Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

Since 9/11, the number of significant terrorist incidents has grown and increased in intensity. These include the attempt on December 22, 2001, by Richard Reid, a British citizen, to blow up a Miami-bound jet using an explosive device hidden in his shoe; the bombing on October 12, 2002, of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, killing 202 vacationers, most of them Australians; the May 13, 2003, explosions at three residential compounds and the offices of an American defense contractor in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; the killings three days later, on May 16, 2003, of some 33 people at a restaurant and Jewish community center in Casablanca, Morocco; the use of a car bomb on August 5, 2003, to attack the new Marriott Hotel, a symbol of American imperialism, in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital; the deaths of at least 19 people in an explosion at the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, August 7, 2003; and the blowing up of the United Nations compound in Baghdad on August 19, 2003, killing Sergio Vieira de Mello, the secretary general’s special representative, and many others. There have also been numerous assassinations of American officials and business people around the world and 184 American service personnel died in Iraq in the six months since May 1, 2003, when President Bush ostentatiously declared that the war was over.¹³

Beyond terrorism, the danger I foresee is that we are embarked on a path not so dissimilar from that of the former Soviet Union a little more than a decade ago. It collapsed for three reasons—internal economic contradictions, imperial overstretch, and an inability to reform. In every sense, we were by far the wealthier of the two Cold War superpowers, so it will certainly take longer for similar afflictions to do their work. But it is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire dominating the world, must go on forever. The blowback from the second half of the twentieth century has only just begun.

Chalmers Johnson

Cardiff, California

October 2003

PROLOGUE:

A SPEAR-CARRIER FOR EMPIRE

Instead of demobilizing after the Cold War, the United States imprudently committed itself to maintaining a global empire. This book is an account of the resentments our policies have built up and of the kinds of economic and political retribution that, particularly in Asia, may be their harvest in the twenty-first century. But before I turn to the sometimes sorry details of the American empire, the reader may want to know a bit about who I am. For how I came to the views presented in this book may help explain why I am putting them forward now, a decade after the end of the Cold War.

Fifty years ago, on the eve of the Korean War, I was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in economics. I had given no thought at all to East Asia, but like most Americans I regarded the Communist revolution in China as a dangerous, deeply disturbing development in our country’s growing confrontation with what we then called the “Communist bloc.” Military conscription was in effect, and any young man had to go into the army—the shortest but most dangerous, unpleasant, and unrewarding way to fulfill one’s obligatory service—or join the navy or air force for a longer but less physically demanding hitch.

I chose the navy—or rather I simply drifted into it. My father had served in the navy. In World War I, he went to Europe as an ordinary seaman on the old St. Louis. In the summer of 1943, during World War II, his ship was sunk by a long-range Japanese torpedo at Iron Bottom Bay, Guadalcanal. He survived and was in the reserves when, in 1950, as the Korean War began, he was “activated” and sent to Japan for a last fling at naval service. Two older cousins of mine fought in the navy at Leyte Gulf, and the idea that men from my family would do their military duty in the navy was more or less taken for granted.

As an undergraduate, I joined the Naval Air Reserve at Oakland Naval Air Station. I was an aviation machinist’s mate third class and flew around in the back of old Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers. Unlike my father’s unit, my reserve squadron was never activated during the Korean War. Having spent two summers in training and after receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1953, I emerged as a newly minted ensign.

What happened next changed my life, but was also a typical occurrence of the Cold War years. When we received our assignments to the fleet, I was dismayed to discover that I was assigned to a ship that did not even have a name—the U.S.S. LST-883, part of the amphibious forces based in Japan. No glamorous aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean for me; I was off to a rust bucket in the Gray Line. A chief petty officer who had been an instructor of mine said to me in his gruff way, “Johnson, you don’t know it, but you lucked out. Those guys going to carriers will just be errand boys, but you’re going to a ship with only six officers. You’ll be given important things to do fast and you won’t have to waste a lot of time heel clicking or boot licking.” As it turned out, he was absolutely right.

One night in the late summer of 1953, I found myself climbing the sheer ladder of an LST moored to a buoy in the harbor of the former Japanese naval base at Yokosuka, then, as today, the headquarters of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Used to land tanks directly onto a beachhead during an amphibious assault, LSTs are diesel-powered, flat- bottomed ships with bow doors. Lacking any sort of keel, they roll all the time, even at anchor, and are no place for anyone given to motion sickness. I came aboard the Hachi-hachi-san (883, in Japanese) as the communications officer and left two years later as the operations officer.

Although we helped marine and army units practice amphibious landings in Korea and Japan, and twice crossed the Pacific at a top speed of ten knots, our diesel engines broke down regularly. The 883 spent fairly long periods being repaired at either the Yokosuka or Sasebo naval bases. Except for a few weekends in Tijuana, this was my first extended stay outside the United States, and I was enchanted by Japan. So I began to read voraciously in its history and literature. I spent Christmas 1953 in Kyoto among the old temples of Higashiyama; then, in that impoverished postwar land, they were still covered with weeds and in states of serious neglect. I began to study the language with an old Japanese naval officer who did not really believe a foreigner could learn it but was happy to be paid for giving lessons anyway.

War-defeated Japan in the 1950s was as different from the Japan of today as the Depression-era United States was from the world’s present-day “lone superpower.” Those of us drawn to Japan then could not imagine that two decades later it would be the first “miracle” economy of East Asia. What attracted us were aspects of an artistic and philosophic culture of great power that offered truly fresh insights to a foreigner from the United States. Even though the American occupation had ended a year earlier, I took it for granted that “United Nations Forces” deserved to ride in heated railroad cars while citizens of Japan shivered in ice-cold, often windowless ones at the end of the train. Nor did it seem at all unusual to me that some Yokosuka entrepreneurs had had the good sense to provide an upscale whorehouse for the exclusive use of American naval officers.

I took it for granted as well that the United States had no choice but to confront the evils of Communist totalitarianism politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically; and I assumed that the Cold War in East Asia was not essentially different from the Cold War in Europe. Admittedly, the French, British, and Dutch had been ridiculously slow to give up their Asian colonies, but American support for the European imperialists was just an unfortunate side effect of a necessary, global anti-Communist effort. I had no doubt that the Japanese-American Security Treaty was a legitimate undertaking meant to shield Japan from revolutionary events elsewhere in Asia and to give it time to evolve into a true democracy.

In 1955, released to inactive duty in the naval reserve, I enrolled as a graduate student at Berkeley. In no rush to find a career, I wanted to put my experiences in Japan into perspective, something the G.I. Bill made possible. Although I returned to Berkeley to study modern Japan, I came under the spell of the university’s preeminent