Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

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Originally published in hardcover in 2000 by Metropolitan Books

First Holt Paperbacks Edition 2001

Reissued 2004

Designed by Michelle McMillian

Printed in the United States of America

9 10 8

CONTENTS

Introduction: After 9/11

Prologue: A Spear-Carrier for Empire

1.     Blowback

2.     Okinawa: Asia’s Last Colony

3.     Stealth Imperialism

4.     South Korea: Legacy of the Cold War

5.     North Korea: Endgame of the Cold War

6.     China: The State of the Revolution

7.     China: Foreign Policy, Human Rights, and Trade

8.     Japan and the Economics of the American Empire

9.     Meltdown

10.     The Consequences of Empire

Further Reading

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION:

AFTER 9/11

In a speech to Congress on September 20, 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, President George W. Bush posed this question: “Why do they hate us?” His answer: “They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote.” He commented later that he was amazed “that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. . . . I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.”

But how “good” are we, really? If we’re so good, why do we inspire such hatred abroad? What have we done to bring so much “blowback” upon ourselves?

This book is a guide to some of the policies during and after the Cold War that generated, and continue to generate, blowback—a term the CIA invented to describe the likelihood that our covert operations in other people’s countries would result in retaliations against Americans, civilian and military, at home and abroad. Blowback was first published in the spring of 2000, some eighteen months before 9/11. My intention in writing it was to warn my fellow Americans about the nature and conduct of U.S. foreign policy over the previous half-century, focusing particularly on the period after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. I argued that many aspects of what the American government had done around the world virtually invited retaliatory attacks from nations and peoples on the receiving end. I did not predict the events of 9/11, but I did clearly state that acts of retaliation were coming and should be anticipated. “World politics in the twenty-first century,” I wrote, “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.”

During the first year after its publication, Blowback was largely ignored in the United States. Few of the mainstream book reviews took any notice of it, and the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs, wrote that “Blowback reads like a comic book.”¹ Not surprisingly perhaps, the response elsewhere in the world was somewhat different. The book 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.²

Domestic lack of interest changed dramatically after September 11, 2001. The book was reprinted eight times in less than two months and became an underground bestseller among Americans suddenly sensitized to, or at least desperate to know about, some of the realities of the world in which they lived. The catastrophic events of the first year of the new millennium not only threw an unusual light on the self-proclaimed role of the United States 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 our “war on terror.” The term “blowback” went from being an esoteric term of CIA tradecraft to virtually a household word, cropping up in discussions of the multiple disasters that were beginning to assail the United States—from anthrax attacks on senators, the media, and other targets to Congress’s gutting the Bill of Rights through passage of the Patriot Act (by votes of 76 to 1 in the Senate and 337 to 79 in the House). There was also a widespread sense around the world that America had it coming.

Blowback