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

A major problem for that network is financing. Most empires of the past paid for themselves or at least attempted to do so. The Spanish, Dutch, and British Empires all enriched their homelands through colonial exploitation. Not so the empire of bases. Militarized and unilateral, it tends to subvert commerce and globalization because it weakens international law and the norms of reciprocity on which trade depends. It thereby adds enormously to the indirect economic burdens of our imperium, a subject to which I shall return later in this book. Occasionally, our empire of bases makes money because, like the gangsters of the 1930s who forced the people and businesses under their sway to pay protection money, the United States pressures foreign governments to pay for its imperial projects. During the first Iraq war, the United States extracted $13 billion from the Japanese and later boasted that it had even made a small net profit from the conflict. But the more open and assertive we become in our claims to dominate the world, the less appealing the old “mutual security” schemes become for other rich but militarily impotent countries. A contraction of trade, capital transfers, and direct subsidies will undermine the U.S. empire of bases much faster than was the case for the older, self-financing empires.

Life in our empire is in certain ways reminiscent of the British Raj, with its military rituals, racism, rivalries, snobbery, and class structure. Once on their bases, America’s modern proconsuls and their sous-warriors never have to mix with either “natives” or American civilians. Just as they did for young nineteenth-century Englishmen and Frenchmen, these military city-states teach American youths arrogance and racism, instilling in them the basic ingredients of racial superiority. The base amenities include ever-expanding military equivalents of Disneyland and Club Med reserved for the exclusive use of active-duty men and women, together with housing, athletic facilities, churches, and schools provided at no cost or at low fixed prices. These installations form a more or less secret global network many parts of which once may have had temporary strategic uses but have long since evolved into permanent outposts. All of this has come about informally and, at least as far as the broad public is concerned, unintentionally. If empire is mentioned at all, it is in terms of American soldiers liberating Afghan women from Islamic fundamentalists, or helping victims of a natural disaster in the Philippines, or protecting Bosnians, Kosavars, or Iraqi Kurds (but not Rwandans, Turkish Kurds, or Palestinians) from campaigns of “ethnic cleansing.”

Whatever the original reason the United States entered a country and set up a base, it remains there for imperial reasons—regional and global hegemony, denial of the territory to rivals, providing access for American companies, maintenance of “stability” or “credibility” as a military force, and simple inertia. For some people our bases validate the American way of life and our “victory” in the Cold War. Whether the United States can afford to be everywhere forever is not considered an appropriate subject for national discussion; nor is it, in the propagandistic atmosphere that has enveloped the country in the new millennium, appropriate to dwell on what empires cost or how they end.

The new empire is not just a physical entity. It is also a cherished object of analysis and adulation by a new army of self-designated “strategic thinkers” working in modern patriotic monasteries called think tanks. It is the focus of interest groups both old and new—such as those concerned with the supply and price of oil and those who profit from constructing and maintaining military garrisons in unlikely places. There are so many interests other than those of the military officials who live off the empire that its existence is distinctly overdetermined—so much so that it is hard to imagine the United States ever voluntarily getting out of the empire business. In addition to its military and their families, the empire supports the military-industrial complex, university research and development centers, petroleum refiners and distributors, innumerable foreign officer corps whom it has trained, manufacturers of sport utility vehicles and small-arms ammunition, multinational corporations and the cheap labor they use to make their products, investment banks, hedge funds and speculators of all varieties, and advocates of “globalization,” meaning theorists who want to force all nations to open themselves up to American exploitation and American-style capitalism. The empire’s values and institutions include military machismo, sexual orthodoxy, socialized medicine for the chosen few, cradle-to-grave security, low pay, stressful family relationships (including the murder of spouses), political conservatism, and an endless harping on behaving like a warrior even though many of the wars fought in the last decade or more have borne less resemblance to traditional physical combat than to arcade computer games.

Among the thousands of pages of propaganda distributed by the Pentagon to celebrate its victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan was a story about a female air force captain sitting at a command post in Pakistan monitoring an unmanned Predator drone over Afghanistan. Suddenly, she spotted a group of Afghan men milling around a Toyota SUV and concluded they were “terrorists.” She ordered in a navy plane armed with a conventional bomb to which a device had been attached that, via a satellite-based global positioning system and inertial guidance, was programmed to hit within thirty to forty-five feet of its target. As the navy pilot dropped his bomb, she could not help crying out to the unsuspecting figures on her computer screen, “Run. Get out of the way! You are going to be killed!” A few seconds later they were indeed dead. Perhaps this story was distributed to demonstrate the innate humanity of our new breed of warriors even though they may fight from hundreds of miles away or from 35,000 feet in stealth bombers. But M. Franklin Rose, a specialist on robotics working for the army, does not think such twinges of empathy will last very long: “So many of these young soldiers grew up on video games and computers, they grew up trusting machines.” 13

Death as antiseptic as in any video game is now de rigueur in the operations of our high-tech armed forces—and is commonly unrestrained by international or domestic law of any kind. For example, on November 4, 2002, the government acknowledged that it had initiated a strike in Yemen similar to the one described above in Afghanistan. A Predator unmanned surveillance aircraft, in this case monitored by CIA operatives based at a French military facility in Djibouti and at CIA headquarters in Virginia, fired a missile that destroyed an SUV said to contain a senior al-Qaeda terrorist. 14Not only was the vehicle so completely vaporized that this claim cannot be verified but the nature of the strike itself—coming after the Yemeni government reportedly refused to act on information passed to it by the CIA—must give pause to other governments. Why could a Hellfire missile released from a remote-controlled drone not destroy reputed terrorists in the Philippines, in Singapore, or in Germany, whatever a local government might think or wish?

During the post-Cold War period, a new set of managers took the helm of the military establishment. They were more interested than their predecessors in warfare employing weapons launched from great heights, or from over the horizon, or from outer space. They were determined to avoid casualties among their own ranks, both to make service in the volunteer armed forces more attractive and to not alarm the citizens who supply the manpower and pay for the military’s activities and lifestyle. This mode of warfare continues the World War II practice of bombing residential areas and cannot avoid, despite the touting of “precision” weaponry, the indiscriminate killing of nonbelligerents and innocent bystanders. There is nothing new about this. The Romans killed or enslaved their captives, plundered and destroyed their enemies’ cities, and slaughtered entire populations without distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants. Twentieth-century “total war,” associated above all with air power, was known in medieval times as “Roman war.” In general, writes Sven Lindquist in his history of bombing, “the laws of war protect enemies of the same race, class, and culture. The laws of war leave the foreign and the alien without protection.” 15Hiroshima and Nagasaki exemplify the latter. The novel aspect today is our hypocrisy about our “precision-guided” munitions. American propaganda resolutely ignores the carnage our high-tech military imposes on civilian populations, declaring that our intentions are by definition good and that such killings and maimings are merely “collateral damage.” Such obfuscation is intrinsic to the world of imperialism and its handmaiden, militarism.