However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic
plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to
destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of
it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living
room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and
militarism in our relations with other countries and
the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases
that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with
our bloated military establishment and the profligate
use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly
inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn
the United States to a devastating trio of
consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and
insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to
that of the former Soviet Union.
According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory
of our military bases around the world, our empire
consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries
and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000
troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one
such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we
still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military
forces living and working there -- 49,364 members of
our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members,
and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these
were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the
largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in
Japan.
These massive concentrations of American military
power outside the United States are not needed for our
defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to
our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are
also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs,
an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus,
the United States spends approximately $250 billion
each year maintaining its global military presence.
The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony --
that is, control or dominance -- over as many nations
on the planet as possible.
We are like the British at the end of World War II:
desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never
needed and can no longer afford, using methods that
often resemble those of failed empires of the past --
including the Axis powers of World War II and the
former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for
us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to
liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather
than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were
Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial
conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should
follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently
backsliding and following our example by assisting us
in the war in Afghanistan.)
Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate
our empire or else watch it liquidate us.
Shortly after his election as president, Barack
Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his
new cabinet, stated as fact that "[w]e have to
maintain the strongest military on the planet." A few
weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the
National Defense University in Washington DC, the
president again insisted, "Now make no mistake, this
nation will maintain our military dominance. We will
have the strongest armed forces in the history of the
world." And in a commencement address to the cadets of
the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed
that "[w]e will maintain America's military dominance
and keep you the finest fighting force the world has
ever seen."
What he failed to note is that the United States no
longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon,
and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.
According to a growing consensus of economists and
political scientists around the world, it is
impossible for the United States to continue in that
role while emerging into full view as a crippled
economic power. No such configuration has ever
persisted in the history of imperialism. The
University of Chicago's Robert Pape, author of the
important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of
Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically
writes:
There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about
our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney,
makes this point using an insightful analogy:
In other words, the United States is not seriously
contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead
ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic
decline and flirting with insolvency.
Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military
Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008),
calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we
would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the
Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did
the same with Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. These are only
two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.
Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate,
represents a striking historical failure of the
imagination. In his first official visit to China
since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner
assured an audience of students at Beijing University,
"Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are
very safe." According to press reports, the students
responded with loud laughter. Well they might.
In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget
predicted that in 2010 the United States will be
burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75
trillion. This includes neither a projected $640
billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of
waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so
immense that it will take several generations for
American citizens to repay the costs of George W.
Bush's imperial adventures -- if they ever can or
will. It represents about 13% of our current gross
domestic product (that is, the value of everything
we produce). It is worth noting that the target
demanded of European nations wanting to join the
Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.
Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts
of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless
weapons spending, including his cancellation of the
F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget
for next year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller,
than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far
bolder cuts in our military expenditures will
obviously be required in the very near future if we
intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal
integrity.
2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan
and It Will Help Bankrupt Us
One of our major strategic blunders in
Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both
Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to
pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods
as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have
learned nothing from Afghanistan's modern history --
to the extent that we even know what it is. Between
1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual
expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and
sub-tribes living in what was then called the
North-West Frontier Territories -- the area along
either side of the artificial border between
Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line.
This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain's
foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.
Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to
establish effective control over the area. As the
eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book
Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 425):
"Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at
guerrilla warfare after resisting centuries of all
comers and fighting among themselves when no comers
were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax
Britannica into their mountain homeland." An
estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an
undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess
no loyalties to the central governments of either
Pakistan or Afghanistan.
The region known today as the Federally Administered
Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is administered
directly by Islamabad, which -- just as British
imperial officials did -- has divided the territory
into seven agencies, each with its own "political
agent" who wields much the same powers as his
colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of
FATA known as Waziristan and the home of Pashtun
tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.
According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould,
experienced Afghan hands and coauthors of Invisible
History: Afghanistan's Untold Story (City Lights,
2009, p. 317):
"If Washington's bureaucrats don't remember the
history of the region, the Afghans do. The British
used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages
after World War I and were condemned for it. When
the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind
helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s,
they were called criminals. For America to use its
overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and
indiscriminate manner defies the world's sense of
justice and morality while turning the Afghan
people and the Islamic world even further against
the United States."
In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities,
the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The
disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban
against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but
Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister
during World War I, gloated: "We insisted on
reserving the right to bomb niggers" (Fitzgerald and
Gould, p. 65). His view prevailed.
The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the
new excuse that our killing of noncombatants is a
result of "collateral damage," or human error. Using
pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy
from computers at military bases in the Arizona and
Nevada deserts among other places, we have killed
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders
in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani and
Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we
are alienating precisely the people we claim to be
saving for democracy.
When in May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was
appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he
ordered new limits on air attacks, including those
carried out by the CIA, except when needed to
protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to
illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command,
only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009,
the United States carried out a drone attack against
a funeral procession that killed at least 80 people,
the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil
so far. There was virtually no reporting of these
developments by the mainstream American press or on
the network television news. (At the time, the media
were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual
adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the
death of pop star Michael Jackson.)
Our military operations in both Pakistan and
Afghanistan have long been plagued by inadequate and
inaccurate intelligence about both countries,
ideological preconceptions about which parties we
should support and which ones we should oppose, and
myopic understandings of what we could possibly hope
to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example,
charge that, contrary to our own intelligence
service's focus on Afghanistan, "Pakistan has always
been the problem." They add:
"Pakistan's army and its Inter-Services
Intelligence branch... from 1973 on, has played
the key role in funding and directing first the
mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the
1980s]… and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan's
army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains
the development of democratic institutions, trains
Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders
them to fight American and NATO soldiers
protecting the Afghan government." (p. 322-324)
The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are
staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who fostered the
Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their
own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an
Islamic jihad. Their purposes have always
included: keeping Afghanistan free of Russian or
Indian influence, providing a training and
recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas
to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by
both Pakistan and India), containing Islamic
radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of
Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from
Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the
United States to pay and train "freedom fighters"
throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan's consistent
policy has been to support the clandestine policies
of the Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the
influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.
Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired),
an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in
Washington, summarizes our hopeless project in South
Asia this way: "Nothing we do will compel 125
million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause
with a United States in league with the two states
that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and
India."
Obama's mid-2009 "surge" of troops into southern
Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand Province,
a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly
reminiscent of General William Westmoreland's
continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and
his promises that if we would ratchet up the
violence just a little more and tolerate a few more
casualties, we would certainly break the will of the
Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading
of the nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it
is in Afghanistan today.
Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army
withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last
Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov,
hissued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted,
will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is
sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union's,
which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan
war. We should recognize that we are wasting time,
lives, and resources in an area where we have never
understood the political dynamics and continue to
make the wrong choices.
3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our
Empire of Bases
In March, New York Times op-ed columnist
Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other forms of sexual
assault against women is the great shame of the U.S.
armed forces, and there is no evidence that this
ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as
possible, is diminishing." He continued:
"New data released by the Pentagon showed an
almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual
assaults -- 2,923 -- and a 25 percent increase in
such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq
and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to
imagine how bizarre it is that women in American
uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related
to serving in a combat zone have to also worry
about defending themselves against rapists wearing
the same uniform and lining up in formation right
beside them."
The problem is exacerbated by having our troops
garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl
next to civilian populations and often preying on
them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual
violence against women and girls by American GIs has
been out of control in Okinawa, Japan's poorest
prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied
by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years
ago.
That island was the scene of the largest
anti-American demonstrations since the end of World
War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and
attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two
Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been
ubiquitous around all of our bases on every
continent and has probably contributed as much to
our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush
administration or our economic exploitation of
poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we
covet.
The military itself has done next to nothing to
protect its own female soldiers or to defend the
rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to
our often racially biased and predatory troops. "The
military's record of prosecuting rapists is not just
lousy, it's atrocious," writes Herbert. In
territories occupied by American military forces,
the high command and the State Department make
strenuous efforts to enact so-called "Status of
Forces Agreements" (SOFAs) that will prevent host
governments from gaining jurisdiction over our
troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also
make it easier for our military to spirit culprits
out of a country before they can be apprehended by
local authorities.
This issue was well illustrated by the case of an
Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan,
who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the
aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based
at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified
her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and
U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and
effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was
harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese
police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect
from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law
by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.
In the course of trying to obtain justice, the
Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty
years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and
American governments signed a secret "understanding"
as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive
its jurisdiction if the crime was not of "national
importance to Japan." The U.S. argued strenuously
for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it
would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per
year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.
Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar
wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and
Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of
Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice
has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world,
with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S.
military personnel who committed crimes between 2001
and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have
just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance
to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely,
military personnel and military contractors accused
of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while
Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect
opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the
country before they can be charged.
Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr
Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches
from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq
(Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the "culture of
unpunished sexual assaults" and the "shockingly low
numbers of courts martial" for rapes and other forms
of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The
Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in
Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a
2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults:
90% of the rapes in the military are never reported
at all and, when they are, the consequences for the
perpetrator are negligible.
It is fair to say that the U.S. military has
created a worldwide sexual playground for its
personnel and protected them to a large extent from
the consequences of their behavior. As a result a
group of female veterans in 2006 created the Service
Women's Action Network (SWAN). Its agenda is to
spread the word that "no woman should join the
military."
I believe a better solution would be to radically
reduce the size of our standing army, and bring the
troops home from countries where they do not
understand their environments and have been taught
to think of the inhabitants as inferior to
themselves.
10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire
Dismantling the American empire would, of course,
involve many steps. Here are ten key places to
begin:
1. We need to put a halt to the serious
environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide.
We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us
from any responsibility for cleaning up after
ourselves.
2. Liquidating the empire will end the
burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the
"opportunity costs" that go with them -- the things
we might otherwise do with our talents and resources
but can't or won't.
3. As we already know (but often forget),
imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the 1960s
and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected
governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote
regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment
of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for
instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors [Pantheon,
1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to
Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would
potentially mean a real end to the modern American
record of using torture abroad.
4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening
train of camp followers, dependents, civilian
employees of the Department of Defense, and
hucksters -- along with their expensive medical
facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools,
clubs, golf courses, and so forth -- that follow our
military enclaves around the world.
5. We need to discredit the myth promoted
by the military-industrial complex that our military
establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs,
scientific research, and defense. These alleged
advantages have long been discredited by serious
economic research. Ending empire would make this
happen.
6. As a self-respecting democratic nation,
we need to stop being the world's largest exporter
of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World
militaries in the techniques of torture, military
coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A
prime candidate for immediate closure is the
so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army's
infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia,
for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers
Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books,
2004], pp. 136-40.)
7. Given the growing constraints on the
federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve
Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing
programs that promote militarism in our schools.
8. We need to restore discipline and
accountability in our armed forces by radically
scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors,
private military companies, and agents working for
the military outside the chain of command and the
Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy
Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the World's Most
Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]).
Ending empire would make this possible.
9. We need to reduce, not increase, the
size of our standing army and deal much more
effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and
combat stress they undergo.
10. To repeat the main message of this
essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on
military force as the chief means of attempting to
achieve foreign policy objectives.
Unfortunately, few empires of the past
voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to
remain independent, self-governing polities. The two
most important recent examples are the British and
Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their
examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback
(2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis:
The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and
editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).
[Note on further reading on the matter of
sexual violence in and around our overseas bases and
rapes in the military: On the response to the
1995 Okinawa rape, see Chalmers Johnson, Blowback:
The Costs and Consequences of American Empire,
chapter 2. On related subjects, see David McNeil,
"Justice for Some. Crime, Victims, and the US-Japan
SOFA," Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 8-1-09, March 15,
2009; "Bilateral Secret Agreement Is Preventing U.S.
Servicemen Committing Crimes in Japan from Being
Prosecuted," Japan Press Weekly, May 23, 2009;
Dieter Fleck, ed., The Handbook of the Law of
Visiting Forces, Oxford University Press, 2001;
Minoru Matsutani, "'53 Secret Japan-US Deal Waived
GI Prosecutions," Japan Times, October 24, 2008;
"Crime Without Punishment in Japan," the Economist,
December 10, 2008; "Japan: Declassified Document
Reveals Agreement to Relinquish Jurisdiction Over
U.S. Forces," Akahata, October 30, 2008;
"Government's Decision First Case in Japan," Ryukyu
Shimpo, May 20, 2008; Dahr Jamail, "Culture of
Unpunished Sexual Assault in Military," Antiwar.com,
May 1, 2009; and Helen Benedict, "The Plight of
Women Soldiers," the Nation, May 5, 2009.]
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