Blowback from Iraq: Global and Growing

By Ronald Bruce St. John, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted December 20, 2004.

Blowback is a term invented by the Central Intelligence Agency to describe the unintended consequences of policies kept secret from the American people. Chalmers Johnson’s excellent book, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire," helped popularize the term. Originally intended for internal use only, blowback increasingly characterizes global reaction to Bush administration policies in and out of the Middle East.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the president told the world you are either “with us or against us.” He then offered a far-reaching moral vision for the Middle East with democracy as the core ingredient. He saw a free Iraq serving as a catalyst for peace in the region, setting in motion progress toward a truly democratic Palestinian state. In pursuit of these objectives, the United States turned to force, rushing to war in Iraq and condoning, if not supporting, draconian Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank. In ruling out the peaceful settlement of disputes in Iraq, Palestine, and elsewhere, American policies legitimized and provoked terror.

Three years later, the number of people “against us” around the world has grown exponentially. The popular view of the United States throughout the Middle East and the broader Islamic world is dark and hateful. In short, the administration’s faith-based, fact-free foreign policy has spawned the antithesis of the Bush vision.

Instead of democracy, U.S. policies have generated mistrust, hostility, and opposition, compounding the sense of degradation, indignity, and humiliation often found in the Islamic world. Both standing governments and legitimate opposition movements in these countries have come to see U.S. policies as a major obstacle to home-grown efforts to promote political reform. In the Islamic world, close association with the United States has become a kiss of death – figuratively and literally.

While the CIA originally conceived of blowback as limited to the unintended consequences of U.S. policy on Americans, it has long enjoyed a wider application. Chile, Guatemala, Iran, and Vietnam are only a few Cold War examples where direct CIA involvement in the domestic politics of another country had unintended, disastrous consequences for its citizenry. What was true during the Cold War is doubly true in the case of the Iraqi occupation and the war on terrorism.

The March 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people, are one example of blowback from U.S. policies affecting non-Americans in Europe. The November 2004 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a young Muslim of Moroccan descent is another. Pinned to the corpse of Van Gogh, who had produced a short film critical of the treatment of women in Muslim societies, was an “open letter” to Ayaan Hirshi Ali, his liberal Muslim film collaborator. The central argument of the letter, which provides considerable insight into the major theological conflict of our time, amounts to an admonition from a radical Islamist to an atheist apostate. In a country known for it toleration and openness, Van Gogh’s murder set off a surprising wave of retaliatory attacks on more than 20 Islamic sites, including mosques and Islamic schools.

The full extent to which the policies of the Bush administration are producing blowback outside the Western world is less well known. The bombing in October 2002 of two Indonesian nightclubs on the isle of Bali is one example. The blasts and subsequent fires left more than 202 dead and hundreds injured, many of them young Australians and other Western vacationers. Those attacks were followed by the suicide bombing of the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in 2003. And almost three years to the day after 9/11, a massive explosion in front of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta killed at least nine, wounding more than 180 others. While the embassy attack occurred less than two weeks before the second round of Indonesia’s presidential elections, most observers agree it was really meant to influence elections in Australia against an incumbent prime minister who made his country a strong American ally. Terrorism thrives on symbolism, and terrorists find Indonesia offers easier access to Australian targets than security-conscious Australia. But too often, innocent Indonesians are the ones doing the dying.

Ronald Bruce St John, an analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus, has published widely on Middle Eastern issues. His latest book on the region is "Libya and the United States: Two Centuries of Strife" (Penn Press, 2002).

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