Chalmers Johnson wrote prophetically in _Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire_ (Henry Holt, 2000):
***** A classic model of the disaster is a U.S. decision to "help" an ally faced with domestic dissidence or even insurrection. First, the "threatened" country is declared part of America's vital interests; next, American military personnel and commercial camp followers are sent in to "assist" the government. The foreignness of this effort as well as its indifference to democracy and local conditions only accelerate the insurrectionary movement. In the end an American protectorate is replaced by a virulently anti-American regime. This scenario played itself out in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iran in our time. Now it appears it might do so in Saudi Arabia.
Since the Gulf War the United States has maintained around thirty-five thousand troops in Saudi Arabia. Devoutly Muslim citizens of that kingdom see their presence as a humiliation to the country and an affront to their religion. Dissident Saudis have launched attacks against Americans and against the Saudi regime itself. After the June 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartments near Dhahran killed nineteen American airmen, the international relations commentator William Pfaff offered the reasonable prediction, "Within 15 years at most, if present American and Saudi Arabian policies are pursued, the Saudi monarchy will be overturned and a radical and anti-American government will way this type of circular reasoning can lead to take power in Riyadh." Yet American foreign policy remains on autopilot, instead of withdrawing from a place where a U.S. presence is only making a dangerous situation worse.
<http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blowback_CJohnson/Quotations_BCJ.html> *****
That's a politico-military blowback. Blowbacks from Japan and Germany have been economic, rather than political or military.
What makes the current development critical for US and other leftists is that the United States may be embarking upon an endless war after it has lost its post-war economic supremacy in large part due to economic competitiveness of the very social forces -- German and Japanese ruling classes and power elites, many of whom rehabilitated fascists and war criminals and their proteges -- that it aided for the purpose of creating an anticommunist empire. In other words, the economic foundations of the US empire -- now the world's largest debtor nation -- have become fragile, likely incapable of withstanding the costs and consequences of an endless war that the faction of its elite currently in power appear to be determined to pursue, in the midst of global economic downturns, no less. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>