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[Dave Monroe]

Okay, my rare post on the events of the past week or two.  From Chalmers 
Johnson, "Blowback," The Nation (October 15, 2001) ...

"The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not 'attack America,' as 
our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked 
American foreign policy.

[...]

"On the day of the disaster, President George W. Bush told the American  
people that we were attacked because we are 'a beacon for freedom' and 
because the attackers were 'evil.' In his address to Congress on September 
20, he said, 'This is civilization's fight.' This attempt to define 
difficult-to-grasp events as only 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.
   "'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.

[...]

"Osama bin Laden joined our call for resistance to the Soviet Union's 1979 
invasion of Afghanistan and accepted our military training and equipment 
along with countless other mujahedeen 'freedom fighters.' It was only after 
the Russians bombed Afghanistan back into the stone age and suffered a 
Vietnam-like defeat, and we turned our backs on the death and destruction we 
had helped cause, that he turned against us. The last straw as far as bin 
Laden was concerned was that, after the Gulf War, we based 'infidel' 
American troops in Saudi Arabia to prop up its decadent, fiercely 
authoritarian regime. Ever since, bin Laden has been attempting to bring the 
things the CIA taught him home to the teachers.  On September 11, he appears 
to have returned to his deadly project with a vengeance.

[...]

"Ironically, though American leaders are deaf to the desires of the 
protesters, the Defense Department has actually adopted the movement's main 
premise--that current global economic arrangements mean more wealth for the 
'West' and more misery for the 'rest'--as a reason why the United States 
should place weapons in space. The US Space Command's pamphlet 'Vision for 
2020' argues that 'the globalization of the world economy will also 
continue, with a widening between the "haves" and the "have-nots,"' and that 
we have a mission to 'dominate the space dimension of military operations to 
protect US interests and investments' in an increasingly dangerous and 
implicitly anti-American world....

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20011015&s=johnson

And see as well ...

Johnson, Chalmers.  Blowback: The Costs and Consequences
   of American Empire.  New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2000.

Now back to our regularly scheduled novel ...

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