FYI from BATR

In foreign affairs, one manifestation of the law of unintended consequences is known as “blowback.” In his book by that title, Chalmers Johnson wrote, “The term ‘blowback,’ which officials of the Central Intelligent Agency first invented for their own internal use, . . . refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign act of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.”