Jacob Conrad:
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) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Wojtek Replies:
Well, that is fortune telling not prediction in a scientific sense. A prediction entails the ability to tell not only what is likely to happen, but also under what circumstances, when and where. Everyone can foretell that there will be an earthquake in California - the point is, however, to tell of what magnitude, where and when. In the same vein, anyone can "predict" that there will acts of hostility against a country, and the probabilty of that happening increases with the size and international salience of a country. But that is not the same as to say who will initiate that hostility, in what form, and under what circumstances.
If I recall, a big chunk of Johnson's Blowback argument is about Far East (the area of his expertise), especially Okinawa - but it was not Japanese kamikaze pilots who flew the airliners into WTC and the Pentagon (another reminder that the past performance is not an indicator of future results). If anything, the Blowback theory would predict that the blowback would come from anyone but the Muslims - after all, the Arab and Muslim countries received a quite favorable treatment from the US (especially by a comparision to Latin America of Far East), as evidences by the US position on the Suez Canal crisis, Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Kuwait, the civil war in Bosnia, the Kosovo debacle, and a friendly attitude toward Saudi Arabia.
The key problem of the Blowback theory is its US-centrism, the "we brought it upon ourselves" religious trope. Most US-ers seem taking it for granted that there are the masters, the only issue is whether the masters of light (the patriotic version) or masters of darkness (the countercultural version). It seemingly does not occur to these folks that they may be mere pawns in someone else's game over which the US has little control. If we shed the US-centric view, the Arab terrorism appears more like an internal affair among various Arab and Muslim factions, and the US being more of a strawman attacked to make a poitn or to demonstrate one's prowess.
Wojtek