airtime to pontificators who had never been to Iraq, who had never fought in a war or served in an embassy or worked on a reconstruction team, and who did not know Iraq's language, culture, people, leaders, history, or region. Other than that, they were experts.
In 2002 and 2003, of course, there was no way of knowing which of countless forecasts and opinions would prove correct. The experts were divided; sometimes fresh-eyed amateurs see what jaded experts miss; the previous U.S. Iraq policy was no big success. All true. Still, the fact that so many of the war's sturdiest proponents were journalists and pundits — in other words, hacks, like me — should have rung more alarm bells. That was mistake No. 2.
Those, however, were small mistakes compared with the fundamental one. It was not, really, a mistake about the war at all. It was a mistake about the president.
Fool me twice, shame on me. In 1990, I was fooled once. In the prelude to the Persian Gulf War, I misjudged President George H.W. Bush. In those days, America's most resounding recent military triumphs had been against the Lilliputian forces of Panama and Grenada, against which weighed the 1975 defeat in Vietnam, the 1980 fiasco of Desert One (President Carter's failed hostage-rescue attempt in Iran), and the 1983 humiliation in Lebanon (where U.S. forces turned tail after losing more than 200 marines to a Hezbollah truck bomb). Saddam Hussein's forces looked formidable and well entrenched in 1990. The sandstorms looked forbidding. And President George H.W. Bush looked hapless. I opposed the war.
The U.S. military proved virtuosic, the Iraqi military proved worthless, the desert proved tractable, and, much the most important, the elder Bush proved dazzling. He marshaled an unprecedented coalition. He won decisively in hours. He quit while he was ahead. He even got other countries to pay. He should not have stood by as Saddam savagely put down postwar rebellions; but otherwise his performance was masterly, not least in its realism and restraint.
As I came to the 2002-2003 Iraq debate, I was determined not to make the same mistake twice. Another Bush was president, and the younger one looked as decisive as his father had once seemed dotty. This, after all, was the George W. Bush who had impressively rallied the nation and the world after September 11.
His foreign-policy team looked easily the equal of his father's, or anybody's. Vice President Cheney was the wise man of Washington and the elder Bush's successful Defense secretary. Secretary of State Colin Powell was the magisterial architect of the Gulf War. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was the man whose plan had worked like a charm in Afghanistan. If Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, was not the equal of her 1990 predecessor, Brent Scowcroft, she was no lightweight. Surely if any war Cabinet could inspire confidence, this was it.
Wrong again. Zero for two.
George W. Bush had more than his share of bad luck in Iraq. He bet that Saddam would have an active nuclear or at least biological-weapons program; that Iraq's social and physical infrastructure would be functional; that the war would be short. None of those bets was crazy, but he lost all three.
Still, a good gambler never bets more than he can afford to lose; he scrubs the odds with a sharp eye on the worst case; he hedges to give himself options. Above all, he keeps abreast of the game.
Bush placed too large a bet, padded the odds, and didn't hedge. Worst of all, he never caught up with the state of play. Again and again, he and his team were too slow in understanding and reacting to events, if they reacted at all. They were late to react to wholesale looting; late to understand the scale of the effort and to commit sufficient forces (arguably they still haven't); late to recognize they confronted an insurgency and to fight it with proven counterinsurgency tactics; late to recognize the emergence of a Shiite-Sunni civil war. Today, almost five years on, they are still behind the curve: As Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., plausibly argues, Bush clings to an insistence on a strong central government in Baghdad, despite that strategy's failure and signs that regionalism would work better.
Some optimists say that in Army Gen. David Petraeus, Bush has finally found his Gen. Grant. That may or may not be true, but it is beside the point. The problem is that Petraeus has not yet found his President Lincoln.
Judging presidents' wartime performance before the war starts is hard. No one could have known in 1860 that Lincoln, a lawyer and military novice, would develop into a commander-in-chief of genius. As lessons go, "Don't misjudge the president before committing to a war" is roughly as useful as "Buy low, sell high."
It does, however, provide some insight into the key mistake of five years ago. In February, asked for the umpteenth time to recant her war vote, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., for the umpteenth time refused. "The mistakes were made by the president," she said. In 2004, she said, "I do not regret giving the president authority…. What I regret is the way the president used the authority."
She had a fair point. She might have sharpened it by saying what I have come to say: I do not regret giving the president authority; I regret giving this president authority. I am sorry. I made a mistake five years ago. But not about the vote. About the leader.
Philip Zelikow, Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission (and a neocon appointed by Bush) sees the blowback mechanism a little differently:
"The al-Qeada leader wanted to punish the United States for supporting Israel."
mr weiss- you are way wrong on this one. we literally funded what became al queda. the idea that because we were helping good guys makes the consequences not our fault is ridiculous. what consolation was that on 9/11? the road to hell is paved with good intentions
You guys should rent "The Living Daylights" to refresh your memories about the 80s. The US supported a loose confederation of anti-Soviet forces usually called the mujahideen in the media.
At the time period, I remember that William O. Casey wanted to develop of coalition of Muslims and Christians against atheistic communists.
The US cut off support for mujahid groups shortly after the Soviets left, and Afghanistan turned to chaos.
The Taliban were a splinter group that took over with the aid of the Pakistani ISI.
Bin Ladin was a bit player during the anti-Soviet resistance period and helped with charitable contributions to the families of Afghan Arabs that were killed in the fighting.
He had family in Boston, and I have heard second or third hand that he at one time had a fondness for American sci-fi.
Qaida is the Arabic word for foundation as in Asimov's Foundation Trilogy.
From Afghanistan, Bin Laden relocated to the Sudan in the early 90s.