From the AP, “US official says Russia ramping up espionage”:
Russia has fully restored its espionage capabilities against the United States after a period of decline following the Cold War, a senior US counterintelligence official said yesterday.
Joel Brenner, the head of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, said the United States is concerned that Russia is continuing to ramp up its operations.
“The Russians are now back at Cold War levels in their efforts against the United States,” he said at an event hosted by the American Bar Association. “They are sending over an increasing and troubling number of intelligence agents.”
Tension has risen between the two countries, as Russian officials have expressed frustration at what they see as US foreign policy unrestrained by consultation with other world powers, including Russia. They have criticized the expansion of NATO into the former Soviet sphere of influence and US plans to install radar and interceptors in Eastern Europe as part of a missile defense program.
In turn, US officials have warned that Russia’s increased assertiveness in challenging US policy is complicating cooperation on foreign-policy goals, including counterterrorism, nuclear nonproliferation, and the promotion of democracy in the Middle East.
In angry comments at a conference in Munich last month, President Vladimir Putin of Russia said that the United States “has overstepped its national borders in every way,” and that “the almost uncontained . . . use of force in international relations” was prompting countries opposed to Washington to seek to build up nuclear arsenals.
—which of course, Russia has been more than happy to oblige, if the price is right.
Seems that Putin has learned well the language of blowback and rationalization—hardly surprising, given that such critiques were born of the linguistic “observations” favored by his erstwhile countrymen of a (perhaps not-so) bygone era, and even today are favored by many leftist western academics, whose influence in the sphere of historiography is increasingly evident in the materialist analyses of many “progressive” ideologues.
Interestingly, many analyses that rely on “blowback”—from the academese of Ward Churchill to the litany of US transgressions cited by Osama bin Laden—are, in fact, intentionalist in nature. That is, they attribute motive—or, to use more familiar language, intent—to the US actor, the upshot of which is that the “meaning” of US actions is tied to the author(s) of those actions. And though these interpretations of events are, in my opinion, poorly thought out and narrativized based on a great number of artificial memetic conjunctions, they at least rely on a set of coherent linguistic assertions—placing blame with US agency, and allowing that such blame is transferable to “innocent” targets by virtue of a connection to the perpetrators (in both cases, American citizens, by virtue of their having paid taxes that support the US war machine and its foreign policy, are indistinguishable, in effect, from the leaders who make the decisions).
More dangerous from a long-term structural view, however, are the kinds of “blowback” arguments that rely on accident rather than intent—on the consequences of actions whose motives, it is acknowledged, were not perfidious. That is, those historical analyses that yield blowback arguments—but which don’t claim any intent on the part of the actor upon which blowback is eventually visited—are, if they stray beyond the merely descriptive, based on an incoherent linguistic notion: namely, that the “meaning” of ones actions is determined by unforeseen and unintended consequences (which, theoretically, at least, can include just about anything, should the initial action be given enough drift).
In this way, to use a crude example, a butterfly flaps its wings in China, and half a world away, 150 people in the Florida Keys die from the hurricane those flapping wings “created”. From this chain of events, two narratives are potentially born, each with its own set of consequences: 1) the flapping of the wings was an aggressive act meant to bring about death and destruction (or, at the very least, unconcerned that it might bring about that destruction, knowing that it, in fact, could); or 2) the flapping of the wings—though it led, through a series of physical concurrences and accidents of probability (which, by definition, are unintentional acts), to the creation of a hurricane that killed 150 people in Florida, was incidental, and so not “responsible” in any way for those deaths, except by the drift of an act that had an immediate intention: to lift the butterfly up and carry it from one plant to the next.
In one case, the narrative on offer is that the “blowback” caused by the butterfly—the hurricane itself—is attributable to an intentional act on the part of the butterfly. That is, the butterfly meant for the hurricane to occur, either consciously or unconsciously; in the other case, the “blowback” caused by the butterfly—the hurricane—is attributable to a retrospective narrativization of events in which the butterfly’s flapping wings are identified as the initiator of the action.
In the first case, meaning is determined by intent, and the analysis of blowback rests with the willingness of interpreters to believe that the butterfly’s agency was motivated out of malice or indifference (the Churchill / bin Laden model); in the second case, the analysis of blowback is based upon what interpreters themselves are able to do with a series of events that they acknowledge may have been unintended, but which they argue were responsible, nevertheless, for the outcome.
The first case—though ludicrous (who, after all, believes a butterfly intends to kill 150 people in Florida by flapping its wings)—is at least semiotically coherent: an act is interpreted as intentional, and the consequences of that intentional act are then placed with the initiating agency, however incorrectly.
The second case, however, is far more pernicious from a philosophical perspective. Because what it allows is that even if we don’t believe the butterfly intended to cause the hurricane, we can nevertheless argue the case that its flapping wings sparked a series of accidents that then resulted in the death of 150 people—which gives us license to argue that the flapping of wings resulted in “blowback,” and that the butterfly, though it meant simply to move from plant to plant, nevertheless caused the hurricane, and so bears the responsibility for it.
Of course, to make that case, however, the interpreter has to connect a series of intervening acts, and has to himself intend to see in that string of events a narrative that he traces back to the butterfly’s flapping wings.
And so just as John McCain must immediately apologize because some people choose to see in his use of the phrase “tar baby” a potential for racial insensitivity (though those same people allow that he didn’t intend it to mean any such racial slur), in my crude example, our butterfly—were it capable of doing so—would be asked to distance itself from its own wing flapping, even though “blowback” analysts would allow that the butterfly didn’t mean to create the hurricane.
The point of all this being that for “blowback” analyses to have any kind of force beyond a mere description of accidental historical occurrences, they must be tethered to implied intent. When that intent is attributed to the initial actor, the critique is valid (if often mistaken); when the intent to identify blowback comes solely from the interpreter—who has allowed that the initial actor’s intent was something other—then it is wrong (and potentially sinisterly opportunistic) to ascribe to the initial actor responsibility for how the interpreter has come to narrative the events.
Or, to put it more succinctly, we should be dubious of any analysis that condemns a butterfly for the beating of its wings—unless that analysis insists that the butterfly acted in a way that was intended to cause damage. The little, winged Eichmann…
In the case of Putin, he is condemning the US for what he reads as its intent. And this can be easily disputed. Had he instead made the case that, whether the US intended to or not, its actions continued to act after their intent was made manifest or completed, and that any and every offshoot or consequence of those act is the responsibility of the US, he would have been making the argument that his ability to create, from a series of unrelated events, a coherent “interpretation” is sufficient cause to lay the blame at the feet of the perceived initiator.
Which is precisely the recipe for placing the meaning of an action with the intepreter, who may then cynically and opportunistically demand that the initiator of the action answer to such an interpretation.
who, after all, believes a butterfly intends to kill 150 people in Florida by flapping its wings?
Is the butterfly’s name Booooosh?
Jeff – You’re one of the only people I’ve ever encountered who understand the importance of the Soviet-style of linguistic manipulation. Lenin’s little revolution wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for his unmatched skill at linguistic terror.
Genius. You’re a genius.
L.
What I’m really waiting for is how alphie interprets this and how it makes him feel.
You mean, murdering, neocon bastard.
Indeed.
Those sneaky Cossack sluts.
That was an awesome analysis. Just warming upto your site. Will be a regular reader after this piece.
Heh. Hehe…
A point to consider and discuss. It’s clearly impossible for a butterfly to create a hurricane. The energy to create a hurricane is in the ocean, and all this chaotic stuff can do is cause the energy released by the ocean to take a different form than it otherwise would have.
Suppose our friend butterfly’s actions cause a hurricane which would have formed on a certain date and hit Guatemala and caused 1000 deaths, to instead form on a different date and hit Florida, causing 150 deaths. Is the butterfly responsible for saving a net 850 people? Especially since we will never know where Hurricane Butterfly would have hit, and how many it would have killed?
Good point, AC.
Go see the movie Breach. Hansen was selling US secrets to the Russians as late as 2001.
There is no reason to believe that the Russians have ceased hostile activity against the US at anytime.
And thus, the Lilliputians tied Gulliver to the ground with thousands of tiny ropes.
God, so many words to tell us that whichever way people may think or speak, they aren’t right if they overlook consequences. There is a no new meaning to so many words strung together just to get a point across….tripe. In my reality, ugly words/thoughts/deeds have terrible consequences, many of which will be unseen and unknowable but will nonetheless cause great harm for untold time to untold number of peoples.
Russians? Why does anyone think they haven’t been conducting themselves like always? They’ve been into this gig for hundreds of years and actually, Putin loves the fact that the “Soviet Union” is no more as it was…he has gotten a golden opportunity to remake it in his image.
Is the world great or not?
Maybe I needed a few more words, because I don’t think this is what I was arguing.
In my reality, ugly words/thoughts/deeds have terrible consequences, many of which will be unseen and unknowable but will nonetheless cause great harm for untold time to untold number of peoples.
You missed Jeff’s point, Sue. He wasn’t pointing out that ugly words/thoughts/deeds have bad consequences that are often unforeseen. If he were, you are right: it would be a big “no duh.”
In his example, though, the butterfly that causes the hurricane wasn’t necessarily doing anything ugly. It was just doing what it does, flit from flower to flower. Not a malicious act, that, but one that can still have bad consequences, regardless of the butterfly’s intentions.
But that still isn’t the thesis of the post. What Jeff is talking about  one of the primary themes of this blog  is how to interpret the meaning of words and actions. The camp on the Left (and in humanities departments in universities) says that stuff means what the listener thinks it means, not what the speaker or actor intended.
The hazard of that mode of operation is that person A can say X and mean X, but then person B can come along and claim that person A meant Y, because that’s how person B interpreted it. Therefore, person A is held accountable for having meant Y even if in reality he meant X.
It’s a totalitarian mode of operation because it means that someone else gets to control your speech and its meanings. “The author is dead,” they like to say in lit crit classes.
As for the case at hand, Putin is imputing bad motives to US policy. Motives, being interior, are hard if not impossible to prove, so the US is bad only if its intentions are bad.
But he could have used the other paradigm and said that the US is bad no matter what its intentions were, because our policies had bad results. Ergo, we have to abase ourselves, grovel, and apologize to people who claim to have been hurt by us, even though the chain of events from policy to alleged result is difficult to objectively ascertain. The Left would argue that as long as somebody is able to connect the dots  based on nothing more than their personal take on how the world works  the chain of causality is THERE, and therefore the initial actor is GUILTY.
There is a no new meaning to so many words strung together just to get a point across….tripe.
Usually, when something I read is over my head, it looks like tripe, too.
Does this mean the neocons would have invaded Iraq whether 9/11 happened or not?
I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, alphie—just as I am certain that if I did, it would have very little to do with what I wrote.
Hmmm.
Seemed pretty straightforward.
Is the Iraq War “blowback” from 9/11?
Oh man, I laughed until I almost puked, reading that from “a”.
Maybe he needs to actually lay something out there instead of squirting out a little word-splat on the screen and wandering off to see if the water dish has been filled yet.
Just as I thought. Only obliquely to do with my post.
Let me give you a hint: You tell ME if YOU BELIEVE it is blowback. And I’ll tell you whether or not your argument is linguistically coherent.
Before engaging the troll in any “deep discussions or witty repartee”, you should ask yourself this question: “Do I really want to talk to this clown, or would I just be better off going out into the front yard and running into a tree with my face?”
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Alphoid’s whole schtick is the blog equivalent of leaving little piddles of pee on the floor. They impart roughly the same edification.
Your point being what, exactly, Jeff?
Only good things have resulted from America’s massive increase in military spending and expansion into other countries?
Any bad things, i.e.:
1. Matching increases in the military capabilities of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
2. Anti-American feelings developing among our former allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
3. The insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Somalia.
are simply coincidences and in no way should be considered as reasons not to keep increasing the U.S. defense budget and opening new U.S. military outposts around the world?
Points to remember:
1. alphie claims he has no worldview;
2. alphie is worried about who will replace Putin next year, so he clearly “knows” something no one else does.
alphie trying to change the subject as he realizes he’s way out of his depth here.
For the record, however, anti-Americanism is on the decline in Pakistan.
Again, no idea what any of that has to do with my post, alphie. I scanned my post, and saw nothing at all about “America’s massive increase in military spending and expansion into other countries”—from which it followed that I found no corresponding judgments passed on the notion.
You seem to be finding things in the post that aren’t there.
Which makes me think you’ve been poking around behind my sofa cushions.
I’ll ask you again. Do YOU believe the Iraq war was “blowback” for 911? If so, why?
Oh, and just to give you a preemptive hint (we’ll call it a pedagogical Bush Doctrine), the failure to have your intentions properly interpreted, or your inability to make your intentions adequately known, do not speak to the FACT of your intentions. Instead, they speak to your failure to adequately signal your intentions. It is a problem of communication, not of meaning.
Be back after a walk and a nap.
Clearly the US is responsible in part for the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, because the insurgents used to be the government in those countries. The first one was the base from which AQ was able to train the 9/11 attackers. The second was run by one of the worst mass murderes of the last 50 years. That they are insurgencies, rather than governments, represents progress.
MADELINE ALBRIGHT IS THE MODERN NATHAN HALE!!
Fred Thompson is a War Criminal and a Hate Crime!
Of course Thompson’s going to question the intelligence of Charlie Sheen and Rosie O’Donnell. It’s a page pulled right from the Republican playbook. First they go after the Muslim men, then they question everyone’s patriotism, and then those who are left who aren’t marching lockstep and seig-heilling fast enough will be mocked as whacky “conspiracy theorists.†Fred Thompson can’t run from the fact that he, ZOG, Hallyburtin, and all his fellow Republicans, orchestrated the attacks of September 11 and is responsible for the reckless warmongering which is tearing the world apart. THERE’S BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS, FRED THOMPSON!!!! THERE’S BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS, FRED THOMPSON!!!! THERE’S BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS AND WE’RE ON TO YOU, FRED THOMPSON!!!! AND IT’S ALL FOR OIL, THAT SWEET SWEET OIL. WHAT’S A FEW MORE DEAD BROWN SKINNED ARABS AS LONG AS YOU HAVE SUVS TO DRIVE??
Jeff,
Is there a reason you can’t answer my simple question?
Do you consider the Iraq War “blowback” from 9/11?
true patriot – you forgot to mention the passage of the USA Hate-triot Act.
Alphie,
If I’m understanding the post correctly, a question would be whether or not bin Laden caused the invasion of Iraq versus whether or not bin Laden intentionally caused the invasion of Iraq.
I am probably way off base, but that seems to be the tightest mapping of your question on to what I think was going on in the original post.
BRD
Won’t happen Jeff. Jihadi boy takes no positions. Well, his usual, but it’s not the best posture for reasoned debate. He makes no declarations he need defend. Not in his repertoire. His mission, as he sees it, is to hijack every thread into a discussion of the Jihadi Way.
Fred Thompson can’t run from the fact that he, ZOG, Hallyburtin, and all his fellow Republicans, orchestrated the attacks of September 11 and is responsible for the reckless warmongering which is tearing the world apart.
Yeah! Bushco is so freakin’ sneaky, so perverse, so incredibly powerful, that they were able to pull off a stunt like 9/11 and yet…
…they were unable to engineer the discovery of WMDs in Iraq’s giant easy-to-dig-in-without-leaving-traces sandbox.
Man, what a bunch of incompetents! Here they went to all that trouble to concoct lies about the WMDs and they plum forgot to plant them so that they could be Big Heroes and not have egg on their face for a whole election cycle.
Whatta buncha maroons! What ignoranimuses!
TW: freedom48. Really.
Sure, JPT,
Jeff’s response to my questioon:
You tell ME if YOU BELIEVE it is blowback. And I’ll tell you whether or not your argument is linguistically coherent.
Whom are you describing?
Alphoid wants an answer to his utterly irrelevant question, Jeff. How dare you duck his question by throwing it back in his face.
Which he, as usual, ducked simply by ducking.
He quacks me up.
See, Jeff?
The only result of asking jihadi boy to take a position is that he tries his shtick with someone else. If that doesn’t work, he abandons the thread to the adults and resurfaces in another. Rinse and repeat.
Good teachers don’t just theorize, McGehee.
They provide examples, too.
Look at Newton’s Third Law of Motion:
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Nature’s “blowback”
A butterfly flaps its wings, it flys.
Is Putin right?
Have other countries reacted to America invading two countries and increasing its defense spending by $300 billion a year?
I think there’s more to North Korea’s nukes than linguistics.
…anyone keeping a list of Things Alphie Has No Clue About?
It’s worrying. His density is reaching that point where it forms an event horizon.
See that teacher over their trying to catch raindrops with a lasso? He is providing an example of trying to hold a rational discussion with alphie.
Lisa: They can’t seriously expect us to swallow that tripe.
Skinner: Now as a special treat courtesy of our friends at the Meat Council, please help yourself to this tripe.
Lisa: Stop it Stop IT! Don’t you realize you’ve just been brainwashed by corporate propaganda?
Janie: Hmmph, apparently my crazy friend here hasn’t heard of the food chain.
Uter: Yeah, Lisa’s a grade A moron!
Ralph: When I grow up, I’m going to go to Bovine University.
..anyone keeping a list of Things Alphie Has No Clue About?
It’s worrying. His density is reaching that point where it forms an event horizon.
Posted by Patrick Chester
No. Because to react is to encourage, and who knows, stupidity may be contagious.
Mr. Goldstein, if I may, have you ever seen any blowback rhetoric based in your second, more linguistically pernicious case? I have to wonder if such arguments have ever been delivered in a manner where they have merit to those listening. I’d like to think people would find it a bit more difficult to swallow that sort of anti-intentionalism in such arguments, but blowback is a Marxist, psuedo-intellectual idea anyway, so I could see it happening…
OHNOES – I’ve seen plenty of implicit examples, but I suspect you’re looking for explicit examples.
I think the idea is both so common and so unexamined that it is rarely expressed literally.
I think that the contention that the “intention-override” version of the blowback argument is relatively common is worth examining, though I’m not sure I want to start a research project on top of my other six right now.
Why do bad ideas spread faster than good ones, anyway?
More importantly, why do people who spread bad ideas seem so damned tireless!?!
Here’s an example of blowback even the alphoid can understand:
Got it now, alphoid? That’s blowback.
Like the people who keep saying that Americans who criticize the Iraq war are somehow creating the Iraqi insurgency?
Flapping lips in, say, San Franscico somehow cause Jihadis to spring forth from the dry desert soil of Iraq?
Beats having to entertain the idea that most people just don’t care for foreign troops occupying their country, I guess.
Blowback can be seen in the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, to salvage an unpopular
regime (Taraki) who the Soviets had convinced
themselves was actually a CIA puppet, according to the Mitrokhin files (A lot of vodka went toward that proposition) Ironically, this coincided with the Saudi initiative to appear
more devout due to the Grand Mosque siege by
Juhayman Uteibi, and Mohammed Quahtani, the
collapse of the Sassanid regime in Iran, which
created a power vacuum, the newly emerging
regime of General Zia’s need to exert pressure
against the Soviets through likes of Ismael
Khan (re Robert Kaplan’s Soldiers of God) etc,
all of which drove the jihadist imperative north
into the Moslem Soviet Republics. Another step
was Russian pressure on their Serbian brethren
which led to the Bosnian civil war, which drew
in another generation of jihadists: (ie; KSM,
Zawahiri, Al Midhar and Al Hamzi) Finally, the Russian attempt to reconquer Chechnya, a land under occupation for the better part of 250 years.
From the time of Tolstoy and Lermontov. The
capital, “Grozny” means fortress, not unlike
Ft. Apache, Ft. Sill, you get the Idea. These
are the currents that drove the jihadists toward
9/11, long before the word PNAC had ever been uttered.
Bias and tendentious “framings” have led to a precipitous collapse of audience across several media. Whoops. They didn’t mean to. But there it is.
I did not mean to be linguistically pernicious, but I have made this claim more than once.
I’m not sure I’m getting some of the fundamentals here. Could somebody please pitch me another analogy? Maybe one with a car crash or something.
“Blowback” is just a cool way to say “consequences”, BRD.
Jeff seems to be trying to come up with a cool new way to say “unintended cosequences”.
Alphie,
What are your thoughts on this point?
BRD
’bout what,BRD?
Unintended cosequences in gereral?
The blowback from the Iraq War?
Or the quest for a neologism?
Alphie,
I guess what I’m kind of confused about right now, is whether or not one could turn this apparatus on its head, and say things like ‘Saddam failed to comply with post-1991 UN Resolution, so therefore his execution was an unintended consequence of his actions’.
You can run that kind of thinking from here to armageddon and back again, but as yet, I only see this being proposed as a one way statement (i.e. the US deserves pain and disaster). To put it another way, we are told regularly that we have to understand the Other and respect their cultural perspective; why can’t we argue that it is time to put the shoe on the other foot and demand that they understand us, and accept our cultural outlook, lest we lash out as they have done to us.
This whole tit-for-tat authenticity is a manifestly destructive approach to how one deals with those who are different, which is why I find the single word explanation ‘blowback’ to be less than fully satisfying.
This is the sort of question I put to you, because it is a class of problem we have yet to address.
BRD
“They” lashed out at us, BRD?
We know who did it, and they’re all dead.
There are plenty of foreigners who understand America. That’s one reason why we’re running such a huge trade deficit with the rest of the world.
America has rather unique foreign policy goals.
Understanding is an important tool needed to achieve those unique goals.
So the 19 all acted on their own, huh? All those other al Qaeda types are innocent of 9/11 precisely because they weren’t on the planes themselves?
Nice.