Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

This article is the one that empowers Congress and makes the United States a democracy. It guarantees that the people’s representatives will know what the state apparatus is actually doing and it authorizes full disclosure of these activities. It has not been applied to the Department of Defense or the Central Intelligence Agency since their creation. Instead there has been a permanent policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The White House has always kept the intelligence agencies’ budgets secret, and deceptions in the defense budget date back to the Manhattan Project of World War II and the secret decisions to build atomic bombs and use them against the Japanese. In 1997, then Senator Robert Torricelli (D-New Jersey) proposed an amendment to the 1998 Defense Authorization bill requiring that Congress disclose aggregate intelligence expenditures. He lost, but he was able to point out that the intelligence agencies spend more than the combined gross national products of North Korea, Libya, Iran, and Iraq—and they do so in the name of the American people but without any advice or supervision from them.

The subject matter of this book is American militarism, its physical presence in the world, the growth of the “special forces” as a private army of the president, and the secrecy that allows ever more militarized and secret institutions to live and thrive. This is not an optimistic report. As the great sociologist of the modern state, Max Weber, concluded, “Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret. Bureaucratic administration always tends to be an administration of ‘secret sessions’: in so far as it can, it hides its knowledge and action from criticism.... The concept of the ‘official secret’ is the specific invention of the bureaucracy, and nothing is so fanatically defended by the bureaucracy as this attitude.... In facing a parliament the bureaucracy, out of a sure power instinct, fights every attempt of the parliament to gain knowledge by means of its own experts or interest groups.... Bureaucracy naturally welcomes a poorly informed and hence a powerless parliament—at least in so far as ignorance somehow agrees with the bureaucracy’s interests.”9

Weber could have been describing America’s government today. In the war against Afghanistan the only information available to the public and its representatives came from the Department of Defense. The military has become expert at managing the news. Following the attacks of September 11, government at every level began to restrict information available to the public, including charges it was bringing against people it had picked up in Afghanistan and elsewhere and was holding incommunicado in a Pentagon prison in Cuba. Our newspapers began to read like official gazettes, television news simply gave up and followed the orders of its corporate owners, and the two political parties competed with each other in being obsequious to the White House.

As militarism, the arrogance of power, and the euphemisms required to justify imperialism inevitably conflict with America’s democratic structure of government and distort its culture and basic values, I fear that we will lose our country. If I overstate the threat, I am sure to be forgiven because future generations will be so glad I was wrong. The danger I foresee is that the United States is embarked on a path not unlike that of the former Soviet Union during the 1980s. The USSR collapsed for three basic reasons—internal economic contradictions driven by ideological rigidity, imperial overstretch, and an inability to reform. Because the United States is far wealthier, it may take longer for similar afflictions to do their work. But the similarities are obvious and it is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire dominating the world, must go on forever.

1

IMPERIALISMS, OLD AND NEW

What was the name of that river which Julius Caesar crossed? Was it not called the Rubicon? Yesterday, Mr. Bush may have crossed the very same river.

ROBERT FISK,

Middle East correspondent for the London Independent,

reporting from the United Nations, September 13, 2002

American leaders now like to compare themselves to imperial Romans, even though they do not know much Roman history. The main lesson for the United States ought to be how the Roman Republic evolved into an empire, in the process destroying its system of elections for its two consuls (its chief executives), rendering the Roman senate impotent, ending forever the occasional popular assemblies and legislative comitia that were at the heart of republican life, and ushering in permanent military dictatorship.

Much like the United States today, the Roman Republic had slowly acquired an empire through military conquest. By the first century BC, it dominated all of Gaul, most of Iberia, the coast of North Africa, Greece, the Balkans, and parts of Asia Minor. As the Canadian essayist Manuel Miles observes, “There is no historical law prohibiting a republic from possessing an empire. There is a trend toward autocratic takeovers of imperial republics, however, especially after they reach a certain stage of growth. Even now this process is underway in the USA—the President, like the first Roman emperors, decides when and where to wage war, and his Senate rubber stamps and extorts the funding for his imperial adventures, just as the original came to do in the time of Caesar and Octavian.” 1

The Roman senate, much like Congress, worked well enough for two centuries. But by the first century BC, the size of the empire and the armies its maintenance required overwhelmed the capacities of the senate and the consuls. In 49 BC, Julius Caesar violated Roman law by bringing his army across the small stream called the Rubicon in northern Italy and plunged the country into civil war among the imperators, the generals of Rome’s large armies. After the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Octavian emerged as the most powerful of the generals and assumed dictatorial powers in order to end the military civil wars. In 27 BC, the senate passed most of its power on to him, giving him the name of Augustus. As the first emperor, he reigned from 27 BC to AD 14. Within a few decades, the Roman senate had grown to over a thousand members, while being reduced to little more than a club of the old aristocratic and military families. Rome ruled all of the known world except for China, but in the process Roman democracy was supplanted by dictatorship, and eventually the Romans were overwhelmed by the world of enemies they had created. To the very end Roman armies pretended to speak for “the senate and the Roman people” and paraded under banners emblazoned with the Latin initials SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus). But the days when the senate mattered were long past; empire had become an end in itself.

As the Roman republic was disintegrating, not all of its citizens quietly acquiesced in the loss of their democratic rights. In Shakespeare’s famous version of the politics of those days, one citizen, Cassius, asks Brutus, “Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed that he is grown so great?” In a sense this book is an attempt to answer that question in the context of an American imperium. To start, consider just one proposition on which today’s imperialists—poisoned by false pride and self-glorifying assumptions—have fattened. I am referring to the dangerously misleading conclusion that the United States caused the Soviet Union’s collapse and therefore “won” the Cold War. The mind-set that produced this conclusion offers clues to how the United States, like ancient Rome, embarked on the path toward militarism and empire.

Among American triumphalists, devoted fans of Ronald Reagan, and old star-wars enthusiasts, there is a myth that President Reagan’s sponsorship of what he called the strategic defense initiative (SDI)—a never-completed, never-deployable, largely space-based defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles—set off a competition with the USSR over defense spending that ultimately caused the latter’s downfall. The triumphalists allege that even though Reagan’s star-wars proposals never came within light-years of working, they forced the USSR into an arms race that broke its back economically. Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, his support of anti-Soviet guerrillas in Afghanistan, and his illegal support of “counterrevolutionaries” (contras) against the elected government of Nicaragua—so this argument goes—created a climate in which SDI was decisive. Thus, despite an almost unbroken record of mistaken assessments and misplaced advice about the strength and problems of the USSR during its final decade, Robert Gates, George H. W. Bush’s CIA director, still concludes in his memoir, “In my view, it was the broad resurgence of the West—symbolized by SDI—that convinced even some of the conservative members of the Soviet leadership that major internal changes were needed in the USSR. That decision, once made, set the stage for the dramatic events inside the Soviet Union of the next several years.” 2