Nemesis

My drives to and from work have had a shadow fall over them recently. It started when I began listening to the audiobook of Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis in my car. On one hand, it's an utterly fascinating look at our government and various elements of our foreign policy since the end of World War II. On the other, it is a chronicle of horror with, among other things, the CIA acting as a tentacle of the Executive Branch with a secret budget and no oversight. I am currently in media res of the sorry story of how two Marines and a sailor abducted, beat and raped a twelve-year-old girl on the island of Okinawa where we have no less than 37 military bases. Prior to this, Johnson gave overviews of the Roman and British empires, a look at the CIA including an in-depth explanation of my country's role in the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973, and lots of discussion about the concentration of executive power & the military-industrial complex. Every morning and afternoon I feel like Kevin Kostner's Jim Garrison being lectured to by Mr. X.



It's not that Johnson is L. Fletcher Prouty but the reader has my rapt attention as I listen and I find the words enlightening, if sad and angering as well. There is a lot of history and arguments in Nemesis to which I cannot do justice and, besides, I'm not even three quarters of the way through it. The broadest lesson is that America is an empire. Different from those of Rome and Britain, but an empire nonetheless. Johnson sites the Pentagon's Base Structure Report which lists 737 military bases scattered across every continent on the globe in some 130 countries. He cites this and continues to note what's missing from the report before giving his own tally of 1000+ bases. Our military budget is similarly scrutinized and assigned a total of somewhere around $750,000,000,000. That's a lot of zeroes. With 1000+ bases as part of a total military budget of three quarters of a trillion dollars, the suitability of the word "empire" can be in little doubt.

It was bad enough to listen to accounts of the CIA as a rogue arm of the presidency and a description of the military-industrial complex, but perhaps the worst blow came as I heard about the military bases that are currently in and the ones we're building in Iraq. By "we" I mean American taxpayers essentially giving corporate welfare to one subsidiary of Haliburton or another. And then there's the Orwellian misuse of language when the military refers to these outposts as "enduring" instead of "permanent". It made me realize that the question "When are we going to get out of Iraq?" is fraught with ambiguities despite it being rather straightforward on it face. To the average American citizen, the question no doubt conjures up images of our fighting men & women and all of their equipment being loaded onto C-130s and transport ships which take off or leave port. On the other hand, I highly suspect that the question to our politicos and captains of industry means something a bit different. I think that, to these people, "getting out of Iraq" means handing over the routine duties of law enforcement over to the Iraqis and sending the majority of our troops home while the 3 or 4 bases that the Pentagon wants to keep come hell or high water are populated by the remaining troops. In the political sense, getting out of Iraq means retreating to our multi-billion dollar bases, not actually leaving the borders of the country. Our embassy there is to be the biggest one in the world and we're spending billions of dollars to build military bases there that are to endure. Strictly speaking, we're not going to leave Iraq. Even if the Iraqis stood up tomorrow and took over all policing duties and assembled as army for national defense and drove out all the terrorists – we'd still have a presence there. Even if the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites miraculously all found a way to live in harmony, we'd still have our military bases there. To average Joes and Janes, getting out of Iraq is about leaving. By contrast, to those in power, it is about what we leave behind.

There is an ongoing intra-lefty debate about the lesser of two evils. Just mention the name of Ralph Nader when you're in a room of lefties and you'll see what I mean. Nader asserts that there's no real differences between the two major parties in this country. While progressives might agree, your more garden variety liberal is likely to take issue with this. A common retort is to point out abortion. Dems are generally pro-choice while Republicans are generally in favor of having Roe v Wade overturned. The point is taken but I would note that most liberals who refute Nader's statement look to domestic policies when arguing in opposition. Listening to Nemesis and attempting to take a broader view which is inclusive of our foreign policy, I think that Nader is, at least partially, redeemed. Presidents of both parties have eagerly used the power of the CIA for decidedly undemocratic purposes; and no President nor seemingly any Congressperson of either party has ever tried to restrain our country's militarism or the military industrial complex of the past 60 years. Eisenhower's warning has gone unheeded.



I'm not advocating that those on the left side of the political spectrum ought to stop voting for Democrats. But I do think we should consider Johnson's warnings and what one can draw from them: merely putting a Dem in the White House in 2008 doesn't mean that all American troops will be brought home or that America will cede its authority on the world stage. Even anti-war Congresspeople fight tooth and nail to keep the military bases in their districts from closing. My roommate Stevie blames Nader and advocates for progressive candidates on the local level. While having them serve on our school boards, in our state legislatures, etc. is certainly a good thing, conceding to the lesser of two evils in national offices is to concede to militarism, which is, according to Johnson, why the terrorists hate us.

EDIT: You can watch a recent interview with Chalmers Johnson at the Conversations With History site at the UC Berkeley.