We fight tooth and nails over the scraps left over for social programs and a $1 trillion health care program for 10 years is angonized over like it will lead to financial ruin by various types of conservatives, whether the monlitihic reactionaies in the GOP or the blue dog democrats, yet we spend $250 a bilion a year on largely offensive weapons. What a tragedy for those who suffer pain and even death needlessly at home due to lack of health care and abroad as we bomb their villages and weddings. ********* Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhardt, July 31, 2009 Think of this as the American health care reform program that no one is discussing. Tom Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire And Ten Steps to Take to Do So By Chalmers Johnson However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. ...The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union. According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there — 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan. These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony — that is, control or dominance — over as many nations on the planet as possible. We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past — including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.) Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us. 1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that "[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet." ... What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster. According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes: 2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan’s modern history — to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the North-West Frontier Territories — the area along either side of the artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain’s foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand. Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area. As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 425): "Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland." An estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan. ... "If Washington’s bureaucrats don’t remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world’s sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States." od the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices. 3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, "Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing." He continued: "New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults — 2,923 — and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them." The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan’s poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago. ... It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. As a result a group of female veterans in 2006 created the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN). Its agenda is to spread the word that "no woman should join the military." I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves. 10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin: 1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves. 2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the "opportunity costs" that go with them — the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can’t or won’t. 3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors [Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad. 4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters — along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth — that follow our military enclaves around the world. 5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen. 6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world’s largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army’s infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.) 7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools. 8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this possible. 9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo. 10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2009/07/30/three-good-reasons-to-liquidate-our-empire/
That article was close to complete garbage in my opinion. If the authors had focused more on economic and geo-political reasons for reducing our worldwide presence, I'd be more inclined to take them seriously. Here's a good dose of reality for the authors: If we did not have such an overwhelming military force, the foreign relations repair that we've been engaging in under Obama would be much less effective. It's better to be feared than loved, but a good measure of both never hurts.
They said nothing about cutting out all the foreign aid. Most of the money, food and medical supplies we send never gets to the poor anyway. It goes into the pockets of greedy bureaucrats and other thieves, foreign and domestic. That money, food and medical supplies should be channeled to the poor right here in the United States, especially since the current administration is turning a blind eye to, and even ecouraging, the creation of a domestic "third world" of illegal immigrants. I'm very much in favor of feeding a hungry child in the Bronx over his or her counterpart in the Sudan. However, I agree we don't need to keep troops in Germany and Japan. They should be doing more to pay for their own defense.
But I like being the toughest guy on the block! So what if it costs a few hundred billion, here and there? And who cares about all those furren peoples and their itty-bitty countries? If it wasn't for us, who would stand up for them? Or lay down? Or dance a jig? Really, glynch, why do you hate (fill in an itty-bitty country)?
Thumbs, I have to disagree with you. I've seen foreign aid in action and it makes a huge difference. Yes, a certain percentage gets siphoned off due to corruption, depending on the location, but so does "aid" right here in the USA. There are numerous countries around the world that have made real progress because of foreign aid, from the US and from other 1st world countries. If anything, we spend far too little overseas on aid not connected with military hardware. Non-military aid has a far bigger impact on the lives in the countries that military aid typically goes to, and the oligarchies and dictatorships so often propped up by that military aid are undermined by the improved education, improved health, and increased prosperity that non-military aid helps bring about. Would you have us return to "Fortress America" again, to being the proverbial ostrich with its head buried in the sand, heedless of the world around it?
In my old age I am changing my perspective about the good that our goods actually do. When we send aid, most of it is re-crated and stamped "fill-in-the-blank" government, and the poor are told that what does get to them is from their kindly dictator. This is not to imply that I have taken a "Fortress America" mentality. We should be active in world politics, but we should curtail our contributions to the United Nations to no more than the least of the Big Seven. We need to re-assure our financier (China) that we are mending our fiscal fences. Buying friendship hasn't really worked. However, you are right in that we need to stop funding militaristic dictatorships. War will come either way, so let's take better care of our own in the interim.
In theory I agree with the article that maintaining a US military hegemony isn't practical and creates as many, quite possibly more, problems than it solves. I don't think we need to return to a fortress America where we put our head in the sand about world affairs but I think we shouldn't be looked at as the World's policeman and instead of taking the lead to solve global problems should engage in things multilaterally.
Americans are arrogrant and hate it the most when other people tell them to do stuff. How are we going to take it when there's a power greater than us give us **** through their double standards?
You won't have to wait long. China and India are poised to move us off the throne. Russia and the U.S. are fading into technological oblivion because we allowed our manufacturing base to migrate while we encouraged the poor and uneducated of other countries to immigrate.
Technological oblivion is a harsh assessment. Manufacturing capacity is reduced, but other industrialized countries would still trade their overall tech standing with ours in a heartbeat. If there was a time for capitalist optimism, one would hope our market would self correct and entrepreneurs would shift capital back into American manufacturing when needed.
Militarism and empire contribute heavily to the deindustrialization of the US. Their may be some spin offs, but having so much of our technical intelligence devoted to war detracts from industry. Also contributing is the near theology of "one market under God" perpetrated by billionaires who push it as it helps them avoid taxes. The ideology disguised as university level economics and scholarship is also churned out to millions of biz school graduates.
It'd only be worth liquidating the empire if we wouldn't spend the money we 'saved' on other stuff. Fat chance of that happening.
Not exactly. If anything we have benefitted immensely from the best and brightest of others countries immigrating here. This idea that we are taking the poor and uneducated of other countries doesn't hold water considering it takes ambition and effort to get here.
Perhaps we can cut some things in the military, but I disagree with "liquidating" our empire. We still need a strong defense. It's not a nice world out there.
There is a HUGE difference between defending our country and having the kind of "empire" that we have. There is no reason for us to spend the kind of money we do on defense in today's world. We need to defend ourselves, but we don't need the military-industrial complex to do it.
Well, pulling back our so-called "empire" could mean withdrawing our protection of countries like Taiwan and Saudi Arabia. That could have destabilizing effects in those regions.
