I'd like to elaborate on this theme later on, but a quick note for now. One of the central insights of the entertaining Blowback podcast - building on insights of Chalmers Johnson's book, and then Naomi Klein's work, whom they interviewed - is the nature of that concept itself, which is often presented in more superficial foreign policy discussions in a negative sense. Blowback is some bad result that happens when you do something bad somewhere else, which then comes back to bite you, whether overseas or at home.
Well, sure. This negative sense is true and happens of course, but there is a far more insidious positive reading of the concept: in which empire - and the US empire particularly - feeds off of the disruption and catastrophe, helping to deliberately set it off and then exploit its fruits, which produces additional disruption and catastrophe and chaos in turn, which the empire then feeds off in turn. The empire desires this process and this result; it is an integral component of empire, as opposed to some undesirable outcome to be avoided in the course of wise statecraft. We could characterize this as a process of late empire, though the longer arc of empire was leading to this late dynamic.
This dynamic is emblematic in the Iraq invasion and the subsequent aftershocks that continue to roil the Middle East - and the rest of the industrialized world for that matter - to this day, though the dynamic continues well into the past and could be identified throughout the full course of US foreign policy. Previous turbulent forces created a set of conditions which the US exploited to launch the invasion, which in turn set off a series of catastrophes that defy comprehension, and the changing conditions emerging in the wake of those catastrophes were exploited in turn. It is a well-worn pattern readily observable: the US breaks nations militarily and economically, cracking them open and then seizing on the chaos and calculated debt to pry apart the nation's resources and take them up into itself, which weakens neighboring nations and further on down the globalized line to allies and even into the empire itself, and then those weaknesses are further seized upon and exploited to alienate and concentrate the resources set free by that dissolution and chaos.
Being a bit facetious here, but someone should tell the ruling elites that it is the fundamental fact of exploitation and destruction itself that produces the insecurity. That is where the energy differential is, and it is cumulative, and it gains a momentum of its own. You can't get rid of the insecurity opened up by those transgressions through further exploitation and destruction, as if learning from previous lessons. You can play the divide and conquer game for a long time, but eventually that train runs away from you. And once it really gets moving, you ain't getting off in one piece.
