-Caveat Lector-
Tomdispatch Interview: Chalmers Johnson on Our Military Empire
[Note to Tomdispatch readers: This is the seventh in an ongoing series of
interviews at the site. The last three were with Juan Cole (parts 1 and 2),
Ann Wright, and Mark Danner. Tom.]
Cold Warrior in a Strange Land
A Tomdispatch Interview with Chalmers Johnson (Part 1)
As he and his wife Sheila drive me through downtown San Diego in the glare
of mid-day, he suddenly exclaims, "Look at that structure!" I glance over
and just across the blue expanse of the harbor is an enormous aircraft
carrier. "It's the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan," he says, "the newest carrier in
the fleet. It's a floating Chernobyl and it sits a proverbial six inches off
the bottom with two huge atomic reactors. You make a wrong move and there
goes the country's seventh largest city."
Soon, we're heading toward their home just up the coast in one of those
fabled highway traffic jams that every description of Southern California
must include. "We feel we're far enough north," he adds in the kind of
amused tone that makes his company both alarming and thoroughly
entertaining, "so we could see the glow, get the cat, pack up, and head for
Quartzsite, Arizona."
Chalmers Johnson, who served in the U.S. Navy and now is a historian of
American militarism, lives cheek by jowl with his former service. San Diego
is the headquarters of the 11th Naval District. "It's wall to wall military
bases right up the coast," he comments. "By the way, this summer the
Pentagon's planning the largest naval concentration in the Pacific in the
post-World War II period! Four aircraft-carrier task forces -- two from the
Atlantic and that's almost unprecedented -- doing military exercises off the
coast of China."
That afternoon, we seat ourselves at his dining room table. He's
seventy-four years old, crippled by rheumatoid arthritis and bad knees. He
walks with a cane, but his is one of the spriest minds in town. Out the
window I can see a plethora of strange, oversized succulents. ("That's an
Agave attenuata," he says. "If you want one, feel free. We have them
everywhere. When the blue-gray Tequila plant blooms, its flower climbs 75
feet straight up! Then you get every hummingbird in Southern California.")
In the distance, the Pacific Ocean gleams.
Johnson is wearing a black t-shirt that, he tells me, a former military
officer and friend brought back from Russia. ("He was amused to see hippies
selling these in the Moscow airport.") The shirt sports an illustration of
an AK-47 on its front with the inscription, "Mikhail Kalashnikov" in
Cyrillic script, and underneath, "The freedom fighter's friend, a product of
the Soviet Union." On the back in English, it says, "World Massacre Tour"
with the following list: "The Gulf War, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Angola, Laos,
Nicaragua, Salvador, Lebanon, Gaza Strip, Karabakh, Chechnya
To be
continued."
Johnson, who served as a lieutenant (jg) in the Navy in the early 1950s and
from 1967-1973 was a consultant for the CIA, ran the Center for Chinese
Studies at the University of California, Berkeley for years. He defended the
Vietnam War ("In that I was distinctly a man of my times
"), but is probably
the only person of his generation to have written, in the years since,
anything like this passage from the introduction to his book Blowback: "The
problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement
and not enough about the United States government and its Department of
Defense
In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest
movement. For all its naiveté and unruliness, it was right and American
policy wrong."
Retired, after a long, provocative career as a Japan specialist, he is the
author of the prophetic Blowback, The Costs and Consequences of American
Empire, published in 2000 to little attention. After 9/11, it became a
bestseller, putting the word "blowback," a CIA term for retaliation for U.S.
covert actions, into common usage. He has since written The Sorrows of
Empire, Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. ("As an academic
subject, the American Empire is largely taboo," he tells me. "I'm now
comfortably retired, but I had a successful academic career. I realize that
young academics today will take up the subject and start doing research on
aspects of our empire only if they've got some cover. They need somebody to
go first. I've had some of my former graduate students say, Look, you're
invulnerable. If you won't take the lead, why do you expect us to go do a
research project on the impact of American military whorehouses on Turkey. I
mean, let's face it, it's a good subject!")
He is just now completing the final volume of his Blowback Trilogy. It will
be entitled Nemesis.
Sharp as a tack, energetic and high-spirited, by turns genuinely alarmed and
thoroughly sardonic, he's a talker by nature. Our encounter is an interview
in name only. No one has ever needed an interviewer less. I do begin with a
question that had been on my mind, but it's hardly necessary.
Tomdispatch: Let's start with a telltale moment in your life, the moment
when the Cold War ended. What did it mean to you?
Chalmers Johnson: I was a cold warrior. There's no doubt about that. I
believed the Soviet Union was a genuine menace. I still think so.
There's no doubt that, in some ways, the Soviet Union inspired a degree of
idealism. There are grown men I admire who can't but stand up if they hear
the Internationale being played, even though they split with the Communists
ages ago because of the NKVD and the gulag. I thought we needed to protect
ourselves from the Soviets.
As I saw it, the only justification for our monster military apparatus, its
size, the amounts spent on it, the growth of the Military-Industrial Complex
that [President Dwight] Eisenhower identified for us, was the existence of
the Soviet Union and its determination to match us. The fact that the Soviet
Union was global, that it was extremely powerful, mattered, but none of us
fully anticipated its weaknesses. I had been there in 1978 at the height of
[Soviet leader Leonid] Brezhnev's power. You certainly had a sense then that
no consumer economy was present. My colleagues at the Institute for the USA
and Canada were full of: Oh my god, I found a bottle of good Georgian white
wine, or the Cubans have something good in, let's go over to their bar; but
if you went down to the store, all you could buy was vodka.
It was a fairly rough kind of world, but some things they did very, very
well. We talk about missile defense for this country. To this day, there's
only one nation with a weapon that could penetrate any missile defense we
put up -- and that's Russia. And we still can't possibly match the one they
have, the Topol-M, also known as the SS-27. When [President Ronald] Reagan
said he was going to build a Star Wars, these very smart Soviet
weapon-makers said: We're going to stop it. And they did.
As [Senator] Daniel Moynihan said: Who needs a CIA that couldn't tell the
Soviet Union was falling apart in the 1980s, a $32 billion intelligence
agency that could not figure out their economy was in such awful shape they
were going to come apart as a result of their war in Afghanistan and a few
other things.
In 1989, [Soviet leader] Mikhail Gorbachev makes a decision. They could have
stopped the Germans from tearing down the Berlin Wall, but for the future of
Russia he decided he'd rather have friendly relations with Germany and
France than with those miserable satellites Stalin had created in East
Europe. So he just watches them tear it down and, at once, the whole Soviet
empire starts to unravel. It's the same sort of thing that might happen to
us if we ever stood by and watched the Okinawans kick us out of Okinawa. I
think our empire might unravel in a way you could never stop once it
started.
The Soviet Union imploded. I thought: What an incredible vindication for the
United States. Now it's over, and the time has come for a real victory
dividend, a genuine peace dividend. The question was: Would the U.S. behave
as it had in the past when big wars came to an end? We disarmed so rapidly
after World War II. Granted, in 1947 we started to rearm very rapidly, but
by then our military was farcical. In 1989, what startled me almost more
than the Wall coming down was this: As the entire justification for the
Military-Industrial Complex, for the Pentagon apparatus, for the fleets
around the world, for all our bases came to an end, the United States
instantly -- pure knee-jerk reaction -- began to seek an alternative enemy.
Our leaders simply could not contemplate dismantling the apparatus of the
Cold War.
That was, I thought, shocking. I was no less shocked that the American
public seemed indifferent. And what things they did do were disastrous.
George Bush, the father, was President. He instantaneously declared that he
was no longer interested in Afghanistan. It's over. What a huge cost we've
paid for that, for creating the largest clandestine operation we ever had
and then just walking away, so that any Afghan we recruited in the 1980s in
the fight against the Soviet Union instantaneously came to see us as the
enemy -- and started paying us back. The biggest blowback of the lot was, of
course, 9/11, but there were plenty of them before then.
I was flabbergasted and felt the need to understand what had happened. The
chief question that came to mind almost at once, as soon as it was clear
that our part of the Cold War was going to be perpetuated -- the same
structure, the same military Keynesianism, an economy based largely on the
building of weapons -- was: Did this suggest that the Cold War was, in fact,
a cover for something else; that something else being an American empire
intentionally created during World War II as the successor to the British
Empire?.
Now that led me to say: Yes, the Cold War was not the clean-cut conflict
between totalitarian and democratic values that we had claimed it to be. You
can make something of a claim for that in Western Europe at certain points
in the 1950s, but once you bring it into the global context, once you
include China and our two East Asian wars, Korea and Vietnam, the whole
thing breaks down badly and this caused me to realize that I had some
rethinking to do. The wise-ass sophomore has said to me -- this has happened
a number of times -- "Aren't you being inconsistent?" I usually answer with
the famous remark of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, who, when
once accused of being inconsistent, said to his questioner, "Well, when I
get new information, I rethink my position. What, sir, do you do with new
information?"
A personal experience five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union also
set me rethinking international relations in a more basic way. I was invited
to Okinawa by its governor in the wake of a very serious incident. On
September 4, 1995, two Marines and a sailor raped a 12-year old girl. It
produced the biggest outpouring of anti-Americanism in our key ally, Japan,
since the Security Treaty was signed [in 1960].
I had never been to Okinawa before, even though I had spent most of my life
studying Japan. I was flabbergasted by the 32 American military bases I
found on an island smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands and the
enormous pressures it put on the population there. My first reaction as a
good Cold Warrior was: Okinawa must be exceptional. It's off the beaten
track. The American press doesn't cover it. It's a military colony. Our
military has been there since the battle of Okinawa in 1945. It had all the
smell of the Raj about it. But I assumed that this was just an unfortunate,
if revealing, pimple on the side of our huge apparatus. As I began to study
it, though, I discovered that Okinawa was not exceptional. It was the norm.
It was what you find in all of the American military enclaves around the
world.
TD: The way we garrison the planet has been essential to your rethinking of
the American position in the world. Your chapters on Pentagon basing policy
were the heart of your last book, The Sorrows of Empire. Didn't you find it
strange that, whether reviewers liked the book or not, none of them seemed
to deal with your take on our actual bases? What do you make of that?
Johnson: I don't know why that is. I don't know why Americans take for
granted, for instance, that huge American military reservations in the
United States are natural ways to organize things. There's nothing slightly
natural about them. They're artificial and expensive. One of the most
interesting ceremonies of recent times is the brouhaha over announced base
closings. After all, it's perfectly logical for the Department of Defense to
shut down redundant facilities, but you wouldn't think so from all the fuss.
I'm always amazed by the way we kid ourselves about the influence of the
Military-Industrial Complex in our society. We use euphemisms like
supply-side economics or the Laffer Curve. We never say: We're artificially
making work. If the WPA [Works Progress Administration of the Great
Depression] was often called a dig-holes-and-fill-em-up-again project, now
we're making things that blow up and we sell them to people. Our weapons
aren't particularly good, not compared to those of the great weapons makers
around the world. It's just that we can make a lot of them very rapidly.
TD: As a professional editor, I would say that when we look at the world, we
have a remarkable ability to edit it.
Johnson: Absolutely. We edit parts of it out. I mean, people in San Diego
don't seem the least bit surprised that between here and Los Angeles is a
huge military reservation called Camp Pendleton, the headquarters of the
First Marine Division. I was there myself back in the Korean War days. I
unfortunately crossed the captain of the LST-883 that I was serving on. We
had orders to send an officer to Camp Pendleton and he said, "I know who I'm
going to send." It was me. (He laughs) And I'll never forget it. The world
of Marine drill sergeants is another universe.
In many ways, as an enthusiast for the natural environment, I am delighted
to have Pendleton there. It's a cordon sanitaire. I spent a little time with
its commandant maybe a decade ago. We got to talking about protecting birds
and he said, "I'm under orders to protect these birds. One of my troops
drives across a bird's nest in his tank and I'll court martial him. Now, if
that goddamn bird flies over to San Clemente, he takes his chances." Even
then I thought: That's one of the few things going for you guys, because
nothing else that goes on here particularly contributes to our country.
Today, of course, with the military eager to suspend compliance with
environmental regulations, even that small benefit is gone.
TD: So, returning to our starting point, you saw an empire and
Johnson:
it had to be conceptualized. Empires are defined so often as
holders of colonies, but analytically, by empire we simply mean the
projection of hegemony outward, over other people, using them to serve our
interests, regardless of how their interests may be affected.
So what kind of empire is ours? The unit is not the colony, it's the
military base. This is not quite as unusual as defenders of the concept of
empire often assume. That is to say, we can easily calculate the main
military bases of the Roman Empire in the Middle East, and it turns out to
be about the same number it takes to garrison the region today. You need
about 38 major bases. You can plot them out in Roman times and you can plot
them out today.
An empire of bases -- that's the concept that best explains the logic of the
700 or more military bases around the world acknowledged by the Department
of Defense. Now, we're just kidding ourselves that this is to provide
security for Americans. In most cases, it's true that we first occupied
these bases with some strategic purpose in mind in one of our wars. Then the
war ends and we never give them up. We discovered that it's part of the
game; it's the perk for the people who fought the war. The Marines to this
day believe they deserve to be in Okinawa because of the losses they had in
the bloodiest and last big battle of World War II.
I was astonished, however, at how quickly the concept of empire -- though
not necessarily an empire of bases -- became acceptable to the
neoconservatives and others in the era of the younger Bush. After all, to
use the term proudly, as many of them did, meant flying directly in the face
of the origins of the United States. We used to pride ourselves on being as
anti-imperialist as anybody could be, attacking a king who ruled in such a
tyrannical manner. That lasted only, I suppose, until the Spanish-American
War. We'd already become an empire well before that, of course.
TD: Haven't we now become kind of a one-legged empire in the sense that, as
you've written, just about everything has become military?
Johnson: That's what's truly ominous about the American empire. In most
empires, the military is there, but militarism is so central to ours --
militarism not meaning national defense or even the projection of force for
political purposes, but as a way of life, as a way of getting rich or
getting comfortable. I guarantee you that the first Marine Division lives
better in Okinawa than in Oceanside, California, by considerable orders of
magnitude. After the Wall came down, the Soviet troops didn't leave East
Germany for five years. They didn't want to go home. They were living so
much better in Germany than they knew they would be back in poor Russia.
Most empires try to disguise that military aspect of things. Our problem is:
For some reason, we love our military. We regard it as a microcosm of our
society and as an institution that works. There's nothing more hypocritical,
or constantly invoked by our politicians, than "support our boys." After
all, those boys and girls aren't necessarily the most admirable human beings
that ever came along, certainly not once they get into another society where
they are told they are, by definition, doing good. Then the racism that's
such a part of our society emerges very rapidly -- once they get into
societies where they don't understand what's going on, where they shout at
some poor Iraqi in English.
TD: I assume you'd agree that our imperial budget is the defense budget. Do
you want to make some sense of it for us?
Johnson: Part of empire is the way it's penetrated our society, the way
we've become dependent on it. Empires in the past -- the Roman Empire, the
British Empire, the Japanese Empire -- helped to enrich British citizens,
Roman citizens, Japanese citizens. In our society, we don't want to admit
how deeply the making and selling of weaponry has become our way of life;
that we really have no more than four major weapons manufacturers -- Boeing,
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics -- but these companies
distribute their huge contracts to as many states, as many congressional
districts, as possible.
The military budget is starting to bankrupt the country. It's got so much in
it that's well beyond any rational military purpose. It equals just less
than half of total global military spending. And yet here we are, stymied by
two of the smallest, poorest countries on Earth. Iraq before we invaded had
a GDP the size of the state of Louisiana and Afghanistan was certainly one
of the poorest places on the planet. And yet these two places have stopped
us.
Militarily, we've got an incoherent, not very intelligent budget. It becomes
less incoherent only when you realize the ways it's being used to fund our
industries or that one of the few things we still manufacture reasonably
effectively is weapons. It's a huge export business, run not by the
companies but by foreign military sales within the Pentagon.
This is not, of course, free enterprise. Four huge manufacturers with only
one major customer. This is state socialism and it's keeping the economy
running not in the way it's taught in any economics course in any American
university. It's closer to what John Maynard Keynes advocated for getting
out of the Great Depression -- counter-cyclical governmental expenditures to
keep people employed.
The country suffers from a collective anxiety neurosis every time we talk
about closing bases and it has nothing to do with politics. New England goes
just as mad over shutting down the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard as people here
in San Diego would if you suggested shutting the Marine Corps Air Station.
It's always seen as our base. How dare you take away our base! Our
congressmen must get it back!
This illustrates what I consider the most insidious aspect of our militarism
and our military empire. We can't get off it any more. It's not that we're
hooked in a narcotic sense. It's just that we'd collapse as an economy if we
let it go and we know it. That's the terrifying thing.
And the precedents for this should really terrify us. The greatest single
previous example of military Keynesianism -- that is, of taking an economy
distraught over recession or depression, over people being very close to the
edge and turning it around -- is Germany. Remember, for the five years after
Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he was admired as one of the
geniuses of modern times. And people were put back to work. This was done
entirely through military Keynesianism, an alliance between the Nazi Party
and German manufacturers.
Many at the time claimed it was an answer to the problems of real
Keynesianism, of using artificial government demand to reopen factories,
which was seen as strengthening the trade unions, the working class.
Capitalists were afraid of government policies that tended to strengthen the
working class. They might prove to be revolutionary. They had been often
enough in that century. In this country, we were still shell-shocked over
Bolshevism; to a certain extent, we still are.
What we've done with our economy is very similar to what Adolf Hitler did
with his. We turn out airplanes and other weapons systems in huge numbers.
This leads us right back to 1991 when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. We
couldn't let the Cold War come to an end. We realized it very quickly. In
fact, there are many people who believe that the thrust of the Cold War even
as it began, especially in the National Security Council's grand strategy
document, NSC68, rested on the clear understanding of late middle-aged
Americans who had lived through the Great Depression that the American
economy could not sustain itself on the basis of capitalist free enterprise.
And that's how -- my god in 1966, only a couple of decades after we
started down this path, we ended up with some 32,000 nuclear warheads. That
was the year of the peak stockpile, which made no sense at all. We still
have 9,960 at the present moment.
Now, the 2007 Pentagon budget doesn't make sense either. It's $439.3
billion
TD:
not including war
Johnson: Not including war! These people have talked us into building a
fantastic military apparatus, and then, there was that famous crack [Clinton
Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright made to General Colin Powell: "What's
the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we
can't use it?" Well, if you want to use it today, they charge you another
$120 billion dollars! (He laughs.)
But even the official budget makes no sense. It's filled with weapons like
Lockheed Martin's F-22 -- the biggest single contract ever written. It's a
stealth airplane and it's absolutely useless. They want to build another
Virginia class nuclear submarine. These are just toys for the admirals.
TD: When we were younger, there were always lots of articles about Pentagon
boondoggles, the million-dollar military monkey wrench and the like. No one
bothers to write articles like that any more, do they?
Johnson: That's because they've completely given up on decent, normal
accounting at the Pentagon. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning
economist, and a colleague at Harvard have put together a real Pentagon
budget which, for the wars we're fighting right now, comes out to about $2
trillion. What they've added in are things like interest on the national
debt that was used to buy arms in the past. Turns out to be quite a few
billion dollars. Above all, they try to get a halfway honest figure for
veterans' benefits. For this year, it's officially $68 billion, which is
almost surely way too low given, if nothing more, the huge number of
veterans who applied for and received benefits after our first Gulf War.
We hear on the nightly news about the medical miracle that people can be in
an explosion in which, essentially, three 155 millimeter shells go off
underneath a Humvee, and they survive through heroic emergency efforts.
Barely. Like Bob Woodruff, the anchor person from ABC News. The guy who
saved his life said, I thought he was dead when I picked him up. But many of
these military casualties will be wards of the state forever. Do we intend
to disavow them? It leads you back to the famous antiwar cracks of the
1930s, when Congressmen used to say: There's nothing we wouldn't do for our
troops -- and that's what we do, nothing.
We almost surely will have to repudiate some of the promises we've made. For
instance, Tricare is the government's medical care for veterans, their
families. It's a mere $39 billion for 2007. But those numbers are going to
go off the chart. And we can't afford it.
Even that pompous ideologue Donald Rumsfeld seems to have thrown in the
towel on the latest budget. Not a thing is cut. Every weapon got through. He
stands for "force transformation" and we already have enough nuclear
equipment for any imaginable situation, so why on Earth spend anything more?
And yet the Department of Energy is spending $18.5 billion on nuclear
weapons in fiscal year 2006, according to former Senior Defense Department
Budget Analyst Winslow Wheeler, who is today a researcher with the Center
for Defense Information.
TD: Not included in the Pentagon budget.
Johnson: Of course not. This is the Department of Energy's budget.
TD: In other words, there's a whole hidden budget
Johnson: Oh, it's huge! Three-quarters of a trillion dollars is the number I
use for the whole shebang: $440 billion for the authorized budget; at least
$120 billion for the supplementary war-fighting budget, calculated by Tina
Jones, the comptroller of the Department of Defense, at $6.8 billion per
month. Then you add in all the other things out there, above all veterans'
care, care of the badly wounded who, not so long ago, would have added up to
something more like Vietnam-era casualty figures. In Vietnam, they were dead
bodies; these are still living people. They're so embarrassing to the
administration that they're flown back at night, offloaded without any
citizens seeing what's going on. It's amazing to me that [Congressman] John
Murtha, as big a friend as the defense industry ever had -- you could count
on him to buy any crazy missile-defense gimmick, anything in outer space --
seems to have slightly woken up only because he spent some time as an old
Marine veteran going to the hospitals.
Another person who may be getting this message across to the public is Gary
Trudeau in some of his Doonesbury cartoons. Tom, I know your mother was a
cartoonist and we both treasure Walt Kelly, who drew the Pogo strip. How
applicable is Pogo's most famous line today: "We have met the enemy and he
is us."
[Note: Part 2 of Chalmers Johnson's interview, "What Ever Happened to
Congress?" will appear Thursday.]
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