The Likelihood of Blowback
With every act of blatant, arrogant dishonesty (the invasion of Iraq), of open disdain for criticism (the handling of Katrina), of intentionally demonstrative illegality (presidential eavesdropping), of brutality and ruthlessness (Guantanamo and other institutions of torture), of disdain for Democratic traditions ( the suspension of habeas corpus under the Patriot Act), the current regime provides a steady flow of reassurance that it is the worlds toughest gang and can do whatever it likes with impunity. Daily it proclaims its competence to brutally dominate in a world run by nation-gangs (Huntington's "tribes").
Critics of the regime, who seem intent upon discrediting it in every way possible, barely address the question of U.S. vulnerability to retaliation as a result of the regime's seemingly bizarre, and sociopathic, policies. As a result, the average citizen might well feel assured (however horrified s/he may be by the regime's actions) that in the wake of 9/11, further concern about blowback from U.S. enemies appears to be unfounded.
Just below the public radar, however, exists a burgeoning cache of evidence suggesting the opposite. According to Jonathan Schell, considered a leading experts on issues of national physical security since the beginning of the Cold War, in the October 1, 2001 The Nation, "There is no technical solution to the vulnerability of modern populations to weapons of mass destruction."
A month later, The Scientific American editorial observed that "Not only is the U.S. unprepared to recover from a biological attack, it might not even recognize that one is occurring until the contagion had already spread.... Meanwhile, researchers have gained a new appreciation of how easy it is to create bioweapons."
During his recent presidential campaign, John Kerry urged public awareness of how vulnerable the nations port system was, and of how little the Administration addressed this issue. On February 24 of this year, United Press International (UPI), reporting on the President's approval of the recently revealed planned management take-over of U.S. ports by a Saudi concern, noted that "In a January report, the Council on Foreign Relations pointed out the vulnerability of the shipping security system to terrorist exploitation. ... 'All a terrorist organization needs to do is find a single weak link within a 'trusted' shipper's complex supply chain, such as a poorly paid truck driver taking a container from a remote factory to a port. They can then gain access to the container in one of the half-dozen ways well known to experienced smugglers,' CFR wrote."
A second cache of evidence indicates how likely it is that determined attackers could take advantage of U.S. vulnerabilities. Many of them were trained by our own experts. In Dollars for Terror, published in 2000, prize winning Swiss journalist Richard Labeviere described how during the late 1940s and 50s the CIA made common cause with the fundamentalist Wahabi tribes of Saudi Arabia to create a force capable of undermining other Arabic states. The U.S. intelligence community insisted against criticisms that this alliance could prove dangerous to the United States, that otherwise Arab nations would likely join Russia in the Cold War. The CIA and Wahabis formed an Eastern style gentlemen's agreement: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." This organization became Al Qaeda. In his recently published Devils Game: How the U.S. Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, Robert Dreyfus'affirms and extends Labevier's analysis.
As indicated earlier in this essay, when U.S. intelligence agencies did not train potential attackers, they produced them through abuse. Recent events in our hemisphere demonstrate that the employment of such institutions as The School of the Americas (about which Hidden in Plain Sight, an excellent documentary, is now circulating ) to install arguably the most brutal regimes in history for no other discernable purpose than to render Latin America submissive to U.S. corporate control, have failed to consolidate such control and only bred tough, capable people filled with contempt and distrust for this country.
In the January 7, 2006 The Nation Daphne Eviatar reports of Evo Morales' recent election in Bolivia that "while the U.S. government has expressed deep fears about a Morales presidency, in many ways it's the United States that has put Morales in the position he is in today... On its face, the election of Evo Morales to the presidency of Bolivia would seem like an enormous victory for the left -- another domino in the line of Latin American nations turning away from Washington Consensus-style economics to forge a path of its own."
It seems likely that any of this nation's expanding coalition of adversaries, tempered like fine steel in the fires our imperial regimes have subjected them to for more than a century, can competently inflict great injury upon our society. Conceivably, they could destroy us without defeating our military. The Bush Administration itself repeatedly offers some version of this conclusion as its reason for (1) gutting the Bill-of-Rights and imposing a Patriot Act designed to facilitate a police state, (2) overtly sanctioning the torture of people allegedly suspected of possible terrorist affiliations, and (3) covertly overhauling and redesigning the intelligence community.
These actions the Administration deems necessary because of the formidable threat posed by potential terrorists. By its own accounts, those threatening the United States are well organized and highly sophisticated at guerilla warfare techniques, presenting no target for our full military power. That they must only grow stronger as the energy crisis deepens seems obvious.
The Administration further insists, consistent with the Clash of Civilizations world-view, that the threats our alleged enemies pose would only increase should the U.S. adopt a policy of negotiation rather than bullying. The bulk of historical evidence, however, seems to support an opposite conclusion. Certainly, in light of this evidence, none of the regime's new anti-democratic policies would seem to have much potential for protecting the nation against its determined enemies.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Gen. Curtis LeMay said he was willing to risk the possibility of global atomic devastation in defense of American pride. Fortunately, even his peers regarded this stance as pathological at the time. Were LeMay part of the current Administration, the opposite might be true. To Bill Moyers, noted TV columnist and best selling author of several brilliant analyses of American society, among many other observers, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfield, former Attorney General Ashcroft and other key members of the Administration seem no less Strangelovian than LeMay.
What will happen when citizens perceive the U.S. juggernaut to be hurtling into a chasm? Will men like Cheney and Rumsfield depart the stage quietly when public alarm demands this of them? The President has asserted repeatedly that laws such as the Patriot Act, vastly enhancing the Chief Executive's police powers, will never be used to suppress the citizens of this country. History encourages deep skepticism of such a promise if things fall apart for the current regime.
The public may be confused from time to time, but contrary to the opinions of some political activists, Abraham Lincoln was surely correct: the public is not stupid. We are a social species, and overwhelming evidence indicates that perception and intelligence are not so differentially distributed among us as propagandists would have us believe. We can and must address issues of our survival honestly and realistically, whatever the consequences. No effective movement can be built on hype and misdirection. The history of the ineptitude of imperial repression of Third World ascension, and its implications for U.S. physical security, constitutes a crucial dimension of civic understanding. It also constitutes a necessary ingredient of effective strategy. There seems little doubt that we face more than moral damage should the people of the United States fail to restrain leaders who have lost their sense of direction, and decency. We face annihilation.
David Weiner has been a sociology professor, high school teacher, community organizer, anti-racism activist and political radical for more than half a century. Nowadays he teaches sociology and social psychology at a community college in Austin, Texas.
With every act of blatant, arrogant dishonesty (the invasion of Iraq), of open disdain for criticism (the handling of Katrina), of intentionally demonstrative illegality (presidential eavesdropping), of brutality and ruthlessness (Guantanamo and other institutions of torture), of disdain for Democratic traditions ( the suspension of habeas corpus under the Patriot Act), the current regime provides a steady flow of reassurance that it is the worlds toughest gang and can do whatever it likes with impunity. Daily it proclaims its competence to brutally dominate in a world run by nation-gangs (Huntington's "tribes").
Critics of the regime, who seem intent upon discrediting it in every way possible, barely address the question of U.S. vulnerability to retaliation as a result of the regime's seemingly bizarre, and sociopathic, policies. As a result, the average citizen might well feel assured (however horrified s/he may be by the regime's actions) that in the wake of 9/11, further concern about blowback from U.S. enemies appears to be unfounded.
Just below the public radar, however, exists a burgeoning cache of evidence suggesting the opposite. According to Jonathan Schell, considered a leading experts on issues of national physical security since the beginning of the Cold War, in the October 1, 2001 The Nation, "There is no technical solution to the vulnerability of modern populations to weapons of mass destruction."
During his recent presidential campaign, John Kerry urged public awareness of how vulnerable the nations port system was, and of how little the Administration addressed this issue. On February 24 of this year, United Press International (UPI), reporting on the President's approval of the recently revealed planned management take-over of U.S. ports by a Saudi concern, noted that "In a January report, the Council on Foreign Relations pointed out the vulnerability of the shipping security system to terrorist exploitation. ... 'All a terrorist organization needs to do is find a single weak link within a 'trusted' shipper's complex supply chain, such as a poorly paid truck driver taking a container from a remote factory to a port. They can then gain access to the container in one of the half-dozen ways well known to experienced smugglers,' CFR wrote."
A second cache of evidence indicates how likely it is that determined attackers could take advantage of U.S. vulnerabilities. Many of them were trained by our own experts. In Dollars for Terror, published in 2000, prize winning Swiss journalist Richard Labeviere described how during the late 1940s and 50s the CIA made common cause with the fundamentalist Wahabi tribes of Saudi Arabia to create a force capable of undermining other Arabic states. The U.S. intelligence community insisted against criticisms that this alliance could prove dangerous to the United States, that otherwise Arab nations would likely join Russia in the Cold War. The CIA and Wahabis formed an Eastern style gentlemen's agreement: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." This organization became Al Qaeda. In his recently published Devils Game: How the U.S. Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, Robert Dreyfus'affirms and extends Labevier's analysis.
As indicated earlier in this essay, when U.S. intelligence agencies did not train potential attackers, they produced them through abuse. Recent events in our hemisphere demonstrate that the employment of such institutions as The School of the Americas (about which Hidden in Plain Sight, an excellent documentary, is now circulating ) to install arguably the most brutal regimes in history for no other discernable purpose than to render Latin America submissive to U.S. corporate control, have failed to consolidate such control and only bred tough, capable people filled with contempt and distrust for this country.
In the January 7, 2006 The Nation Daphne Eviatar reports of Evo Morales' recent election in Bolivia that "while the U.S. government has expressed deep fears about a Morales presidency, in many ways it's the United States that has put Morales in the position he is in today... On its face, the election of Evo Morales to the presidency of Bolivia would seem like an enormous victory for the left -- another domino in the line of Latin American nations turning away from Washington Consensus-style economics to forge a path of its own."
It seems likely that any of this nation's expanding coalition of adversaries, tempered like fine steel in the fires our imperial regimes have subjected them to for more than a century, can competently inflict great injury upon our society. Conceivably, they could destroy us without defeating our military. The Bush Administration itself repeatedly offers some version of this conclusion as its reason for (1) gutting the Bill-of-Rights and imposing a Patriot Act designed to facilitate a police state, (2) overtly sanctioning the torture of people allegedly suspected of possible terrorist affiliations, and (3) covertly overhauling and redesigning the intelligence community.
These actions the Administration deems necessary because of the formidable threat posed by potential terrorists. By its own accounts, those threatening the United States are well organized and highly sophisticated at guerilla warfare techniques, presenting no target for our full military power. That they must only grow stronger as the energy crisis deepens seems obvious.
The Administration further insists, consistent with the Clash of Civilizations world-view, that the threats our alleged enemies pose would only increase should the U.S. adopt a policy of negotiation rather than bullying. The bulk of historical evidence, however, seems to support an opposite conclusion. Certainly, in light of this evidence, none of the regime's new anti-democratic policies would seem to have much potential for protecting the nation against its determined enemies.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Gen. Curtis LeMay said he was willing to risk the possibility of global atomic devastation in defense of American pride. Fortunately, even his peers regarded this stance as pathological at the time. Were LeMay part of the current Administration, the opposite might be true. To Bill Moyers, noted TV columnist and best selling author of several brilliant analyses of American society, among many other observers, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfield, former Attorney General Ashcroft and other key members of the Administration seem no less Strangelovian than LeMay.
What will happen when citizens perceive the U.S. juggernaut to be hurtling into a chasm? Will men like Cheney and Rumsfield depart the stage quietly when public alarm demands this of them? The President has asserted repeatedly that laws such as the Patriot Act, vastly enhancing the Chief Executive's police powers, will never be used to suppress the citizens of this country. History encourages deep skepticism of such a promise if things fall apart for the current regime.
The public may be confused from time to time, but contrary to the opinions of some political activists, Abraham Lincoln was surely correct: the public is not stupid. We are a social species, and overwhelming evidence indicates that perception and intelligence are not so differentially distributed among us as propagandists would have us believe. We can and must address issues of our survival honestly and realistically, whatever the consequences. No effective movement can be built on hype and misdirection. The history of the ineptitude of imperial repression of Third World ascension, and its implications for U.S. physical security, constitutes a crucial dimension of civic understanding. It also constitutes a necessary ingredient of effective strategy. There seems little doubt that we face more than moral damage should the people of the United States fail to restrain leaders who have lost their sense of direction, and decency. We face annihilation.
David Weiner has been a sociology professor, high school teacher, community organizer, anti-racism activist and political radical for more than half a century. Nowadays he teaches sociology and social psychology at a community college in Austin, Texas.
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