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

3. See Robert Fisk, “New Crisis, Old Lessons: The Suez Crisis Has Haunted British Government for Almost 50 Years,” Independent, January 15, 2003.

4. Global Security Organization, “King Abdul Aziz Air Base, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia,” ; and Patrick E. Tyler, “Saudis Plan to End U.S. Presence,” New York Times, February 9, 2003.

5. The indispensable source is Ervand Abrahamian, “The 1953 Coup in Iran,” Science & Society 65:2 (Summer 2001), pp. 182–215. Also see Phillip Knightley, “Iraq Chose Saddam for Good Reason: The West Needs a History Lesson,” Independent, August 4, 2002; and the important book by Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003).

6. C. T. Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 287, 293, 299; Robert Burns, “U.S. Building Up Forces at Obscure but Important Air Base in Qatari Desert,” Associated Press, June 30, 2002.

7. Denis F. Doyon, “Middle East Bases,” in Joseph Gerson and Bruce Birchard, eds., The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases (Boston: South End Press for the American Friends Service Committee, 1991), pp. 15, 275–307; Sandars, America’s Overseas Garrisons, pp. 55–59; and BBC News, “Diego Garcia Islanders Battle to Return,” October 31, 2002. For a few details on Diego Garcia in 2002, see Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Installations and Environment), Base Structure Report (A Summary of DoD’s Real Property Inventory) (Washington: Department of Defense, 2002), s.v. “British Indian Ocean Territory.”

8. David Morgan, “Ex-U.S. Official Says CIA Aided Ba’athists,” Reuters, April 20, 2003, posted on CommonDreams.org, May 19, 2003; CBS News, “Profile: Saddam Hussein,” April 8, 2003; Richard Sale, “Saddam Key in Early CIA Plot,” United Press International, April 10, 2003; “Bush Topples an Old U.S. Ally,” SocialistWorkerOnline, April 18, 2003.

9. Michael Dobbs, “U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup; Trade in Chemical Arms Allowed Despite Their Use on Iranians, Kurds,” Washington Post, December 30, 2002; and “Arming Iraq: A Chronology of U.S. Involvement,” March 17, 2003, .

10. Tony Paterson, “Leaked Report Says German and U.S. Firms Supplied Arms to Saddam,” Independent, December 18, 2002; Die Tageszeitung (Berlin), December 20, 2002; and James Cusick and Felicity Arbuthnot, “America Tore Out 8,000 Pages of Iraq Dossier,” Sunday Herald (Scotland), December 22, 2002. Also see Russ W. Baker, “Iraqgate,” Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1993; Christian Dewar, “Arming Iraq: How George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan Helped Iraq Develop Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Democratic Underground, December 13, 2002; Stephen Green, “Rumsfeld’s Account Book: Who Armed Saddam?” CounterPunch, February 24, 2003; Paul Rockwell, “Who Armed Iraq?” San Francisco Chronicle, March 2, 2003; and “Yes, U.S. Helped Iraq Get Chemical, Biological Weapons,” Belleville News-Democrat (Southern Illinois and St. Louis metropolitan area), April 20, 2003, .

11. Jeremy Scahill, “What about Those Chemical Weapons? The Saddam in Rummy’s Closet,” CounterPunch, August 2, 2002. For other discussions of the United States’ supply of poison gas and germ warfare feeder stocks to Iraq during its 1980s war with Iran, see Eric Margolis, “Old Dreams of Empire Dance in Blair’s Head,” Toronto Sun, March 31, 2002; Patrick E. Tyler, “Iraqi Gas Use Didn’t Stop U.S. Aid in ‘88,” (New York Times News Service), San Diego Union-Tribune, August 18, 2002; Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot, “How Did Iraq Get Its Weapons? We Sold Them,” Sunday Herald (Scotland), September 8, 2002; Robert Novak, “Following Iraq’s Bioweapons Trail,” Chicago Sun-Times, September 26, 2002; Matt Kelley, “U.S. Supplied Germs to Iraq in ‘80s,” Associated Press, September 30, 2002; Elson E. Boles, “Helping Iraq Kill with Chemical Weapons,” CounterPunch, October 10, 2002; Jost R. Hiltermann, “America Didn’t Seem to Mind Poison Gas,” International Herald Tribune, January 17, 2003; Stephen C. Pelletiere, “A War Crime or an Act of War?” New York Times, January 31, 2003; and Philip Shenon, “Iraq Links Germs for Weapons to U.S. and France,” New York Times, March 16, 2003.

12. Ritt Goldstein, “Oil Wars Pentagon’s Policy since 1999,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 20, 2003.

13. CBS News, as reported in New York Times, September 5,2002, p. A10; Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), pp. 49, 60–61; Chris Bury, “A Tortured Relationship: U.S.-Iraq Relations. Part 2: War,” ABC News, September 18, 2002; Michael T. Klare, “Scheduling War,” February 12, 2003, ; and Stephen Fidler, “Just When Did the President Decide to Go to War?” Financial Times, March 27, 2003.

14. Robert Kagan and William Kristol, eds., Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000); and Rebuilding America’s Defenses, , s.v.RebuildingAmericanDefensespdf>. On PNAC and the backgrounds of the neoconservatives in the second Bush administration, see Elisabeth Bumiller and Eric Schmitt, “On the Job and at Home, Influential Hawks’ 30-Year Friendship Evolves,” New York Times, September 11, 2002; Tom Barry and Jim Lobe, “The Men Who Stole the Show,” Foreign Policy in Focus, October 2002; Steven R. Weisman, “Abrams Back in Capital Fray at Center of Mideast Battle,” New York Times, December 7, 2002; Glenn Kessler, “U.S. Decision on Iraq Has Puzzling Past,” Washington Post, January 12, 2003; ABC News, “The Plan: Were Neo-Conservatives’ 1998 Memos a Blueprint for Iraq War?” March 10, 2003; and William O. Beeman, “Military Might: The Man behind ‘Total War’ in the Mideast,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 14, 2003.

15. PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, p. 51; and Nicholas Lemann, “The Next World Order,” New Yorker, April 1, 2002, p. 44. I am indebted to John Pilger for drawing my attention to PNAC’s activities. See his article in the New Statesman, December 16, 2002.

16. Scott Ritter, “Is Iraq a True Threat to the U.S.?” Boston Globe, July 20, 2002. On April 5, 2003, British Home Secretary David Blunkett admitted that no weapons of mass destruction were likely to be found in Iraq because they did not exist. See al-Jazerra (English), April 6, 2003.

17. PNAC, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, p. 14.

18. See Tom Regan, “When Contemplating War, Beware of Babies in Incubators,” Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002; Associated Press, “Not All Iraq Claims Backed by Evidence,” December 22, 2002; and Mitchell Cohen, “How Bush Sr. Sold the Bombing of Iraq,” CounterPunch, December 28, 2002.

19. See Victoria Samson, “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Iraq’s ‘Secret’ Weapon?” Center for Defense Information, Terrorism Project, October 10, 2002.

20. The most important source on this subject is Seymour Hersh, “A Case Not Closed,” New Yorker, November 1,1993.

21. Stephen Zunes, Tinderbox: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2003), p. 86; Robert Dreyfuss, “Persian Gulf—or Tonkin Gulf?” American Prospect 13:23 (December 2002); and Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Shows Videos of Iraq Firing at Allied Jets,” New York Times, October 1, 2002.