{"id":579,"date":"2010-11-30T17:06:40","date_gmt":"2010-11-30T16:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=579"},"modified":"2010-11-30T17:10:24","modified_gmt":"2010-11-30T16:10:24","slug":"blowback-and-other-unintended-consequences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=579","title":{"rendered":"Blowback and other unintended consequences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tuesday&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.literaryconnections.co.uk\/resources\/wordoftheday.html\">Word of the Day<\/a> is <em>blowback<\/em>, in praise of Chalmers Johnson, a CIA analyst who chronicled the effects of US power. Shamelessly plagiarising yesterday&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/commentisfree\/2010\/nov\/29\/in-praise-of-chalmers-johnson\">Guardian third editorial<\/a>, It also enables Word of the Day to shoehorn in a topical reference to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/world\/the-us-embassy-cables\">US embassy cables<\/a> and the Wikileaks controversy under the guise of lexicography.<\/p>\n<p>Elsewhere in the same edition of the paper, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/commentisfree\/2010\/nov\/28\/us-embassy-cables-wikileaks\">Simon Jenkins<\/a> notes that some US diplomats are less diplomatic about their own country&#8217;s policies:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Some stars shine through the banality such as the heroic envoy in Islamabad, Anne Patterson. She pleads that Washington&#8217;s whole policy is counterproductive: it &#8216;risks destabilising the Pakistani state, alienating both the civilian government and the military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis without finally achieving the goal&#8217;. Nor is any amount of money going to bribe the Taliban to our side. Patterson&#8217;s cables are like missives from the Titanic as it already heads for the bottom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Hardly news to seasoned observers of the subcontinent&#8217;s recent history &#8211; but a lesson our own recent Prime Ministers might have heeded, as pointed out (ahem) <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=521\">even here<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lexicography, leaks and lessons from diplomacy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[89,90,99],"class_list":["post-579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-afghanistan","tag-pakistan","tag-wikileaks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":585,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions\/585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}