Evil Empire: Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America?
By Chalmers Johnson
TomDispatch.com
Tuesday 15 May 2007
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 "hajjis" 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."
