Chalmers Strikes Back at the Empire

I remember Chalmers Johnson as a preternaturally dynamic professor with a delivery and a voice timbre somewhere between John Cameron Swayze and Jack Benny, if that does anything for you. He was teaching politics of the Far East those days, and he seemed to stop by the class in Wheeler Auditorium on his way to doing something much more important. Such as counseling the government or reading top secret reports from the Rand Corporation. Anyway, he was intellectually intimidating, to say the least, as he addressed us in that staccato, metallic voice.

He was conservative in those days and always seemed faintly disgusted by the radical hijinks going on outside on the Berkeley campus, an impression of him which turns out to be the case, I learn by reading his late writings. Which makes his current position on the American Empire, and his Nemesis trilogy, both surprising and more credible. He's out today with a new post (which can be found on both the Smirking Chimp http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/23038 and Huffington blogsites) where he discusses the 800 pound gorilla that no one ever wants to disturb as they discuss health care reform, or American solvency or our impending bankruptcy. Namely, what to do about those 700 to 800 bases, forts and other military installations the United States maintains around the world, with their huge expense, or what to do about those two ruinously expensive and completely superfluous wars we keep fighting - all against a backdrop of a federal deficit this year of $1.8 trillion dollars.

Chalmers sticks to the official Pentagon number this time around, about $664 billion, which does not count, of course, the "supplementals" for Iraq and Afghanistan; but elsewhere, he does a pretty convincing case of demonstrating that the total outlay for defense and security, honestly counted, approaches $1 trillion per year. I see in the health care debates that Congress and the White House are fighting for the high ground on whose plan will be "deficit neutral." This is such a bad joke. The Republicans chortle that the plan, which, after all, is only concerned with the health and wellbeing of the American people, would cost $1 trillion over ten years, and the Democrats fight mightily to demonstrate this is not the case, that it could all be paid for by "taxing the rich," or employer mandates, or some other conjurer's trick. Suppose it did cost $1 trillion over ten years; gee, where could we get the money?

No one, including our Change Agent new President, ever even brings up the idea of slashing our insanely-too-expensive military budget. Johnson quotes all of Obama's recent speeches to the National Defense University and to the graduates of Annapolis that no matter what happens, America will continue to dominate the world militarily, that we will have unchallenged supremacy. He's so very good at knowing exactly what his audience wants to hear. Of course, in Washington this is simply what almost everyone says. Nothing else is even vaguely admissible.

Other countries don't maintain an archipelago of foreign forts and bases. Only we see the need. We spend just about half of everything spent in the world on defense, but it's never quite enough, because Obama's budget, half of which represents borrowed money, increases the defense budget over Bush's last budget. If we don't figure out how to rein in this spending, nothing else is really possible. The tax base of our sinking economy is not going to produce excess revenue to fund vital domestic needs. $250 billion could be saved annually simply by dismantling the foreign empire of military installations, and another $100 billion could be saved by ceasing the inanity of these pointless conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's about half of the official Pentagon budget including the supplementals.

Some measure of fiscal rationality could therefore break the surface. But it never even gets discussed, which is one sure way of telling that the august solons and executives in Washington D.C. are not at all serious about responsibility or "change" or anything else that would really help. And until they do come around to that realization (which, as Chalmers sadly notes, will probably not happen until events force them to confront the spectre of bankruptcy), there is really almost no point in following the health care debate, cap & trade, or Barack's keggers with cops and profs.

Unapologetic Cassandra-ism; or, Foreseeing the End of the American Republic

Cassandra was a good-looking gal, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, who was so alluring to men that Apollo himself came on to her and granted her the power of prophecy. Cassie, however, could not dig the Greek God's action (he wasn't Yanni, after all). So her power, in effect, became a curse. It did not stop her from predicting the fall of Troy, however, and she added yet another cliche to our always-burgeoning trove with her "beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

My old prof at Berkeley, Chalmers Johnson, has now completed his Cassandra-ish "Blowback" trilogy. The last volume, "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" warns us that the military-industrial complex sitting at the very center of American life acts as a kind of Trojan Horse full of devastating potentialities that threaten the Constitutional basis of our democracy. If we're lucky in a society, we find among ourselves a few brilliant polymaths with that rare capacity to take it all in, to contextualize recent history, to describe the interplay of the moving parts of our governmental and social apparatus. Noam Chomsky, for all his unquestioned brilliance, seems (to me) simply too stridently "off" to offer much help this way. It's as if he never much liked the United States in the first place. His rants have no capacity to redeem because they are nihilistically devoted to complaining as an end in itself. When someone is absolutely insistent on never placing one's country in a broader context of mistake-prone polities, but attacks unmercifully every failure and peccadillo, I think of motivations such as "Daddy" issues as the root of the emotional antipathy.

If, on the other hand, you essentially like America, once served it as a Naval officer and CIA analyst (like Prof. Johnson), and are just disappointed in how screwed up it's gotten, then Chalmers may be the sort of Cassandra for you. I think there's a reason so many of us are nostalgically drawn to tales of World War II. Say what you will about America's questionable decisions during the War (internment of Japanese, the firebombing of civilians in Germany and Japan, the use of atomic bombs at the end), one could at least say that if these were mistakes, they were errors made under tremendous threats to our survival, and there is no doubting the overall moral righteousness of our cause, especially when compared to the evil intentions of Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini and even of our "ally" Stalin.

Chalmers Johnson writes about the problems engendered by never leaving the wartime economy of World War II, the "Keynesian militarism" of the military-industrial complex. He lays it out so it is plain to see. The United States has become a New Sparta, or in his formulation, the New Roman Empire, the republican nature of which foundered after 44 B.C. when Rome sank into a series of military dictatorships. We're dominated by our military institutions, and they are threatening the Constitutional basis of our country. The same thing happened to Rome. There are many facts and figures in "Nemesis" to support the thesis. The United States has at least 737 military installations, many of them large bases and airfields, worldwide. Adding up all the money spent through all agencies (e.g., the nuclear bomb budget of the Department of Energy, and the budgest of the many intelligence agencies), the United States spends 3/4 of a trillion dollars a year on the military and on defense of the country. This is 50% of the discretionary spending of the federal government (outside of entitlements) and more than 25% of the total federal budget. Using this figure, it can be said that the United States spends more money on defense and intelligence (and "homeland security") than the rest of the world put together.

Of course, we can't afford this. We're giving up all kinds of social programs (universal health care, for example, or useful mass transit) that other civilized nations take for granted. We borrow the money at a reckless pace to keep it all going while our manufacturing base for everything except weapons and munitions is shipped overseas (3 million jobs lost since 2001). Everyone agrees that the trade deficit, the national debt, the looming bankruptcy of the entitlement programs are "unsustainable," but we keep trying to sustain them anyway. In one of many lapidary moments, Chalmers Johnson explains that Keynesian economics has been short-circuited in America's militaristic world. The idea was that the government could stimulate short-term development to avoid recessions by taking on deficits to finance, e.g., public works programs which increased employment and the free flow of money; and then, in prosperous times, to retract such programs and to use tax revenues to pay down the deficits created.

The foxes, however, have completely taken over the hen house. There is no brake on spending on the military because militarism is now what the United States does. Congress does not "oversee" the process except to enable it. (Note that the planned response of the Democrat-controlled House Appropriations Committee to Bush's request for "supplementals" for Iraq and Afghanistan is to give him more than he asked for.) It's why we're always at war. It's why we spend more and more on defense even when it's completely irrational, for example, to keep beefing up the standard military when we see our main enemy as disparate groups of Islamic militants engaged in "asymmetric warfare," where a large standing army and lots of overkill bombs are inappropriate and probably useless. Yet when you have all these hammers, every problem looks like a nail.

One effect of reading the book is to understand that George W. Bush is at the extreme end of a gradual process of evolution toward a militaristic, anti-Constitutional movement which has gained momentum over the last 50 years. He did not come out of nothing; the ground was prepared by all the Presidents since World War II. His Manichean, apocalyptic tendencies (and limited comprehension, which makes him susceptible to easy manipulation) have simply quantumly pushed things in a direction they were already going. He's made clear the central thesis of "Nemesis," that a militaristic nation intent on foreign adventurism and domination cannot also maintain a free democracy at home. Not in Ancient Rome, and not now.