The Sorrows of Empire.

The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic by Chalmers Johnson (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 389 pp., $25.00 cloth.

Shortly after the, new millennium began, Chalmers Johnsons book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire hit the markets (see the review in the Humanist, May/June 2001). Six months later, terrorists flew commercial planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and blowback--a CIA term for the unintended consequences of U.S. policies kept secret from the country's people--became part of the language describing terrorist activities.

In his new book The Sorrows of Empire Johnson takes a longer view than he did in Blowback. The United States has been on the path to imperialism for over a century as Johnson describes in great detail, although he emphasizes that it is now an empire of military bases rather than colonies. This military expansion has been so rapid during the past fifty years that it's difficult to keep up with the precise number of bases overseas.

As for the future, Johnson warns of the consequences of disregarding George Washingtons admonition that "overgrown military establishments" are "inauspicious to liberty." More recently Dwight D. Eisenhower's counsel that "the military-industrial complex" endangers "our liberties" and our "democratic processes" has gone largely ignored. With the burdens of militarism and empire already plaguing American society, a grimmer future awaits unless it alters its path. At the moment, that doesn't seem very likely.

The first in Johnson's catalog of sorrows is perpetual war. This comes as no surprise, as U.S. military conflicts have occurred over and over for the past half-century. Now George W. Bush has declared that the "War on Terror" will be open-ended, illustrating what he means by first attacking Afghanistan, which had a clear-cut connection to al-Qaeda, and then Iraq, with no demonstrable connection at all.

More broadly, the U.S. response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was spelled out in an official document, the "National Security Strategy of the United States," which Bush previewed in a speech to cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He argued that the United States has a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world deemed a threat. Bush has stated that the United States must be "ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives." Although the president didn't name any countries in that speech, it turned out he had a hit list of sixty possible targets--an escalation over Vice-President Dick Cheney's identification in November 2001 of "forty or fifty" countries we would consider placing on our attack roster.

Consistent with the warnings of Washington and Eisenhower, war and the bloated military apparatus that support it bring on additional sorrows: loss of democracy, loss of established rights, and the well-known sacrifice of truth. James Madison, the most influential author of the Constitution, considered the power of Congress to declare war extremely important because he felt that such power "would be too great for any one man." Yet Congress has cast no declaration of war in the many conflicts, large and small, since World War II. Most recently, Congress gave Bush unrestricted power--including use of nuclear weapons--in striking at Iraq whenever he deemed it "appropriate." As for constitutional rights, Johnson reviews an abundance of legal proceedings forcing him to conclude that Articles IV and VI of the Bill of Rights are now "dead letters."

Use of deception in U.S. empire-building goes back at least to the manufactured hysteria over the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor in 1898. And later Lyndon Johnson famously used a nonexistent attack on a U.S. destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin to boost congressional support for the war in Vietnam. Disinformation has been increasing exponentially as the executive branch creates new bureaucracies to manage public information and to control as much as possible what people in the country see, read, and therefore believe. This tactic can be very effective, as a recent example shows.

When CNN/USA Today conducted a poll last year, one of the questions asked, "Do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11 attack, or not?" This was after Bush had finally admitted that he had no reason to believe there was any link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorists, having claimed the contrary for a year and a half. More than half of those polled answered the question in the affirmative. Moreover, 84 percent of those who answered "yes" supported the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq.

An empire of bases--at least 725 of them outside the--United States--doesn't come cheap. These and the grandiose military ventures they support prompt Johnson to list bankruptcy as a fourth sorrow. He writes: "The Congressional Budget Office projects federal deficits over the next five years of a staggering $1.08 trillion, on top of an existing government debt in February 2003 of $6.4 trillion." But by January 2004 the CBO had to revise the numbers, forecasting a deficit of $1.4 trillion over the five years after 2004 (much higher if the tax cuts are made permanent, as the president wants), added to a $6.8 trillion total at the end of 2003.

This crushing debt will make it impossible to deal with a rising tide of crises facing the nation. One of the most severe is the inability to deliver adequate health care to the increasing millions of uninsured and underinsured--their plight made worse as many states facing deep fiscal shortages cut back their services. Another pending crisis, less immediate but just as disastrous in the long run, is the looming threat to Social Security that is being ignored rather than addressed. And then there are the nation's enormous trade deficits that are becoming increasingly difficult to finance. The International Monetary Fund recently warned that, with its enormous trade imbalance and huge budget deficits, the United States is running up a record-breaking foreign debt that is threatening its economy and that of the whole world.

An ordeal that plagues the people of a country intent on building an ever-larger empire is its military casualties. Johnson, looking back at several wars, reviews this in detail but, for whatever reason, doesn't include it in his enumeration of sorrows. The evolution of casualty statistics from the first Gulf War offers a chilling commentary on modern conflict, even when one side has virtually complete military superiority over the other.

At the end of hostilities in 1991 a total of 760 U.S. casualties were reported out of nearly 700,000 service people in the area. Yet the following year the Veterans Administration revealed nearly 170,000 service-connected casualties and illnesses. Within a few years almost a third of Norman Schwarzkopf's army had filed claims for medical care, compensation, and benefits based on injuries caused by combat. The final accounting shows a stunning casualty rate of just under 30 percent.

Johnson soberly concludes: "It is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire dominating the world, must go on forever. The blowback from the second half of the twentieth century has only just begun." True, but there is more than one possible ending to the empire. One continues the present path of ongoing war (which in turn cultivates new terrorists), the erosion of democracy and of civil liberties, and financial ruin. The other ending would require curtailing the military and so shrinking the empire. Done wisely, it could even begin reducing the terrorist threat. To achieve the latter ending will require renewed dedication to democracy and to the civil liberties of which we were once so proud. And it will require healthy skepticism toward government pronouncements and their parroting by the uncritical mainstream media.

These are in fact some of the steps toward constructing the decent, humane country and the decent, humane world that most want. Johnson thinks the odds are against the changes needed to move in that direction. That he may be right makes it all the more important to support those changes as vigorously as we can.

Albert L. Huebner has taught physics for more than twenty years at California State University at Northridge and was appointed contributing writer for Toword Freedom in 1995.