Munich American
Peace Committee (MAPC)
Radio Lora, 14. August 2006
Alternative
Radio
Chalmers Johnson
Ein
Imperium verfällt: Nachwirkungen des neuen
Militarismus
Seattle, Washington, 11.
Februar 2004
Heute stellt uns
Chalmers Johnson,
der Präsident des Japan Policy Research Institute und
Professor
emeritus für politische Wissenschaften an der
University of
California in Berkeley und San Diego, seinen Bestseller
„Blowback“ vor, der in Deutschland unter
dem Titel
„Ein Imperium verfällt“ erschienen ist.
Blowback“ - so der Titel der amerikanischen Originalausgabe -
bezeichnet in der Sprache der Geheimdienste den „negativen
Effekt
verdeckter Operationen auf deren Ursprungsland“, also die
Konsequenzen und Racheakte, die die vor den eigenen
Wählern
geheimgehaltenen Geheimdienstaktionen nach sich ziehen.
Zwei Gründe waren für das Entstehen von
„Blowback“ ausschlaggebend: der Niedergang der
Sowjetunion
und die Vorfälle auf Okinawa von 1995. Als der Kalte Krieg
1991 zu
Ende ging, rüstete unsere Regierung nicht ab, sondern begann,
weltweit nach neuen Feinden Ausschau zu halten. Sollte der Kalte Krieg
lediglich der Tarnung amerikanischer Weltmachtambitionen gedient
haben????
Okinawa ist für Japan das, was Puerto Rico für die
USA ist: Eine arme Insel, auf deren Bewohner man von oben herabsieht. Die
Japaner von den respektablen Hauptinseln benützen Okinawa als
Abstellplatz für unsere Truppen und halten sie so
außer Reich- und Hörweite und außerhalb sexueller
Übergriffe auf ihre Frauen und Töchter. Als zwei Marines und ein Matrose
am 4. September 1995 im Inselinneren ein 12-jähriges
Mädchen verschleppten, schlugen und vergewaltigten, behauptete
der amerikanische Kommandeur, dass es sich dabei um einen tragischen
Einzelfall gehandelt habe. Meine Nachforschungen ergaben jedoch, dass
es dort seit 50 Jahren jährlich mindestens zwei
Militärgerichtsverhandlungen wegen sexueller
Übergriffe amerikanischer Truppenangehöriger gibt. Der einzige
Unterschied bestand darin, dass es sich diesmal um ein erst 12-jähriges
Kind handelte. Und ich fand auch heraus, dass Okinawa keineswegs eine
Ausnahme darstellt, sondern sexuelle Übergriffe, Gewalt,
Umweltverschmutzung, Verkehrs- und Trunkenheitsdelikte und Prostitution
in der Welt der Militärbasen gang und gebe sind. Dies ist
einer der Gründe, warum Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice,
Paul Wolfowitz und Richard Armitage Präsident Bushs
Frage “Why do they hate us?“ „Warum hassen sie
uns?“ mühelos beantworten könnten. Doch darüber
hinaus rüsteten wir die Mudschahedin 1980 erstmals mit den Stinger
Boden-Luft-Raketen aus, die heute weltweit die zivile Luftfahrt
bedrohen. Nach der Niederlage der Sowjetunion ließen wir das
völlig zerstörte Afghanistan trotz eines drohenden
Bürgerkrieges im Stich. Wir stationierten US Truppen in
Saudi-Arabien, dem Land der Heiligen Stätten von Mekka und
Medina. Wir erklärten den Taliban den Krieg, obwohl wir sie
noch kurz zuvor wegen der Aussicht auf eine Öl-Pipeline durch
Afghanistan tatkräftig unterstützt hatten. Der Krieg
gegen Irak war bereits mit dem Amtsantritt der Bush Administration im Januar
2001 – also lange vor dem 11. September
– beschlossene Sache. Und dennoch fragen wir uns allen Ernstes, welche
Gründe die Attentäter um Osama bin Laden für
ihre Anschläge gehabt haben mögen. Im Irakkrieg ging es um
den Zugriff auf das Erdöl, denn in Washington wußte man
ganz genau, dass an der Bedrohung durch Saddam Hussein und seiner Verbindung
mit Al Qaida nichts, aber auch gar nichts dran war.
Und nun sind wir im Begriff, den Krieg gegen den Terror zu verlieren,
weltweit nehmen Terrorgefahr und Terroranschläge zu. Um das zu
verhindern, wären sofort nach dem 11. September 2001 drei
Maßnahmen notwendig gewesen:
1. der sofortige Truppenabzug aus Saudi-Arabien,
2. Sicherheitsgarantien für Israel bei gleichzeitigem
Einfrieren aller finanziellen Militärhilfe,
3. ein drastisches Benzinsparprogramm, um unsere
Abhängigkeit vom Erdöl der Golfregion beenden.
Doch nichts davon ist geschehen und alles ist nur immer schlimmer
geworden. Wir können im Irak weder bleiben, noch
können wie
gehen. Wenn wir bleiben, steigt die Zahl der Todesopfer ins
Unermeßliche, wenn wir gehen, droht der gesamten Region der
Flächenbrand eines Bürgerkrieges.
- 2 -
In meinem Buch „Der Selbstmord der amerikanischen
Demokratie“ beschreibe ich, wie die irrige Annahme, wir hätten den Kalten Krieg gewonnen,
uns
dazu verleitet hat, als Neues Rom aufzutreten. Wir haben uns mit 725
Militärbasen rund um die ganze Welt in anderer Leute
Ländern
breit gemacht. Wir spionieren an vermutlich 300 weiteren
Orten
e-mails, Telefongespräche und Faxe aus. Wir behalten
Stillschweigen über neue ständige
Militärstützpunkte im Irak und in Afghanistan und
über
das gigantisch große, gigantisch teure von Cheneys
Ex-Arbeitgebern Kellogg, Brown & Root gebaute Camp
Bondsteel
im Kosovo, an der geplanten Trans-Balkan-Pipeline. Auch die
gesamten Geheimdienstausgaben und 40% des Militärhaushaltes
sind
geheim. Selbst ein anderer Präsident und ein durch und durch
honoriger Kongress stünde gegenüber den
Geheimdiensten und
dem militärisch-industriellen Komplex auf verlorenem Posten.
Verlierer sind auch die Soldatinnen und Soldaten, denen man eine
gesicherte Zukunft mit Aufstiegschancen und Pensionsansprüchen
vorgaukelte, bevor sie als Kanonenfutter in den Irak geschickt wurden.
Ich befürchte, dass das Neue Imperium – so wie einst
das
Römische Weltreich – immer mehr zu einer
Militärdiktatur wird, die angesichts des riesigen US
Handelsdefizits im Handumdrehen am Bestellstab daherkommen
könnte.
Sollte es so weit kommen, könnte ich meiner geliebten alten
Russian Blue Katze zuliebe nur in Malaga Zuflucht nehmen, weil es dort
keine lange Quarantäne für sie gibt. Vorher lassen Sie mich jedoch noch Ihre Fragen beantworten.
- 3 –
Ich denke, dass man den Einfluss des Philosophen Leo Strauss
auf
das neo-konservative „Project for the New American
Century“
nicht überbewerten sollte. Es geht bei diesen Leuten weniger
um
Leo Strauss, sondern um ihre engen Beziehungen zum rechten
Flügel
der Likud Partei und zu Benjamin Netanyahu. Sie wollen den Irak um
jeden Preis vernichten, selbst auf Kosten amerikanischer Interessen. Um
von ihnen und damit auch vom Pentagon ernst genommen zu werden,
hätte Saddam Hussein – wie Nordkorea –
über
Massenvernichtungswaffen verfügen müssen. Natürlich geht es um Erdöl. Alle unsere
führenden
Politiker, Condi Rice inbegriffen, kommen ja aus der
Ölwirtschaft. Natürlich wollte auch der Präsident nach der
Plünderung
der Pensionskassen und den Korruptionsskandalen seine Zustimmungswerte
durch einen patriotischen Akt aufbessern. Was eignet sich
dafür
mehr als ein patriotischer Krieg!
Warum die 130 Länder unsere 725
Militärstützpunkte akzeptieren?
Einerseits aus Scham über die Erniedrigung wenn wir uns
über
ihre Gesetze hinwegsetzen und amerikanische Vergewaltiger einfach
außer Landes bringen, andererseits aus Eitelkeit, weil man
dem
neuen Großen Freund einen Gefallen tun möchte oder
weil man
selbst auch nicht viel von Demokratie und Menschenrechten
hält.
Ob ein demokratischer Präsident noch etwas ändern
könnte?
Die Sowjetunion ging unter, weil ihre Wirtschaft -
ähnlich
wie Enron und die Aktienbörse bei uns - sich allen
Reformbestrebungen widersetzte. Und obwohl Michael Gorbatschow der
erste Staatsmann in der Geschichte war, der sein Reich freiwillig
aufgab und auch die Rote Armee nicht von der Kette nahm als die
Berliner Mauer fiel, gelang es ihm nicht, seine Reformpläne
gegen
die Gier der neuen russischen Wirtschaftsbosse durchzusetzen. Warum
könnte etwas Ähnliches nicht auch in den USA
passieren?
Vielleicht weil im Februar 2003 weltweit 10 Million Menschen
auf
die Strasse gingen, um gegen den drohenden Krieg im Irak zu
demonstrieren; weil bereits 1999 in Seattle eine Koalition aus
unterschiedlichsten Menschengruppen den Internationalen
Währungsfond, die Welthandelsorganisation und die Weltbank als
undemokratisch bezeichnet hatten? Prominenten Annalisten, wie Friedman
von der New York Times, verschlug es die Sprache und Berlusconi
beschimpfte die Kritiker als Taliban-Horden. Aber Seattle war der
Anfang einer weltweiten „Anti-Bush-“ und
„Pro-Demokratie“- Bewegung.
Und wer weiß, vielleicht bewirkt diese Bewegung mehr als die
demokratische Partei der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika..
Radio Lora, 14. August 2006
CHALMERS JOHNSON
Blowback:
Impacts of the New Militarism
Seattle, Washington 11 February 2004
Chalmers Johnson is the
author of the national bestseller Blowback. He is president of the
Japan Policy Research Institute and
professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. His
latest book is Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic.
I thought I would begin with just a quick rundown of the origins of my
own American Empire Project. Blowback, subtitled The Cost and
Consequences of American Empire, was researched and written during
1998-1999. It was published early in the year 2000. It grew out of two
quite specific influences on me. As I say in the front of the book, I
had been throughout the Cold War a spear carrier for empire. I believed
the Soviet Union was a genuine menace. I was in that sense a routine
professor of international relations.
Two things happened. One was the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. I
expected a much greater peace dividend, a much greater withdrawal of
the United States from its elaborate military apparatus around the
world, to confront the Soviet Union. Instead, our government did
everything in its power to find a replacement enemy, almost at once,
and it shored up the old Cold War structures, particularly in East Asia
and in Latin America. This struck me analytically as an important
development. It raised the question, was the Cold War in fact a cover
for something more fundamental. Was the Cold War in fact a way of
justifying something that the leaders of our government did not think
was fully justifiable, namely, an American imperial project, going back
to World War II and growing out of the demise of the British Empire. As
I say, I expected a great deal more. It didn't come, and it required
analysis.
The second concrete influence. Okinawa is sort of the Japanese
equivalent of Puerto Rico. It's the poorest island in the Japanese
archipelago, the most southern island. It was seized and annexed into
the Japanese empire about the same time we were seizing and annexing
Puerto Rico. It has always been discriminated against. The Japanese use
it today as a dumping ground for our troops so that self-respecting
Japanese on the mainland won't have to live near them or listen to
them, or be raped by them, is what it really adds up to. On September
4, 1995, two marines and a sailor from Camp Hanson, in central Okinawa,
had abducted, beaten, and raped a 12-year-old girl. It set off the
biggest anti-American demonstrations in Japan since the security treaty
was signed. The governor of Okinawa had invited me to come in February
of 1996 to talk to his staff about this incident.
And I was simply appalled by 38 American military bases located on an
island smaller than Kawai in the Hawaiian Islands. The headquarters of
the Third Marine Division, together, living cheek by jowl with
1,300,000 Okinawan civilians. The commandant of U.S. forces in Japan at
that time was General Richard Myers, who is, of course, today chairman
of the joint chiefs of staff. Myers made the usual kind of propaganda
that you get from the military apparatus, that this was an
exceptionally tragic incident, three bad apples, etc. My research led
to the discovery that over the last 50 years the rate of sexually
violent crimes against Okinawan women by our troops leading to court
martial is two per month, and that continues right now. There was
nothing even slightly exceptional about this except that the Marines
went too far this time in raping a 12-year-old girl who was not fully
socialized. A group of women - I admire them a great deal - called
Okinawan Women Act Against Military Violence have protected her very
effectively but also have assisted her in getting revenge.
My first reaction to Okinawa was that this place has to be exceptional.
Nobody watches it, the military is very skillful in their public
relations, the journalists don't come here. For 20 years after the war
it was a military colony governed by an American Army lieutenant
general. But then I went on to do research in the other great enclaves
of bases around the world, in Germany, in Italy, in the Persian Gulf,
in Diego Garcia, in places like that, and I discovered that, no,
Okinawa is not unique, it's typical, that this is what comes with this
base world: sexually violent crimes, environmental pollution,
hit-and-run driving, bar brawls, prostitution, things of this sort.
The book was written, intended as a specific warning to Americans of
what was likely to happen to them in view of our foreign policy. You
should understand the word “blowback.” It was first
used by
the CIA in their after-action report on their first covert operation,
the overthrow of the government of Iran, of Mohammad Mossadeq, in 1953
for the sake of the British Petroleum Company while pretending that he
was a Communist.
Actually, the Pope would have more likely been a Communist than
Mossadeq. They said in the report, which was declassified only a few
years ago, that we may expect some “blowback” from
what
we've done in Iran. And, of course, it became a model for then
comparable incidents Guatemala, Brazil, the Congo, Chile, Greece, Cuba,
throughout Indochina. Probably the most recent one was just the
overthrow of the government in Georgia. It has every sign of an
American-inspired operation.
Blowback does not mean simply the unintended consequences of American
foreign policy actions. It means the unintended consequences of actions
that have been kept secret from the American public. It means
retaliation, but when the retaliation comes, the American public has no
possible way to put it in context. The people on the receiving end,
it's not secret to them, but it is secret to the American public.
That's why someone like Bush, a week after September 11, 2001, said to
the Congress rhetorically, “Why do they hate us?”
You could
easily have said to them that people in your immediate entourage are
the ones who could best answer that question, that is, former Secretary
of Defense Cheney, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Colin
Powell, Condoleezza Rice, NSC staff during the first Bush
administration, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage. These people ran the
biggest single clandestine operation our country has ever carried out,
namely, the recruiting, arming, and sending into combat of the
mujahideen militants in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when we armed them
for the first time with Stinger surface-to-air missiles, the only time
they had ever been used. They're now around the world and threaten
civil aviation almost everywhere.
I was again startled by the Bush Administration's blundering response.
In trying to understand the causes of these terrorist acts and respond
appropriately, the Bush Administration refused to ask the most obvious
of forensic questions, what were the motives of the people involved.
Osama bin Laden is a man from a wealthy Saudi family, long life spent
in the construction industry. He's the sort of man who you would have
more likely seen on the ski slopes at Gstaad with a blonde Swiss girl
on his arm or as a house guest at Kennebunkport, part of the
military-petroleum complex. He, like his fellows, were disgusted when,
after the Soviet Union was defeated in 1989, the Americans simply
walked away and allowed Afghanistan to decline into a miserable civil
war. By 1992, Kabul looked like Hiroshima. Moreover, they were deeply
outraged by the decision of the Bush Administration to put U.S.
troops in Saudi Arabia out at Prince Sultan Air Base, starting in 1990.
That is, Saudi Arabia, the house of Saud, the ruling house, is
understood in Islamic circles to be responsible for the defense of the
two most sacred sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina. It was an insult to
Saudi Arabians for us to put our troops there. Lieutenant Colonel
McSally, she's the highest-ranking female pilot in the U.S. Air Force,
was based at Prince Sultan Air Base.
She was outraged. She said publicly, “I'm allowed to fly an
F16,
but in this country I can't drive a car,” and that she was
forced
to wear an abaya, that is, a full-length covering for devout Islamic
women, whenever she left the base. She sued Rumsfeld and won her case.
But my argument is she never should have been there in the first place.
It just simply was a terrible mistake.
Bush chose to go to war in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime,
which we had previously favored. We were delighted to see them come to
power, for the sake of the Union Oil Company of California that wished
to build oil and gas pipelines across Afghanistan, from Tajikistan to
the Arabian Sea in Pakistan, and we had no objections at all to the
order that they had imposed, even though it was of a 13th-century
variety. It was only later that we did.
Secondly, of course, the decision to go to war with Saddam Hussein in
Iraq, a decision, we now know from former Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill, that was actually made in January 2001, when the Bush
Administration came to power. Also, I'm not here just to criticize the
Bush Administration. There is a great deal of continuity with previous
administrations on these kinds of issues. America has been trying to
tap the oil resources of the Caspian Basin for a long time. I've actual
I swum in the Caspian Sea, and I do remember it quite well, the
slightly oily smell of the place. When I did it, it was better known
for sturgeon and caviar than it was for oil drilling. But the guru of
the Republican Party, former Secretary of State Jim Baker, his law
firm, Baker & Butts, actually has an office in Baku,
Azerbaijan. I
want to tell you, there is not much legal business to do in Baku,
Azerbaijan. They're there as part of the military-petroleum complex, as
well as our bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
The decision to go to war with Iraq was basically designed to steal
Iraq's petroleum resources and was put into operation, according to
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in July of 2002, well
before any of the Bush Administration’s posturing at the U.N.
We
know this because she testified to Congress that Richard Haass, the
chairman of the policy planning staff in the State Department had
called her in July of 2002 and said he would like to have an
appointment to talk about Iraq, and she said: Save your breath. The
decision is made. There is no reason for you to come over here. We're
going ahead with it anyway. Certainly, in making these decisions, the
government knew that Saddam was not a threat to the United States and
that he had nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda.
In his now notorious “long, hard slog” memo of
October 16
of last year, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld wrote, “To date, we
lack
metrics.” He's a stand-up comic and he likes words like
“metrics.” He means measure. “To date, we
lack [a
measure] to know if we are winning or losing the global war on
terror.” That's simply wrong. We do have a quite good metric,
that is, a measure. From 1993 through 2001, through 9/11/2001, that is,
through the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, al-Qaeda managed to carry out five major bombings around the
world successfully. Since that time, in two years they've carried out
17. That's down to and including the suicide bombing of the HSBC Bank
and the British consulate in Istanbul.
We are losing the war on terror. The U.S. attacks on Afghanistan and
Iraq have only increased the threat of al-Qaeda. The tactic of
terrorism, that is, attacking the innocent in order to draw attention
to the sins of the invulnerable, is an extremely old tactic. Part of
the strategy is to elicit a military overreaction from the target
regime, one of the things that has certainly occurred in this context,
with devastating results. There is only, really, one effective way to
deal with a terrorist strategy, and that is the attempt to separate the
militant and probably irreconcilable activists from their passive
supporters. The only way you can do that is to respond to the
legitimate grievances of the passive supporters by altering your
foreign policy. Once you have done that, then you have some hopes that
these passive supporters will become disgusted with this form of
violence and allow you to arrest them.
In the wake of 9/11, there were three things that we could have done
almost at once that would have surely defused much of the issues. First
was to withdraw our troops from Saudi Arabia. They never should have
been there in the first place.
The defense of the house of Saud is not going to be carried out
militarily in any case. We did withdraw them after the fall of Baghdad,
knowing full well that we should have had them out a long time earlier.
Secondly, we should have said, “As a matter of national
policy
the American public believes in the survival of Israel. We are prepared
to sign a treaty with Israel, if need be, to guarantee your security.
But that does not include Zionist imperialism in the West Bank and in
Gaza.” We give Israel $3 billion out of the defense budget
every
year. It has the largest fleet of F16s of any nation on earth outside
of our own. It is not a small and defenseless country; it is a nuclear
power. And we should, I believe, have withheld those funds until Israel
began to withdraw. Having not done so, we now have literally no
credibility in any Islamic country on earth. But also, I want to assure
you, we have greatly added to the long-range dangers to the survival of
Israel. Ariel Sharon and the right wing of the Likud Party are creating
a cancer for the people of Israel in the West Bank.
The third thing we should have done was instantaneously have undertaken
a program of fuel conservation in this country. With the technology
that is readily available today and shows up in Japanese cars every
time you turn around anyway, we could have ended our entire dependence
on petroleum from the Persian Gulf. Instead, the symbol of America for
cartoon writers in Europe after 9/11 was some jerk driving down the
freeway in a Chevrolet Suburban, it gets 11 miles to the gallon; they
doubled sales after 9/11, with an American flag attached to his
antenna. And it was a disaster.
We didn't do any of these things, and the situation has been made much
worse, to the point that today we're in Iraq and we can neither leave
nor stay. If we stay, the casualties will mount to a politically
unacceptable level. If we get out, we almost certainly ask for a civil
war that will inflame the rest of the area because a semi-independent
Kurdistan will be intolerable to Turkey, a semi-independent Shia
southern Iraq will be extremely attractive to Iran, and the Sunnis will
regard themselves as surrounded by enemies. Iraq was an artificial
country created by British imperialism after the First World War. It
should have always been recognized.
It was in light of these post-9/11 events that I began to look for
reasons other than the ones stated by our government for our policies.
The results of this research are reported in The Sorrows of Empire. I
concluded that after 1991 we made a classic error, a Talleyrand-type
error. We concluded that we had won the Cold War, whereas the truth of
the matter is we have in recent times been tending down exactly the
same path that the former Soviet Union took. We were always richer. We
didn't lose it quite as badly as they did. From this belief that we won
the Cold War, many prominent Republican, but not entirely Republican,
international relations theorists, General Zinni would call them
chicken hawks, those without any experience of either war or barracks
life. I'm not saying the president has to be a veteran, but at times it
wouldn't hurt. It's an odd situation in the Pentagon where every
civilian leader has no knowledge whatsoever of what goes on in war or
in the armed forces. Having concluded that we won the Cold War, these
people concluded we were a new Rome, we were a colossus athwart the
world, we were beyond good and evil, we didn't need friends. They as
much as used the old slogan of the Roman Empire, “We do not
care
whether they love us so long as they fear us,” and as much as
said so. Wolfowitz began writing this in the last years of the Bush Sr.
administration. They were then out of power during the Clinton
Administration but organized into something called the Project for the
New American Century. They came back in with the Bush Administration
and then hijacked our foreign policy after 9/11 to begin to implement
their plans of preemptive war and things of that sort.
At the heart of my book is an analysis of our 725 military bases spread
around the world in other people's countries. That 725 is the official
number reported in the Base Structure Report of the Pentagon, an annual
report on real estate owned by the military. The number is actually
probably at least 300 more than that. None of the espionage bases are
listed, and they are huge installations, Men with Hills in Yorkshire,
it's our main base for listening to every single e-mail, telephone
call, fax, what else it may be, across the Atlantic. We know what goes
on there, largely because of a very prominent woman, Lindis Percy, of
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, who has made her career breaking
into these places and demonstrating what goes on there. Every time
she's about to be tried and convicted for criminal trespass, the U.S.
embassy withdraws the charges on grounds that it would reveal far much
more than we want revealed. If many of you remember, she was the one
seen hanging an American flag upside down on the gates of Buckingham
Palace when the boy emperor arrived for his state visit. We don't
report in there any of the bases in Kyrgyzstan, in Uzbekistan. We do
not report the four bases being built, permanent bases, in Iraq, none
of the bases in Afghanistan.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, they do not report Camp
Bondsteel in the Balkans, in Kosovo. The army likes to say there are
only two man made objects you can see from outer space: one is the
Great Wall of China and the other is Camp Bondsteel. It was built in
1999 by the Kellogg, Brown & Root subsidiary of Cheney's
Halliburton Company. It's the most expensive base we've built since the
Vietnam War. This is in an area where we're supposed to be there on a
peacekeeping operation that Bill Clinton said would last six months and
President Bush ran on the ticket of we shouldn't be there at all and
should withdraw. We're there in the most permanent base you ever saw.
But it's part of the military-petroleum complex. That's where the oil
that we are planning to extract from the Caspian Sea would be taken,
across the Black Sea by ship, then through a trans-Balkan pipeline from
Bulgaria opening into the Adriatic in Albania. And this base is
directly on that route. That route was also surveyed for us by the
Kellogg, Brown & Root company.
Kellogg, Brown & Root does all the services there. Those of you
who
are veterans, you would not recognize life in the armed forces today,
if you are a veteran of World War II or Korea or Vietnam. You no longer
do KP, you don't clean latrines. You don't do any of that. It's all
farmed out to private entrepreneurs, an extremely expensive business.
Soldiers at Camp Bondsteel say that “We ought to have a patch
that says, ‘Services provided by Kellogg, Brown &
Root of
Houston.’” Of the $87 billion that was just
recently
appropriated for the war in Iraq, fully a third of it is going to
private military corporations to provide these services to our troops.
One of the themes of my book, again, I don't want to dwell on this or
take too much time; I'm going to come to an end pretty fast, is that
imperialism is inevitably accompanied, it's the Siamese twin - they're
inseparable, by militarism. Militarism is not the defense of the
country. Militarism is vested interests in the standing army. It is
what the two most famous generals who became presidents of our country
warned us against. George Washington, in his famous farewell address,
when he spoke of the dangers of standing armies, that they were an
enemy of liberty and particularly of republican liberty. Washington was
not an isolationist. What he had in mind was that the maintenance of a
standing army inevitably draws power away from the congress and the
courts toward the imperial presidency. The other, equally famous, you
really ought to read it all at some point, is Dwight Eisenhower's
farewell address in 1961, in which he invented the phrase
“military-industrial complex.” He meant to say, we
know
from his memoirs, “military-industrial-congressional
complex,” but he was warned off not to use that phrase. But
he
spoke quite powerfully of hidden power.
Well, it's here. It's in power today. I think it's fairly obvious that
George Bush can be defeated or is in the process of defeating himself.
It is not at all obvious that anyone who replaced him could stand up to
the vested interests of the Pentagon, of the secret intelligence
agencies, and the military industrial complex. We may very well have
already crossed the Rubicon on those issues. I'll come back in a moment
to why. But just do bear in mind, 40% of the defense budget is secret.
All of the intelligence budgets are secret. Even if you had a
completely honest Congress, it's impossible to do oversight if you
can't get the facts. Contrary to Article I of the Constitution, the
American public has not had an honest and accurate accounting of how
their tax money is spent since World War II, since the Manhattan
Project, building atomic bombs, which has never been fully reported.
In my last chapter, I dwell on what I call the four sorrows of empire.
These are endless war, the end of the republic, lying and propaganda by
the government, and bankruptcy. Let me just say a word or two about
these..
Bush and Cheney between them have now identified between 50 and 60
nations in which they wish to bring about regime change using our Roman
legions. There is a command within the Pentagon today working on how to
implement that. It's part of what Colin Powell has referred to as our
new family of bases, places that we are building in what we call the
arc of conflict from essentially Colombia, in the Andean region, across
through the Middle East, down into Southeast Asia, into the Philippines
and Indonesia.
As for the end of the republic, what I have in mind here is precisely a
sort of drawing on the end of the Roman Republic. It lasted two
centuries. The way it came to an end was that the Romans had, rather
thoughtlessly, acquired themselves an empire, and then they discovered
that required massive standing armies. Until that time, the Roman
legions were raised - it's one of the things I always admired about the
Roman Republic - they had conscription, but the people they conscripted
were the richest people in the society, those who had the greatest to
lose.
They didn't want slaves or plebs in the Roman legions. These were
farmers. They went off to a single battle. They fought, they came back,
they marched through the Forum in triumph, and went back to their
fields. Once you got standing armies, then you began to develop vested
interests in the military as a career.
Again, I just want to remind you, service in the armed forces today is
not an obligation of citizenship, it is a career choice. Since 1973,
people are in the armed forces for their particular reasons, in many
cases to escape one or another dead end of the society. PFC Lynch,
after she was wounded at Nasariya was asked on one of the news
programs, “Why did you join the Army?” She said,
“I
couldn't get a job at Wal-Mart in Palestine, West Virginia. I joined
the Army to get out of Palestine, West Virginia.” It's
genuinely
a career choice. Well, this is a different kind of career choice. You
join the Army, you sleep in your tank on the DMZ all day, you sleep in
the arms of Korean prostitutes in the evening, and you get out and take
the police exam. It's a career. It's got a good pension on it. And
that's true. African Americans are twice as well represented in the
Army as they are in the society. Fifty percent of the women in the
armed forces are national minorities. It's a very odd kind of army.
What you must understand, they didn't expect to be shot at. In fact,
the Army even promises them that they're not going to be shot at.
That may be the greatest restraint on the empire right now, which is,
again, a little bit like the Roman Republic, that they may not continue
to enlist. We're running out of cannon fodder. And the alternatives are
then, obviously, to turn to the draft, which would be politically
explosive, or the classic imperial activity is to look for sepoys, look
for foreigners to do your fighting for you. We tried that in Vietnam,
we tried it many times in the past. We could try it again.
The end of the republic refers to what happened in a certain sense --
so much of our Constitution is inspired by Roman precedents. You will
recall that the great defenses of the Constitution by Madison, Jay, and
others in the Federalist Papers are all signed Publius. Who was
Publius? Publius Agricola was the first Roman consul. The separation of
powers, term limits, toleration of slavery - all of these things came
from Roman precedents.
What happened at the end of the Roman Republic was that vested
interests in the military became so overwhelming that some members of
the conservative senate now chose to represent the armed forcs against
civilian rule, the most famous, of course, being the genius Julius
Caesar. But after his assassination in the senate in 44 B.C., this then
led on to another boy emperor, Octavian, who in 27 B.C. became the god
Augustus Caesar. The senate threw in the towel, and Rome became a
military dictatorship. The succeeding leaders were Tiberius, who
withdrew to Capri with a covey of small boys to entertain himself; then
Caligula, a genuine madman; Claudius, who was poisoned by his wife with
a poisoned mushroom, we believe in order to bring her son to power,
namely, Nero. This is not exactly good government, is what I'm getting
at. For those of you who are Christians, Nero did manage to really make
something out of Peter and Paul that the Christians don't forget.
The end of the republic, to me probably the most inspiring figure in
our public life right now is that odd character, Senator Robert Byrd
from West Virginia - but, again, he's an old man from an extremely poor
state - giving these passionate, unimaginably brilliant lectures to an
empty senate chamber. He is our Cicero, but he's old enough, he's not
going to end up the way Cicero did. Cicero ended up with his head in
both hands nailed to the Forum wall by Octavian for playing the same
kind of role as we move toward military dictatorship. But the times are
perilous, and even though Byrd believes the American public, once they
realize how cheated they have been and how the republic has been stolen
from them, will rise up and resist, I'm not myself sure any longer. I'd
be glad to talk about that. Adlai Stevenson, once somebody in the
audience said to him, “You have all the intellectuals in the
country behind you.” And he said, “That's great.
What I
need is a majority.” And that's where you don't see it today.
Lying and propaganda by the government, these are the biggest issues of
all. But easily the best example of all was February 5 of last year,
when the secretary of state, seated in the U.N. Security Council, with
the director of the CIA seated directly behind him as if he were a
potted plant, in order to provide credibility for what he was saying,
attempted to even recreate the rather famous scene in which Adlai
Stevenson in the same hall came in with the U2 pictures of Russian
missiles in Cuba and offered our evidence to the world, and they joined
us in demanding that this be avoided. We now know that every single
thing Colin Powell said that day was a tissue of lies, and he had every
reason to know that they were. There is not a serious statesman on
earth today who would trust anything our secretary of state had to say.
Even if the American people are willing to see their Constitution go by
the boards, I would just simply mention to you, Madison, in defending
the Constitution, said that the single most important article in it was
that one that stipulates the war power can only be in the hands of the
elected representatives of the people. Never, he said, under any
circumstances should it be entrusted to a single man or woman. In
October of 2002, our Congress voted to give that power to a single man,
when he chose to do it, in any circumstances, including the use of
atomic weapons. And there was virtually no debate. The only two people
who even addressed the issue directly were Senator Byrd and Senator
Warner from Virginia, on the opposite side from Byrd.
The burden of proof is on you if you wish to argue that the structure
of government outlined in the Constitution of 1787 still prevails.
Articles IV and VI of the Bill of Rights right now are dead letters.
That is to say, you do not have the right of habeas corpus if you're a
citizen in a federal court right now, and you are not protected from
searches and seizures in your home right now. We will soon find out if
the Supreme Court that appointed this president is prepared to do
anything about that. But right now the president has the power, it's a
new concept he's invented, to declare a citizen a bad guy. And if you
declare a citizen a bad guy, you can throw him in a Naval prison in
Charleston, South Carolina, and throw the key away.
I didn't mention to you the last of the sorrows, bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy? Herb Stein, when he was chairman of the Council of Economic
Advisers, used to say, “Things that can't go on forever
don't.” What's happening right now is that we are very close
to
the point where they can't go on much longer, deficits of the sort that
we're running. A $400 billion defense budget, not even including Iraq
and Afghanistan, or atomic energy and the Department of Energy, all of
these other things, probably runs up to a half trillion dollars a year,
which is not being funded. All it takes is for the people in the rest
of the world, who save their money and lend it to us to balance our
trade deficits, to up and decide that the Euro is a better bet than the
dollar. And the moment that happens, it's over: the United States has
become a basket case.
Let me conclude. Lord Byron said of the Greeks, “I would have
saved them if I could.” My own feeling is that it’s
my wife
keeps saying to me, “You can't end like this all the
time.”
When somebody stands up and says, “What should I do
personally?” I say, “Well, if you've got a little
money
ahead, I'd buy a condo in Vancouver, or otherwise at least give some
thought to your escape route.” I have a geriatric Russian
Blue
cat that I'm extremely fond of, so I've made an inquiry. The only good
country on earth that will take a cat without a long quarantine is
Spain. So it looks like Malaga for me, if it comes to it. But let me
stop on that light note.
This book is not an upper, but I hope that it's written completely in
the clear. And my purpose in writing it was simply to lay out a fairly
large amount of data. And the devil is in the details here, that I'm
reasonably certain very few Americans have. That's where the secrecy
comes in. Let me stop there and respond to your questions and comments.
Thank you very much.
Q & A
The question was about the group of so-called neoconservatives today,
the term that's used. They're organized into an organization - it has
its own Web site; you ought to take a look at it - called the Project
for the New American Century. It has been alleged in the press that
many of these people were educated at the University of Chicago and
influenced by the political philosopher Leo Strauss.
I think you can make too much out of this. I have to say to you that my
teacher of moral philosophy ages ago, when she was at Berkeley, was
Hannah Arendt. Arendt did not care for Strauss at all, so I never paid
that much attention to him. What I thought you were going to say rather
than Leo Strauss, there is ample evidence that within this group - and
I am not in any sense trying to be anti-Israeli, because I'm in fact
quite alarmed by the dangers that Israel is in today - many of these
people have very close ties to the right wing of the Likud Party, I
mean, close ties to Benjamin Netanyahu. They have written papers for
him, they are personal associates of his, and things of this sort.
And much of what they stand for does reflect the particular views of
the Sharonistas, if you will, that it serves their interests to destroy
Iraq, even if it has not particularly served ours.
That is, what virtually all the rest of the world has now figured out
from this war is that what was wrong with Saddam Hussein is that he
didn't have weapons of mass destruction. If you do have them, then we
take you quite seriously, and we're very cautious, as in North Korea.
The result is the greatest single impetus toward nuclear proliferation
because of the fear of the American juggernaut coming at you. I'm
reasonably certain that Luis da Silva in Brazil, for example -- Brazil
had a reasonably well developed program toward the creation of atomic
weapons at one time, and they abandoned it when they signed the nuclear
nonproliferation treaty. I'm certain that President da Silva has said
to some of his advisers, or at least asked them, Make sure that the
American ambassador doesn't hear any of this, but if they did start
putting Brazil on an axis of something or other and thinking about it,
because we don't buy their economic globalization ideas right now, tell
me, how fast could we revive the program? That looks like it's the only
thing that stops them.
So it's a very serious issue. But this, I think, reflects more Likud
Israeli policy, which is extremely influential within the Pentagon.
Not for a minute to say, though, that that's the whole story. It's also
petroleum politics. Every senior figure in our government is a former
petroleum executive, including, certainly, Condi Rice. She was a member
of the board of Chevron until the day before she went into the
government. She had a supertanker named after her, The Condoleezza
Rice. After she went into the government, they changed it to some
obscure name. As a former naval person, we usually regard that as bad
luck, to change the name of a ship. But give her credit, it was a
double-hulled tanker. It's not going to be an Exxon Valdez, at any
rate. Oil politics and the determination to both maintain our
profligate use of fossil fuels as well as to control other countries by
dominating the supply, was certainly part of it.
Third, I think we have to add in the weapons of mass distraction. As
2002 progressed, Karl Rove, the president's political adviser,
undoubtedly said to him, You are dead on arrival. You have almost no
legitimacy in the country. Workers' pension funds are being pilfered,
corruption in our corporations, in Martha Stewart, in the Stock
Exchange. It's a tradition that the party in the White House loses in
an off-year election. What should we do? History tells you what to do.
Go to war. Make the eagle scream. Make it a patriotic issue. Wrap
yourself in the flag. And it's worked. Beware of an October surprise
this year,too. Remember, no date on earth is better known in
international politics to every single political leader on earth than
the date of the American presidential election. It's fixed in stone.
It's not like a parliamentary system. It's not that the prime minister
can dissolve the government when he wishes to go to the people, things
of that sort. And we're therefore in a very highly political season
right now.
The question was, Why do the 130 countries around the world in which we
have these 725 military bases accept them.
The main, root cause is war. That is to say, we've acquired them in the
course of our wars, the huge enclaves in Okinawa, in Japan, 101 bases
in South Korea, in Germany, in Italy. Every time we go to war, we
establish more and new military bases.
And we very rarely close them when the war is over. That, as I say, in
my view, has slowly grown into a form of empire in which the military
base is today the equivalent of what used to be the colony.
Why do nations accept these things? It's a complex issue, I think. That
is, they also are often humiliated by the status-offorces agreements
that we impose them, essentially to try and protect our soldiers from
ever being held responsible for crimes they commit in these societies,
to provide extraterritoriality for them in one form or another. Very
commonly we simply fly an accused rapist out of the country before the
local police has a chance to get him. This has been particularly
prevalent in the Pacific. It's racist. That is, in Germany, you commit
a crime, the German police will arrest you and try you in a German
court. They can also go after you on an American military base. You
can't begin to do a thing like that in Japan or Korea. These agreements
are so embarrassing that they're kept secret in the Islamic countries
where we have bases, huge base enclaves in Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab
Republic, Oman. One-third of Kuwait is occupied by us right now, the
whole northern third of the country.
But it is basically a complex of reasons. Sometimes they have accepted
military bases for the implicit understanding that we will protect a
small country against an allegedly dangerous neighbor. This is much the
way British imperialism used to act in the past. In other cases it is
simply to try and curry favor with the colossus of the United States.
We much prefer bases in countries that are explicitly antidemocratic.
That makes it easier for us, as in, say, Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan.
These are ruled by former Soviet leaders who are as unpleasant
characters as you could imagine. President Bush says that he loathes
Kim Jong Il of North Korea. These characters could give Kim Jong Il a
run for his money, but they've all been entertained in the Oval Office
of the White House. It is interesting to me, when he says he loathes
Kim Jong Il, I always thought that Bush and Kim Jong Il have at least
one thing in common: without their daddies, neither of them would be
where they are today. They share that. But it's a combination of
pressure, force, or, in many cases, we engineered the government that
invited us in.
Echoing back to what you
said about
it might be too late, even if a Democratic person got into the White
House at this time, I felt incredibly frustrated by the real obvious
manipulation of the media of the Democratic race and with the different
candidates.
And I'd like your
comments on that.
I'd like your comments on Kerry as a possibility and what kind of job
you think he would do. And would you please elaborate on what you said
about if a Democrat got in at this point, it may be too late. And is
there anything we can do about that?
These are complex questions, and I just have to say at the outset, I'm
not a prophet. Cassandra was the only one that was really any good at
that sort of thing. And she was right: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
There was something in that horse. And I'm not as good as she was. I
don't have that kind of track record. But what I think we can say here
is that -- here's the reason that I worry that they can't be stopped.
We know with precision today the things that brought down the Soviet
Union in 1991. They were, first, domestic, ideological rigidity in its
economic institutions, making it very hard to reform them. Do we have
that? That's what Enron, the Stock Exchange, all the rest of it is all
about. The second was imperial overstretch. They were simply stretched
too far, just as we are today. But third was the inability to reform.
As a teacher of international relations, we usually say no empire ever
voluntarily gave up. The only exception I can think of to this is
probably Mikhail Gorbachev, that is, that he did make the decision in
1989 that he would rather have friendly relations with France and
Germany than he would with these rundown and decrepit satellites like
Romania and Bulgaria in East Europe, and therefore he did not use the
Red army when the Berlin Wall was breached. The point, though, is that
no matter how hard he tried, he was stopped cold by vested interests
within the Soviet Union. And remember, the Soviet Union was a very
different country from Russia. Russia is a much smaller place than what
the old Soviet Union used to be. He was stopped cold. And when I think
about that, I ask myself, Are there vested interests in this country,
even if you did come up with a leader who wanted to reform? I think
they're more entrenched, been there longer, and profit more than any
apparatchik in the Soviet system ever thought of doing.
As for the particular Democratic candidates, I have a Howard Dean
bumper strip on my car. I realize it's over, but the reason it is there
is because I think the only issue is the Constitution. I think that is
the issue. And he was the first to identify that that was the issue.
But I'm still appalled by the fact that no Democrat, and certainly not
the party, has begun even slightly, Kucinich probably has, to
articulate an alternative program of what we need in the way of armed
force, what does it take to defend the country. Ought we reinstitute
the obligation of citizens to defend the country, when needed, but
scale down the standing army? The Department of Defense today is not a
Department of Defense; it's an alternative form of government on the
south bank of the Potomac River. But to try to think of something
optimistic, I'm about tell you something optimistic. But I don't know
anything about Kerry. Look, it's the year of the monkey. I'll vote for
a monkey against this government. You may just have to go out and do
that.
In February of 2003, 10 million people on earth, in every major
democracy marched and demonstrated against the war impending in Iraq:
the 400,000 in New York City, 2 million in London, the largest
demonstration in British history, a million each in Berlin, Madrid,
Rome, etc. That movement grew out of something that actually started
here in Seattle, that is, in November 1999, when a really amazing
coalition of people came together to expose that the International
Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank were
among the most undemocratic institutions. That's when they really
sort of put it on the map. It caused any number of prominent
analysts in America, like Friedman of The New York Times, to almost
have apoplexy. Berlusconi described them as “Talibanized
hordes.” I live in southern California. I know two extremely
wealthy physicians from Newport Beach who flew up here and walked with
the Vietnamese delegation in turtle costumes. These guys are extremely
serious environmentalists.
They said they will never forget the Seattle police. They came away
controlling their enthusiasm for the Seattle police. They also said,
“We doctors know where to kick.” But it is just to
say,
that movement has grown into what is now a global anti-Bush,
pro-democracy movement that hasn't gone away, it hasn't disappeared.
The World Social Forum finished its convention in Bombay. If you have
not read Arundhati Roy's speech, you should. It is absolutely
brilliant. As usual, she says things that nobody else ever said before,
and then they are common knowledge after she says them. You will recall
that this speech is called “Do the Turkeys Enjoy
Thanksgiving?” What she's concerned with there is our habit
or
our practice in America of singling out a single turkey that the
president forgives and sends out to live a happy life on a Virginia
farm while we eat the rest of them. She believes that this saved turkey
is typical of people of the Third World. She goes out of her way to say
that “I am a saved turkey. I am a rich writer in India. I am
not
starving like most people here.” She identifies Colin Powell
and
Condoleezza Rice as two obvious American turkeys. Do read it, though,
if for no reason than that she says, “I'm tired of
demonstrating.
I want action,” and she calls for a global boycott against
the
U.S.
Whether this kind of movement can actually influence events is
obviously an open question. It has already had rather considerable
influence. I personally believe such a movement is as important as the
rise of a new alternative superpower confronting the Roman Empire in
its particular pretenses toward world domination. I ultimately think
that might make more difference than the Democratic Party. Thank you
very much.
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