05/17/07 – Chalmers Johnson – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Worden and introducing our first guest today, Chalmers Johnson.
He's the author of the Blowback trilogy, Blowback, The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, Sorrows of Empire, Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, and the newest, Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here.
It's good to have you on Anti-War Radio.
And this book is quite an accomplishment, I must say.
I actually haven't read the first one, but this is definitely a great follow-up to Sorrows of Empire.
Well, thank you.
And I think the overall point that you're making in this book, I believe, sir, is that if America just stuck to our Constitution, our republic could last another few hundred years at least, but that we have decided instead to embrace empire and that we're now driving our society over a cliff.
That's exactly the case, that there's no more unstable combination, history tells us, than a country like the United States today that is a domestic democracy and a foreign empire.
You can be one or you can be the other, but you can't be both.
We seem to be headed in the direction of one of the models for our constitutional authors, namely the Roman Republic, moving toward domestic tyranny, the loss of our democracy, for the sake of keeping our empire, it will surely bankrupt us.
And I'm trying to offer all the evidence I can on the trouble we're in and to make clear that the root cause of the trouble is imperialism and militarism.
At the end of the book, you close by saying that your model for writing what it is that you're writing is a Japanese man from the days of World War II named Hatsumi Ozaki.
Who is he?
Well, Hatsumi Ozaki was a very famous Asahi Shimbun, that's one of the country's leading newspaper journalists in China, and he had been warning since the late 1930s that Japan's imperialist policies toward China was radicalizing the country and likely to lead ultimately to a very powerful resistance movement led by the Chinese Communist Party.
That is, of course, exactly what did happen.
The Japanese behavior of the continent of China brought the Chinese Communist Party to power, gave them a mass basis in the resistance to their activities.
He collaborated with Richard Zorga, the Soviet Union's chief representative in Japan during World War II.
Both of them were finally arrested by the Japanese government and were executed on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in November of 1944.
I obviously do not wish to follow in the steps of Ozaki, but he is a bit of a hero in that he literally gave his life to warn his country about the folly of the behavior they were pursuing.
Weren't there Bible stories and stuff about the people who try to warn and nobody ever listens?
Well, there's no doubt about that.
The thing that impresses me today is that I think there are a lot more people listening, not just to me, but to many voices, including those that are featured prominently on antiwar.com, indicating that we know a good deal about these kinds of problems.
We know what happened to the Roman Republic and all other subsequent empires.
We have the option of at least attempting to do what the British did after World War II, and that was to liquidate their empire in order to maintain their democracy.
In fact, it was by then obviously futile after the war with Nazism to continue to try and rule India using the methods of administrative massacres that the British had resorted to so often.
We have this option.
We're not pursuing it.
We're not even discussing it.
The thing that seems tragic is that so many of our citizens seem to expect the political system, which has already failed us, that the political system will automatically correct the wrong course that we're on.
I don't believe that.
I think that's a very dangerous misconception.
And now the title for your book, Nemesis, comes from, that's the ancient Greek goddess of comeuppance?
The Greek goddess of revenge, of retribution, of the punisher of hubris and arrogance.
I don't think that everything about the American empire in the post-World War II period has deserved the attention of Nemesis.
It is particularly our behavior, the real hubris, that seemed to overwhelm us after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
This is when we start to call ourselves the indispensable nation, that we are a new Rome towards the world, that we can dominate the world through military force alone.
When we really become scofflaws toward international law, no longer claiming that it no longer applies to us, the Air Force prattles on about how we have a full spectrum dominance.
You know that this kind of hubristic nonsense is going to get us into trouble, and it certainly did, leading nothing more to the most obvious disaster of them all, namely the belief in preventive war.
That is, after all, what the Japanese tried to do to us in December 1941.
It's illegal, a disaster, and the tragedy is that we have not held responsible or even attempted to make accountable the people who led us in this direction.
It seems strange, too, when America is really the world empire by default, because basically everybody except us lost World War II.
Well, there's no doubt about that, but it's not as though we didn't also act of commission.
Our empire today is 737 American military bases in other people's countries.
I guarantee you that for the defense of the United States, and even as a responsible member of the United Nations, we don't need more than 37 of those 737.
The others are for purposes of maintaining hegemony over other people.
Never doubt that imperialism is a pure form of tyranny.
It never rules through consent.
Just ask the Iraqis if you have any doubt about that.
We always try to pretend to ourselves above all through our propaganda that we are loved and that we are doing good.
No one on the receiving end ever listens for a minute to that kind of nonsense.
Yeah, I guess I was just saying that the idea that we're the indispensable nation, that we found the end of history and all that kind of thing, is it's a lot for a country that basically just inherited the world by default.
Well, I think that's true.
I believe that.
I mean, we started talking endlessly about how we won the Cold War.
Well, we never even discussed this.
In my view, nobody won the Cold War.
Both we and the Soviets lost it.
They lost it first because they were always poorer than we were.
But the requirements of the Cold War, the attempt to maintain hegemony on half the globe, produced the same kinds of problems for both countries.
Imperial overstretch, economic irrationality as the military industries, the military industrial complex increasingly takes over, inability to reform.
We are now beginning to come to the sort of moment that Mikhail Gorbachev was facing after 1989.
It's going to take us down.
And really, they had the same problem that we do in terms of denying reality, which is something that you focus on a lot at the beginning of the book.
Is that here, we're just going on year after year after year where not only are we not discussing some of these most important issues, but the discussion that we are having is just patently ridiculous.
It is ridiculous.
We're spending far too much time talking about what goes on in the bedroom, what goes on in the church, neither of which I think the politicians have any special claim to speak on at all.
And it's simply boring, irrelevant and a tremendous nuisance.
Well, I'm certain that if you didn't see it, you at least heard of what happened at the Republican debate where Ron Paul invoked the CIA's phrase blowback and said that the reason we were attacked or actually he said a major contributing factor to why America was attacked on September 11th was because of our intervention overseas.
Well, I think it's wonderful that he said so.
I also was just I couldn't quite believe it.
I didn't actually see the debate.
Looking at the news broadcast later is how Giuliani became sort of apoplectic on saying, I've never heard of this.
I can't conceive that we could be in any way responsible for the things that happened on 9-11.
It was a clearest example of blowback, that is retaliation by our former allies, the mujahideen and including Osama bin Laden in the largest clandestine activity we ever carried out, namely the recruiting army and sending into battle of the Afghan guerrillas against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
And then it's been pretty clear.
I remember in, well, gee, 11 years ago, in 1996, Newsweek did a whole thing about this guy bin Laden.
And now he's issued this declaration of war against us.
And it said right in the title that the purpose of the war was to drive the Americans out of the land of two holy places, Saudi Arabia, the land of Mecca and Medina.
Yes.
No question about it.
That he's warned us 100 times.
I mean, we've this is not as though 9-11 came out of the blue.
There was the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, and the attacks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at our then Air Force base there, the attacks on our embassies in East Africa in 1998, the attack on the U.S.S.
Cole in the year 2000.
And as I say, bin Laden was certainly a CIA asset at one time.
He was a rich, pious Saudi from a very well-to-do Saudi Arabian family, whom at the time of the administration of the first George Bush, you'd have probably expected it to meet him as a houseguest at Kennebunkport, Maine.
And if I remember right, he offered the Saudi king to use his Mujahideen warriors to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait and was quite angry that the king said, no, we're going to invite the Americans in instead.
That was really the beginning of the end there.
And bin Laden was not the only Saudi citizen to say that this is a national disgrace, that the House of Fad, the ruling house in Saudi Arabia, which is charged with the defense of the two most sacred sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina, should invite in American infidels to do that job.
And let's not kid ourselves.
The Americans are serious infidels.
Our soldiers have an awful lot of latent racism in them.
They are prepped up by imperialist propaganda in training to believe that they are superior to the people they are pushing around.
It was unnecessary to put U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia is surrounded by water.
We have 12 carrier task forces that could easily deal with it.
If you really needed military force in order to defend the House of Fad, you probably did not.
But the whole thing was a disaster that went on throughout the 1990s and for which we are now paying.
And really, this cuts to the heart of the definition of blowback in terms of Saudi Arabia here and the debate the other night.
Well, as you have repeatedly said, blowback isn't just unintended consequences of American foreign activity, but of covert activity.
So that when the consequences come, the American people don't have the context to put it in.
They don't understand that bin Laden used to work for us, that we created his mujahideen for him, financed it, and then angered them with our policies for the last 10 years.
And because they don't know that, it's then that much easier for Giuliani to reassure them that now it's only because of women's rights and freedom of religion, as he told Sean Hannity.
The term blowback was first used by the Central Intelligence Agency in its after-action report on the first overthrow of a foreign elected government that we disliked, namely the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953.
We overthrew his government at the request of the British government and the interests of the British Petroleum Company.
We pretended that he was a communist.
Certainly he was not.
The pope would have been a better candidate to that than Mosaddegh.
It's almost from that stupid policy which brought the Shah to power, and his repressive regime then led to genuine revolution in 1979.
But it's from those events that most of the troubles that we're in in the Middle East right now resist and worsen on an almost daily basis as a president who simply, well, we're told that two years into the war before he figured out that there was a difference between Shia and Sunni Islam.
It's just a tragedy, but certainly you're absolutely right.
Blowback does not mean just retaliation for illegal acts committed by the United States in foreign countries.
It means illegal acts that were committed by the United States that were kept totally secret from the American public until the retaliation comes.
These acts are never secrets from the people of the receiving end.
All right.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Chalmers Johnson.
He's a former advisor to the CIA and author of the books Blowback, Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, the Last Days of the American Republic.
Well, I guess I have to ask you, weren't the last days of the American Republic in the 1930s?
Well, you might put it that way.
That's not just advertising hype, though.
I've not tried to sell books.
What I have tried to say is that we have down-caught ourselves in a very dangerous position, and it's not at all clear how we could get out of it, how any president or any political party could resist the influence of the military industrial complex, of the secret intelligence agencies, how you could begin to turn things around.
I mean, just take the state of our manufacturing economy.
We've lost 3 million manufacturing jobs since the year 2000, since George Bush became president.
We are facing a loss of up to 10 million in a very short period of time, and yet we continue to stick to an outmoded and irrelevant academic doctrine of free trade, whereas all of our main competitors on earth, and particularly China and Japan, routinely pursue national industrial policies intended to ensure that they maintain as close to full employment as possible.
We could end our catastrophic trade deficits tomorrow by using the perfectly legal authorization in the World Trade Organization to use tariffs to stop this right now.
We just simply are not participating in trying to save ourselves.
Well, and even barring that, we could just halt the subsidies to the companies that they receive for exporting.
I mean, our Navy socializes the cost of all their security on the seas.
Our government will bail them out if locals burn their factory down.
Right.
But this is precisely the kind of problem that I believe.
I mean, the reason that I say the last days of the American Republic is because I find it inconceivable that we could actually have a discussion in this country about militarism and imperialism and what they're costing us.
I mean, give the former Soviet Union credit.
Gorbachev did, at least at the end, after 1989, after his loss in Afghanistan, start seriously to think about the need for reform in the Soviet Union.
He clearly recognized that it would be advantageous to the Soviet Union to have friendly relationships with France and Germany, rather than to maintain those crummy colonies or satellites, if you want to use that term, that Stalin had created in Eastern Europe.
He tried.
Vested interests stopped him.
Do we have vested interests?
What do you think the military industrial complex is?
But we're not even trying to reform.
We're spending our time talking about whether we want Hillary Rodham Clinton or Milt Romney or John McCain or whatever, as if they could make any difference at all, or want to.
And then the one guy who gets up there and is really honest about what's going on here is shouted down.
Yes.
Well, that's what we call tragedy.
And now, when you talk about the industrial base being moved overseas, it seems like the only part of the industrial base that's left is, and maybe not even all of that, is the war machine.
That's the only place.
I mean, you just simply cannot imagine a superpower or even a major power that totally loses its industrial basis.
We're not England in 1914.
England in 1914 didn't have the kind of catastrophic trade and current account deficits that we have today.
Empires go down very rapidly these days.
If you and I had been talking in 1985 and I had said to you that four or five years from now the Soviet Union won't exist any longer, you'd have thought, this is not really a reliable observer.
Well, it's gone.
Russia is a much smaller place than the former Soviet Union used to be.
It went extremely rapidly.
What on earth makes us think that we're immune to that?
Well, I'm not really certain.
I know that, well, in terms of Rudy Giuliani's response that there's just, America never did anything to possibly provoke anyone else in the world to want to do anything bad to us, that it's basically just childishness.
It's a refusal to accept responsibility for our own actions.
Exactly.
People are asking for it when they do things like that or when they then revert to things as nonsensical as preventive war, the sort of trap we've gotten ourselves into in Iraq, the failure to have even elementary knowledge about this part of the world and the sort of forces we were playing with, to have incompetence like Condoleezza Rice as our Secretary of State.
She's an authority on a country that doesn't exist, namely the Soviet Union.
Other than that, she seems to know next to nothing about the rest of the world.
It's to allow our foreign policy to be hijacked by ideologues like the neoconservatives or Ahmed Chalabi and his, Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli lobby, the vested interest of warmongers and the military industrial complex, the vested interest of the now huge and continuing to grow military establishment.
This is why I call the book The Last Days of the American Republic, though obviously the reason for writing the book is to say people, inattentive citizens, need to be mobilized to what they're about to lose and the consequences of their losing it.
And now I guess that's what I'm waiting for is, you know, a new let's all get clean for Jean kind of movement to support somebody like Ron Paul, for example.
And I just don't see it.
People just seem like they're not interested at all.
I mean, that's why we're having this conversation today is that we obviously do believe it still would be at least conceivable that you could mobilize the general public.
I grant you, given the almost abject and continuing failure of the press to provide the citizen with the information that would be needed for him or her to play the genuine citizen role, the elementary oversight of the government, the powers given to the press in the protections of the First Amendment.
These were not to protect People magazine.
These were to provide them with defenses so that they could penetrate the secrecy of the federal bureaucracy and try and try to provide people with the sort of information.
I mean, the Constitution guarantees us that we will have an accurate statement of how our tax bunnies are ultimately spent.
Well, that hasn't been true in the United States since the Manhattan Project of World War II.
These are the sorts of problems that are.
I mean, this is why I come back to say what we need is a movement not to elect X or Y politician.
It is to restore the system of checks and balances, to stop this nonsense of a president going around saying and repeatedly saying, I am the decider.
It's hard to think of a more anti-constitutional phrase or remark than that.
We don't have a decider.
The government is structured in such a way that it has to rule through consensus among diverse and divergent sources of power in our society.
Yep.
And now we're headed not only off a cliff, but it seems like there's a really steep hill at the top of the cliff.
The English, you talk about how the English after World War II basically had this discussion that they could either choose to live under dictatorship back on the rainy little island or they could abandon their empire.
It seems to me from the few British people I know that they are a lot more in tune with what their government is doing and, you know, a lot more attached to reality than the American people.
I agree with you, but let's not overstate it.
The British didn't do this as brilliantly as we would like to think.
I mean, I say give them credit.
They did recognize they couldn't hang on to the jewel in their crown, the vast subcontinent of India, and continue to rule through essentially military force and the slaughter of defenseless people, which they had resorted to so often in India.
And they recognized that.
But still, there were lots of atavisms and fallbacks as they tried to get rid of the empire, including the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956, the fierce and racist campaign against Niki Kuyu in Kenya during the 1950s.
I think you would have to include Tony Blair today, and of all the places you would have thought the British would have had enough sense to never get involved in again, it was Iraq since they created this misshapen country out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.
So they didn't do a perfect job, but they did basically recognize the futility of continuing to try and dominate much of the rest of the world through imperial power.
Now, what sort of liberties were the average citizens of England losing at the end of World War II, where they felt like they had to make some kind of decision?
Well, clearly, the issue was, if you were going to continue to maintain the empire in the face of now growing resistance, that is, there were revolts against British rule in almost every one of the colonies, and that this would require a total militarization of the society, it would be like the erstwhile model for our republic, the Roman Republic, which in order to maintain its empire lost its democracy and became what we politely call the Roman Empire.
But the Roman Empire was in fact a military dictatorship, ruled by some of the most incompetent people on earth.
I mean, Augustus Caesar is one thing, but then when you see what followed him, Tiberius, Caligula, Caligula was followed by Claudius, and then of course by Nero.
Well, whatever you think of this, I guarantee you it wasn't good government.
Well, yeah.
And you talk all about how, really, the stages that the Roman Republic went through as the military got more and more power and the people got less and less.
And we've already had General Tommy Franks, our commander in the assault on Baghdad, has said publicly that as far as he's concerned, another 9-11 attack in the United States means that the military has no choice but to take over.
We already have seen that in the threat of an American attack on Iran, it has apparently been frustrated by the genuine mutiny of our now steadfast common commander, Admiral Fallon.
I admire him for the stance he took, but I have to admit, if the high command does decide to mutiny over a war on Iran, the constitution, the day that occurs, the constitution is a dead letter.
And that's the kind of thing that we're threatening, and it was the thing for which the British were concerned about, too.
The militarization, that is to say, the indispensable handmaiden of imperialism is militarism.
You have to have that huge standing army in order to acquire the empire, to police the empire, to expand the empire, and it develops a logic of its own that one of our famous militarists, Dwight Eisenhower, warned us about when he created the phrase military-industrial complex, which we live with today.
What is really dangerous is the thought that we may not be able to extricate ourselves, that we are already too dependent on the one thing we do well, namely the world's largest arms manufacturer, that we're quite willing to make cluster bombs, land mines, depleted uranium ammunition.
These things are unbelievably lethal on civilian populations, but that's the way we make our living in this country.
I live in the 50th district of California.
We have just put our congressman in jail for eight and a half years, Randy Duke Cunningham, for selling his vote, allowing himself to be bribed, or inviting bribery, by the military-industrial complex.
Unfortunately, it's all too common, or it's uncommon is putting a guy as dumb as Cunningham in jail.
And now, that's a very important point I think you make about Admiral Fallon, and this is actually, the interview for next hour will be Gareth Porter on exactly this story.
Oh, and it's an important story, I mean, that I think we're now beginning to, we've heard rumors for some time that the military high command was threatening a genuine mutiny, if the war preparations toward Iran went ahead that had been so marvelously exposed by Seymour Hirsch in his articles.
But we didn't know the details.
We've now begun to discover it, and it makes perfect sense that it is a Navy admiral appointed CENTCOM commander who is the main person standing in the way of such utter folly as an attack on Iran.
And that really does show what a precarious position we're in when the military are the cooler heads that we're thankful they prevail.
But at the same time, we have to get worried about maintaining civilian control over the military.
They're not allowed to tell the president no.
They're not Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, or Senator John McCain, or any of these other characters who waste so much of our time endlessly spinning their past, the things they've said, and their incompetence.
And now, to the bases you mentioned earlier, over 700 bases, you say in the book that if we include all the secret ones and the ones in Iraq and everything else, we're talking about a number approaching 1,000 American military bases in foreign countries.
Well, a lot of them are disguised.
I mean, the bases in Britain are all disguised as Royal Air Force bases.
There aren't any Englishmen or Scots or Welshmen on these bases.
They're American bases.
The espionage bases are all secret.
Some of them are secret.
They're not listed in the base structure report, which is the annual DOD, Department of Defense, inventory of property we have around the world.
Many of them are not included for political reasons.
The countries involved would be too embarrassed to have it known that they had acknowledged and allowed American bases to be established there.
It's a complex thing to calculate it, but the official number is 737, which is simply absurd, and it is, above all, absurdly expensive.
And now, in the Bush years, we've seen the battlefield expanded to include America.
We now have a new northern command.
Oh, well, that's unbelievable when you think about it.
I mean, for two centuries, we have never created a military command for North America.
We certainly always resisted it during World War II, simply because of the Pasi-Covitatis Act, the law after the Civil War.
So long as the courts are open and functioning, the military is never to be given police powers within the United States itself.
That basic constitutional right provision has been watered down badly.
The northern command is the worst yet.
We now have the northern command messing around in police forces, fire departments, and everywhere else all over the country.
And obviously, the public is prepared to say, well, we don't know, but they'd probably do a better job of dealing with a nuclear attack or a nuclear accident or something like that than would anybody else, though the chief effect of this growing federal intrusion into our, that is, federal government intrusion into our federal structure, is that the military services we might use for domestic defense, the National Guard has been absolutely ruined by its misuse in Iraq, the destruction of virtually all of its equipment.
The case of the recent tornado destroying a Kansas town is just the first of numerous examples that states the National Guard is in trouble.
And while at the same time, under the Military Appropriations Act that was passed last year, the president has the authority now to take what's left of those Guard units from one state and use them in other states and so forth without even consulting the governors.
Well, this is the sort of thing where the Constitution starts to break down, I mean, where the 10th Amendment that says the powers not explicitly assigned to Washington, D.C. in the Constitution are reserved to the states, this is being eroded so badly today that anyone who believes that the government in Washington, D.C. today bears any resemblance to the government outlined in the Constitution of 1787, well, the burden of proof is on him or her.
Yeah, indeed.
That's a good way to say it.
And now, I don't know if you saw this morning, Lew Rockwell has an article today where it's about Ron Paul and the Republican debate.
I haven't seen it yet, I'll look at it today on antiwar.com.
Well, it's on lourockwell.com.
He says in there, he brings up that most Americans think of America like they, as a projection of their own neighborhood, peaceful, hardworking, green grass, blue sky, everything's fine.
And so, therefore, they just can't understand it, you know, to hear somebody like you or someone like me calling America an empire and a brutal one at that, they think the problem must be you or I rather than America's foreign policy.
Well, I think that actually we are beginning to see signs among the citizenry that they're aware that something is going very, very seriously wrong, that they can't avoid things like the disaster of Katrina and the destruction of one of our major cities, New Orleans, that they can't ignore the fact that we are easily, by orders of magnitude, the world's largest net debtor nation and continue to go more into debt every day and are extremely vulnerable.
I mean, if the Soviet Union decides, not the Soviet Union, if Saudi Arabia decided tonight that they wanted to be paid for their oil in euros rather than dollars, well, there goes the United States right then and there.
The only thing propping up the dollar today is the global agreement imposed on the rest of the world by us a long time ago, that international oil payments would be transacted in dollars.
It doesn't make any sense to do that anymore and there are a lot of countries around who would be utterly delighted to be paid in euros, and certainly it would also please the Europeans.
So this really is kind of a death spiral, isn't it?
Like our foreign policy in the Middle East is to maintain this dollar hegemony, and yet that's what's bankrupting us.
Well, precisely.
This is why I'm not kidding when I'm talking about the last days of the American republic.
The evidence strongly suggests this is a country in, as you say, a terminal spiral downward.
At the same time, the only thing that one could think of that you might do about it, other than go into exile or let the military take over, is a mobilization of the citizenry comparable, at least to say, the mobilization for the civil rights movement of the 1960s to demand a restoration of the balance of power in our government, to put the Congress back to work doing what it's supposed to do, to get the court back paying attention and not claiming that every time we come up with a delicate issue, well, this is a national security issue, we have to leave it to the president, and to begin to put real restraint on the activities of people in our super-secret White House.
My friends, this is one of the most important books you will ever read, from the author of Blowback and Sorrows of Empire, its nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic by Chalmers Johnson.
Thank you so much for your time today, sir.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate your invitation.