Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

by Chalmers Johnson

  The most obvious problem with these propositions is that they have simply not proved true. When “instability” finally hit the region, the American forward bases offered no solace. The economic crisis that began in 1997 revealed that in East Asia, rather than security being like oxygen, it is money that you may not miss until it is pulled out. The presence of American military forces in the region did not prevent the instability—in some cases, chaos—that ensued in the wake of this crisis. In fact, the Pentagon only made matters worse by continuing to try to hawk massively expensive weapons systems to countries no longer able to afford them. As for the military’s contributing to economic growth, former Japanese prime minister Morihiro Hosokawa has this sharp observation: “It was after U.S. forces withdrew from Indochina and Thailand in the 1970s that economic growth in Southeast Asia gained momentum and economic relations with the United States began to expand. The economy of the Philippines took off after the U.S. forces left there in the 1990s. These experiences show that there is little or no relation between foreign military presence and economic growth.”46

  That the forward deployment of American troops brings “stability” to East Asia is, of course, a false syllogism and, as military strategist Col. Harry Summers Jr. puts it, the equivalent of using elephant bane in New York City. Elephant bane is a chemical repellent spread by African farmers to keep elephants out of their gardens and orchards. Pentagon theorists, Colonel Summers suggests, are like the New Yorker who spreads elephant bane around his apartment and then extols its benefits because he encounters no elephants.47 The strategy “works” because the threat is illusory. The real, long-term threat to stability in East Asia is the economic crisis caused by an American determination to perpetuate its system of satellites and its own regional hegemony long after it has lost whatever Cold War economic or political rationale it had.

  Why is the United States really still in Okinawa? For its military personnel, the answer is obvious. They enjoy being based there for the same reasons that the former Soviet Union’s troops enjoyed being based in East Germany. Life in one of their country’s military colonies was for the officers and enlisted men and women of both armies better than anything most of them could possibly have experienced back home. As the unofficial guide to American military bases in Okinawa puts it, “If you prefer living with a view of beautiful Kin Bay from a lofty high-rise, [Camp] Courtney [headquarters of the 3rd Marine Division] provides hundreds of scenic dwellings in the form of nine-story apartment complexes.” For the marine family’s shopping needs, “At a construction cost of more than $11 million, the [Camp] Foster Exchange is the newest in the Pacific area. It offers all the conveniences of a modern shopping center. . . . When they’re not at work, [Camp] Hansen Marines can take advantage of two of the most beautiful beaches on the island, Kin Red and Kin Blue.”48 All active-duty military personnel on Okinawa receive either rent- and utility-cost-free housing on base or enormous housing allowances ranging from $900 to $2,000 a month, depending on rank and family size. These benefits are supplemented by generous cost-of-living allowances—which for a captain or a major with one dependent is about $700 a month. This is not hardship living.

  Okinawa is still essentially a military colony of the Pentagon’s, a huge safe house where Green Berets and the Defense Intelligence Agency, not to mention the air force and Marine Corps, can do things they would not dare do in the United States. It is used to project American power throughout Asia in the service of a de facto U.S. grand strategy to perpetuate or increase American hegemonic power in this crucial region. The U.S. military is the author and prime beneficiary of this strategy, and it is in the driver’s seat executing it. This becomes clear when we turn to some of its secret global (and especially Asian) activities that it is fully aware of—but that other parts of its government and its people are not.

  STEALTH IMPERIALISM

  Offering predictions about the future has never been one of the more reliable human activities, so to guess exactly how blowback may play itself out in the twenty-first century is, at best, a perilous undertaking. But one can certainly see that just as the North Koreans retain considerable bitterness toward their former Japanese overlords, so present American policy is seeding resentments that are bound to breed attempts at revenge.

  To make this matter more complicated, much of what the U.S. military and intelligence communities do in Asia and globally is a lot less visible than in Okinawa. Largely by design, much of America’s imperial politics takes place well below the sight lines of the American public. Throughout the world in the wake of the Cold War, official and unofficial U.S. representatives have been acting, often in covert ways, to prop up repressive regimes or their militaries and police forces, sometimes against significant segments of their own populaces. Such policies are likely to produce future instances of blowback whose origins, on arrival, will seem anything but self-evident to the American public.

  Every now and then, however, America’s responsibility for its imperial policies briefly comes into public view. One such moment occurred on July 17, 1998, in Rome, when, by a margin of 120 to 7, delegates from the nations of the world voted to establish an international criminal court to bring to justice soldiers and political leaders charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. This court will differ from the International Court of Justice in The Hague in that, unlike the older court, which can settle disputes only among nations, it will have jurisdiction over individuals. As a result, efforts like those to bring Bosnian and Rwandan war criminals to justice, which today need specially constituted U.N. tribunals, will be far easier. The new court will put on trial individuals who commit or order atrocities comparable to those of the Nazis during World War II, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Hutus in Rwanda, or military governments like those of El Salvador, Argentina, Chile, Honduras, Guatemala, Burma, and Indonesia in the 1980s and 1990s.

  Leading democracies of the world, including Britain, Canada, Holland, France, Japan, and Germany, supported the treaty. Only Algeria, China, Israel, Libya, Qatar, Yemen, and the United States voted against it. With his opening speech to the conference, American ambassador Bill Richardson managed to infuriate virtually every human rights group on earth and led many delegates to accuse the United States of “neocolonial aspirations.” The United States, he said, would support only a court that received its cases solely from the U.N. Security Council, where a single American vote can veto any action.

  American officials claim that they must protect their two hundred thousand troops permanently deployed in forty countries from “politically motivated charges.” They maintain that, due to America’s “special global responsibilities,” no proceedings can be permitted to take place against its soldiers or clandestine agents unless the United States itself agrees to them. In essence, America’s leaders believe that their “lone superpower” must be above the very concept of international law—unless defined and controlled by them.

  The terms of the treaty setting up the court specifically include as war crimes rape, forced pregnancy, torture, and the forcible recruitment of children into the military. The United States objected to including these acts within the court’s jurisdiction, claiming that the court should concern, itself only with genocide. The French at first joined the United States in opposing the treaty because French troops had trained the Hutu-controlled Rwandan military, which in 1993 and 1994 helped organize the massacres of some eight hundred thousand people belonging to the Tutsi tribe. France feared that its officers and men could be charged with complicity in genocide. After a clause was added to the treaty allowing signatories to exempt themselves from the court’s jurisdiction for its first seven years, France said that its fears had been assuaged and agreed to sign.

  This escape clause was still not enough for the United States. Its representative held that because the “world’s greatest military and economic power . . . is expected” to intervene in humanitarian catastrophe
s wherever they occur, this “unique position” makes its personnel especially vulnerable to the mandate of an international criminal court capable of arresting and trying individuals. He did not deal with the question of whether war crimes charges against Americans might on some occasions be warranted, nor did he, of course, raise the possibility that if his country intervened less often in the affairs of other states where none of its vital interests were involved, it might avoid the possibility of even a capricious indictment.

  Secretary of Defense William Cohen attempted to intimidate delegates to the conference by threatening to withdraw American forces from the territories of those allies that did not support the United States’ proposal for limiting the international criminal court’s jurisdiction. In Washington, Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at hearings on the new international criminal court treaty urged the president and Congress to announce that it would indeed make good on Cohen’s threat—a suggestion that led some Japanese, among others, to speculate that ratifying the treaty might finally be a way to get the Americans out of their countries.

  In his book Death by Government, the historian Rudolph Rummel estimates that during the twentieth century, 170 million civilians have been victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.1 As Michael Scharf of the American Society of International Law notes, the pledge of “never again” by the two war crimes tribunals that the Allies set up in Nuremberg and Tokyo in the wake of World War II has in the intervening years become “again and again.”2

  At Nuremberg, the United States pioneered the idea of holding governmental leaders responsible for war crimes, and it is one of the few countries that has an assistant secretary of state for human rights. Its pundits and lawmakers endlessly criticize other nations for failing to meet American standards in the treatment of human beings under their jurisdiction. No country has been more active than the United States in publicizing the idea of “human rights,” even if it has been notably silent in some cases, ignoring, implicitly condoning, or even endorsing acts of state terrorism by regimes with which it has been closely associated. (Examples would include the repression of the Kwangju rebels in South Korea in 1980; all of the right-wing death squads in Central America during the 1980s; the Shah’s repression of dissidents in Iran when he was allied with the United States; the United States’ support in bringing General Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile and its subsequent willingness to exonerate him from responsibility for the torture and killing of at least four thousand of his own citizens; and Turkey’s genocide against its Kurdish population.) The American government displays one face to its own people (and its English-speaking allies) but another in areas where the support of repressive governments seems necessary to maintain American imperial dominance. Whenever this contradiction is revealed, as at Rome, Americans try to cover it up with rhetoric about the national burden of being the “indispensable nation,” or what the Council on Foreign Relations calls the world’s “reluctant sheriff.”

  Only seven months before the Rome vote, there was another moment when the nature of America’s stealth imperialism was revealed. In December 1997, in Ottawa, 123 nations pledged to ban the use, production, or shipment of antipersonnel land mines. Retired American military leaders like General Norman Schwarzkopf, commanding general of allied forces in the Gulf War, have endorsed the ban, arguing that these primitive but lethal weapons have no role in modern warfare. The Clinton administration, however, bowed to military vested interests desperate to retain land mines in the American arsenal. Among other things, it insisted that land mines were needed to protect South Korea against the “North’s overwhelming military advantage,” itself a myth. The holdouts against this agreement were Afghanistan, China, Russia (which later reversed its position), Vietnam—and the United States. An American citizen, Jody Williams of Putney, Vermont, would later win the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in organizing nations and various lobbying groups like the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation to work toward ending the use of this “garbage weapon”—a phrase from Robert Muller, another American and a Vietnam veteran wounded by a land mine, who set in motion the movement that resulted in the treaty.3 The Clinton administration felt so embarrassed by its vote that in May 1998 it convened its own Conference on Global Humanitarian Demining at the State Department in a public relations attempt to improve its image. Only twenty-one countries attended.

  There are today between sixty million and one hundred million deployed land mines in some sixty countries around the world (at least ten million in Cambodia alone and another nine million in Angola). They cost on average about three dollars apiece to produce. They kill some twenty-six thousand people a year, primarily civilians in developing countries, and they have been responsible for the deaths of more people than all the weapons of mass destruction combined.

  Although the U.S. military claims that it has accounted for all the mines it has laid in Korea and that they cause no civilian casualties, this is simply untrue. There are, for example, still some twenty thousand to thirty thousand M14 antipersonnel mines in the ground in the Chungri mountain area of Yong-do, just off the seaport of Pusan in the extreme south of Korea. The U.S. forces laid the mines in 1956 to protect a missile unit it based there, and they were never removed when the unit was relocated. They have been blamed for many civilian injuries and deaths since the 1960s.4

  The Australian government, which strongly backed the Ottawa treaty, estimates that it would take 1,100 years to clear the world’s mines using current techniques, which depend on metal detection. Modern land mines actually contain little metal, and Australia is sponsoring research to locate buried mines through their “thermal footprints”—that is, by identifying irregularities in ground-surface temperatures created by the different properties of mines and the earth around them. It plans to incorporate this technology into unmanned aerial vehicles whose task will be to detect mines from the air and so lessen current risks to ground personnel in mine-clearing operations.5 One might well ask why the Pentagon, with its $267.2 billion budget for the year 2000, has not provided serious funding for similar research.

  Former marine Bobby Muller, who in 1969 was blown off a road in Vietnam by a mine and later crippled by gunfire, says that President Clinton told him he simply could not “risk a breach with the Pentagon establishment by daring to sign the treaty.” Jody Williams put it more bluntly, saying that Clinton “did not have the courage to be the commander-in-chief of his military.”6, But these comments may miss the point. It is not just a matter of personal courage. The relationship between the civilian elite that runs this country and its powerful military has undergone a sea change since the 1950s. It is now increasingly likely that a congressman, a senator, a state department official, even a president will not have served in the military. The draft-deferment system during the Vietnam War signaled the early stages of this process, in which promising students and professionals—mainly middle- or upperclass young men—were kept out of Vietnam in the name of national security and the nation’s welfare, while the poor and working-class largely fought the war. Both President Clinton and his secretary of defense William Cohen enjoyed student deferments during Vietnam (Cohen had a marital one as well), and neither served in the armed forces. In the wake of Vietnam, with the military transformed into a purely volunteer career choice, the gap between the experiences of the civilian and the military hierarchies has only widened—and with the threat of the former USSR ended, the fact is that the military has for the first time begun to slip beyond civilian control.

  When it comes to an issue like land mines, a civilian president, even one with better command credentials than Clinton, can no longer afford to cross his military leaders. Similarly, it is hardly imaginable today that a president could support something like an international criminal court that offers the threat, no matter how distant, of putting American men in uniform (or their civilian surrogates around the world) at risk of indictment. George Washington’s Far
ewell Address now reads more like a diagnosis than a warning: he counseled Americans to “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.”

  When, in Rome, the U.S. representative expressed fears of “politically motivated charges” against Americans, he was actually worrying about, among other matters, situations in which Americans might use a brutal local military to undermine what it deemed an “unacceptable” regime, as has happened numerous times in the past—in Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s Congo in 1961, in President Ngo Dinh Diem’s South Vietnam in 1963, and in President Salvador Allende’s Chile in 1973. Such activities have often been foreshadowed by the military “training” programs the United States has long conducted with the militaries of other nations around the world.

  In 1987, in fact, the government created a new Special Operations Command headquartered in Tampa, Florida, and placed it under an equally new assistant secretary of defense for special operations and lowintensity conflict. The command’s purpose was to consolidate and coordinate the activities of the forty-seven thousand “special forces” groups scattered across the military’s complex organizational charts, including the army’s Green Berets, Rangers, and covert Delta Force; the Navy’s SEALS and covert Team 6; and the special operations and commando units of the air force and the Marine Corps. One of the sponsors of this new structure was William Cohen, then a Republican senator from Maine, whose “keen interest in special operations” Washington Post reporter Dana Priest has noted “dates back decades.”7 Some military professionals and observers discount special operations because they do not rely on traditional military subdivisions and because they cost so little money compared with carrier task forces or B-2 bombers. Their political clout, however, vastly exceeds their budgetary needs and they were in no way “downsized” after the end of the Cold War. These covert units work closely with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Programs like the CIA’s efforts at an army base in Colorado and in Okinawa until 1968 to train some four hundred Tibetan exiles to fight the Chinese or the CIA’s vast operations in supplying weapons to guerrillas harassing the Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s have now been turned over to the Special Operations Command.