The Madrid – Washington 2005 Connection: The Comeback of the "Blowback"

by N.J.Bordier-Skougor

I found the conference sponsored by the New America Foundation on Terrorism, Security and America's Purpose in Washington, D.C. last week remarkably similar to the Club of Madrid conference that took place last March with nearly the same name, International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security.

It’s this similarity that made the Washington conference so unusual. I was pleasantly surprized to find that the refreshingly open dialogue about terrorism that took place among the 55 former democratic heads of state that comprise the Club of Madrid, and the policy makers, academicians and civil society organizations in attendance in Madrid, could actually be replicated on U.S. shores two blocks from the White House.

While the “group think” of the Bush administration’s foreign and domestic policies was adeptly conveyed at both the Madrid and Washington conferences by an array of government officials and neoconservative ideologues, I was happy to see key components of it unceremoniously brushed aside in Washington last week by the critical views of hard-headed thinkers of the “reality-based” community.

An illustrious array of incumbent and former Republican and Democratic senators and representatives were there, including Warren Rudman, Lee Hamilton, Jane Harman, Chuck Hagel and Joe Biden. Republican party stalwart Rita Hauser and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright brought no-nonsense views to the table, as did the venerable former White House counsel Ted Sorensen. It was heartwarming to see former presidential advisor Morton H. Halperin playing a wise and inspirational role both center stage and behind-the-scenes, evoking nostalgic memories from my graduate school days as an aspiring policy wonk during the Kennedy and Johnson eras.

In addition to the astounding leadership of NAF’s Steve Clemmons and a cast of what appeared to be thousands of bipartisan advocates and collaborators, what appears to have made this dialogue possible on the shores of a nation whose federal government is now virtually under single-party Republican rule are the devastating human and financial losses resulting from the Bush administration’s imperial overreach, which are are now being shown on television sets around the world. Numerous conference participants jumped into the mix with growing numbers of the general public and elected Congressional representatives to unmask the deceitful rationale and red herrings the administration has contrived to conceal the underlying causes of terrorism, and the motivations behind the counterproductive U.S. military campaigns that the Bush administration insists on carrying out abroad.

Thanks to the conference's truth-telling ambiance, the “blowback” school of thought that was considered politically incorrect for the past five years was able to make a notable comeback. Originally a term invented by C.I.A. insiders, and the title of a book published in 2000 by Chalmers Johnson entitled Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, it refers to the negative and often devastating consequences of U.S. government acts that are unknown to U.S. citizens because of ignorance or government dissembling and dissimulation. What was most remarkable about the Washington conference last week is the fact that reputable and well-known policy-makers and analysts came out of the closet and explained why terrorist attacks against the U.S. are in fact delayed “blowback” against U.S. and Western interference in the Middle East over the past 100 years.

In contrast to the speakers whose analytic processes could not extend further back than what they believe to be the unprovoked attacks of 9/11, and their conviction that the al Qaeda network is driven exclusively by a “radical Islamist ideology”, a steady stream of participants explained that U.S. interference in the Middle East in support of Middle East dictatorships to obtain oil and favored nation trading policies infuriated successive generations of indigenous populations throughout the Middle East. These interferences prevented them from acquiring political and civil rights, and fully exercising their right to develop sustainable livelihoods and grassroots economies. The “jihadist” struggle against Western interference that resulted in the attacks of 9/11, 3/11 and 7/7 in Western capitals, according to the "blowback" school of thought, are not gratuitous acts of religious fanatics but an economic and political backlash aimed at forcing the U.S. and its allies to cease their support of dictators, their military occupation of Muslim lands and their unfair exploitation of the region’s primary natural resource, oil.

As one Muslim passionately explained, the cause of terrorist attacks is not “radical Islamist ideology” but the many forms of U.S. and Western interference in the Middle East and elsewhere. Historically, these have ranged from efforts to convert non-Westerners to Christianity, the supposed discharge of the “white man’s burden” in colonizing and “civilizing” large portions of the world, and more recently to occupying foreign countries in order to rid them of dictators and alleged terrorists, create democracies at gunpoint, and convert their economies into unfettered free markets. The victims of these interferences have now risen up to expel their invaders, only to see their invasions and occupations dramatically escalate in scale and damage to their daily lives.

In real-time, concrete terms, what it is like for Iraqi’s to live under the current U.S. military occupation was vividly described by NAF fellow Nir Rosen, author of the "Letter from Falluja" published in the New Yorker. What it is like to live under a murderous dictatorship supported by the U.S. in exchange for military bases was equally vividly described by Uzbekistan journalist Galima Bukharbaeva.

For me, the crowning moments of the conference came on the concluding day in the comments of several analysts from conservative think tanks. What made them such gems is that these participants not only recognized that the causes of terrorism are primarily Western economic and political acts, but that the solutions are also economic and political, not military. Terrorism can be stopped by changing U.S. economic and foreign policies. The Bush administration’s “global war on terrorism” is not only counterproductive but unnecessary.

I could scarcely believe my own ears when I heard one conservative analyst openly refer to terrorist attacks on the U.S. as “blowback” from prior policies and acts carried out by the U.S. government abroad. Future terrorist "blowback", he argued, can be prevented by rectifying the adverse economic and political conditions that the U.S. created throughout the Muslim world. The failure of the Bush administration’s efforts to build democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrates that it is too much a part of the problem to be part of the solution. What is needed are non-aligned multilateral forces committed to the rule of law, combined with highly-specialized nongovernmental organizations. By joining forces, they can resolve conflicts nonviolently, and build sustainable democracies and economies abroad.

On the 4th anniversary of 9/11, this conference makes me cautiously obtimistic that it is finally dawning on mainstream American policy-makers on both sides of the aisle that there are economic and political options that have yet to be exercised to stop the terrorism that has resulted from historic and current U.S. and Western interference in the Muslim world. Per the even more radical suggestion from a remarkably prescient and courageous jurist from a prominent U.S. university, it might just well be that the global stage is being set for law-abiding stakeholders everywhere to negotiate a peaceful end to the terrorist conflicts that are spreading around the world. Stay tuned!