In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
We should take nothing for granted.
Sorrows of Empire, Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, and Nemesis, the Last Days of the American Republic, which is just out in paperback.
Welcome back to the show, Dr. Johnson.
Thank you very much.
Yes, so you have this new article for Tom Dispatch, which is featured on antiwar.com today, How to Sink America.
And it's funny, you almost remind me in this article, well you did remind me in this article of the old saying, none dare call it treason.
And I got to imagining that maybe when George Bush looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and saw his soul, that maybe Putin hypnotized Bush, and now Bush is a KGB agent, and all these terrible things that he's done to our country are actually deliberately to destroy it.
What do you think?
Be careful, we in America have a tendency toward conspiracy theories.
And I'm sorry to say, I think not Putin, we've done it to ourselves.
The thing that's really just amazing of what's going on today, is that with the meltdown of international markets, and the probability of a recession and everything else, you still find that the Americans, the politicians, the presidential candidates, the entire lot, simply will not discuss the unbelievable waste of our resources in the defense budget.
It goes on year in, year out.
They have, that Iraq is now almost, they've decided they're not going to discuss it anymore.
The Republicans are talking about victory, which is meaningless.
The Democrats are talking about instantaneous withdrawal, with the option of returning at once, about as bloody a mistake as you could make.
And it begins to really look like a very, very seriously dangerous situation.
So it's not treason, but it might as well be.
It's just as bad, basically.
Oh, it's just as bad, in many ways worse.
That is, bankruptcy, insolvency in this country, the inability to pay our bills, the inability to continue to finance our unbelievable trade deficit, things of this sort, would result in such punishing instability within the United States, that you couldn't rule out revolution.
That's often accompanied such things in the past.
Germany in 1923, China in 1948, something very close to it in Argentina in 2001 and 2002.
We're toying with very, very dangerous things, and all we read in the newspaper is, as usual, Bush can't seem to think of anything else but tax cuts that certainly are not an answer to the problems we have right now.
Now, it's in the news just today that Congress is passing Bush another military budget, this time for $696 billion.
Yes, it's hard to believe.
I mean, we are spending now, given the fact that that budget is just the formal, very formal, very artificial budget for the Department of Defense.
Several prominent commentators on it have said that it always ought to be simply doubled in order to understand the actual amounts that we are spending on the national security establishment, including nuclear weapons, care of the wounded, actual defense of the country, and the Department of Homeland Security, things of this sort.
These sums are simply not sustainable.
We don't have that kind of money.
We continue to borrow it from people who don't trust us any longer.
And time is running out.
Dr. Johnson, don't they always say, though, that, well, it's a really small proportion of the GDP, so it's okay.
It's a big number now, but we have a lot bigger economy now.
I don't think it is that small a proportion of the GDP.
Moreover, our GDP is increasingly based on precisely defense expenditures.
We don't manufacture that much in this country anymore.
It's just astonishing how you look around everything from automobiles to consumer electronics to very big-ticket items like high-tech medical machines.
They're made abroad.
We've slowly, over the last 60 years, and as Eisenhower warned in the clip that you opened the program with, we've eroded our manufacturing bases to such an extent that it may very well be irretrievable today.
What we have to do is be able to hold it together, but we're not going to see the same old world in which the United States was the world's leader and was the unquestioned superpower.
In your article, you say that by 1990, 83 percent of American manufacturing was strictly for military purposes?
Well, that is, the cumulative total had added up to just to that amount.
It was virtually the whole damn GDP.
Wow.
Yes.
Once you see it in full perspective, it is not just the armed forces themselves, but the diversion of scientific resources into weapons research, the huge expenditures in R&D on war, the outer space stuff that we're spending on a non-existent enemy, the 800 military bases around the world.
It all adds up.
You'd have thought that by now we would have figured out that Iran or Iraq was a mistake, that we have to start cutting our losses, that it already cost us over a trillion dollars.
But here we are going into the sixth year of war, probably it'll end up being our longest war by the time we finish it, and we're talking about again enacting a new budget next month that will be over a trillion dollars.
That's a thousand billion.
The number is literally unimaginable.
Well, like, for example, in the election, at least the way the TV is portraying it, everyone is concerned about the economy, but they're not making the connection that the economy is suffering because of the war.
Most people, I think, take for granted that war is good for the economy and for some reason our economy is suffering anyway, rather than recognizing that this is where our wealth has gone.
It is one of the things that I am trying to warn about in this article, that military Keynesianism, the use of the military budget to sustain the economy, devoting all of our manufacturing resources to an activity that neither enhances consumption nor production.
It's an extremely artificial kind of economy.
To do that for 60 years, and you end up with a six we're in, and it's a very, very serious six.
Extremely hard to overstate how dangerous it is.
Even so, if the numbers could be brought down to where, as you say, this very large economy could sustain them, we would maintain stability at least for a few more years.
As it is right now, though, the cost of our wars are escalating so dangerously, and the military is so utterly convinced that though we may have begun to reduce violence in Iraq, we're still going to be there for at least another decade.
It adds up to a disaster scenario.
And now, kind of the basic flaw here is the Bastiat's old broken window fallacy, right?
Yes.
And would you explain that for the audience, people who don't understand?
Because I know, Dr. Johnson, I grew up my whole life being told that World War II saved America from the Great Depression.
And the lesson that I took from that, and that I know the rest of society took from that, and people said this on the eve of war with Iraq, well, it's good for the economy.
It is a common assumption.
It's something that was built into our Cold War policy in F.C.
68 of 1950, the fundamental basic strategy for waging the Cold War, in which we systematically overstated the size of the Soviet military threat and things of this sort, had built in it the proposition that in order to avoid the return of depression, in order to maintain relatively full economy, employment, that we needed to build both a large civilian economy and serving the needs of the people and of international trade, while at the same time building a massive military establishment.
One cannot imagine how big this is, that over the last, I mean, since the late 1940s down to 1996, we spent well over $5 trillion on nuclear weapons alone.
We didn't use a single one of them, of course.
Thankfully, we didn't.
But this is a perfect example of the use of the military budget to create jobs for people in make-work projects.
At the peak of our stockpile, we had well over 3,500 usable, deliverable atomic and nuclear warheads and thermonuclear warheads.
This is the kind of thing that has slowly brought us close to the edge of bankruptcy.
And the thing that's amazing is we're continuing to do it now by putting it on the tab, by borrowing from foreigners who continue to lend to us primarily because it's useful for them, for their own economies, to sustain our economy.
But at the meantime, it means that most manufacturing has moved to other countries now, that we've, it was since the 1960s that we began to notice that Japan was outdoing us in terms of quality control, innovation, R&D on new consumer products, things of that sort.
It is just astonishing how every day goes by and some new product is mentioned that every hospital in the country wants one, whether they're all made in Germany or Japan or in Europe today.
The European Union is the world's largest economy today, well ahead of the United States.
This is according to the CIA fact book.
It's not statistics that I've dreamed up.
And this is what I'm trying to warn about in this article.
And also, as you say, where the focus of the discussion ought to be in this country, we're not telling the people the truth about what's going on, or pretending that what's happened is a slowdown in consumer spending.
What has instead happened is a structural flaw in the economy that condemns this to second-class status.
So now, the common perception that American factories are moving overseas basically just because labor is cheaper over there and that kind of thing, you think that that's only a partial explanation that really our Pentagon's policy has a lot to do with it as well?
Oh, I think no question about it.
It's both a matter of imperialism, also recognize that in the rest of the world today, there is a huge reservoir of talent coming up.
We have so squandered our educational system that we hardly are competitive in this area at all anymore.
That is, the research commitments of countries like China and India today are simply mind-boggling compared with the story efforts we're doing, except, of course, in military weaponry, which is where we specialize.
We're beginning to look like the Roman Empire.
And, you know, when you say mind-boggling, that's really what this article did to me.
It made me imagine what America could have been like or something if we had taken a different policy after World War II, rather than taking all these trillions of dollars and investing them in hydrogen bombs that we never use and aircraft carriers, if that money had stayed in the pockets of the American taxpayer or even had gone to the government but been spent on, you know, public schooling and that kind of thing.
We could have doubled our capital stock.
We would be easily the genuine superpower that we aren't today.
It's almost imaginable that you can call yourself a superpower, or in the past, the superpower has always been not just the world's richest nation, but the world's number one lending nation, the creditor nation to the rest of the world.
We've been the world's leading net deficit nation now for many years, and it continues, and it's getting worse.
The contradiction between this, the fact that our influence today is based entirely on military prowess, and even there it looks weaker all the time when you think that maybe 20,000 to 30,000 insurgents have stopped our most formidable army on earth, rather cold in Iraq, and that late in the day we're only beginning to see some reduction in violence with a shift toward a counter-insurgency strategy, that it is a sign of how we've been going in the wrong direction, and now the price is starting to be paid.
Well, now, would your opponents, do they have an argument at all for, I mean, if you leave morality aside, and you just say, no, well, you may be right, we're wasting a lot of money in Iraq right now, but once we take over all of Central Asia and we're able to steal all that oil and gas and whatever, that then it'll be a net benefit to us?
But we're not able to do that.
We talk about that as if we were Rome out conquering new territories, but in fact we're losing them all the time.
Bill Clinton already started in the 1990s to expand into Central Asia with investments in Kazakhstan, in Azerbaijan, places of this sort.
Increasingly, these investments are being replaced by investments from Russia, from the European Union, and that we're simply not able to do that.
We keep talking about creating an Africa command that will in some ways dominate the whole continent militarily, that we could use to exploit economically.
We're receiving resistance everywhere, there's no African country that will allow us to place the headquarters in it.
These are pipe dreams that are left over from the kind of war mentality that was cultivated in the country throughout the Cold War.
Yeah, you know, when you mention the scientists and the crowding out of all the investment from peaceful purposes and productive purposes, I actually know a young scientist who lamented to me that she just cannot find a career path at all in this country that doesn't have anything to do with making weapons for the government.
There's basically no science available for somebody who's not interested in killing people.
Well, that's the absurdity of it all, that in such a situation, that country should call itself the world's leading superpower.
We're heading down the wrong track.
It's not sustainable.
It reminds me of Herbert Stein, who's head of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Nixon administration years ago, rather famously said, things that can't go on forever, don't.
Well, that's exactly us right now.
These ideas, these principles, these beliefs, the military-industrial complex could sustain us, is just plain run out.
The real danger today is the military-industrial complex has so corrupted our Congress with the thought that they can put a military base or a new military industry or a research and development facility or a weapons lab or something in their districts, that oversight of the defense budget or of the military budget has simply become farcical.
In fact, you talk about in your books how they made sure that, was it the B-2 bomber, that one piece of it was made in every congressional district in the country or something?
Well, every one they possibly could, just to make sure that if anybody got the idea, any member of Congress, that we didn't need a new weapon of mass destruction, well, you could turn them out of office at the next election.
Now, the interventionists will always say that, well, we can't stop now.
I mean, okay, maybe we shouldn't have gotten to World War I, but we got to stop Hitler now.
And, well, maybe we shouldn't have saved the Soviet Union, but we got to stop them from taking over the whole world now.
And maybe we shouldn't have backed Osama bin Laden, but we got to stop Osama bin Laden now.
And I guess I wonder what you think will happen when and if the American, or I guess when the American empire collapses and we are not the hegemon in Asia, who's going to take our place?
Are the Russians going to come to dominate that part of the world, the Chinese, the Indians, nobody?
I'm not sure that we need a hegemon to maintain peace and stability.
That, in fact, the kind of thinking that has been enshrined in this country over the, throughout the Cold War, is the sort of thing that leads to the belief that frequent wars are necessary for our economic well-being.
That there is no reason to expect that we will need the use of military force.
Most of the problems that we face as a country and as a planet these days are multinational and go beyond the particular use of military force.
If there's anything we've demonstrated to the rest of the world is what a blunt instrument our military actually is, that after all, most of the wars we've fought in recent years are ones that we just frankly lost, and at unbelievable expense, we can't keep it up.
So that I, that's not something that worries me.
I'm ready to give, give peace a try.
Everybody, it's Dr. Chalmers Johnson.
He's the author of the Blowback Trilogy, the last one, the third book, Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic, is just out in paperback, and he's got a new article today on antiwar.com, How to Sink America.
And now, I guess I wonder, you know, when you talk about the last days of the American Republic, it seems like really the last days of the American Republic were a hundred years ago, when they turned us into an empire, and I guess really what you're talking about is the last days of the American empire, and I wonder whether you think that the republic can be saved when the empire falls apart, or whether we're going to have, you know, despotism and horrible consequences here at home.
I'm not Cassandra, and I'm not a prophet of what's actually going to happen.
I'm trying to use historical references.
Our constitutional structure was, to a very large extent, modeled after that of the Roman Republic.
The Roman Republic, when, again, it inadvertently created an empire, and with that came its inescapable accompaniment, militarism, that it did, over time, give way, it was destroyed internally by the demands of the empire, and this led to the Roman Empire, which was a military dictatorship, and the end of the democracy that existed for Roman citizens in, say, the first century B.C.
I argue, and nemesis, that we have one great example, that is, we now know, historically, it's an extremely unstable combination to try and be a domestic democracy and a foreign empire.
One or the other comes to the fore, but you can't be both.
That there is one prominent example, in recent times, of an empire that did give up, that abolished its empire, and thereby maintained and continued its democracy.
That was Britain, after World War II, when it realized it could not continue to dominate places like India through military force, and that's what empire means.
It's what it always implies.
Empire never rules by consent, no matter how hard you try to kid yourself about it.
These are the sorts of things that are starting to catch up with us.
Our policies may have made some sense in dealing with the Soviet Union, though undoubtedly they could have been less costly, and they did not necessarily involve the expansion of our empire of military bases into a global planetary system of bases, that we never closed one.
Once we've got one, we've been in Okinawa ever since the Battle of Okinawa of 1945, even though there's never been anything even slightly warlike there since then.
The same in Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953, of which I'm a veteran.
This sort of thing is absurd.
It reflects today a vested interest, a way of life and living as an empire, claiming to be the preeminent power on earth.
What is going to happen?
I think it's fairly patently obvious today that many nations of the world are withdrawing from our example.
We are spending close to a trillion dollars a year on our military establishment.
The next closest country, China, is spending maybe 50 billion.
The disparities are simply monstrous between the amount of money...
I mean, we're spending more than all the rest of the world combined on our military establishment.
We have the largest military budgets in this country today since World War II.
It can't go on forever.
We would hope that it doesn't end like Germany in 1945, where there's just total destruction of the place because of our bad behavior.
But that would require much greater wisdom than we're seeing so far from our political system.
Our political system failed us in getting us into this position.
There's little reason to believe that it's going to save us by electing the Democrats, and with their interest, not so much in restoring the system of constitutional government and checks and balances, but more in simply acquiring the presidency for their own benefit.
Now, when you make your parallels to the Roman Empire, I guess the real turning point, they always say, it's the cliche now, right, is crossing the Rubicon.
Yes.
When Julius Caesar came back to the capital, he brought his army across the Rubicon River against tradition.
Yes.
And that was the end of the Republic there.
It was, indeed.
He became life dictator, thereby ending the democracy of the Roman Republic.
He was then assassinated on the ice of March 44 BC, after a period of considerable turmoil, was replaced by his truly ruthless grandnephew, Octavian, who became the emperor and the god, Augustus Caesar.
And now, a modern day, I guess, parallel, or a danger, a possible parallel, was something that was discussed, I believe, in your most recent interview with Charles Goyette in Phoenix, Arizona, where you two were talking about Admiral Fallon and Admiral Mullen standing up, basically, to Bush and Cheney, and more or less refusing to go to war with Iran.
And on one hand, we think that's great, that there's a lot of opposition in the military preventing Dick Cheney from getting his war, but as you were pointing out to Charles Goyette, this is a serious challenge to the doctrine of civilian supremacy over the military, even if it's to stop a war.
Do we really want the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff telling the president, no?
Or Admiral Fallon, the CENTCOM commander?
I happen to agree with him.
I think that the idea of going to war with Iran is suicidal, but at the same time, if he ever should act on his statement that this won't happen on my watch, you might as well throw the Constitution away that day.
He's become our Caesar.
I mean, the alternative would be for him to just resign, rather than say, Yes.
I'm going to hold on to my job and continue to refuse to do it.
Right.
Yeah.
But, you know, this is the part that...
And it's not going to solve our problem by his doing that.
It might solve his personal problem.
Right.
See, this is the thing is, I'm full of hyperbole and I'm an alarmist and all these things, but you're a real scholar and a former analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.
And, you know, you're talking about American Rubicons being crossed and the possibility of revolution and total economic collapse and terrible things.
I grant you, pundits are often seem extreme and exaggerate, but every once in a while, they are right.
The situation is something that can't go on forever, that we have worked our way into a cul-de-sac.
That's what I fear, what I'm alarmist about, and I am trying to ring an alarm.
Well, it's being rung over here.
There's no doubt about that.
For anybody who hasn't read the Blowback Trilogy, I highly recommend it.
And in fact, that's something that we could go into right there, is the fact that you wrote Blowback before September 11th.
You were trying to explain September 11th.
You predicted it.
Well, I didn't exactly predict it, but I did say that we had caused enormous resentment against us by the use of the CIA in clandestine overthrows and undercutting and destabilizing a foreign government throughout the second half of the 20th century.
And that those were the things that were still on the agenda that were coming back to haunt us.
As it turns out, the biggest single example of blowback we have is, of course, September 11th, 2001, in which our erstwhile allies, the people we had recruited and armed for the largest clandestine operation we ever carried out, the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, when they came and repaid us for not sticking with them, betraying them.
Once the Soviet Union withdrew, we totally lost interest.
Afghanistan descended into one of the worst civil wars of modern history.
It got to the point where the people of Afghanistan welcomed the Taliban into power.
Anything would be better with what they were living with.
Osama bin Laden, a former asset of ours, and the people that we had recruited, decided to get even.
They didn't particularly disguise what they were doing.
They killed a large number of American airmen in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
They blew up our embassies in East Africa.
They damn near sank the USS Cole in Aden Harbor, and then they drove hijacked airliners into public buildings in September 11th, 2001.
This is blowback.
It means retaliation, but it means retaliation for things our government has done abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public, so that when the retaliation comes, the public has enormous difficulty seeing cause and effect, putting it in context, understanding it, and they tend often to make the situation worse by simply retaliating against any convenient scapegoat, Iraq being a good example.
Yeah, not just unintended consequences, but unintended consequences of covert action, so that we can be buffaloed into thinking, well, they hate us because of their crazy religion, or something like that.
And we were buffaloed.
Let me just say, though, I also give antiwar.com enormous credit over the years for being one of the few sources of public sanity in the media, and I'm glad to see they keep up the work.
Oh, well, thank you very much, and likewise, of course.
I wanted to also point out, if I remember this right, you say that the term blowback was actually originated by the CIA after the coup in Iran in 1953, is that right?
Yes, in the After Action Report, it has only recently been declassified.
The people who carried out this operation say, we're going to get some blowback for this, and we certainly did, to a certain extent.
The very first clandestine operation is the one that we're still paying for mightily in the Middle East.
Yeah, you know, Robert Dreyfus in his book, Devil's Game, points out the Ayatollah Khomeini and his group were actually used by the CIA to help overthrow Mossadegh and install the Shah, the same people who came back to bite us 26 years later.
Yes.
Incredible story.
Important point, yeah.
All right, well, everybody, it's Chalmers Johnson.
He's the president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and author of the Blowback Trilogy, Blowback, Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic.
It's out in paperback, run out and get it.
He's got an article today on antiwar.com and Tom Dispatch, How to Sink America.
Thanks very much for your time today, sir.
Scott Horton, I appreciate your invitation very much.
