There is a phenomenon in the intelligence world which they call “blowback.” It happens when an operation leads to unintended consequences, and to be more specific, when it results in effects which are actually antithetical to your own interests.
Two specific examples come to mind;
During the Afghanistan War, the CIA armed local rebels with US weaponry and even training. Included were lessons on bomb-making, booby-trapping and advanced military tactics. Those local rebels used those tactics to take over the country once the Soviets had left, calling themselves The Taliban.
Some of them broke off to assist in the formation of an Islamic terrorist organisation which called itself The Base. In Arabic, Al Queada.
And during the Syrian Civil War, US trained, financed and armed operatives fought to destroy the Assad regime. They captured huge swathes of the country, and came together with militants from Iraq, Iran and elsewhere and swelled into the organisation Daesh, or the Islamic State of Iraq And The Levant; we call it ISIS. One of its founders was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
He, of course, had been a senior member of Al Queada.
Unintended consequences. Blowback.
What some might call karmic payback for acts of stupidity, and arrogance.
The club from Ibrox knows a bit about that.
They bowed to the rabid wailing of a section of their support a couple of years back and got our fans virtually banned from the stadium. Celtic had spelled out to that club what would happen if they cut our allocation, so they were well aware that there would be adverse consequences from us.
What they didn’t anticipate – because they’re stupid, because they never thought it through – was the chaos it would unleash across the rest of the game as clubs everywhere saw the way they treated us and how we responded and started, one at a time, giving in to their own supporters on the issue of cutting allocations.
Where once both clubs took many thousands of fans to every away ground in the country, now those same clubs would rather stands sat virtually empty than give their club or ours a half decent allocation of tickets.
Some of those clubs had already cut allocations, giving us one stand instead of two, and others had resisted such demands from their supporters.
All that changed when the Ibrox club gave in to its own mad-skull element. From then on we were on a one-way trajectory. We might have reached our nadir with the news out of Hearts last night.
Hearts are now offering both clubs a mere 600 tickets for Tynecastle.
And lest their fans bitch and wail and moan about it, they better understand the role their club has played in normalising this stuff, and as long as they continue to lobby for our allocation at their ground to remain at the bare minimum there is no prospect of things changing here.
Hearts aren’t even pretending this is other than what it is.
They are cutting allocations for every club except one, and that club, perversely, is Hibs.
Because they recognise that the Edinburgh derby is an occasion which shouldn’t be spoiled. But every other club in the land is going to feel the sting of that decision.
Hearts are doing it, they say, to “prioritise their own fans”.
It’s the exact same excuse as the club from Ibrox is using when it comes to us.
How many more teams will follow suit?
How long until the allocations are in the hundreds for every club in the SPFL?
We could be suffering the effects of this for years, and for what? Because their supporters were bitter and angry over the sight of us celebrating at their ground?
There were other solutions to this; how about “play better?” for one?
There were other ways that this could have gone … but no, their lunatic fringe banging on the bars of their cage got what they wanted, and now we’re in this situation.
And so are they, of course, which is the irony of this.
They wouldn’t have cared that we suffered additional consequences, but those consequences are increasingly being visited on them too.
Their away support wants to watch its team, just as ours does, and as much as we’re suffering from the effects of their stupidity we are not suffering alone.
They are getting what they deserve, and if this wasn’t affecting us I might even find it funny.
What a mess they have made. What a disaster their spiteful short-sighted policy has been, and the blowback from it continues to spread in all directions, including theirs.