The Sorrows of Empire
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

Der Spiegel magazine called Chalmers Johnson the "California Cassandra" for the prescience of his 2000 book, Blowback, which predicted that U.S. foreign policies were creating resentments abroad that could result in retaliatory attacks.

Blowback, Johnson explained, is a CIA term coined to describe the reaction to foreign operations the government keeps secret from Americans. For example, the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini was blowback to the CIA's covert actions in 1953, overthrowing Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosadegh.

After Blowback became a best seller and was reprinted 13 times in the post 9/11 era, Johnson wrote The Sorrows of Empire, which documents the U.S. military-industrial complex as it strives for "full-spectrum dominance" through perpetual war and secret operations. Noting that the U.S. maintains 725 military bases world wide—not including espionage bases, Air Force bases or 14 permanent bases under construction in Iraq—Johnson points out the many intrusions upon foreign populations and the fact that Americans never had to put up with foreign troops and have no idea the resentment our military bases create all over the world.

Covert espionage has been extended to commercial operations under the code name, "Echelon." The system, which targets international civil communications, is so secret that the National Security Administration has refused to admit it exists or to discuss it with delegations from the European Parliament who have come to Washington to protest such surveillance. Boeing, Enron, General Electric, and Bechtel have all benefited form this "state-sponsored information piracy." Americans may still prefer to use euphemisms such as "sole Super Power" and " indispensable nation," but historically our country has undergone "a transformation from republic to empire that may well prove irreversible," concludes Johnson.

A new picture of Empire has begun to emerge. The U.S. retains its centuries-old lock on Latin America and our close collaboration with the single-party government of Japan, although we are deeply disliked in Okinawa and South Korea. Our lack of legitimacy in the war with Iraq has undercut our position in what Donald Rumsfeld disparagingly called "the old Europe," so we are trying to compensate by finding allies and building bases in the much poorer, still struggling ex-Communist countries of Eastern Europe. In the oil-rich area of Southern Eurasia, we are building outposts in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia in an attempt to bring the whole area under American hegemony. Johnson then demonstrates with historically documented details that the U.S. did not do any of these things to fight terrorism, liberate Iraq, trigger a domino effect for the democratization of the Middle East, or the other excuses proffered by the ruling elite, but because of oil, Israel, and domestic politics—and to fulfill our self-perceived destiny as a new Rome. Johnson convincingly highlights the long historical involvement of the U.S. in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, showing how this country went from protector to predator.

"America is not to be Rome or Britain," insisted a testy Charles Beard, writing on the eve of war in 1939. Beard was certain that a second world war, like its predecessor two decades earlier, would be at root a contest for empire. If the U.S. allowed itself to be drawn into such a conflict, it would surely succumb to this imperial temptation, forfeiting, perhaps forever, its true vocation as a Great Republic.

During the Cold War itself, a few dissenters following in Beard's footsteps had dared to question American Exceptionalism, the proposition that the United States was nothing like Rome or Britain. They suggested that the exercise of American power throughout the twentieth century could not be fully understood except as a deliberate project aimed at accruing wealth and influence and military might. To persist in pretending otherwise was to indulge in what William Appleman Williams termed a "grand illusion," the charming belief that the United States could reap the rewards of empire without paying the costs of Empire and without admitting that it was an empire.

Chalmers Johnson continues in his chapter, "Whatever Happened to Globalization," that our government seems not to grasp the relation between its military unilateralism and the collateral damage it is doing to international commerce, an activity that depends on mutually beneficial relationships among individuals, communities, businesses, and countries to function well. In the twentieth century, no country succeeded in increasing its power through military buildups or war. France, Germany, Japan, and Russia suffered heavy losses at that game. A state of perpetual war is a prerequisite of the military state, and this is what Vice President Richard Cheney foresees in his call for regime change in 50 countries. In Johnson's opinion the same forces that brought down the U.S.S.R. are working on the U.S. today. "The decline of the military empire began May 1, 2003," he said, "when the boy emperor from Crawford, Texas pretended to fly a plane onto the Carrier Abraham Lincoln, replete with a banner reading 'Mission Accomplished.'" Well, he noted, "the Iraqis are no longer stooges of the Saddam regime—and they want the Americans out."

David Graham

Dave, a member of CPF and St. Malachy's Parish, taught history for many years in France and the U.S.

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