Somehow or other I would up reading an old text by Chalmers Johnson on Revolutionary Change. I was sort of enchanted by the text and I am working on a review which is taking longer than I expected (as usual). Johnson was an insider turned opponent of the US imperium, and he popularized the term blowback to characterize the unintended consequences at home of imperial overreach abroad:
Blowbackis a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government's international activities that have been kept secret from the American people. The CIA's fears that there might ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of Iran were well founded. Installing the Shah in power brought twenty-five years of tyranny and repression to the Iranian people and elicited the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution. The staff of the American embassy in Teheran was held hostage for more than a year. This misguidedcovert operationof the US government helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world that the United States was an implacable enemy.
Johnson died a while back, but in his last years he published at least four books urging the dismantling of the US Empire. He also contributed numerous valuable posts at TomDispatch, which provides long-standing criticism of US war mongering. There's also a fascinating collection of information on Johnson from the perspective of some defenders of the deposed Iranian parlimentarian Mossadegh.