The New Orleans Terrorist Attack Proves Blowback is Back

In his Farewell Address, George Washington announced it was US policy “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” Similarly, Thomas Jefferson declared that “peace, commerce, and honest friends will all nations, entangling alliances with none” should be the American creed.

In our modern times, this view has been most famously articulated by Ron Paul, who stood tall in the 2008 Republican presidential debates and professed that “they attack us because we’ve been over there.”

Despite how well these sentiments have aged, they have gone completely ignored by America’s modern political class, and the recent New Orleans terrorist attack is just the latest reminder of that fact.

According to several reports, New Orleans bomber Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who killed 14 people and injured more than 30 others on Bourbon Street, professed support for ISIS.

Jabber, an army veteran from Texas, placed two improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and drove his pickup truck into a crowd just as jubilant people were celebrating the New Year.

Mere hours before the attack, he posted on Facebook that he had joined the organization, and originally considered killing his family, but did not think it would benefit the “war between believers and unbelievers.”

ISIS, a terrorist organization that traces its origins to Al-Qaeda in Iraq, was largely created by the US. This is because the US war against Iraq—which toppled Saddam’s regime and created a power vacuum—encouraged radical Arabs from the Middle East to converge on the country. The prolonged occupation of Iraq allowed ISIS to form and grow into the institution it is today. Simply put, ISIS is blowback for the reckless foreign policy project that was the US invasion of Iraq.

If ISIS’ presence in Iraq wasn’t enough, the US encouraged it to develop into an international terrorist organization beginning in 2014 through its involvement in Syria, which began with targeted bombings and was followed by a ground invasion. Even after the Assad regime fell last month, the US still occupies one-third of the country.

Whatever Jabbar’s motivations, and regardless of how involved he was in the organization, it’s clear that he could never have been magnetized to ISIS or its mission without the decades of senseless US military excursions in the Middle East.

ISIS, just like Al-Qaeda before it, was the product of US military intervention. This is understood by anyone who follows foreign policy closely. Still, the CIA, corporate media, and military-industrial complex continue to use these organizations as justifications for more wars, more regime change operations, more bombing campaigns, and more overseas bases. Ironically, the US presence in the region creates the very problems the war machine purports to solve. The only difference this time is it manifested domestically.

It’s not likely that the US empire will be abandoned anytime soon, and Trump’s recent foreign policy appointments seem only to confirm that fact. Nevertheless, until the war machine’s aspirations for conquest and world domination are ended the American people will suffer. The deaths will continue to rise, the national debt will continue to grow, and the dollar will continue to be debased to finance this madness.

And on top of all of it, innocents will pay the price in the US—as they did on New Year’s Eve—as a consequence of US foreign policy blunders. So much for the old neocon slogan, “We have to kill them over there so they can’t kill us over here.”

To our peril, the empire remains, and the blowback will continue until it is given up. We can cling to hope that it will be confined to some obscure corner of the world, but the New Orleans incident—just like 9/11—proves it doesn’t always work that way. As our rulers continue to ignore the lessons of the past, Washington, Jefferson, and Paul’s warnings on the dangers of entangling alliances seem all the more wise.