Quotes About Blowback

'Blowback,' as many 'Nation' readers are aware, was a term introduced into popular circulation by the late political scientist Chalmers Johnson, an old Cold Warrior turned dissident.

Without a clear picture of where the military's covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world.

The blowback against a bailout of Lehman would have been fierce. It is often forgotten, but the prevailing wisdom the day after Lehman fell was that its collapse was a good thing.

In the real world, bullets that miss their targets keep traveling until they hit something. They fly through windows, and into the bodies of bystanders. And even successfully killing a bad guy creates blowback, sets off a whole chain of consequences that are impossible to predict. Guns always represent a failure of negotiation.

People still use the phrase hoisted by his own petard

I had seriously considered conducting an unscheduled press conference after the November meeting, but decided that it risked disrupting markets. Instead, I spent several hours telephoning key reporters individually, answering questions on background. I also wrote an op-ed that was published November 4 in the Washington Post. Despite these efforts, I was unprepared for the blowback from policymakers abroad and politicians at home.

In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.

Even an empire cannot control the long-term effects of its policies. That is the essence of blowback.

But how "good" are we, really? If we're so good, why do we inspire such hatred abroad? What have we done to bring so much "blowback" upon ourselves?

This book is a guide to some of the policies during and after the Cold War that generated, and continue to generate, blowback—a term the CIA invented to describe the likelihood that our covert operations in other people's countries would result in retaliations against Americans, civilian and military, at home and abroad.