Chalmers Johnson is a retired professor who taught at UCSD, an expert on Japan and East Asia. During his career, he was quite an establishment figure. His book on MITI is said to be a "classic" (I know little of the subject, and can't vouch for that judgment). In retirement, however, he seems to have become quite radical. Here is how he remembers his experience of the Vietnam years:
"[I] believe[d] that the United States could not afford to lose in Vietnam...It proved to be a disastrously wrong position... I was also in those years irritated by campus antiwar protresters, who seemed to me self-indulgent as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework... As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America's imperial role that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naivete and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong." (p. xiv)
Johnson had served in the navy in the early 50s, and went to grad school starting in 1955, with support from government and foundation fellowships, to become an Asia scholar. He writes of those years now:
"I had no hint that, as a student of Asia, I would become as much a spear-carrier for empire as I had been in the navy." (p. xii)
Here's what he says about "blowback" in general:
"The term 'blowback,' which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own internal use, is starting to circulate among students of international relations. It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. When the daily press reports as the malign acts of 'terrorists' or 'drug lords' or 'rogue states' often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations." (p. 8)
About Osama bin Laden, Johnson writes as follows:
"Blowback itself can lead to more blowback, in a spiral of destructive behavior. A good illustration of this lies in the government's reaction to the August 7, 1998 bombings of American embassy buildings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam... The US government promptly placed the blame on Osama bin Laden, a Saudi who had long denounced his country's rulers and their American allies. On August 20, the United States retaliated by firing nearly eighty cruise missiles...into a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, and an old mujahideen camp in Afghanistan. (One missile went four hundred miles off course and landed in Pakistan..."
"Government spokesmen continue to justify these attacks as 'deterring' terrorism... In this way, future blowback possibilities are seeded into the world. The same spokesmen ignore the fact that the alleged mastermind of the embassy bombings, bin Laden, is a former protege of the United States. When America was organizing Afghan rebels against the USSR in the 1980s, he played an important part in driving the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and only turned against the United States in 1991 because he regarded the stationing of American troops in his native Saudi Arabia during and after the Gulf War as a violation of his religious beliefs. Thus, the attacks on our embassies in Africa...are an instance of blowback... the spiral of blowback and retaliation...is undoubtedly not yet at an end in the case of bin Laden." (pp. 10-11)
I'm not aware of anyone in journalism or academe who came closer to predicting the heavy blowback headed our way, which is certainly not at an end. After all, as Johnson writes, "The United States...is the world's most prominent target for blowback, being the world's lone imperial power, the primary source of the sort of secret and semisecret operations that shore up repressive regimes... It is typical of an imperial people to have a short memory for its less pleasant imperial acts, but for those on the receiving end, memory can be long indeed." (pp. 11-12)
Jacob Conrad