Post by Watchman on Mar 26, 2007 12:14:45 GMT -5
Eisenhower's Dire Warning And The Fall Of The Great American EmpireIs the American Empire on the Brink of Collapse?
By Mark Karlin, BuzzFlash.
U.S. military expert Chalmers Johnson argues the catastrophe in Iraq and the staggering cost of running a military that stretches across 130 countries on 737 bases may finally cost America its empire.
"I believe that we're close to a tipping point right now. What happened to the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 could easily be happening to us for essentially the same reasons. Imperial overreach, inability to reform, rigid economic ideology. ... The world's balance of power didn't change one iota on September 11, 2001. The only way we could lose the power and influence we had at that time was through our own actions, and that's what we did."
-- Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
Has our "leadership" traded democracy for empire? Have their over-bloated egos convinced them that they are the world's newly crowned colonial kings? Author Chalmers Johnson is certainly not given to wearing rose-colored glasses. As he concludes in his newest book, Nemesis: "... my country is launched on a dangerous path that it must abandon or else face the consequences."
Johnson's well-argued, persuasive argument draws on the economic, military, and political lessons of the past, which may be just what's needed to wake up Americans in time to change course. In this interview, he explained his hopes and fears for contemporary America.
* * *
Mark Karlin: You've written a three-part series of books on the United States as an empire. The first was called Blowback. The second is The Sorrows of the Empire. And, now, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. That's kind of a doomsday declension there.
Chalmers Johnson: I guess you could say that. It's inadvertent. I didn't set out to write three volumes. I don't know whether Gibbons set out to write The Decline and the Fall of the Roman Empire. But one led to the other.
The first was written well before 9/11, and it was concerned with what I perceived to be the American public's lack of understanding that most of the foreign policy problems of the 21st century were going to be things left over from the Cold War. Above all, I argue that our numerous clandestine activities, some of which are almost totally disreputable, will come back to haunt us.
The second book followed on the first, in that it was a broad analysis of what I called our military-based empire, an empire of 737 American military bases in over 130 countries around the world. That number is the official Pentagon count. They are genuine military bases. They're very extensive. They are not, as some defenders of the Pentagon like to say, just Marine guards. We haven't got 700 embassies around the world. The Sorrows of Empire was written as we were preparing for our invasion of Iraq, and it was published virtually on the day that we invaded.
Karlin: And now Nemesis is your cataclysmic conclusion. Not long ago, it was considered sort of radical to say that America is a neo-colonial empire. But you embrace that concept in many ways.
Johnson: Right.
Karlin: The perspective in much of the neocon writing, in The Weekly Standard, for instance, is that America is an empire. It's a superpower. It can take whatever it wants. Basically, the rule of thumb becomes, if you challenge the U.S. assertion of military control and dominance, you're an enemy of the United States. You don't have to threaten the United States, but merely oppose the imposition of the military authority.
Johnson: Quite true. The roots of this military empire go back, of course, to World War II, which is when we conquered Germany, Japan, Italy, places of that sort, and did not withdraw after the war was over. We've been in Okinawa, for example, ever since 1945. The people there have been fighting against us ever since 1945, in three major revolts -- they hate it.
But the critical point comes with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Paul Wolfowitz, who was then in the Department of Defense working for Dick Cheney in the first Bush administration, wrote that our policy now is to prevent any nation, or combination of nations, from ever having the kind of power that could challenge us in any way militarily.
This is when we really invite "Nemesis," the goddess of retribution, vengeance, and hubris, into our midst by proclaiming that we "won" the Cold War. It's not at all clear that we've won the Cold War. Probably, we and the U.S.S.R. lost it, but they lost it first and harder because they were always poorer than we were. The assumption was that we were now the global superpower; we were the lone superpower; we were a new Rome. We could do anything we wanted to. We could dominate the world through military force.
This is as clear a statement of imperial intent as I think one could imagine, and it is what leads to such radical ideas as war as a choice, preventive war, wars such as that in Iraq, which was essentially to expand the empire by providing a new stable base for us in the Middle East, having lost Iran in 1979, and having so antagonized the Saudis that they were no longer allowing us to use our bases there the way we like.
So, yes, I think the word imperialism is appropriate here, but not in the sense of colonization of the world. I'm meaning imperialism in the sense of, for example, the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe throughout the Cold War after World War II. That is, we dominate places militarily, we insist on local satellite-type governments that are subservient to us, that follow our orders and report to us when we ask them to. Yet we have troops based in their territories. They are part of our global longevity.
Karlin: We've heard both Bush and Cheney repeat their mantra that the troops won't come home until our mission is accomplished, until we achieve victory. It's somewhat fascinating, in a very tragic sort of way, to try to figure out what the heck these guys are talking about. We have seen from both of them so many different missions publicly stated. First it was weapons of mass destruction. Then it was regime change. When we changed the regime and found out there were no weapons of mass destruction, we suddenly developed new missions.
Johnson: Right.
Karlin: Now it's not clear what the mission is. Bush just says let's complete the mission. I've speculated on my site Buzzflash that this is sort of a policy of white man's rule, coming from the days of the Confederacy, where, if you were a white male, you were entitled to run a plantation, or whip your slave. You were the head of the household, no matter what.
Johnson: I wouldn't put it in racist terms, but you're quite right. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that at the root of all imperialism, there has to be a racist view.
Karlin: When Bush says we have to accomplish the mission, or Cheney says we have to achieve victory, the question hangs out there as to what our mission is now? And what could possibly be victory in these circumstances? To them, mission or victory mainly means that we are perceived as winning and Iraq remains under our control.
Johnson: I believe that's absolutely true. It's one of the reasons why we didn't have a withdrawal strategy from Iraq -- we didn't intend to leave. Several people who retired from the Pentagon in protest at the start of the war -- I'm thinking of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Hoffman particularly -- have testified that the purpose of the invasion was to establish a new, stable pillar of power for the United States in the Middle East. We had lost our main two bases of power in the region -- Iran, which we lost in 1979 because of the revolution against the Shah, whom we ourselves placed in power -- and then Saudi Arabia, because of the serious blunder made after the first Gulf War -- the placing of American Air Force and ground troops in Saudi Arabia after 1991. That was unnecessary. It's stupid. We do not have an obligation to defend the government of Saudi Arabia. It was deeply resented by any number of sincere Saudi patriots, including former asset and colleague, Osama bin Laden. Their reaction was that the regime that is charged with the defense of the two most sacred sites of Islam -- Mecca and Medina -- should not rely upon foreign infidels who know next to nothing about our religion and our background.
The result was that, over the 1990s and going into the 2000s, the Saudis began to restrict the uses we had of Prince Sultan Air Base at Riyadh. They became so restricted that, finally, in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, we moved our main headquarters to Qatar and conducted the war from there. This left us, however, with only the numerous small bases we have in the Persian Gulf. But these are in rather fragile countries.
Iraq was the place of choice, to these characters, who knew virtually nothing about the Middle East. Spoke not a word of Arabic or knew even the history of it. Iraq was the one they picked out because it's the second largest source of oil on earth, and it looked like an easy conquest.
We now know that the President himself didn't understand the difference between Shia and Sunni Islam -- that he did not appreciate that Saddam Hussein's regime was a minority Sunni dictatorship over the majority Shia population. That once you brought about regime change there, the inevitable result would be unleashing the Shia population, who had previously been suppressed, to run their country, and that they would align themselves with the largest Shia power of all, a Shia superpower, namely, Iran, right next door, where most of their leaders had spent the period of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship.
That's essentially what's happened. It's hard to imagine how this served our interests, given the deep hostility between Iran and the United States ever since we started interfering in that country back in 1953. It is hard to imagine how this served the interests of Israel, in that it gave Shia support there. Support from Iran now spreads throughout the Middle East to Hezbollah, Hamas, and other organizations. And it leads to a contradiction in terms of what we're doing there. At times, we seem to be trying to restore Sunni rule, so that we can bring about some peace. On the other hand, we have no choice but to support the majority power because of our propaganda about supporting democracy at the point of an assault rifle.
Karlin: In Nemesis you draw comparisons to the Roman empire. As you point out, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we became the most powerful nation, at least in our self-perception. But in terms of our economy, we are at the mercy of all the countries that are keeping our economy afloat through loans. Militarily, we have the most powerful weapons, but this seems to have done nothing for us in Iraq.
Johnson: Nothing at all. In fact, sticking to Iraq just for a moment, one of the most absurd things is the fact that we have a defense budget that's larger than all other defense budgets on earth. This army of 150,000 troops that we've sent to Iraq -- a country with the GDP of Louisiana, I'd say --- they've been stopped by 20,000 insurgents. This is a scandal and a discrediting of the military, the Pentagon, and the strategies we've pursued.
But the broad argument that I'm trying to make in Nemesis is that history tells us there's no more unstable, critical configuration than the combination of domestic democracy and foreign empire. You can be one or the other. You can be a democratic country, as we have claimed in the past to be, based on our Constitution. Or you can be an empire. But you can't be both.
The classic example is the Roman republic, on which our country was, in many respects, modeled. They decided, largely through the influence of militarism, to retain their empire. Having decided to retain it, they then lost their democracy due to military intervention in politics after the assassination of Julius Caesar and the coming to power of military dictators. They were termed Roman emperors, but they were essentially military dictators.
There is an alternative model that I advocate in the book. It's not as clear-cut an example, but it is certainly one that's relevant, and that is Great Britain after World War II. After the spectacular war against Nazism, it was brought home to the British that if they were going to retain the jewel in the crown of their empire, namely India, with its huge, vast population, it could do so. It could keep people under its control through military force. They'd used that often enough in India, as it was.
In light of the Nazi experience, though, it now seemed almost impossible to go in that direction. Britain realized that to retain its empire, it would have to become a tyranny domestically. It chose, in my view, to give up its empire. It didn't do it beautifully, and we see imperialistic atavisms all the time, Tony Blair being the best example. But it chose to give up its empire in order to retain its democracy.
The causative issue is militarism. Imperialism, by definition, requires military force. It requires huge standing armies. It requires a large military-industrial complex. It requires the willingness to use force regularly. Imperialism is a pure form of tyranny. It never rules through consent, any more than we do in Iraq today.
The power of the military establishment is what threatens the separation of powers on which our Constitution is based. The Constitution, the chief bulwark against tyranny and dictatorship, separates the executive and legislative and judicial branches. It does not concentrate power in the executive branch, or concentrate money there, or secrecy.
The two most famous warnings in the history of our country address militarism -- namely George Washington's farewell address, read at the opening of every session of Congress, and Eisenhower's speech. Washington spoke of the greatest enemy of liberty as being standing armies. He said they were the particular enemy of republican liberties. He was not opposed to defending the country; he was talking about standing armies, as distinct from armies raised to defend the country in a time of national emergency. It was standing armies, Washington argued, that overbalance the separation of powers, that serve the presidency and destroy federalism.
The next great warning, which was even more striking, were the words of Dwight Eisenhower in 1961. He spoke of the military-industrial complex and its unwarranted, unchecked, unsupervised power and the enormous damage it was doing. This is what I'm talking about in Nemesis, and why I use this, as you put it, very apocalyptic subtitle.
But I do mean it. I believe that we're close to a tipping point right now. What happened to the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 could easily be happening to us for essentially the same reasons. Imperial overreach, inability to reform, rigid economic ideology. And we have, as you know, also very serious economic dependencies on the rest of the world now. We are a wholly indebted country. We're not paying for the things we're doing. The sort of news we saw in recent days in the Stock Exchange is entirely predictable.
Karlin: Is the Middle East intervention -- Iraq, and the desire to nuke Iran -- is this empire building in the guise of fighting terrorism?
Johnson: Yes.
Karlin: If there weren't terrorists, Bush and Cheney would have had to invent them?
Johnson: Absolutely. There's just no doubt about it. In fact, we have to say that in any historical perspective, that the response of Bush-Cheney to 9/11 was a catastrophe of misjudgment and almost surely based on interests entirely separate from the terrorist attacks. We enhanced Osama bin Laden's power by declaring war on terrorism, escalating his position. The world's balance of power didn't change one iota on September 11th, 2001. The only way we could lose the power and influence we had at that time was through our own actions, and that's what we did.
Instead of calling it a war on terrorism, we should have called it a national emergency. We should have gone after the terrorists as criminals, as organized crime, because of their attacks on innocent civilians. Tracked them down -- we have the capacity to do that -- arrested them, extradited them back to the United States, tried them in our courts, and executed them. Had we done that, we would have retained the support of virtually the entire rest of the world, including the Islamic world, as the victims on 9/11.
But we did the opposite. We simply went crazy, and we also refused to acknowledge that the retaliation that came on 9/11 was blow-back. We were partly responsible for what happened, since the people who attacked us were our former allies in the largest single clandestine operation we ever carried out, including Armenians sending into battle of the Mujahideen against the Russians in Afghanistan. Certainly, Osama bin Laden was not unfamiliar to our Central Intelligence Agency. They had been working with him for quite a long time.
It's in that sense that I think it was a catastrophic error. But the truth is, in retrospect, it doesn't look like an error at all. They saw it as an opportunity -- as a golden opportunity to carry out these sort of mad and speculative schemes that they had been working on throughout the 1990s, dreaming that we were this new Rome that could do anything it wants to.