Regime-change blowback

[bemildred]

The US mid-term elections of 2006 were a classic example of political "blowback", a term the Central Intelligence Agency invented for internal analysis. It refers to the unintended consequences of covert operations. The public is generally unaware that the headlines of violence by terrorist groups or drug lords or rogue states are blowbacks from previous US policies.

"Blowback" first appeared in a March 1954 report, since declassified, relating to the 1953 covert operation to subject the nationalist government of democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran to regime change. By installing Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as shah to replace Mossadegh, the US condemned the Iranian people to a quarter-century of tyranny and repression that eventually strengthened extremist Islamic fundamentalism and gave birth to theocratic revolution led by ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979.

The misguided US policy elicited a tidal wave of anti-US sentiments across the Islamic world that set the stage for the Iranian student occupation of the US Embassy. The crisis destroyed president Jimmy Carter's chance for a second term and turned US domestic politics sharply to the extreme right, along a belligerent path that eventually led to a blowback in the form of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In reaction, the US adopted a foreign policy of "regime change", with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as opening salvos in President George W Bush's "war on terrorism".

The disastrous war to force a regime change in Iraq in turn produced a regime change in Washington on the second Tuesday of November in 2006.

Asia Times