What goes around comes around.
That is the terrible
law of blowback.
When the United States bombs another
country, threatens its government, kills its people,
occupies its territory or attempts to dictate its future,
the consequences do not remain safely contained thousands of
miles away.
They come home.
They come home in flag-draped
coffins and shattered military families. They come home
in retaliatory
attacks on American bases and embassies. They come home
through terrorist plots, cyber sabotage, disrupted
shipping lanes, higher
energy prices, depleted
weapons stockpiles, and trillions
of dollars in debt.
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They come home through hacked
water systems, vulnerable
power grids, heightened domestic surveillance,
militarized police and government demands that the American
people surrender still more freedom in exchange for the
promise of protection from dangers the government itself
helped create.
This is blowback.
Blowback
isn’t just about war. It’s about the consequences of the
rash, heedless and heartless decisions made every day by the
actors of the American police state—and the fact that it
is “we the people” who will be paying the price for
those terrible decisions for years to come.
President
Trump’s war with Iran is only the latest reminder that no
government can bomb, threaten and police the world
indefinitely without eventually bringing the consequences
home.
For months, the
Trump administration has lurched between war and threatened
war, massive bombing campaigns and aborted strikes,
demands for surrender and claims that peace is
imminent.
There appears to be no coherent plan for
ending the conflict.
There is, however, a mounting
bill—and it will be paid in American lives, American
dollars, American security and American freedom.
This
is what happens when a government appoints itself judge,
jury, executioner and police officer to the world.
The
government creates enemies faster than it can kill
them.
It destabilizes one country, then uses the
resulting chaos to justify intervening in another. It bombs
in the name of peace, occupies in the name of freedom,
surveils in the name of security, and retaliates against
retaliation in an endless cycle of violence that serves the
war machine while leaving ordinary people everywhere less
safe.
We have seen this before.
Every president
promises that the next military intervention will be
limited, targeted, necessary and decisive. Every president
promises that overwhelming force will restore order. Every
president assures us that the experts know what they are
doing.
Yet the wars continue, the enemies multiply,
the costs rise, the Constitution contracts, and the American
people are left to cope with the consequences.
The
blowback from Trump’s wars may not look like the blowback
from wars of the past.
Retaliation may not arrive in
the form of a missile—it may arrive through a computer
terminal connected to a small-town
water plant.
In recent days, hackers
reportedly targeted water and wastewater systems in at least
seven states. More than 30 community water systems in
Minnesota were attacked, while additional systems in
Michigan were compromised. Pumps were disrupted.
Remote-control systems were accessed. Some communities
temporarily lost normal operations.
Officials reported
no contamination and no resulting threat to public
health.
We were fortunate this time. But what happens
next time?
Although Iran is suspected
of plotting attacks on water and energy infrastructure
nationwide, the Trump administration has rejected
suggestions that the recent cyberattacks were retaliation
for the war.
Whether or not Iran is behind these
cyberattacks, the warning could not be clearer: in an age of
networked infrastructure, the battlefield is
everywhere.
It is the water treatment plant. The
electrical grid. The hospital. The bank. The airport. The
communications network. The family car. The phone in your
pocket.
That is the danger of pouring America’s
resources into policing the globe while neglecting the
systems on which ordinary Americans depend at home and
leaving the homeland dangerously exposed.
Every
country bombed, every government threatened, every civilian
population terrorized, and every community reduced to rubble
creates new grievances, new enemies and new reasons for
retaliation.
That retaliation does not always come
from another army.
It comes through terrorist cells.
It comes through lone actors radicalized by images of dead
children and destroyed cities. It comes through hackers
probing water systems, electrical grids, hospitals, banks,
transportation networks and communications systems.
It
comes through attacks on American troops, embassies, ships
and businesses.
It comes through oil shocks, disrupted
trade routes, depleted military stockpiles, emergency
appropriations, and still more national debt.
Blowback
carries a staggering price tag—and the war profiteers are
not the ones expected to pay it. The American people
are.
War spending is bankrupting America.
The
military-industrial complex profits from every deployment,
every missile launched, every weapon depleted and every new
enemy created.
Meanwhile, the politicians claim there
is never enough money to secure vulnerable water systems,
modernize the electrical grid, repair collapsing
infrastructure, provide affordable health care, or protect
communities from disasters here at home.
This is the
economic face of blowback: the government spends trillions
of dollars making enemies abroad, then pleads poverty when
asked to protect the American people from the
consequences.
Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the
U.S. government is spending money it does not have on a
military empire it cannot afford while leaving the country
it is supposed to defend dangerously exposed.
The
consequences are not merely financial.
Decades of
bombing, occupation, drone killings, regime change and
support for brutal governments have also fueled rage against
the United States.
The 9/11
attacks were blowback. The Boston
Marathon bombing was blowback. The attempted
Times Square bombing was blowback. The Fort
Hood shooting was blowback.
Every new threat
becomes a justification to turn America into a
battlefield—militarizing the police and treating the
American people like suspects and enemy combatants—while
paving the way for more surveillance, more secrecy, more
military equipment, more emergency authority and fewer
constitutional restraints.
As I make clear in my book
Battlefield
America: The War on the American People and its
fictional counterpart The
Erik Blair Diaries, a nation that abandons the rule
of law abroad will eventually find that the rule of law has
little power to restrain its government at home.
This,
too, is blowback: unchecked power, diminished freedom and a
government that ceases to serve its people.
About John W. Whitehead:
Constitutional
attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and
president of The Rutherford
Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield
America: The War on the American People, the
award-winning A
Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police
State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The
Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org.
Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford
Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is
available at www.rutherford.org.
