Evil Empire
Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for
America?By Chalmers Johnson
05/17/07 "ICH"
-- -- In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a
false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening
the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United
States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most
of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that
have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system
of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies
proposed so far by American politicians or analysts
addresses the root causes of the problem.
According to an
NBC
News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26,
2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be
headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush
administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on
this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was
running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't
agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all,
what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.
The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though
large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of
the political system itself led the country into its current
crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course
correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of
the New York Times
reported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000
American citizens had already contributed some $113.6
million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham
Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph
Giuliani, or John McCain.
If these people actually believe a presidential election
a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the
country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money.
As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism,
puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace
President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the
system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of
power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize
it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch
but to regain them."
George W. Bush has, of course, flagrantly violated his
oath of office, which requires him "to protect and defend
the constitution," and the opposition party has been
remarkably reluctant to hold him to account. Among the "high
crimes and misdemeanors" that, under other political
circumstances, would surely constitute the Constitutional
grounds for impeachment are these: the President and his top
officials pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to put
together a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's
nuclear weapons that both the administration and the Agency
knew to be patently dishonest. They then used this false NIE
to justify an American war of aggression. After launching an
invasion of Iraq, the administration unilaterally
reinterpreted international and domestic law to permit the
torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in
Baghdad, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at other secret
locations around the world.
Nothing in the Constitution, least of all the
commander-in-chief clause, allows the president to commit
felonies. Nonetheless, within days after the 9/11 attacks,
President Bush had signed a secret executive order
authorizing a new policy of "extraordinary rendition," in
which the CIA is allowed to kidnap terrorist suspects
anywhere on Earth and transfer them to prisons in countries
like Egypt, Syria, or Uzbekistan, where torture is a normal
practice, or to secret CIA prisons outside the United States
where Agency operatives themselves do the torturing.
On the home front, despite the post-9/11 congressional
authorization of new surveillance powers to the
administration, its officials chose to ignore these and, on
its own initiative, undertook extensive spying on American
citizens without obtaining the necessary judicial warrants
and without reporting to Congress on this program. These
actions are prima-facie violations of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (and subsequent
revisions) and of Amendment IV of the Constitution.
These alone constitute more than adequate grounds for
impeachment, while hardly scratching the surface. And yet,
on the eve of the national elections of November 2006, then
House Minority Leader, now Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.),
pledged on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that
"impeachment is off the table." She called it "a waste of
time." And six months after the Democratic Party took
control of both houses of Congress, the prison at Guantánamo
Bay was still open and conducting drumhead courts martial of
the prisoners held there; the CIA was still using "enhanced
interrogation techniques" on prisoners in foreign jails;
illegal intrusions into the privacy of American citizens
continued unabated; and, more than fifty years after the
CIA was founded, it continues to operate under, at best, the
most perfunctory congressional oversight.
Promoting Lies, Demoting Democracy
Without question, the administration's catastrophic war
in Iraq is the single overarching issue that has convinced a
large majority of Americans that the country is "heading in
the wrong direction." But the war itself is the outcome of
an imperial presidency and the abject failure of Congress to
perform its Constitutional duty of oversight. Had the
government been working as the authors of the Constitution
intended, the war could not have occurred. Even now, the
Democratic majority remains reluctant to use its power of
the purse to cut off funding for the war, thereby ending the
American occupation of Iraq and starting to curtail the
ever-growing power of the military-industrial complex.
One major problem of the American social and political
system is the failure of the press, especially television
news, to inform the public about the true breadth of the
unconstitutional activities of the executive branch. As
Frederick A. O. Schwarz and Aziz Z. Huq, the authors of
Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of
Terror, observe, "For the public to play its proper
checking role at the ballot box, citizens must know what is
done by the government in their names."
Instead of uncovering administration lies and
manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the
first amendment to the Constitution protects the press
precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the
bureaucrat's most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a
result of this failure, democratic oversight of the
government by an actively engaged citizenry did not -- and
could not -- occur. The people of the United States became
mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists,
vested interests, and foreign operatives -- including
domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi
exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile
industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the
military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of
the professional military establishment -- essentially
hijacked the government.
Some respected professional journalists do not see these
failings as the mere result of personal turpitude but rather
as deep structural and cultural problems within the American
system as it exists today. In an
interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty
years one of America's leading investigative reporters, put
the matter this way:
"All of the institutions we thought would protect us --
particularly the press, but also the military, the
bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed… So all
the things that we expect would normally carry us
through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is
the press, because that's the most glaring…. What can be
done to fix the situation? [long pause] You'd have to
fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and
executives."
Veteran analyst of the press (and former presidential
press secretary), Bill Moyers, considering a classic moment
of media failure,
concluded: "The disgraceful press reaction to Colin
Powell's presentation at the United Nations [on February 5,
2003] seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key
British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a
student's thesis, downloaded from the Web -- with the
student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with
'plagiarism.'"
As a result of such multiple failures (still ongoing),
the executive branch easily misled the American public.
A Made-in-America Human Catastrophe
Of the failings mentioned by Hersh, that of the military
is particularly striking, resembling as it does the failures
of the Vietnam era, thirty-plus years earlier. One would
have thought the high command had learned some lessons from
the defeat of 1975. Instead, it once again went to war
pumped up on our own propaganda -- especially the conjoined
beliefs that the United States was the "indispensable
nation," the "lone superpower," and the "victor" in the Cold
War; and that it was a new Rome the likes of which the world
had never seen, possessing as it did -- from the heavens to
the remotest spot on the planet -- "full spectrum
dominance." The idea that the U.S. was an unquestioned
military colossus athwart the world, which no power or
people could effectively oppose, was hubristic nonsense
certain to get the country into deep trouble -- as it did --
and bring the U.S. Army to the point of collapse, as
happened in Vietnam and may well happen again in Iraq (and
Afghanistan).
Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our
military invaded Iraq with far too small a force; failed to
respond adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army (and
Baathist Party) went underground; tolerated an orgy of
looting and lawlessness throughout the country; disobeyed
orders and ignored international obligations (including the
obligation of an occupying power to protect the facilities
and treasures of the occupied country -- especially, in this
case,
Baghdad's National Museum and other archaeological sites
of untold historic value); and incompetently fanned the
flames of an insurgency against our occupation, committing
numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.
According to Andrew Bacevich, "Next to nothing can be
done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within the capacity
of the United States to determine the outcome of events
there." Our former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas W.
Freeman, says of President Bush's recent "surge" strategy in
Baghdad and al-Anbar Province: "The reinforcement of failure
is a poor substitute for its correction."
Symbolically, a certain sign of the disaster to come in
Iraq arrived via an April 26th posting from the courageous
but anonymous Sunni woman who has, since August 2003,
published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her
family,
she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile
-- joining
up to two million of her compatriots who have left the
country. In her final dispatch, she wrote:
"There are moments when the injustice of having to leave
your country simply because an imbecile got it into his
head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in
order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our
home and what remains of family and friends.... And to
what?"
Retired General Barry McCaffrey, commander of the 24th
Infantry Division in the first Iraq war and a consistent
cheerleader for Bush strategies in the second, recently
radically changed his tune. He now
says, "No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier,
diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the
streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor
Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed
protection." In a different context, Gen. McCaffrey has
concluded: "The U.S. Army is rapidly unraveling."
Even military failure in Iraq is still being spun into an
endless web of lies and distortions by the White House, the
Pentagon, military pundits, and the now-routine reporting of
propagandists disguised as journalists. For example, in the
first months of 2007, rising car-bomb attacks in Baghdad
were
making a mockery of Bush administration and Pentagon
claims that the U.S. troop escalation in the capital had
brought about "a dramatic drop in sectarian violence." The
official response to this problem: the Pentagon simply
quit including deaths from car bombings in its count of
sectarian casualties. (It has never attempted to report
civilian casualties publicly or accurately.) Since August
2003, there have been over 1,050 car bombings in Iraq. One
study
estimates that through June 2006 the death toll from
these alone has been a staggering 78,000 Iraqis.
The war and occupation George W. Bush unleashed in Iraq
has proved unimaginably lethal for unarmed civilians, but
reporting the true levels of lethality in Iraq, or the
nature of the direct American role in it was, for a long
time, virtually taboo in the U.S. media. As late as October
2006, the journal of the British Medical Association, The
Lancet, published a study conducted by researchers from
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and al-Mustansiriya
University in Baghdad estimating that, since March 2003,
there were some 601,027 more Iraqi deaths from violence than
would have been expected without a war. The British and
American governments at first dismissed the findings,
claiming the research was based on faulty statistical
methods -- and the American media ignored the study, played
down its importance, or dismissed its figures.
On March 27, 2007, however, it was revealed that the
chief scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defense,
Roy Anderson, had offered a more honest response. The
methods used in the study were,
he wrote, "close to best practice." Another British
official described them as "a tried and tested way of
measuring mortality in conflict zones." Over 600,000 violent
deaths in a population estimated in 2006 at 26.8 million --
that is, one in every 45 individuals -- amounts to a
made-in-America human catastrophe.
One subject that the government, the military, and the
news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and
murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when
operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background
racism that is embedded in many Americans' mental make-up
and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed
into recruits during military training, they do not see
assaults on unarmed "rag heads" or "hajis" as murder. The
cult of silence on this subject began to slip only slightly
in May 2007 when a report prepared by the Army's Mental
Health Advisory Team was
leaked to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Based on
anonymous surveys and focus groups involving 1,320 soldiers
and 447 Marines, the study revealed that only 56% of
soldiers would report a unit member for injuring or killing
an innocent noncombatant, while a mere 40% of Marines would
do so. Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to
the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly
trained soldier. If so, then the answer to this problem is
to ensure that, in the future, there are many fewer
imperialist wars of choice sponsored by the United States.
The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex
Many other aspects of imperialism and militarism are
undermining America's Constitutional system. By now, for
example, the privatization of military and intelligence
functions is totally out of control, beyond the law, and
beyond any form of Congressional oversight. It is also
incredibly lucrative for the owners and operators of
so-called private military companies -- and the money to pay
for their activities ultimately comes from taxpayers through
government contracts. Any accounting of these funds, largely
distributed to crony companies with insider connections, is
chaotic at best. Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater:
The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army,
estimates that there are 126,000 private military
contractors in Iraq, more than enough to keep the war going,
even if most official U.S. troops were withdrawn. "From the
beginning," Scahill writes, "these contractors have been a
major hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the
mainstream media and absolutely central to maintaining the
U.S. occupation of Iraq."
America's massive "military" budgets, still on the rise,
are beginning to threaten the U.S. with bankruptcy, given
that its trade and fiscal deficits already easily make it
the world's largest net debtor nation. Spending on the
military establishment -- sometimes mislabeled "defense
spending" -- has
soared to the highest levels since World War II,
exceeding the budgets of the Korean and Vietnam War eras as
well as President Ronald Reagan's weapons-buying binge in
the 1980s. According to calculations by the National
Priorities Project, a non-profit research organization that
examines the local impact of federal spending policies,
military spending today
consumes 40% of every tax dollar.
Equally alarming, it is virtually impossible for a member
of Congress or an ordinary citizen to obtain even a modest
handle on the actual size of military spending or its impact
on the structure and functioning of our economic system.
Some $30 billion of the official Defense Department (DoD)
appropriation in the current fiscal year is "black," meaning
that it is allegedly going for
highly classified projects. Even the open DoD budget
receives only perfunctory scrutiny because members of
Congress, seeking lucrative defense contracts for their
districts, have mutually beneficial relationships with
defense contractors and the Pentagon. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower identified this phenomenon, in the draft version
of his 1961 farewell address, as the
"military-industrial-congressional complex." Forty-six years
later, in a way even Eisenhower probably couldn't have
imagined, the defense budget is beyond serious congressional
oversight or control.
The DoD always tries to minimize the size of its budget
by representing it as a declining percentage of the gross
national product. What it never reveals is that total
military spending is actually many times larger than the
official appropriation for the Defense Department. For
fiscal year 2006, Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute
calculated national security outlays at almost a
trillion dollars -- $934.9 billion to be exact -- broken
down as follows (in billions of dollars):
Department of Defense: $499.4
Department of Energy (atomic weapons): $16.6
Department of State (foreign military aid): $25.3
Department of Veterans Affairs (treatment of wounded
soldiers): $69.8
Department of Homeland Security (actual defense): $69.1
Department of Justice (1/3rd for the FBI): $1.9
Department of the Treasury (military retirements): $38.5
NASA (satellite launches): $7.6
Interest on war debts, 1916-present: $206.7
Totaled, the sum is larger than the combined sum spent by
all other nations on military security.
This spending helps sustain the national economy and
represents, essentially, a major jobs program. However, it
is beginning to crowd out the civilian economy, causing
stagnation in income levels. It also contributes to the
hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs to other countries. On
May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research
released a series of estimates on "the economic impact of
the Iraq war and higher military spending." Its figures
show, among other things, that, after an initial demand
stimulus, the effect of a significant rise in military
spending (as we've experienced in recent years) turns
negative around the sixth year.
Sooner or later, higher military spending forces
inflation and interest rates up, reducing demand in
interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, notably in annual
car and truck sales. Job losses follow. The non-military
construction and manufacturing sectors experience the
largest share of these losses.
The report concludes, "Most economic models show that
military spending diverts resources from productive uses,
such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows
economic growth and reduces employment."
Imperial Liquidation?
Imperialism and militarism have thus begun to imperil
both the financial and social well-being of our republic.
What the country desperately needs is a popular movement to
rebuild the Constitutional system and subject the government
once again to the discipline of checks and balances. Neither
the replacement of one political party by the other, nor
protectionist economic policies aimed at rescuing what's
left of our manufacturing economy will correct what has gone
wrong. Both of these solutions fail to address the root
cause of our national decline.
I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis
we face. The American people must make the decision to
dismantle both the empire that has been created in their
name and the huge (still growing) military establishment
that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that
undertaken by the British government when, after World War
II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain
avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a
domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have
been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of
the world by force.
For the U.S., the decision to mount such a campaign of
imperial liquidation may already come too late, given the
vast and deeply entrenched interests of the
military-industrial complex. To succeed, such an endeavor
might virtually require a revolutionary mobilization of the
American citizenry, one at least comparable to the civil
rights movement of the 1960s.
Even to contemplate a drawing back from empire --
something so inconceivable to our pundits and newspaper
editorial writers that it is simply never considered -- we
must specify as clearly as possible precisely what the
elected leaders and citizens of the United States would have
to do. Two cardinal decisions would have to be made. First,
in Iraq, we would have to initiate a firm timetable for
withdrawing all our military forces and turning over
the permanent military bases we have built to the Iraqis.
Second, domestically, we would have to reverse federal
budget priorities.
In the
words of Noam Chomsky, a venerable critic of American
imperialism: "Where spending is rising, as in military
supplemental bills to conduct the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, it would sharply decline. Where spending is
steady or declining (health, education, job training, the
promotion of energy conservation and renewable energy
sources, veterans benefits, funding for the UN and UN
peacekeeping operations, and so on), it would sharply
increase. Bush's tax cuts for people with incomes over
$200,000 a year would be immediately rescinded."
Such reforms would begin at once to reduce the malevolent
influence of the military-industrial complex, but many other
areas would require attention as well. As part of the
process of de-garrisoning the planet and liquidating our
empire, we would have to launch an orderly closing-up
process for at least 700 of the
737 military
bases we maintain (by official Pentagon count) in over
130 foreign countries on every continent except Antarctica.
We should ultimately aim at closing all our imperialist
enclaves, but in order to avoid isolationism and maintain a
capacity to assist the United Nations in global peacekeeping
operations, we should, for the time being, probably retain
some 37 of them, mostly naval and air bases.
Equally important, we should rewrite all our Status of
Forces Agreements -- those American-dictated "agreements"
that exempt our troops based in foreign countries from local
criminal laws, taxes, immigration controls, anti-pollution
legislation, and anything else the American military can
think of. It must be established as a matter of principle
and law that American forces stationed outside the U.S. will
deal with their host nations on a basis of equality, not of
extraterritorial privilege.
The American approach to diplomatic relations with the
rest of the world would also require a major overhaul. We
would have to end our belligerent unilateralism toward other
countries as well as our scofflaw behavior regarding
international law. Our objective should be to strengthen the
United Nations, including our respect for its majority, by
working to end the Security Council veto system (and by
stopping using our present right to veto). The United States
needs to cease being the world's largest supplier of arms
and munitions -- a lethal trade whose management should be
placed under UN supervision. We should encourage the UN to
begin outlawing weapons like land mines, cluster bombs, and
depleted-uranium ammunition that play particularly long-term
havoc with civilian populations. As part of an attempt to
right the diplomatic balance, we should take some obvious
steps like recognizing Cuba and ending our blockade of that
island and, in the Middle East, working to equalize aid to
Israel and Palestine, while attempting to broker a real
solution to that disastrous situation. Our goal should be a
return to leading by example -- and by sound arguments --
rather than by continual resort to unilateral armed force
and repeated foreign military interventions.
In terms of the organization of the executive branch, we
need to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947, taking
away from the CIA all functions that involve sabotage,
torture, subversion, overseas election rigging, rendition,
and other forms of clandestine activity. The president
should be deprived of his power to order these types of
operations except with the explicit advice and consent of
the Senate. The CIA should basically devote itself to the
collection and analysis of foreign intelligence. We should
eliminate as much secrecy as possible so that neither the
CIA, nor any other comparable organization ever again
becomes the president's private army.
In order to halt our economic decline and lessen our
dependence on our trading partners, the U.S. must cap its
trade deficits through the perfectly legal use of tariffs in
accordance with World Trade Organization rules, and it must
begin to
guide its domestic market in accordance with a national
industrial policy, just as the leading economies of the
world (particularly the Japanese and Chinese ones) do as a
matter of routine. Even though it may involve trampling on
the vested interests of American university economics
departments, there is simply no excuse for a continued
reliance on an outdated doctrine of "free trade."
Normally, a proposed list of reforms like this would
simply be rejected as utopian. I understand this reaction. I
do want to stress, however, that failure to undertake such
reforms would mean condemning the United States to the fate
that befell the Roman Republic and all other empires since
then. That is why I gave my book
Nemesis the subtitle "The Last Days of the American
Republic."
When Ronald Reagan coined the phrase "evil empire," he
was referring to the Soviet Union, and I basically agreed
with him that the USSR needed to be contained and
checkmated. But today it is the U.S. that is widely
perceived as an evil empire and world forces are gathering
to stop us. The Bush administration insists that if we leave
Iraq our enemies will "win" or -- even more improbably --
"follow us home." I believe that, if we leave Iraq and our
other imperial enclaves, we can regain the moral high ground
and disavow the need for a foreign policy based on
preventive war. I also believe that unless we follow this
path, we will lose our democracy and then it will not matter
much what else we lose. In the immortal words of Pogo, "We
have met the enemy and he is us."
Chalmers Johnson is the author of
Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2007). It is the final volume of
his Blowback Trilogy.
