The title of Chalmers Johnson’s latest book, the last in his trilogy of empire, invokes the Greek goddess of retribution.  He named the first book in his trilogy after the CIA term for the harmful unintended consequences that sometimes result from the agency’s covert policies.  “Blowback,” he wrote, “is but another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows,” which is but another way of saying that there is a moral order in the world that men violate at their peril; that justice may be delayed but is nonetheless certain.  In Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000), which he finished writing in the summer of 1999, Johnson warned:

The innocent of the twenty-first century are going to harvest unexpected blowback disasters from the imperialist escapades of recent decades.  Although most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was, and still is, being done in their name, all are likely to pay a steep price—individually and collectively—for their nation’s continued efforts to dominate the global scene.

The book went unnoticed before September 11.  Now, Chalmers Johnson has been on C-SPAN and interviewed by NPR, but anyone who believes he is being read, and heeded, by large numbers of Americans, especially among the leadership class, should consider the fate of the Trojan prophetess Cassandra, to whom Apollo gave the gift of prophecy but later, in a fit of pique, decreed that she should never be believed.

Johnson is aware of the inefficacy of unwelcome truth.  He observed in the second volume of his trilogy, Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (2004), that “most Americans do not recognize—or do not want to recognize—that [their nation] dominates the world through its military power.”  They prefer comforting illusions of innocence and Davidic revenge.

Thomas Jefferson’s metaphorical “empire of liberty” aside, empire is defined as the rule or domination of subject peoples by another nation.  That power can be exercised in many ways, but the essence remains the same.  There have been imperial republics: Athens after the Persian Wars; Rome before Caesar; Great Britain up to the middle of the 20th century; the United States since 1945.  There have been imperial autocracies, such as Napoleonic France and Augustan Rome.

Johnson argues that the United States has been an “empire of bases.”  According to the 2002 Base Structure Report, 725 of these existed in 38 countries.  The 2004 report lists 737.  Not included are secret military bases (e.g., in Israel), nonsecret bases in countries whose rulers prefer minimum publicity, recently constructed bases, listening outposts for communications intelligence (often disguised), and secret prisons and interrogation centers operated by the CIA.  Johnson concludes that the real number must be over a thousand.  They serve, he believes, five purposes: imperial policing and force projection; electronic spying; petroleum security; profit-making for military contractors and the arms industry; and colonial comfort for the officer class.  Remarkably, the list bears no relation to the professed aims of American policymakers—spreading democracy, securing the homeland—which he regards as pure political fictions.  If the federal government is defending the homeland, then why are the southern borders a sieve?

Blowback remains essential reading because it reveals how President George W. Bush’s unilateral belligerency, however recklessly and ineptly executed, represents not a departure from, but an intensification of, the policy of imperial military expansion pursued by his two predecessors.  Ostensibly, Clinton intervened in the Balkans to halt ethnic cleansing; in reality, he did so to guard the proposed AMBO (Albanian-Macedonian-Bulgarian) trans-Balkan pipeline with new permanent bases, including Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, built by the military contractor KBR.  He also fired cruise missiles into a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant (1998), bombed Belgrade (1999), and refused to sign the international treaty banning land mines (1997).

It was not Condoleezza Rice but Madeleine Albright who boasted in 1998 that, “if we have to use force, it is because we are America.  We are the indispensable nation.  We stand tall.  We see farther into the future.”  And anyone who believes that the election of a Democrat in 2008 will lead to a prudential retreat from any part of the world should recall Secretary of Defense William Cohen’s declaration in 1997 that the United States will keep armed forces in Korea even after the reunification of the country.

Officially, President Bush invaded Iraq to topple a dictator who threatened the American homeland.  Johnson offers another explanation: The thing was done because it could be done.  The empire has become self-perpetuating and self-justifying, not a means to an end, but an end in itself.  It exists only for the sake of its builders, suppliers, administrators, and enforcers.  Albright’s infamous question to General Powell in the early 90’s—“What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”—sums up the situation nicely, as does Hannah Arendt’s insight that “the central political idea of imperialism is expansion.”  One intervention leads to another, and failure serves just as well as, or even better than, success; retaliatory blowback and resentment are as rewarding as the offer of basing rights or the expression of gratitude, for the reason that it justifies more spending, more intervention, and more war.  And the American public pays the price—in interest payments on an expanding national debt; in a progressive loss of liberty at home as imperial interventions generate retaliation and render them less secure; in a chronic state of fear; and in a neglect of pressing domestic needs.

Johnson charges that the government hides the true cost of its imperial establishment. He believes the real amount is nearly double the official defense budget.  In a follow-up essay, he cites figures put together by Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute.  For Fiscal Year 2006, the Department of Defense spent $499.4 billion.  Higgs adds the State Department’s foreign military aid program, $25.3 billion; the Department of Energy’s nuclear program, $16.6 billion; Veterans’ Affairs, $69.8 billion; Homeland Security, $69.1 billion; interest payments on past defense borrowing, $206.7 billion.  Add various other defense-related programs and the total reaches $935 billion.

Johnson omits the cost of recapitalizing the Armed Forces (replacing worn out Bradleys and Apaches), which retired Gen. William Odom estimates at $400 billion for the Army alone.  All these sums represent a vast squandering of national wealth, the equivalent of tossing thousands of gold bars into the ocean.  Johnson rightly considers it military Keynesianism, and, while it creates jobs and enriches a few in the short term, it is bankrupting the country.

It is also subverting the republic.  Black budgets, official secrecy, official lying, the unitary presidency, corporate funding of election campaigns (including the political contributions of defense contractors), the revolving door between corporation and state (which allows for the circulation of elites from the board room to the state room, and back again) are practices inimical to self-government.  They continue because a corrupt political class is incapable of reforming itself, and the public is disengaged and inattentive.  Johnson also blames a complicit corporate media and “the difficulties of mobilizing our large and diverse population.”  That is an indirect reference to immigration policy, which he otherwise ignores.

Imported diversity has proved a two-edged sword for the government.  It has enriched the plutocracy by swelling the number of workers and consumers; and it has protected it by fracturing the body politic into a thousand antagonistic pieces.  (How can there be a populist reaction without a people?)  And it has deprived it of a united and spirited population willing to pay and fight for the empire.

That empire is now run according to the profit motive.  Private contractors build and maintain the infrastructure, provide logistics, train foreign soldiers, and field armies of mercenaries.  There are 50,000 such private warriors in Iraq alone.  That infrastructure is funded by bond sales to rich investors.  Johnson believes that this debt, coupled with chronic trade deficits, will eventually bring the empire down.  Chronic ineptitude and arrogant folly only hasten that day.  Smart leaders would have got out of Afghanistan in six months, and never have gone into Iraq.  But where’s the profit in such prudence?

For Johnson, the only question is whether the republic—understood as both a constitutional order of laws and a commonwealth—will outlast the empire.  The danger is that the empire will persist, propped up by foreign investors and soldiers of fortune, long enough to wreck the republic and the country irredeemably.

The wars of the 21st century will be fought over land, living space, and limited resources (fresh water, forests, fertility), as overpopulation, overdevelopment, overconsumption, and overheating push the planet to the brink of apocalypse.  Our best defense against its horsemen is good government, conservation, and sensible planning.  Instead of industrial farms, family farms.  Instead of coal, gas, and oil, nuclear, solar, and hydrogen plants.  Instead of bases across Eurasia, bases along the Mexican border.  Instead of mass immigration, an immigration moratorium.  Instead of war, peace.

 

[Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, by Chalmers Johnson (New York: Henry Holt & Co.) 354 pp., $26.00]