What is blowback? We occasionally hear the term brought up in political discussions, but in my opinion not nearly often enough, and many Americans have no idea what it actually means.
Blowback is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the United States government’s international espionage activities. It’s covertly acting, and years or perhaps even decades down the road, encountering unintended and unexpected consequences resulting directly or indirectly from those actions. In essence, it’s cause and effect.
By Ryan Gephart
Contributor
What is blowback? We occasionally hear the term brought up in political discussions, but in my opinion not nearly often enough, and many Americans have no idea what it actually means.
Blowback is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the United States government’s international espionage activities. It’s covertly acting, and years or perhaps even decades down the road, encountering unintended and unexpected consequences resulting directly or indirectly from those actions. In essence, it’s cause and effect.
The term “blowback” is a CIA term first used in March of 1954 to describe the 1953 operation to overthrow the elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in Iran. The main reason for the overthrow of Mosaddeq was his attempts to nationalize the Iranian oil industry to generate a greater profit for Iran itself instead of letting the British reap most of the profits through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which would later become the oil conglomerate British Petroleum (BP).
As one could imagine, the British government didn’t like this idea one bit, but they did not want to have a go at a solution alone. So the U.S. was led to believe by the British that Mosaddeq’s administration was increasingly turning towards communism and the Soviet sphere of influence in a time when Cold War tensions were reaching a feverish pitch.
As a result, both the Britain and the U.S. began to publically denounce Mosaddeq’s policies for Iran as harmful to the country, and in December of 1952 British and U.S. intelligence agreed that the prime minister should be ousted. In April of 1953, the CIA and MI6, respective intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Britain, appropriated millions of dollars to launch a propaganda campaign against Mosaddeq. This plot became known as Operation Ajax and it centered on convincing Iran’s monarch, the Shah, to use his constitutional authority to dismiss Mosaddeq from office. The results?
After several meetings and much persuasion, the Shah was convinced by the U.S. and British to have Mosaddeq removed from power. He was arrested, tried, and found guilty for high treason. Although the Shah spared his life, he was sentenced to three years in solitary confinement in a military jail and then was exiled to his village not far from Tehran where he remained under house arrest until his death in 1967.
However, the CIA had fears at the time that there might ultimately be some blowback from its unwarranted interference into the affairs of Iran. They were correct. By installing the Shah in power brought 25 years of tyranny and repression to the Iranian people and as a result inspired the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in 1979.
The staff of the American embassy in Teheran was held hostage for more than a year. This misguided and irresponsible “covert operation” of the U.S. government helped convince many people throughout the Islamic world that the U.S. was an enemy and honestly, can you blame them?
This pattern of cause and effect, of action and reaction, has become all too familiar. Those who are our friends one day, turn out to be our enemies the next.
For instance, we once backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the 80’s, who we armed to the teeth as long as he was at war with Khomeini’s Iran. A decade later we were bombing and starving the Iraqi people in an incompetent and misguided attempt to oust him from power.
In 1979, Osama Bin Laden joined our call for resistance to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and accepted our military training and equipment along with countless other mujahedeen “freedom fighters”. It was only after the Soviet Union bombed Afghanistan back into the stone age and suffered a Vietnam-like defeat that we turned our backs on the death and destruction that we helped cause.
It was then that Bin Laden turned against us. I suppose it also doesn’t help that we helped set up a fiercely authoritarian regime in Saudi Arabia as well as built countless bases in the holy lands of Islam.
Currently, the U.S. has over 800 Defense Department installations located in other countries. At this very moment, we are building an embassy in Iraq that is larger in size than the Vatican in Rome. We are building 14 permanent bases in Iraq. How would we feel if China, Russia, or another world power were doing this in our country? We would be furious. We must look at what we do from the perspective of how we would feel if somebody else did it to us.
I believe strongly that the CIA is correct when they talk about blowback. If we ignore this blowback principle, if we believe that we can go around policing the world and do as we please and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.
We were not attacked on September 11, 2001 because we were rich and free, ladies and gentlemen. If this were true then why wasn’t Great Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, or Canada attacked? All of which, with the exception of Canada, are in closer proximity to Al Qaeda and are themselves western democracies with strong economies.
The dark and disturbing truth, my friends, is that we were attacked because we have been meddling in Middle Eastern politics on a grand scale for decades. To quote Republican President Ronald Reagan: “We do not understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics.”
Even Al Qaeda and Bin Laden have said this themselves as their reasons for attacking us as it states in the 9/11 Report. We believe that they attacked us and in the future will attempt to attack us, so why do we continue to ignore their reasoning for attacking us and cling to this absurd popular notion that we were attacked because they hate our freedom and prosperity?
I’d imagine by now a few of you are asking yourselves, “Is he saying that America invited the attacks of 9/11?” Of course not.
However, a series of policies mired in ignorance of the political climate in which they were employed by our government over a span of half a century have contributed significantly to widespread elicited hatred of us abroad. Even our own CIA tells us this in their teaching of the principle of blowback.
The propping up of authoritarian dictatorships, the occupation of our military troops on the holy lands of Islam, bombing a Muslim country in Iraq for a decade while enacting sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, etc. It’s easy to see how our government could inspire hatred and disdain for us by those negatively affected by these events.
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