Can We End the American Empire Before It Ends Us?

By Chalmers Johnson
chicobeat.com, October 12, 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

The United States 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.

George W. Bush and his top officials pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to put together a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's nuclear weapons that both the administration and the Agency knew to be patently dishonest. They then used it 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 Guantanamo 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 alone constitute more than adequate grounds for impeachment. 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."

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.

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. 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.

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. Seymour Hersh, for 40 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."

Of the failings mentioned by Hersh, that of the military is particularly striking. It 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. The idea that the U.S. was an unquestioned military colossus, which no power or people could effectively oppose, was hubristic nonsense.

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 went underground, tolerated an orgy of looting and lawlessness throughout the country, disobeyed orders and ignored international obligations, and incompetently fanned the flames of an insurgency by committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.

A sign of the disaster to come in Iraq arrived via an April 26 posting from the courageous but anonymous Sunni woman who, 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."

In October 2006, the British Medical Association 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 over 600,000 more Iraqi deaths from violence than would have been expected without a war. The British and American governments at first dismissed the findings, and the American media ignored the study, played down its importance, or dismissed its figures.

Many other aspects of imperialism and militarism are undermining America's constitutional system. For example, the privatization of military and intelligence functions is 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. Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, said 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."

America's massive "military" budgets are beginning to threaten the U.S. with bankruptcy. Spending on the military establishment 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 binge. 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 percent 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.

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. 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. On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimated "the economic impact of the Iraq war and higher military spending." The report concludes that "military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment."

The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge 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.

Even to contemplate a drawing back from empire, 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.

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 a closing-up process for at least 700 of the 737 military bases we maintain in over 130 foreign countries.

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. The United States needs to cease being the world's largest supplier of arms and munitions. Our goal should be a return to leading by example rather than by continually resorting to unilateral armed force and repeated foreign military interventions.

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. We should eliminate as much secrecy as possible.

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. I believe that, if we leave Iraq and our other imperial enclaves, we can regain the moral high ground.
 

Uncovering the Empire's New Clothes

By Ethan Vesely-Flad
Fellowship, Winter 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

In what he describes as an "inadvertent trilogy," Chalmers Johnson warns of an imperial pathology that has captured the United States.

His first volume, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, was released in 2000 — but became a bestseller after the September 2001 al Qaida attacks on the United States. Johnson had essentially predicted the attacks by outlining the ways that the U.S.'s extensive and continuing legacy of global intervention would eventually spark a retaliation by those who bore the brunt of that imperial agenda.

Three years later, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic described the inevitable breakdown of what many people insist is the "greatest country on earth." Johnson outlined four fundamental results of U.S. domestic and foreign policy: endless war, the loss of constitutional freedoms, a culture of lying and deceit, and an impending national economic failure due to our massive investment in the military-industrial complex.

Now, in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, Johnson seeks to present historical, political, economic, and philosophical evidence of where U.S. current behavior is likely to lead. He believes that "to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent."
 

Apocalypse Now?

By Stephen Holmes
The Nation, October 29, 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

Is there anything historically unprecedented about the Bush Administration's military adventurism, intense secrecy and fearmongering?

Chalmers Johnson, a former Navy man, cold war consultant to the CIA and emeritus professor at the University of California, San Diego, helps us unravel this mystery by breathing new life into an old myth. In ancient Greece, Nemesis was the goddess of divine retribution for acts of hubris. Transgressions would never go unpunished; balance and proportion would inevitably be restored. The contemporary incarnation of Nemesis is "blowback," a notion apparently coined by the CIA.

Johnson has no patience for those who attribute terrorism to a clash of civilizations. He argues that anti-American rage, rather than emerging fully formed from a highly malleable religious tradition, has been triggered by decades of immoral and illegal behavior by American officials and proxies abroad. Identifying blowback as the root cause of 9/11, Johnson also argues that Bush's excessively violent and lawless reaction to the attack, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, will provoke blowback of its own.

Johnson speculates that we have already entered the "last days" of the Republic. America's post-World War II "imperialism," he predicts, will soon put an end to self-government in the United States. The destruction of the American Republic may even illustrate a profound historical regularity: "Over any fairly lengthy period of time, successful imperialism requires that a domestic republic or a domestic democracy change into a domestic tyranny."

Johnson's conviction that imperialism tends to transform democracies into autocracies is based largely on his study of ancient Rome. "Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end," Johnson writes, adding that "Bush has unleashed a political crisis comparable to the one Julius Caesar posed for the Roman constitution," threatening to subvert the traditional constitutional order and put dictatorship in its place.

One reason for Johnson's end-of-days gloom is that he can identify no power center capable of resisting the forces that currently drive American foreign policy. In his words, "our political system may no longer be capable of saving the United States as we know it, since it is hard to imagine any president or Congress standing up to the powerful vested interests of the Pentagon, the secret intelligence agencies, and the military-industrial complex."

In the past, Johnson argues, "the separation of powers, even if no longer a true balance of power, continued to serve as a check on any claims of presidential dominance." That last rampart has now been breached, he concludes, pointing to warrantless wiretaps and ghost prisons as conspicuous examples of unilateral executive actions undertaken with negligible oversight or accountability.

Behind checks and balances lies a simple insight: an executive branch that is consistently shielded from well-informed criticisms is highly unlikely to perform well. By stressing the pathological effects of excessive executive-branch secrecy and the inability of a corrupted legislature to challenge it effectively, Johnson brings us a step closer to understanding the historical uniqueness of the Bush Administration.

To understand what makes the current Administration seem unprecedented in American history, it's probably best to focus on the expansion of executive secrecy and the concomitant weakening of checks and balances, undertaken in response not to a palpable threat from a militarily powerful hostile state but to evanescent and unquantifiable threats from future unknown jihadists. For the executive to ask Congress and the country, on the basis of undisclosed information, for unchecked powers to fight an enemy whose true capacities are impossible to ascertain and who will perhaps continue to lurk in the shadows forever — that is truly unprecedented.

Gazing into his crystal ball, Johnson reports that "we will never again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation, unless we abolish the CIA, restore intelligence collecting to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon." In other words, the United States will be embroiled in foreign wars until it collapses.

But it is hard to take Johnson's pose seriously. His tendency to discover the inevitable unfolding of higher justice in every unintended consequence of immoral behavior can only be ascribed to wishful thinking.
 

Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific. He taught for thirty years, 1962-1992, at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California and held endowed chairs in Asian politics at both of them. At Berkeley he served as chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies and as chairman of the Department of Political Science. His B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in economics and political science are all from the University of California, Berkeley.
 

AR  Johnson is quite an idealist. What about oil? What about global leadership and manifest destiny? Why not play hardball? Someone has to play the big baddy or the game of history loses its zest. On the other hand, maybe Americans should try for a nobler destiny.
 

The RAND Corporation

By Chalmers Johnson

Edited by Andy Ross

Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire
By Alex Abella
Harcourt, 400 pages

The RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California, was set up immediately after World War II and soon became a key institutional building block of the Cold War American empire. As the premier think tank for the U.S.'s role as hegemon of the Western world, RAND was instrumental in giving that empire the militaristic cast it retains to this day and in hugely enlarging official demands for atomic bombs, nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. Without RAND, our military-industrial complex, as well as our democracy, would look quite different.

Alex Abella has made a valiant effort to uncover RAND's internal struggles. But Abella's book is profoundly schizophrenic. On the one hand, the author is breathlessly captivated by RAND's fast-talking economists, mathematicians, and thinkers-about-the-unthinkable; on the other hand, he agrees with Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis that, in promoting the interests of the Air Force, RAND concocted an "unnecessary Cold War" that gave the dying Soviet empire an extra 30 years of life.

We need a study that takes a more jaundiced view of RAND's geniuses, Nobel prize winners, and self-professed saviors of the Western world. It is likely that, after the American empire has gone the way of all previous empires, the RAND Corporation will be more accurately seen as a handmaiden of the government that was always super-cautious about speaking truth to power.

RAND was the brainchild of General H.H. Arnold, chief of staff of the Army Air Corps from 1941 until it became the Air Force in 1947, and his chief wartime scientific adviser, the aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán. In the beginning, RAND was a free-standing division within the Douglas Aircraft Company. Its first head was Franklin R. Collbohm, a Douglas engineer and test pilot. In May 1948, RAND was incorporated as a not-for-profit entity independent of Douglas, but it continued to receive the bulk of its funding from the Air Force, and began to accept extensive support from the Ford Foundation.

Collbohm stayed on as chief executive officer until 1966, when he was forced out in disputes between the Air Force and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara's "whiz kids" were Defense intellectuals, many of whom had worked at RAND and were determined to restructure the armed forces to cut costs and curb interservice rivalries. Collbohm was replaced by Henry S. Rowan, an MIT-educated engineer turned economist and strategist.

RAND's golden age of creativity lasted from approximately 1950 to 1970. During that period its theorists worked diligently on such new analytical techniques and inventions as systems analysis, game theory, reconnaissance satellites, the Internet, advanced computers, digital communications, missile defense, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. During the 1970s, RAND began to turn to projects in the civilian world, such as health financing systems, insurance, and urban governance.

Much of RAND's work was always ideological, designed to support the American values of individualism and personal gratification as well as to counter Marxism, but its ideological bent was disguised in statistics and equations, which allegedly made its analyses "rational" and "scientific." Most RAND analyses were formal, deductive, and mathematical but rarely based on concrete research into actually functioning societies.

For example, RAND's research conclusions on the Third World, limited war, and counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War were notably wrong-headed. It argued that the United States should support "military modernization" in underdeveloped countries and that military takeovers and military rule were good things. The result was that virtually every government in East Asia during the 1960s and 1970s was a U.S.-backed military dictatorship, including South Vietnam, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan.

Following the axioms of mathematical economics, RAND researchers tended to lump all human motives under what the Canadian political scientist C.B. Macpherson called "possessive individualism" and not to analyze them further. Therefore, they often misunderstood mass political movements, failing to appreciate the strength of organizations like the Vietcong and its resistance to the RAND-conceived Vietnam War strategy of "escalated" bombing of military and civilian targets.

Similarly, RAND researchers saw Soviet motives in the blackest, most unnuanced terms. Abella observes, "For a place where thinking the unthinkable was supposed to be the common coin, strangely enough there was virtually no internal RAND debate on the nature of the Soviet Union or on the validity of existing American policies to contain it. RANDites took their cues from the military's top echelons."

Among the notables who worked for RAND were Kenneth Arrow, John Forbes Nash, Herbert Simon, Paul Samuelson, and Edmund Phelps, each of whom became a Nobel Laureate in economics. Other major figures were Bruno Augenstein, who invented the multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV), and Paul Baran, who studied communications systems that could survive a nuclear attack, which led in time to the Internet. Others at RAND were Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Samuel Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb.

The most notorious RAND writers and theorists were the nuclear war strategists: Bernard Brodie, one of the earliest analysts of nuclear deterrence; Thomas Schelling , a pioneer in the study of strategic bargaining and a Nobel Laureate in economics; James Schlesinger ,Secretary of Defense from 1973 to 1975; Herman Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War (1960); and Albert Wohlstetter, easily the best known of all RAND researchers.

Abella calls Wohlstetter "the leading intellectual figure at RAND," and describes him as "self-assured to the point of arrogance." Wohlstetter, he adds, "personified the imperial ethos of the mandarins who made America the center of power and culture in the postwar Western world."

Starting in 1967, I was a consultant for RAND and became personally acquainted with Albert Wohlstetter. In 1967, he and I attended a meeting in New Delhi of the Institute of Strategic Studies to help promote the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Wohlstetter gave a display of his well-known arrogance by announcing to the delegates that he did not believe India, as a civilization, "deserved an atom bomb." India would join the nuclear club in 1974.

Albert Wohlstetter was born and raised in Manhattan and studied mathematics at the City College of New York and Columbia University. After World War II, Wohlstetter moved to Southern California. In 1951, he was recruited by Charles Hitch for RAND's Mathematics Division, where he worked on mathematical logic. Wohlstetter then became intrigued by the issues involved in providing airbases for Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers. He came up with a comprehensive and sophisticated basing study that ran directly counter to the ideas of General Curtis LeMay, then the head of SAC.

In 1951, there were a total of 32 SAC bases in Europe and Asia, all located close to the borders of the Soviet Union. Wohlstetter's team discovered that the bombers were parked out in the open, without fortified hangars, and that SAC's radar defenses could easily be circumvented by low-flying Soviet bombers. RAND calculated that the USSR would need "only" 120 tactical nuclear bombs of 40 kilotons each to destroy up to 85% of SAC's European-based fleet. LeMay, who had long favored a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, reasoned that the loss of his bombers would only mean that they could be replaced with more modern aircraft. He also believed that the appropriate retaliatory strategy for the United States involved what he called a "Sunday punch," massive retaliation using all available American nuclear weapons. SAC planners proposed annihilating three-quarters of the population in each of 188 Russian cities.

Wohlstetter's answer to this holocaust was to start thinking about how a country might actually wage a nuclear war. He is credited with coming up with a number of concepts, all now accepted U.S. military doctrine. One is "second-strike capability," which is considered the ultimate deterrent against an enemy nation launching a first strike. Another is "fail-safe procedures," thereby providing some protection against accidental war. Wohlstetter also championed the idea that all retaliatory bombers should be based in the continental United States.

Wohlstetter's ideas put an end to the strategy of terror attacks on Soviet cities in favor of a "counter-force strategy" that targeted Soviet military installations. He also promoted the dispersal and "hardening" of SAC bases to make them less susceptible to preemptive attacks and strongly supported using reconnaissance aircraft and orbiting satellites to acquire accurate intelligence on Soviet bomber and missile strength. By October 1953, the Air Force had accepted most of Wohlstetter's recommendations.

In 1963, RAND chief Frank Collbohm fired Wohlstetter. Wohlstetter became a tenured professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He continued to vastly overstate the threat of Soviet power and enthusiastically backed every movement that came along calling for stepped up war preparations against the USSR.

Naturally, he supported the creation of "Team B" when George H. W. Bush was head of the CIA in 1976. Team B consisted of a group of anti-Soviet professors and polemicists who were convinced that the CIA was "far too forgiving of the Soviet Union." Actually, by the late 1970s and 1980s, the fatal sclerosis of the Soviet economy was well underway. But Team B set the stage for the Reagan administration to expend massive sums on arms. In return, Ronald Reagan bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Wohlstetter in November 1985.

RAND has espoused a broad range of ideas from "rational choice theory" to the systematic execution of Vietnamese in the CIA's Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. As an institution, the RAND Corporation remains one of the most potent and complex purveyors of American imperialism. While RAND has an unparalleled record of providing unbiased, unblinking analyses of technical and carefully limited problems involved in waging contemporary war, its record of advice on cardinal policies involving war and peace, the protection of civilians in wartime, arms races, and decisions to resort to armed force has been abysmal.

In Vietnam, RAND invented the theories that led two administrations to military escalation against North Vietnam. Abella comments, "RAND found itself bound by the power of the purse wielded by its patron, whether it be the Air Force or the Office of the Secretary of Defense." And it has always relied on classifying its research to protect itself, even when no military secrets were involved.

RAND created an in-house, fully accredited graduate school of public policy that offers Ph.D. degrees to American and foreign students. Founded in 1970 as the RAND Graduate Institute and today known as the Frederick S. Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS), it had, by January 2006, awarded over 180 Ph.D.s in microeconomics, statistics, and econometrics, social and behavioral sciences, and operations research. Its faculty numbers 54 professors, and it has an annual student body of approximately 900.