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“Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic"
An interview with Chalmers Johnson
In his new book,
Nemesis - The Last Days of the American
Republic. CIA analyst, distinguished scholar, and
best-selling author Chalmers Johnson argues that US military and
economic overreach may actually lead to the nation's collapse as
a constitutional republic. It's the last volume in his Blowback
trilogy, following the best-selling "Blowback" and "The Sorrows
of Empire." In those two, Johnson argued American clandestine
and military activity has led to un-intended, but direct
disaster here in the United States.
Broadcast - 02/27/07 -
Democracy Now! -
AMY GOODMAN: Today, we spend the hour with the former
CIA consultant, distinguished scholar, best-selling author,
Chalmers Johnson. He's just published a new book. It's called
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. It's the
last volume in his trilogy, which began with Blowback,
went onto The Sorrows of Empire. In those two, Johnson
argued American clandestine and military activity has led to
unintended but direct disaster here in the United States. In his
new book, Johnson argues that US military and economic overreach
may actually lead to the nation's collapse as a constitutional
republic.
Chalmers Johnson is a retired professor of international
relations at the University of California, San Diego. He's also
president of the Japan Policy Research Institute. He's written
for a number of publications, including the Los Angeles Times,
The London Review of Books, Harper’s magazine and
The Nation. In 2005, he was featured prominently in the
award-winning documentary, Why We Fight. Chalmers Johnson
joined me yesterday from San Diego. I began by asking him about
the title of his book, Nemesis.
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Nemesis was the ancient Greek
goddess of revenge, the punisher of hubris and arrogance in
human beings. You may recall she is the one that led
Narcissus to the pond and showed him his reflection, and he
dove in and drowned. I chose the title, because it seems to
me that she's present in our country right now, just waiting
to make her -- to carry out her divine mission.
By the subtitle, I really do mean it. This is not just
hype to sell books -- “The Last Days of the American
Republic.” I’m here concerned with a very real, concrete
problem in political analysis, namely that the political
system of the United States today, history tells us, is one
of the most unstable combinations there is -- that is,
domestic democracy and foreign empire -- that the choices
are stark. A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or
an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to
imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which
so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman
Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic
dictatorship.
I’ve spent some time in the book talking about an
alternative, namely that of the British Empire after World
War II, in which it made the decision, not perfectly
executed by any manner of means, but nonetheless made the
decision to give up its empire in order to keep its
democracy. It became apparent to the British quite late in
the game that they could keep the jewel in their crown,
India, only at the expense of administrative massacres, of
which they had carried them out often in India. In the wake
of the war against Nazism, which had just ended, it became,
I think, obvious to the British that in order to retain
their empire, they would have to become a tyranny, and they,
therefore, I believe, properly chose, admirably chose to
give up their empire.
As I say, they didn't do it perfectly. There were
tremendous atavistic fallbacks in the 1950s in the Anglo,
French, Israeli attack on Egypt; in the repression of the
Kikuyu -- savage repression, really -- in Kenya; and then,
of course, the most obvious and weird atavism of them all,
Tony Blair and his enthusiasm for renewed British
imperialism in Iraq. But nonetheless, it seems to me that
the history of Britain is clear that it gave up its empire
in order to remain a democracy. I believe this is something
we should be discussing very hard in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, you connect the
breakdown of constitutional government with militarism.
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the signs of the
breakdown of constitutional government and how it links?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, yes. Militarism is the --
what the social side has called the “intervening variable,”
the causative connection. That is to say, to maintain an
empire requires a very large standing army, huge
expenditures on arms that leads to a military-industrial
complex, and generally speaking, a vicious cycle sets up of
interests that lead to perpetual series of wars.
It goes back to probably the earliest warning ever
delivered to us by our first president, George Washington,
in his famous farewell address. It’s read at the opening of
every new session of Congress. Washington said that the
great enemy of the republic is standing armies; it is a
particular enemy of republican liberty. What he meant by it
is that it breaks down the separation of powers into an
executive, legislative, and judicial branches that are
intended to check each other -- this is our most fundamental
bulwark against dictatorship and tyranny -- it causes it to
break down, because standing armies, militarism, military
establishment, military-industrial complex all draw power
away from the rest of the country to Washington, including
taxes, that within Washington they draw it to the
presidency, and they begin to create an imperial presidency,
who then implements the military's desire for secrecy,
making oversight of the government almost impossible for a
member of Congress, even, much less for a citizen.
It seems to me that this is also the same warning that
Dwight Eisenhower gave in his famous farewell address of
1961, in which he, in quite vituperative language, quite
undiplomatic language -- one ought to go back and read
Eisenhower. He was truly alarmed when he spoke of the rise
of a large arms industry that was beyond supervision, that
was not under effective control of the interests of the
military-industrial complex, a phrase that he coined. We
know from his writings that he intended to say a
military-industrial-congressional complex. He was warned off
from going that far. But it's in that sense that I believe
the nexus -- or, that is, the incompatibility between
domestic democracy and foreign imperialism comes into being.
AMY GOODMAN: Who was he warned by?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Members of Congress. Republican
memb--
AMY GOODMAN: And why were they opposed?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, they did not want to have
their oversight abilities impugned. They weren't carrying
them out very well. You must also say that Eisenhower was --
I think he's been overly praised for this. It was a heroic
statement, but at the same time, he was the butcher of
Guatemala, the person who authorized our first clandestine
operation and one of the most tragic that we ever did: the
overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 for the sake
of the British Petroleum Company. And he also presided over
the fantastic growth of the military-industrial complex, of
the lunatic oversupply of nuclear weapons, of the empowering
of the Air Force, and things of this sort. It seems to be
only at the end that he realized what a monster he had
created.
AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis:
The Last Days of the American Republic. We'll come back to
him in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: As we return to my interview with
Chalmers Johnson -- his new book, Nemesis: The Last Days of
the American Republic -- I asked him to talk about the
expansion of US military bases around the globe.
CHALMERS JOHNSON: According to the official count
right now -- it's something called the Base Structure
Report, which is an unclassified Pentagon inventory of real
property owned around the world and the cost it would take
to replace it -- there are right now 737 American military
bases on every continent, in well over 130 countries. Some
apologists from the Pentagon like to say, well, this is
false, that we're counting Marine guards at embassies. I
guarantee you that it's simply stupid. We don't have
anything like 737 American embassies abroad, and all of
these are genuine military bases with all of the problems
that that involves.
In the southernmost prefecture of Japan, Okinawa, site of
the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, there’s a small island,
smaller than Kawaii in the Hawaiian islands, with 1,300,000
Okinawans. There's thirty-seven American military bases
there. The revolt against them has been endemic for fifty
years. The governor is always saying to the local military
commander, “You're living on the side of a volcano that
could explode at any time.” It has exploded in the past.
What this means is just an endless, nonstop series of
sexually violent crimes, drunken brawls, hit-and-run
accidents, environmental pollution, noise pollution,
helicopters falling out of the air from Futenma Marine Corps
Air Base and falling onto the campus of Okinawa
International University. One thing after another. Back in
1995, we had one of the most serious incidents, when two
Marines and a sailor abducted, beat and raped a
twelve-year-old girl. This led to the largest demonstrations
against the United States since we signed the security
treaty with Japan decades ago. It's this kind of thing.
I first went to Okinawa in 1996. I was invited by
then-Governor Ota in the wake of the rape incident. I’ve
devoted my life to the study of Japan, but like many
Japanese, many Japanese specialists, I had never been in
Okinawa. I was shocked by what I saw. It was the British
Raj. It was like Soviet troops living in East Germany, more
comfortable than they would be back at, say, Oceanside,
California, next door to Camp Pendleton. And it was a
scandal in every sense. My first reaction -- I’ve not made a
secret of it -- that I was, before the collapse of the
Soviet Union, certainly a Cold Warrior. My first explanation
was that this is simply off the beaten track, that people
don't come down here and report it. As I began to study the
network of bases around the world and the incidents that
have gone with them and the military coups that have brought
about regime change and governments that we approve of, I
began to realize that Okinawa was not unusual; it was,
unfortunately, typical.
These bases, as I say, are spread everywhere. The most
recent manifestation of the American military empire is the
decision by the Pentagon now, with presidential approval, of
course, to create another regional command in Africa. This
may either be at the base that we have in Djibouti at the
Horn of Africa. It may well be in the Gulf of Guinea, where
we are prospecting for oil, and the Navy would very much
like to put ourselves there. It is not at all clear that we
should have any form of American military presence in
Africa, but we're going to have an enlarged one.
Invariably, remember what this means. Imperialism is a
form of tyranny. It never rules through consent of the
governed. It doesn't ask for the consent of the governed. We
talk about the spread of democracy, but we're talking about
the spread of democracy at the point of an assault rifle.
That's a contradiction in terms. It doesn't work. Any
self-respecting person being democratized in this manner
starts thinking of retaliation. Nemesis becomes appropriate.
AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, there have been
major protests against US military bases. Recently in
Vicenza in Italy, about 100,000 people protested. Ecuador
announced that it would close the Manta Air Base, the
military base there. What about the response, the resistance
to this web of bases around the world?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, there is a genuine
resistance and has been for a long time. As I say, in the
case of Okinawa, there's been at least three different
historical revolts against the American presence. There's
collaboration between the Japanese government and the
Pentagon to use this island, which is a Japanese version of
Puerto Rico. It's a place that's always been discriminated
against. It's the Japanese way of having their cake and
eating it, too. They like the alliance with America, but
they do not want American soldiers based anywhere near the
citizens of mainland Japan. So they essentially dump them or
quarantine them off into this island, where the population
pays the cost.
This is true, what's going on in Italy right now, where
there is tremendous resistance to the CIA rendition cases.
That is, kidnapping people that we've identified and flying
them secretly to countries where we know they will be
tortured. There's right now something like twenty-five CIA
officers by name who are under indictment by the Italian
government for felonies committed by agents of the United
States in Italy. And, indeed, we just did have these major
demonstrations in Vicenza. The people there believe that
with the enlargement of the base that is already there -- I
mean, this is, after all, the old Palladian city, a city of
great and famous architecture, that they would become a
target of terrorism, of numerous other things.
We see the resistance in the form of Prime Minister
Zapatero in Spain, that he promised the people that after he
came to power, he would get out of Iraq, and he was one of
the few who did deliver, who does remember that if democracy
means anything, it means that public opinion matters, though
in an awful lot of countries, it doesn't actually seem to be
the case. But he has reduced radically the American military
presence in Spain.
And it continues around the world. There is a growing
irritation at the American colossus athwart the world, using
its military muscle to do as it pleases. We see it right
now, that people of the Persian Gulf are not being asked
whether or not they want anywhere between two and four huge
carrier task forces in the fifth fleet in CENTCOM’s navy in
the Persian Gulf, and all of which looks like preparation
for an assault on Iran. We don't know that for certain by
any manner of means, but there's plenty enough to make us
suspicious.
Then you look back historically, probably there is no
more anti-American democracy on earth than Greece. They will
never forgive us for bringing to power the Greek colonels
the in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and, of course, also
establishing then numerous American military enclaves in
Greece until the colonels themselves finally self-destructed
by simply going too far.
And the cases are ubiquitous in Latin America, in Africa
today. Probably still the most important area, of course, of
military imperialism is the opening up of southern Eurasia,
after it became available to foreign imperialistic pressure
with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Many important observers who have resigned their
commissions from the Pentagon have made the case that the
fundamental explanation for the war in Iraq was precisely to
make it the new -- to replace the two old pillars of
American foreign policy in the Middle East. The first
pillar, Iran, collapsed, of course, with the revolution in
1979 against the Shah, who we had installed in power. The
second pillar, Saudi Arabia, had become less and less useful
to us, because of our own bungling. We put forces, military
forces, ground forces, an air force, in Saudi Arabia after
the Gulf War in 1991. This was unnecessary, it was stupid,
it was arrogant. It caused antagonism among numerous
patriotic Saudis, not least of whom, one was our former
asset and colleague, Osama bin Laden -- that Saudi Arabia is
charged with the defense of the two most sacred sites in
Islam: Mecca and Medina. We ought to be able to do this
ourselves without using infidel troops that know absolutely
nothing about our religion, our country, our lifestyle, or
anything else. Over time, the Saudis began to restrict the
use of Prince Sultan Air Base outside Riyadh. We actually
closed down our major operations headquarters there just
before the invasion of Iraq and moved it to Qatar.
And then we chose Iraq as the second most oil-rich
country on earth, and as a place perfectly suited for our
presence. I think many people have commented on it, Seymour
Hersh notably, but I think, importantly, one of the reasons
we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn't intend to
leave. And certainly the evidence of it is the now series of
at least five very, very large, heavily reinforced, long
double runways, five air bases in Iraq, strategically
located all over the country. You can never get our
ambassador, the Department of Defense, the President, or
anybody to say unequivocally we don't intend to have bases
there. It's a subject on which Congress never, ever opens
its mouth. Occasionally, military officers -- the commander
of Air Force in CENTCOM has repeatedly, in his sort of
off-hand way, when asked, “How long do you think we'll be
here?” and he usually says, “Oh, at least a decade in these
bases.” And then, we continue to reinforce them.
Now, then, we’ve tried to build bases in Central Asia in
the Caspian Basin oil-rich countries that were made
independent -- not in any sense democracies -- made
independent by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. We
have now been thrown out of one of them for too much
heavy-handed interference. And the price of our stay in
Kyrgyzstan has quadrupled, much more than that actually.
It’s gone from a few million dollars to well over $100
million. But we continue to play these games, and they are
games, and the game is property called imperialism.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Chalmers Johnson.
Now, Chalmers Johnson, you were a consultant for the CIA for
a period through Richard Nixon, starting with Johnson in
1967, right through 1973. And I’m wondering how you see its
use has changed. You talk about, and you write in your book
about the Central Intelligence Agency, the president's
private army.
CHALMERS JOHNSON: I say, at one point, we will
never know peace until we abolish it, or, at any rate,
restrict what is the monster that it's grown into. The
National Security Act of 1947 lists five functions. It
creates the Central Intelligence Agency. It lists five
functions for it. The purpose, above all, was to prevent
surprise attack, to prevent a recurrence of the attack, such
as the one at Pearl Harbor. Of these five functions, four
are various forms of information-gathering through open
sources, espionage, signals intelligence, things of this
sort. The fifth is simply a catchall, that the CIA will do
anything that the National Security Council, namely the
foreign affairs bureaucracy in the White House attached
directly to the president orders it to do.
That's turned out to be the tail that wags the dog.
Intelligence is not taken all that seriously. It's not that
good. My function inside the agency in the late ’60s, early
’70s was in the Office of National Estimates. My wife used
to ask me at times, “Why are they so highly classified?” And
I said, “Well, probably and mostly, simply because they’re
the very best we can do, and they read like a sort of
lowbrow foreign affairs article.” They're not full of great
technical detail and certainty nothing on sources of
intelligence.
But as the agency developed over time, and as it was made
clear to the president, every president since Truman, made
clear to them shortly after they were inaugurated, you have
at your disposal a private army. It is totally secret. There
is no form of oversight. There was no form of congressional
oversight until the late 1970s, and it proved to be
incompetent in the face of Iran-Contra and things like that.
He can do anything you want to with it. You could order
assassinations. You could order governments overthrown. You
could order economies subverted that seemed to get in our
way. You could instruct Latin American military officers in
state terrorism. You can carry out extraordinary renditions
and order the torture of people, despite the fact that it is
a clear violation of American law and carries the death
penalty if the torture victim should die, and they commonly
do in the case of renditions to places like Egypt.
No president since Truman, once told that he has this
power, has ever failed to use it. That became the route of
rapid advancement within the CIA, dirty tricks, clandestine
activities, the carrying out of the president's orders to
overthrow somebody, starting -- the first one was the
overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. It’s from
that, the After Action Report, which has only recently been
declassified, that the word “blowback” that I used in the
first of my three books on American foreign policy, that's
where the word “blowback” comes from. It means retaliation
for clandestine activities carried out abroad.
But these clandestine activities also have one other
caveat on them: they are kept totally secret from the
American public, so that when the retaliation does come,
they're unable ever to put it in context, to see it in
cause-and-effect terms. They usually lash out against the
alleged perpetrators, usually simply inaugurating another
cycle of blowback. The best example is easily 9/11 in 2001,
which was clearly blowback for the largest clandestine
operation we ever carried out, namely the recruiting, arming
and sending into battle of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan
against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. But this is the
way the CIA has evolved.
It's been responsible for the overthrow of Salvador
Allende in Chile and bringing to power probably the most
odious dictator on either side in the Cold War, namely
General Augusto Pinochet; the installation of the Greek
colonels in the late ‘60s and early ’70s in Greece; the
coups, one after another, in numerous Latin American
countries, all under the cover of avoiding Soviet
imperialism carried out by Fidel Castro, when the real
purpose was to protect the interests of the United Fruit
Company, and continued to exploit the extremely poor and
essentially defenseless people of Central America.
The list is endless. The overthrow of Sukarno in
Indonesia, the bringing to power of General Suharto, then
the elimination of General Suharto when he got on our
nerves. It has a distinctly Roman quality to it. And this is
why I -- moreover, there is no effective oversight. There
are a few, often crooked congressmen, like Randy "Duke"
Cunningham, who are charged with oversight. When Charlie
Wilson, the congressman, long-sitting congressman from the
Second District of Texas, was named chairman of the House
Intelligence Oversight Committee during the Afghan period,
he wrote at once to his pals in the CIA, “The fox is in the
henhouse. Gentlemen, do anything you want to.”
AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson has just finished his
trilogy. The first was Blowback, then Sorrows of
Empire, now Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic. We'll be back with the conclusion of the interview
in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We return to the conclusion of my
interview with Chalmers Johnson. Professor Johnson is a noted
expert on Asia politics. He has authored a number of books on
the Chinese revolution, on Japanese economic development. In his
thirty years in the University of California system, Johnson
served as chair of the Center for Chinese Studies at the
University of California, Berkeley. I asked him to talk about
China's role as a growing world power.
CHALMERS JOHNSON: I’m optimistic about China. I
think that they have shown a remarkable movement toward
moderation. I believe that the public supports them, because
they've done something that the public wanted done and was
extremely fearful about, namely the dismantling of a
Leninist economy without reducing the conditions that
occurred in Yeltsin's Russia, that China has -- it’s
unleashed its fantastic growth potential and is moving ahead
with great power and insight.
There are many things that we do not like in the way this
is developing, particularly the fear of China by the
American neoconservatives. They have no alternative but to
adjust to this. It's the same kind of adjustment that should
have been made in the 20th century to the rise of new
sources of power in Germany, in Russia, in Japan. The
failure by the sated English-speaking powers -- above all,
England and the United States -- to adjust led to savage and
essentially worthless wars. But the Americans are again
continuing to harp on China's growth, where, in fact, I’ve
been impressed with the ease with which China has adjusted
to the interests of countries that do not necessarily like
China at all -- Indonesia, for example, Vietnam.
They are contiguously egging on the Japanese to be
antagonistic toward China, which was the scene of their
greatest war crimes during World War II, for which they have
never adequately either responded or paid compensation. I
wonder what foolishness is this. A war with China would have
the same -- it would have the same configuration as the
Vietnam War. We would certainly lose it.
The glue, the political glue of China today, the source
of its legitimacy, is increasingly Chinese nationalism,
which is passionately held. As the Hong Kong joke has it,
China just had a couple of bad centuries, and it's back.
We have not been watching it with quite the hawk eyes we
were during the first months of the Bush administration,
when, after a spy incident in which the Chinese forced down
one of our reconnaissance planes that was penetrating their
coastal areas in an extremely aggressive manner -- if it had
been a Chinese plane off of our coast, we would have shot it
down; they simply forced it down, it was a loss of an
airplane and one of their own pilots -- that, you'll recall,
George Bush said on television that he would, if the Chinese
ever menaced the island of Taiwan, he would use the full
weight and force of the American military against China.
This is insanity, genuine insanity. There's no way that -- I
mean, if the Chinese defeated every single American, they'd
still have 800 million of them left, and you simply have to
adjust to that, not antagonize it, and I believe there's
plenty of ample evidence that you can adjust to the Chinese.
AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, in January, the
Chinese launched their first anti-satellite test, and I
wanted to segue into that to the militarization of space.
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, precisely, I have a
chapter in Nemesis that I’m extremely proud of called
“The Ultimate Imperialist Project: Outer Space.” It's about
the congressional missile lobby, the fantastic waste of
funds on things that we know don't work. But they're not
intended to work. They're part of military Keynesianism, of
maintaining our economy through military expenditures. They
provide jobs in as many different constituencies as the
military-industrial complex can place them.
We have arrogantly talked about full-spectrum dominance
of control of the globe from outer space, the domination of
the low and high orbits that are so necessary. We've all
become so dependent upon them today for global positioning
devices, telecommunications, mapping, weather forecasting,
one thing after another. In fact, the Chinese, the Russians,
the Europeans have been asking us repeatedly for decent
international measures, international treaties, to prevent
the weaponization of space, to prevent the growing
catastrophe of orbiting debris that are extremely lethal to
satellites, to -- as Sally Ride, one of the commanders of
our space shuttle, she was in an incident in which a piece
of paint, or in orbit -- that's at 17,000 miles an hour in
low-earth orbit -- hit the windshield of the challenger and
put a bad dent in it.
Now, if a piece of paint can do that, I hate to tell you
what a lens cap or an old wrench or something like that --
so there's a whole bunch of them out there. At the Johnson
Space Center, they keep a regular growing inventory of these
old pieces of, some case, weaponry, some case, launch
vehicles for satellites, things of this sort. They publish a
very lovely little newsletter that talks about how a piece
of an American space capsule from twenty years ago
rear-ended a shot Chinese-launched vehicle and produced a
few more debris. It's a catastrophe.
But instead, we've got -- there's no other word for it --
an arrogant, almost Roman, out-of-control Air Force that
continues to serve the interests of the military-industrial
complex, the space lobby, to build things that they know
won't work.
AMY GOODMAN: What is a space Pearl Harbor?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: A space Pearl Harbor would mean,
they believe, what the Chinese did in January, when they
tested an anti-satellite weapon against one of their old and
redundant satellites. Satellites do burn out. There's no way
to repair them, so they simply shot it down with a rocket.
This explosion produces massive amounts of debris, whizzing
around the earth in low-earth orbit. If you put it higher
into orbit, you would start killing off the main satellites
on which, well, probably this television broadcast is going
to depend on, too. And there's no way to ever get rid of
things that are orbiting in high-earth orbit. Low-earth
orbit, some of them will descend into the atmosphere and
burn up.
But the Air Force has continuously used this so-called
threat of our being blinded by -- because we have become so
reliant on global positioning systems. Our so-called “smart
bombs” depend on them, that we’ve -- they're not very smart,
and it's not as good a global positioning system as the
peaceful one the Europeans are building called Galileo. They
use it to say we must arm space, we must have anti-satellite
weapons in space, we have rebuffed every effort to control
this, and finding out the Chinese have called our bluff.
AMY GOODMAN: Where does Fort Greely, Alaska, fit
into this, the silos?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, that is, there's three
ways to shoot down an alleged incoming missile. This is the
whole farce of whether there is a defense against a missile.
I guarantee you there is no defense at all against the
Topol-M, the Russian missile that goes into orbit extremely
rapidly -- it goes into its arch extremely rapidly. It has a
maneuvering ability that means that it's undetectable.
We're basically looking at very low-brow weapons that
would be coming from a country like North Korea, in which we
have three different ways of trying to intercept them. We
used to only try to do with one under the Clinton
administration. Under the enthusiasm of the current
neoconservatives, we have three ways. One, on blastoff, this
is extremely difficult to do, but we're trying to create a
laser, carried in a Boeing 747, that would hit one. You've
got to be virtually on top of the launch site in order to do
so. It’s never worked. It probably doesn't work, and it's
just expensive.
The much more common one would be to down the hostile
missile, while it is in outer space, from having given up
its launch vehicle and is now heading at very high speed
toward the United States. This is what the interceptors that
have been put in the ground at Fort Greely, Alaska, and a
couple of them at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California,
are supposed to do. They have never once yet had a
successful intercept. The radar is not there to actually
track the allegedly hostile vehicle. As one senior Pentagon
scientist said the other day, these are really essentially
scarecrows, hoping that they would scare off the North
Koreans.
This is a catastrophic misuse of resources against a
small and failed communist state, North Korea. There is no
easier thing on earth to detect than a hostile missile
launch, and the proper approach to preventing that is
deterrence. We have thought about it, worked on it,
practiced it, studied it now for decades. The North Koreans
have an excellent reputation for rationality. They know if
they did launch such a vehicle at Japan or at the United
States, they would disappear the next day in a retaliatory
strike, and they don't do it.
It's why, in the case of Iran, the only logical thing to
do is to learn to live with a nuclear-armed Iran. It's
inevitable for a country now surrounded by nuclear powers --
the United States in the Persian Gulf, the Soviet Union,
Israel, Pakistan and India. The Iranians are rationalists
and recognize the only way you're ever going to dissuade
people from using their nuclear power to intimidate us is a
threat of retaliation. So we are developing our minimal
deterrent, and we should learn to live with it.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Chalmers Johnson, you have
just completed your trilogy. Your first book, Blowback,
then Sorrows of Empire, and now finally Nemesis:
The Last Days of the American Republic. What is your
prediction?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, I don't see any way out of
it. I think it's gone too far. I think we are domestically
too dependent on the military-industrial complex, that every
time -- I mean, it's perfectly logical for any Secretary of
Defense to try and close military bases that are redundant,
that are useless, that are worn out, that go back to the
Civil War. Any time he tries to do it, you produce an uproar
in the surrounding community from newspapers, television,
priests, local politicians: save our base.
The two mother hens of the Defense Facilities
Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the
people committed to taking care of our bases are easily Kay
Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Dianne Feinstein of
California, the two states with the largest number of
military bases, and those two senators would do anything in
their power to keep them open. This is the insidious way in
which the military-industrial complex has penetrated into
our democracy and gravely weakened it, produced vested
interests in what I call military Keynesianism, the use and
manipulation of what is now three-quarters of a trillion
dollars of the Defense budget, once you include all the
other things that aren't included in just the single
appropriation for the Department of Defense.
This is a -- it's out of control. We depend upon it, we
like it, we live off of it. I cannot imagine any President
of any party putting together the coalition of forces that
could begin to break into these vested interests, any more
than a Gorbachev was able to do it in his attempted reforms
of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
AMY GOODMAN: Is there anything, Chalmers, that
gives you hope?
CHALMERS JOHNSON: Well, that's exactly what we're
doing this morning. That is, the only way -- you've got to
reconstitute the constitutional system in America, or it is
over. That is that empires -- once you go in the direction
of empire, you ultimately lead to overstretch, bankruptcy,
coalitions of nations hostile to your imperialism. We're
well on that route.
The way that it might be stopped is by a mobilization of
inattentive citizens. I don't know that that's going to
happen. I’m extremely dubious, given the nature of
conglomerate control of, say, the television networks in
America for the sake of advertising revenue. We see Rupert
Murdoch talking about buying a third of the Los Angeles
Times. But, nonetheless, there is the internet, there is
Amy Goodman, there are -- there's a lot more information
than there was.
One of the things I have experienced in these three books
is a much more receptive audience of alarmed Americans to
Nemesis than to the previous two books, where there was
considerable skepticism, so that one -- if we do see a
renaissance of citizenship in America, then I believe we
could recapture our government. If we continue politics as
in the past, then I think there is no alternative but to say
Nemesis is in the country, she's on the premises, and she is
waiting to carry out her divine mission.
AMY GOODMAN: Chalmers Johnson, his new book is
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. It's the
last volume in his Blowback trilogy, following the
best-selling Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire.
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