Chalmers Johnson - Blowback, Second Edition - The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

It is likely that U.S. covert policies have helped create similar conditions in the Congo, Guatemala, and Turkey, and that we are simply waiting for the blowback to occur. Guatemala is a particularly striking example of American imperial policies in its own “backyard.” In 1954, the Eisenhower administration planned and the CIA organized and funded a military coup that overthrew a Guatemalan president whose modest land reform policies were considered a threat to American corporations. Blowback from this led to a Marxist guerrilla insurgency in the 1980s and so to CIA- and Pentagon-supported genocide against Mayan peasants. In the spring of 1999, a report on the Guatemalan civil war from the U.N.-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification made clear that “the American training of the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques” was a “key factor” in the “genocide. . . . Entire Mayan villages were attacked and burned and their inhabitants were slaughtered in an effort to deny the guerrillas protection.” 8According to the commission, between 1981 and 1983 the military government of Guatemala—financed and supported by the U.S. government—destroyed some four hundred Mayan villages in a campaign of genocide in which approximately two hundred thousand peasants were killed. José Pertierra, an attorney representing Jennifer Harbury, an American lawyer who spent years trying to find out what happened to her “disappeared” Guatemalan husband and supporter of the guerrillas, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, writes that the Guatemalan military officer who arrested, tortured, and murdered Bámaca was a CIA “asset” and was paid $44,000 for the information he obtained from him. 9

Visiting Guatemala in March 1999, soon after the report’s release, President Clinton said, “It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake. . . . The United States will no longer take part in campaigns of repression.” 10But on virtually the day that the president was swearing off “dirty tricks” in other people’s countries, his government was reasserting its support for Turkey in its war of repression against its Kurdish minority.

The Kurds constitute fifteen million people in a Turkish population estimated at fifty-eight million. Another five million Kurds live largely within reach of Turkey’s borders in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The Turks have discriminated against the Kurds for the past seventy years and have conducted an intense genocidal campaign against them since 1992, in the process destroying some three thousand Kurdish villages and hamlets in the backward southeastern part of the country. Former American ambassador to Croatia Peter W. Galbraith comments that “Turkey routinely jails Kurdish politicians for activities that would be protected speech in democratic countries.” 11The Europeans have so far barred Turkey from the European Union because of its treatment of the Kurds. Because of its strategic location on the border of the former Soviet Union, however, Turkey was a valued American ally and NATO member during the Cold War, and the United States maintains the relationship unchanged even though the USSR has disappeared.

After Israel and Egypt, Turkey is the third-highest recipient of American military assistance. Between 1991 and 1995, the United States supplied four-fifths of Turkey’s military imports, which were among the largest in the world. The U.S. government, in turn, depends on the NATO base at Incirlik, Turkey, to carry out Operation Provide Comfort, set up after the Gulf War to supply and protect Iraqi Kurds from repression by Saddam Hussein—at the same time that the United States acquiesces in Turkish mistreatment of its far larger Kurdish population. One obvious reason is that communities like Stratford and Bridgeport, Connecticut, where Black Hawk and Comanche helicopters are made, depend for their economic health on continued large-scale arms sales to countries like Turkey. At the time of the Gulf War, a senior adviser to the Turkish prime minister said to John Shattuck, assistant secretary of state for human rights, “If you want to stop human rights abuses do two things—stop IMF credits and cut off aid from the Pentagon. But don’t sell the weapons and give aid and then complain about the Kurdish issue. Don’t tell us about human rights while you’re selling these weapons.” 12

The capture in February 1999 of the Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan exposed the nature of American involvement with Turkey, in this case via a CIA gambit that holds promise as a rich source of future blowback. The CIA term for this policy is “disruption,” by which it means the harassment of terrorists around the world. The point is to flush them out of hiding so that cooperative police forces or secret services can then arrest and imprison them. According to John Diamond of the Associated Press, “The CIA keeps its role secret, and the foreign countries that actually crack down on the suspects carefully hide the U.S. role, lest they stir up trouble for themselves.” There are no safeguards at all against misidentifying “suspects,” and “the CIA sends no formal notice to Congress.” Disruption is said to be a preemptive, offensive form of counterterrorism. Richard Clarke, President Clinton’s antiterrorism czar, likes it because he can avoid “the cumbersome Congressional reporting requirements that go with CIA-directed covert operations” and because “human rights organizations would have no way of identifying a CIA role.” The CIA has carried out disruption operations in at least ten countries since September 1998. In the case of Ocalan’s capture, the United States “provided Turkey with critical information about Ocalan’s whereabouts.” This was the first time some of the details of a “disruption” campaign were made public. 13

In many other countries there are milder or subtler versions of these kinds of covert manipulations that may lead to future blowback. To take but one example, the U.S. State Department recently published volume 22 of Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963 , the official chronicle of American foreign policy, in this case devoted to relations between the United States, China, Korea, and Japan thirty-five or more years ago. Nonetheless, the government refused to declassify some 13.5 percent of the documents that should have been included in the section on Japan, particularly materials relating to military operations and U.S. bases in that country. For the first time, the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, charged by law with supervising the editing and publication of this venerable series, wrote in the Preface that volume 22 “does not constitute a ‘thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of major United States foreign policy decisions.’ ” The State Department, surely under instructions from the CIA and the Department of Defense, took the unusual step of holding back key documents—undoubtedly involving among other matters secret CIA payments to the conservative, long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its leading politicians, as well as the presence of nuclear arms at American bases in Japan, fearing that their publication might result in the kind of blowback of which a poor Third World country like Guatemala would be incapable, but which Japan might well undertake.

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 easy to grasp in its most straightforward manifestation. The unintended consequences of American policies and acts in country X are 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, as demonstrated in this book, is hardly restricted to such reasonably straightforward examples.