Sorrows
Of Empire
By Chalmers Johnson
FPIF Special Report
26 November 2003
Although tyranny,
because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples,
it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions
of its own people
-Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
With
the fall of Baghdad, America's dutiful Anglophone allies--the British
and Australians--are due for their just rewards: luncheons for Blair
and Howard with the Boy Emperor at his "ranch" in Crawford,
Texas. The Americans fielded an army of 255,000 in Iraq, the British
45,000, and the Australians 2,000. It was not much of a war--merely
confirming the antiwar forces' contention that an unchallenged slaughter
of Iraqis and a Mongol-like sacking of an ancient city were not necessary
to deal with the menace of Saddam Hussein. But the war did leave the
United States and its two Sepoy nations much weaker than they had been
before the war--the Western democratic alliance was seemingly irretrievably
fractured; a potentiality for British leadership of the European Union
went up in smoke; Pentagon plans to make Iraq over into a client state
sundered on Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish realities; and "international
law," including the Charter of the United Nations, was grievously
weakened. Why the British and Australians went along with this fiasco
when they could so easily have stood for something other than might
makes right remains a mystery.
The United States
has been inching toward imperialism and militarism for many years. Disguising
the direction they were taking, American leaders cloaked their foreign
policy in euphemisms such as "lone superpower," "indispensable
nation," "reluctant sheriff," "humanitarian intervention,"
and "globalization." However, with the advent of the George
Bush administration in 2001, these pretenses gave way to assertions
of the Second Coming of the Roman Empire. "American imperialism
used to be a fiction of the far-left imagination," writes the English
journalist Madeleine Bunting, "now it is an uncomfortable fact
of life."1
On March 19, 2003,
the Bush administration took the imperial step of invading Iraq, a sovereign
nation one-twelfth the size of the U.S. in terms of population and virtually
undefended in the face of the awesome array of weapons employed against
it. The U.S. undertook its second war with Iraq with no legal justification
and worldwide protests against its actions and motives, thereby bringing
to an end the system of international order that existed throughout
the cold war and that traces its roots back to seventeenth century doctrines
of sovereignty, non-intervention in the affairs of other states, and
the illegitimacy of aggressive war.
From the moment
the United States assumed the permanent military domination of the world,
it was on its own--feared, hated, corrupt and corrupting, maintaining
"order" through state terrorism and bribery, and given to
megalomaniacal rhetoric and sophistries while virtually inviting the
rest of the world to combine against it. The U.S. had mounted the Napoleonic
tiger and could not get off. During the Watergate scandal of the early
1970s, the president's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, once reproved
White House counsel, John Dean, for speaking too frankly to Congress
about the felonies President Nixon had ordered. "John," he
said, "once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get
it back in." This homely metaphor by a former advertising executive
who was to spend 18 months in prison for his own role in Watergate fairly
accurately describes the situation of the United States.
The sorrows of empire
are the inescapable consequences of the national policies American elites
chose after September 11, 2001. Militarism and imperialism always bring
with them sorrows. The ubiquitous symbol of the Christian religion,
the cross, is perhaps the world's most famous reminder of the sorrows
that accompanied the Roman Empire--it represents the most atrocious
death the Roman proconsuls could devise in order to keep subordinate
peoples in line. From Cato to Cicero, the slogan of Roman leaders was
"Let them hate us so long as they fear us."
Four sorrows, it
seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative
effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined
in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual
war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be
and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as
they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy
and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is
itself transformed from a co-equal "executive branch" of government
into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda,
disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military
legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its
economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges
the education, health, and safety of its citizens. All I have space
for here is to touch briefly on three of these: endless war, the loss
of Constitutional liberties, and financial ruin.
Allegedly in response
to the attacks of al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, President Bush declared
that the United States would dominate the world through absolute military
superiority and wage preventive war against any possible competitor.
He began to enunciate this doctrine in his June 1, 2002, speech to the
cadets of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and spelled it out
in his "National Security Strategy of the United States" of
September 20, 2002.
At West Point, the
president said that the United States had a unilateral right to overthrow
any government in the world that it deemed a threat to American security.
He argued that the United States must be prepared to wage the "war
on terror" against as many as sixty countries if weapons of mass
destruction are to be kept out of terrorists' hands. "We must take
that battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats
before they emerge." Americans must be "ready for pre-emptive
action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives
... . In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path
of action. And this nation will act." Although Bush did not name
every single one, his hit-list of sixty possible target countries was
an escalation over Vice President Dick Cheney, who in November 2001,
said that there were only "forty or fifty" countries that
United States wanted to attack after eliminating the al Qaeda terrorists
in Afghanistan.2
At West Point, the
president justified his proposed massive military effort in terms of
alleged universal values: "We will defend the peace against threats
from terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building
good relations among the great powers. And we will extend the peace
by encouraging free and open societies on every continent." He
added an assertion that is demonstrably untrue but that in the mouth
of the president of the United States on an official occasion amounted
to the announcement of a crusade: "Moral truth is the same in every
culture, in every time, in every place."
In his National
Security Strategy, he expanded on these goals to include "America
must stand firmly for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity; the
rule of law; limits on the absolute power of the state; free speech;
freedom of worship; equal justice; respect for women; religious and
ethnic tolerance; and respect for private property." In the preamble
to the strategy, he (or Condoleezza Rice, the probable actual author)
wrote that there is "a single sustainable model for national success"--America's--that
is "right and true for every person in every society. ... The United
States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are
right and true for all people everywhere."
The paradoxical
effect of this grand strategy is that it may prove more radically disruptive
of world order than anything the terrorists of September 11, 2001, could
have hoped to achieve on their own. Through its actions, the United
States seems determined to bring about precisely the threats that it
says it is trying to prevent. Its apparent acceptance of a "clash
of civilizations"--wars to establish a moral truth that is the
same in every culture--sounds remarkably like a jihad, even to its basis
in Christian fundamentalism. Bush seems to equate himself with Jesus
Christ in his repeated statements (notably on September 20, 2001) that
those who are not with us are against us, which duplicates Matthew chapter
12, verse 30, "He that is not with me is against me."
Implementation of
the National Security Strategy will be considerably more problematic
than its promulgation and contains numerous unintended consequences.
By mid-2003, the United States armed forces were already seriously overstretched,
and the U.S. government was going deeply into debt to finance its war
machine. The American budget dedicated to international affairs allocates
93% to the military and only 7% to the State Department, and does not
have much flexibility left for further military adventures.3 The Pentagon
has deployed a quarter of a million troops against Iraq, several thousand
soldiers are engaged in daily skirmishes in Afghanistan, countless Navy
and Air Force crews are manning strategic weapons in the waters off
North Korea, a few thousand Marines have been dispatched to the southern
Philippines to fight a century-old Islamic separatist movement, several
hundred "advisers" are participating in the early stages of
a Vietnam-like insurgency in Colombia and elsewhere in the Andean nations,
and the U.S. currently maintains a military presence in 140 of the 189
member countries of the United Nations, including significant deployments
in twenty-five. The U.S. has military treaties or binding security arrangements
with at least thirty-six countries.4
Aside from the financial
cost, there is another constraint. The American people are totally unwilling
to accept large numbers of American casualties. In order to produce
the "no-contact" or "painless dentistry" approach
to warfare, the Pentagon has committed itself to a massive and very
expensive effort to computerize battle.5 It has spent lavishly on smart
bombs, battlefield sensors, computer-guided munitions, and extremely
high performance aircraft and ships. The main reason for all this gadgetry
is to keep troops out of the line of fire.
Unfortunately, as
the conflicts in both Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated, ground
troops follow in the wake of massive aerial bombing and missile attacks.
The first Iraq War produced four classes of casualties--killed in action,
wounded in action, killed in accidents (including "friendly fire"),
and injuries and illnesses that appeared only after the end of hostilities.
During 1990 and 1991, some 696,778 individuals served in the Persian
Gulf as elements of Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm.
Of these 148 were killed in battle, 467 were wounded in action, and
145 were killed in accidents, producing a total of 760 casualties, quite
a low number given the scale of the operations.
However, as of May
2002, the Veterans Administration (VA) reported that an additional 8,306
soldiers had died and 159,705 were injured or ill as a result of service-connected
"exposures" suffered during the war. Even more alarmingly,
the VA revealed that 206,861 veterans, almost a third of General Schwarzkopf's
entire army, had filed claims for medical care, compensation, and pension
benefits based on injuries and illnesses caused by combat in 1991. After
reviewing the cases, the agency has classified 168,011 applicants as
"disabled veterans." In light of these deaths and disabilities,
the casualty rate for the first Gulf War is actually a staggering 29.3%.
A significant probable
factor in these deaths and disabilities is depleted uranium (or DU)
ammunition, although this is a hotly contested proposition. Some researchers,
often paid for by the Pentagon, argue that depleted uranium could not
possibly be the cause of these war-related maladies and that a more
likely explanation is dust and debris from the blowing up of Saddam
Hussein's chemical and biological weapons factories in 1991, or perhaps
a "cocktail" of particles from DU ammunition, the destruction
of nerve gas bunkers, and polluted air from burning oil fields. But
the evidence--including abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and birth
defects in Iraq and also in the areas of Kosovo where the U.S. used
depleted-uranium weapons in the 1999 air war--points primarily toward
DU. Moreover, simply by insisting on employing such weaponry, the American
military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that
classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction.
DU, or Uranium-238,
is a waste product of power-generating nuclear-reactors. It is used
in projectiles like tank shells and cruise missiles because it is 1.7
times denser than lead, burns as it flies, and penetrates armor easily,
but it breaks up and vaporizes on impact--which makes it potentially
very deadly. Each shell fired by an American tank includes between three
and ten pounds of DU. Such warheads are essentially "dirty bombs,"
not very radioactive individually but nonetheless suspected of being
capable in quantity of causing serious illnesses and birth defects.6
In 1991, U.S. forces
fired a staggering 944,000 DU rounds in Kuwait and Iraq. The Pentagon
admits that it left behind at a bare minimum 320 metric tons of DU on
the battlefield. One study of Gulf War veterans showed that their children
had a higher possibility of being born with severe deformities, including
missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems, and fused fingers.
Aside from the damage
done to our own troops and civilians by depleted uranium, the United
States military remains committed to the most devastating forms of terror
bombing, often without even a pretense of precision targeting of militarily
significant installations. This aspect of current American military
thinking can be found in the writing of Harlan Ullman, a high-ranking
Pentagon official and protégé of General Colin Powell,
who advocates that the United States attack its enemies in the same
way it defeated Japan in World War II. He writes, "Super tools
and weapons--information age equivalents of the atomic bomb--have to
be invented. As the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally
convinced the Japanese Emperor and High Command that even suicidal resistance
was futile, these tools must be directed toward a similar outcome."
Ullman is the author of the idea is that the U.S. should "deter
and overpower an adversary through the adversary's perception and fear
of his vulnerability and our own invincibility." He calls this
"rapid dominance" or "shock and awe." He once suggested
that it might be a good idea to use electromagnetic waves to attack
peoples' neurological systems and scare them to death.7
The United States
government has other ways to implement its new world strategy without
getting its hands dirty, including what it and its Israeli allies call
"targeted killings." During February, 2003, the Bush administration
sought the Israeli government's counsel on how to create a legal justification
for the assassination of terrorism suspects. In his 2003 State of the
Union speech, President Bush said that terrorism suspects who were not
caught and brought to trial have been "otherwise dealt with"
and observed that "more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been
arrested in many countries, and many others have met a different fate.
Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States
and our friends and allies."8
High-tech warfare
invites the kind of creative judo the terrorists of al Qaeda utilized
on September 11. Employing domestic American airliners as their weapons
of mass destruction, they took a deadly toll of innocent American bystanders.
The U.S. worries that they might acquire or be given fissionable material
by a "rogue state," but the much more likely source is via
theft from the huge nuclear stockpiles of the United States and Russia.
The weapons-grade anthrax used in the September 2001 terrorist attacks
in the United States almost certainly came from the Pentagon's own biological
stockpile, not from some poverty stricken Third World country. The U.S.
government has probably solved the case but is too embarrassed by it
actually to apprehend those responsible and bring them publicly before
a court of justice.9 Meanwhile, the emphasis on using a professional
military with its array of "people-zappers" will only strengthen
the identification between the United States and tyranny.
If the likelihood
of perpetual war hangs over the world, the situation domestically in
the United States is no better. Militarism and imperialism threaten
democratic government at home just as seriously as they menace the independence
and sovereignty of other countries. Whether George Bush and his zealots
can ever bring about a "regime change" in Iraq or any other
country is an open question, but there is no doubt that they already
have done so within the United States. In keeping with the Roman pretensions
of his administration, Bush often speaks as if he were a modern Caligula
(the Roman emperor who reigned from 37 to 41 AD and who wanted to appoint
his horse to the Senate). In the second presidential debate on October
11, 2000, Bush said, "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck
of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." A little more
than a year later, he replied to a question by the Washington Post journalist
Bob Woodward, "I'm the commander--see, I don't need to explain--I
do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing
about being president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they
say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."10
Bush and his administration
have worked zealously to expand the powers of the presidency at the
expense of the other branches of government. Article 1, Section 8, of
the Constitution says explicitly that "The Congress shall have
the power to declare war." It prohibits the president from making
that decision. The most influential author of the Constitution, James
Madison, wrote in 1793, "In no part of the Constitution is more
wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of
war or peace to the legislature, and not the executive department. ...
The trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man."11
Yet, after September 11, 2001, President Bush unilaterally declared
that the nation was "at war" against terrorism, and a White
House spokesman later noted that the president "considers any opposition
to his policies to be no less than an act of treason."
During October 3
to 10, 2002, Congress's "week of shame," both houses voted
to give the president open-ended authority to wage war against Iraq.
It permitted the president to use any means, including military force
and nuclear weapons, in a preventive strike against Iraq as soon and
as long as he--and he alone--determined it to be "appropriate."
The vote was 296 to 33 in the House and 77 to 23 in the Senate. There
was no debate; the members were too politically cowed to address the
issue directly. Thus, for example, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-New Mexico)
spoke on the hundredth anniversary of the 4-H Club; Sen. Jim Bunning
(R-Kentucky) talked about the Future Farmers of America in his state;
and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) gave Congress a brief history
of the city of Mountain View, California.12
Equally serious,
the Bush administration arrogated to itself the power unilaterally to
judge whether an American citizen or a foreigner is part of a terrorist
organization and can therefore be stripped of all Constitutional rights
or rights under international law. President Bush's government has imprisoned
664 individuals from forty-two countries, including teenage children,
at a concentration camp in Guantánmo, Cuba, where they are beyond
the reach of the Constitution. It has also designated them "illegal
combatants," a concept unknown in international law, to place them
beyond the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war.
None of them has been charged with anything: they are merely captives.
The key cases here
concern two native-born American citizens--Yasir Esam Hamdi and Jose
Padilla. Hamdi, age 22, was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but raised
in Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon claimed he was captured fighting for the
Taliban in Afghanistan, although in a more detailed submission it acknowledged
that he surrendered to the Northern Alliance forces, the warlords whom
the U.S. had paid to fight on its side, before he engaged in any form
of combat. Padilla is a Brooklyn-born American of Puerto Rican ancestry.
He was arrested by federal agents on May 8, 2002, at O'Hare Airport,
Chicago, after he arrived on a flight from Pakistan. He was held for
a month without any charges being filed or contact with an attorney
or the outside world. On the eve of his appearance in federal court
in New York, he was hastily transferred to a military prison in Charleston,
South Carolina; and President Bush designated him "a bad guy"
and an "enemy combatant." No charges were brought against
him, and attempts to force the government to make its case via writs
of habeas corpus were routinely turned down on grounds that the courts
have no jurisdiction over a military prisoner.
A year and a half
after September 11, 2001, at least two articles of the Bill of Rights
were dead letters--the fourth prohibiting unwarranted searches and seizures
and the sixth guaranteeing a jury of peers, the assistance of an attorney
in offering a defense, the right to confront one's accusers, protection
against self-incrimination, and, most critically, the requirement that
the government spell out its charges and make them public. The second
half of Thomas Jefferson's old warning--"When the government fears
the people, there is liberty; when the people fear the government, there
is tyranny"--clearly applies.13
The final sorrow
of empire is financial ruin. It is different from the other three in
that bankruptcy may not be as fatal to the American Constitution as
endless war, loss of liberty, and habitual official lying; but it is
the only sorrow that will certainly lead to a crisis. The U.S. proved
to be ready militarily for an Iraq war, maybe even a North Korea war,
and perhaps an Iran war, but it is unprepared economically for even
one of them, much less all three in short succession.
The permanent military
domination of the world is an expensive business. During fiscal year
2003, the U.S.'s military appropriations bill, signed on October 23,
2002, came to $354.8 billion. For fiscal year 2004, the Department of
Defense asked Congress for a 4.2% increase, to $380 billion. When the
budget was presented, sycophantic Congressmen spent most of their time
asking the defense secretary if he was sure he did not need even more
money and suggesting big weapons projects that could be built in their
districts. They seemed to say that no matter how much the U.S. spends
on "defense," it will not be enough. The next largest military
spender is Russia, but its military budget is only 14% of the U.S.'s
total. To equal current U.S. expenditures, the military budgets of the
next twenty-seven highest spenders would have to be added together.
The American amounts do not include the intelligence budgets, most of
which are controlled by the Pentagon, nor do they include expenditures
for the Iraq war or the Pentagon's request for a special $10 billion
account to combat terrorism.
Estimates of the
likely cost of the war vary widely. In 2002, President Bush's first
chief economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, guessed that attacking Iraq--an
economy somewhat smaller than that of Louisiana's--would require around
$140 billion, but this figure already looks too small. In March 2003,
the Bush administration said it would need an additional amount somewhere
between $60 billion and $95 billion just to cover the build-up of troops
in and around Iraq, the ships and planes carrying them, their munitions
and other supplies, and the fuel they will consume. These figures did
not include the costs of the postwar occupation and reconstruction of
the country. A high-level Council on Foreign Relations study concluded
that President Bush has failed "to fully describe to Congress and
the American people the magnitude of the resources that will be required
to meet the post-conflict needs" of Iraq.14
The first Gulf war
cost about $61 billion. However, American allies such as Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Japan, and South Korea chipped
in some $54.1 billion, about 80% of the total, leaving the U.S.'s financial
contribution a minuscule $7 billion. Japan alone contributed $13 billion.
Nothing like that will happen again. Virtually the entire world is agreed
that if the lone superpower wants to go off in personal pursuit of a
preventive war, it can pick up its own tab. The problem is that the
U.S. is becoming quite short on cash. The budget for 2003 forecasts
a $304 billion federal deficit, excluding the costs of the Iraq war
and shortfalls in the budgets of programs that are guaranteed, backed,
or sponsored by the U.S. government. Virtually all of the U.S. states
face severe fiscal shortages and are pleading with the federal government
for bailouts, particularly to pay for congressionally mandated anti-terrorism
and civil defense programs. The Congressional Budget Office projects
federal deficits over the next five years of over $1 trillion, on top
of an already existing government debt in February 2003 of $6.4 trillion.
In my judgment,
American imperialism and militarism are so far advanced and obstacles
to its further growth have been so completely neutralized that the decline
of the U.S. has already begun. The country is following the path already
taken by its erstwhile adversary in the cold war, the former Soviet
Union. The U.S.'s refusal to dismantle its own empire of military bases
when the menace of the Soviet Union disappeared, combined with its inappropriate
response to the blowback of September 11, 2001, makes this decline virtually
inevitable.
There is only one
development that could conceivably stop this cancerous process, and
that is for the people to retake control of Congress, reform it and
the election laws to make it a genuine assembly of democratic representatives,
and cut off the supply of money to the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence
Agency. That was, after all, the way the Vietnam War was finally brought
to a halt.
John le Carré,
the novelist most famous for his books on the role of intelligence services
in the cold war, writes, "America has entered one of its periods
of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than
McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially
more disastrous than the Vietnam War."15 His view is somewhat more
optimistic than mine. If it is just a period of madness, like musth
in elephants, we might get over it. The U.S. still has a strong civil
society that could, at least in theory, overcome the entrenched interests
of the armed forces and the military-industrial complex. I fear, however,
that the U.S. has indeed crossed the Rubicon and that there is no way
to restore Constitutional government short of a revolutionary rehabilitation
of American democracy. Without root and branch reform, Nemesis awaits.
She is the goddess of revenge, the punisher of pride and arrogance,
and the United States is on course for a rendezvous with her.
NOTES
Madeleine Bunting, "Beginning of the End: The U.S. Is Ignoring
an Important Lesson from History--that an Empire Cannot Survive on Brute
Force Alone," The Guardian, February 3, 2003.
Ewen MacAskill, "Up to 50 States Are on Blacklist, Says Cheney,"
The Guardian, November 17, 2001; James Doran, "Terror War Must
Target 60 Nations, says Bush," The Times, London, June 3, 2002.
Tom Barry, "The U.S. Power Complex: What's New?" Foreign Policy
in Focus, Special Report, November 2002, n. 11.
Madhavee Inamdar, "Global Vigilance in a Global Village: U.S. Expands
Its Military Bases," The Progressive Response, vol. 6, no. 41 (December
31, 2002).
William M. Arkin, "The Best Defense," Los Angeles Times, July
14, 2002; "War Designed to Test New Weapons: Interview with Vladimir
Slipchenko," Rossiyskaya Gazeta, February 22, 2003, online at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/SLI303A.html
Doug Rokke, "Gulf War Casualties," September 30, 2002, online
at http://www.rense.com/general29/gulf.htm; Susanna Hecht, "Uranium
Warheads May Leave Both Sides a Legacy of Death for Decades," Los
Angeles Times, March 30, 2003; Neil Mackay, "U.S. Forces' Use of
Depleted Uranium Is 'Illegal,'" Glasgow Sunday Herald, March 30,
2003; Steven Rosenfeld, "Gulf War Syndrome, The Sequel," TomPaine.com,
April 8, 2003; "UK to Aid DU Removal," BBC News, April 23,
2003; Frances Williams, "Clean-up of Pollution Urged to Reduce
Health Risks" and Vanessa Houlder, "Allied Troops 'Risk Uranium
Exposure,'" Financial Times, April 25, 2003; Jonathan Duffy, "Iraq's
Cancer Children Overlooked in War," BBC News, April 29, 2003.
See Ira Chernus, "Shock & Awe: Is Baghdad the Next Hiroshima?"
CommonDreams.org, January 27, 2003. On the proposed Anglo-American use
of such weapons as lasers that can blind and stun and microwave beams
that can heat the water in human skin to the boiling point, see Antony
Barnett, "Army's Secret 'People Zapper' Plans," The Observer,
November 3, 2002. The United States is also sponsoring research on chemical
and biological weapons that violates the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention
and other international treaties. One of the projects is to produce
antibiotic-resistant anthrax. Julian Borger, "U.S. Weapons Secrets
Exposed," The Guardian, October 29, 2002; and Thomas Fuller, "Microwave
Weapons: The Dangers of First Use," International Herald Tribune,
March 17, 2003.
"Complete Text of President Bush's State of the Union Address,"
Los Angeles Times, January 28, 2003. Also see Ian Urbina, "On the
Road with Murder, Inc.," Asia Times, January 24, 2003; Ori Nir,
"Bush Seeks Israeli Advice on 'Targeted Killings,'" Forward,
February 7, 2003.
See Marilyn W. Thompson, The Killer Strain: Anthrax and a Government
Exposed (New York: HarperCollins, 2003); and Chuck Murphy, "Not
Iraq, But Anniston, Ala.," St. Petersburg Times, March 16, 2003.
According to Murphy, the U.S. Army is currently storing in the United
States, 873,020 pounds of sarin, 1,657,480 pounds of VX nerve agent,
and 1,976,760 pounds of mustard agent.
Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp.
145-46.
James Madison, as quoted by Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-West Virginia),
October 3, 2002, speaking in opposition to a resolution granting the
president open-ended authority to go to war whenever he chooses to do
so. See John C. Bonifaz, "War Powers: The White House Continues
to Defy the Constitution," TomPaine.com, February 4, 2003.
Winslow T. Wheeler, "The Week of Shame: Congress Wilts as the President
Demands an Unclogged Road to War" (Washington: Center for Defense
Information, January 2003), p. 17.
William Norman Grigg, "Suspending Habeas Corpus," The New
American, vol. 18, no. 14 (July 15, 2002). Also see "Detaining
Americans," Washington Post, June 13, 2002; Nat Hentoff, "George
W. Bush's Constitution," Village Voice, January 3, 2003; Benjamin
Weiser, "U.S. to Appeal Order Giving Lawyers Access to Detainee,"
New York Times, March 26, 2003; Dick Meyer, "John Ashcroft: Minister
of Fear," CBSNews.com, June 12, 2002; Edward Alden and Caroline
Daniel, "Battle Lines Blurred as U.S. Searches for Enemies in the
War on Terrorism," Financial Times, January 2, 2003.
Leslie Wayne, "Rumsfeld Warns He Will Ask Congress for More Billions,"
New York Times, February 6, 2003; Thom Shanker and Richard W. Stevenson,
"Pentagon Wants $10 Billion a Year for Antiterror Fund," New
York Times, November 27, 2002; Jason Nissé, "The $800 Billion
Conflict and a World Left Licking Its Wounds," The Independent,
March 9, 2003; Patrick E. Tyler, "Panel Faults Bush on War Costs
and Risks," New York Times, March 12, 2003; David R. Sands, "Allies
Unlikely to Help Pay for Second Iraq Invasion," Washington Times,
March 10, 2003.
59.Edmund L. Andrews, "Federal Debt Near Ceiling; Second Time in
9 Months," New York Times, February 20, 2003.
John le Carré, "The United States of America Has Gone Mad,"
The Times (London), January 15, 2003, online at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-543296,00.html
Chalmers Johnson is the president of the Japan Policy Research Institute
in California and author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of
American Empire. This essay is an excerpt from his forthcoming book
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Repbublic
(New York: Metropolitan Books; and London: Verso).
Published by Foreign
Policy In Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource
Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) and the Institute for Policy
Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org).©2003.
All rights reserved.