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Lorenzo's
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. . . about Chaos,
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The Life of the American Republic May Be Almost Over
(Marc Cooper, LA Weekly, July 2-8, 2004)
[The following comments are those of Chalmers Johnson during a recent interview with Marc Cooper.)

I like living here. But I think we are trending like the Soviet Union was in 1985. If I had said then that the Soviets were five years away from extinction, you'd have said I had spent too much time inhaling exotic substances around Berkeley. . . . After the Soviets, who I thought were a real threat, collapsed, I expected a much greater demobilization, a pullback of American troops, a real peace dividend, a re-orienting of federal expenditures to domestic needs. Instead, our government turned at once to find a replacement enemy: China, drugs, terrorism, instability. Anything to justify this huge apparatus of the Cold War structure. . . . The role of the citizen now is to be ever better informed. When Benjamin Franklin was asked, "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" he replied: "A republic if you can keep it." We've not been paying attention to what we need to do to keep it. I think we made a disastrous error in the classic strategic sense when in 1991 we concluded that we "had won the Cold War." No. We simply didn't lose it as badly as the Soviets did. We were both caught up in imperial overreach, in weapons industries that came to dominate our societies. We allowed ideologues to capture our Department of Defense and lead us off -- in a phrase they like -- into a New Rome. We are no longer a status quo power respectful of international law. We became a revisionist power, one fundamentally opposed to the world as it is organized, much like Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, Bolshevik Russia or Maoist China. . . . Easily the most important right in our Constitution, according to James Madison, who wrote much of the document, is the one giving the right to go to war exclusively to the elected representatives of the people, to the Congress. Never, Madison continued, should that right be given to a single man. But in October 2002, our Congress gave that power to a single man, to exercise whenever he wanted, and with nuclear weapons if he so chose. And the following March, without any international consultation or legitimacy, he exercised that power by staging a unilateral attack on Iraq. . . . The Bill of Rights -- articles 4 and 6 -- are now open to question. Do people really have the right to habeas corpus? Are they still secure in their homes from illegal seizures? The answer for the moment is no. . . . By an American empire I mean 725 military bases in 138 foreign countries circling the globe from Greenland to Asia, from Japan to Latin America. This is a sort of base world -- a secret, enclosed, separate world where our half-million troops, contractors and spies live quite comfortably around the world. I think that's an empire. Granted, the unit of European imperialism was the colony. The unit of American imperialism is the military base. . . . This base world becomes part of the vested interest we associate not with security but with militarism, the danger of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned against. . . . There’s the literal cost. We are flirting with bankruptcy. We are not paying for what is now a $750 billion tab. The defense appropriation itself is about $420 billion. That doesn't include another $125 billion, which is the cost of Afghanistan and Iraq. Then another $20 billion for nuclear weapons in the Department of Energy. Add in another $200 billion or so for military pensions and for health benefits for our veterans. Together, that's three-quarters of a trillion dollars. . . . We are putting it on the tab, running up some of the most extraordinary budget and trade deficits in history. If the bankers of Asia and Japan should tire of financing this, if they notice the euro is now stronger than the dollar, then all this ends -- whether or not they like the Boy Emperor from Crawford. We would face a terrible crisis. . . . The greater cost is what the public will lose, if they haven't already lost it: the republic, the structural defense of our liberties, the separation of powers to block the growth of a dictatorial presidency. . . . there was never a plan to leave Iraq because there is no intention of leaving Iraq. We are currently building 14 bases there. Dick Cheney can't imagine giving up that oil. And the military can't imagine giving up those bases. That's why they can't come up with a plan to leave. . . . The political system alone can no longer save the republic. Even if Congress wanted to exercise real oversight, how can it when 40 percent of the military budget is secret? All of the intelligence budget is secret. The only hopeful sign I saw was a year ago when 10 million people demonstrated in the streets for peace. We also saw the recent election in Spain as a response to what is happening. If we can see that now in the U.S., in the U.K., in Italy, then maybe we can have some hope. Otherwise we will soon be talking about the short happy life of the American republic.

posted by Lorenzo 1:49 PM