Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
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Praise for Nemesis
“Nemesis, the final volume in the remarkable Blowback trilogy, completes a true patriot’s anguished and devastating critique of the militarism that threatens to destroy the United States from within. In detail and with unflinching candor, Chalmers Johnson decries the discrepancies between what America professes to be and what it has actually become—a global empire of military bases and operations; a secret government increasingly characterized by covert activities, enormous ’black’ budgets, and near dictatorial executive power; a misguided republic that has betrayed its noblest ideals and most basic founding principles in pursuit of disastrously conceived notions of security, stability, and progress.”
—John Dower, author of
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
“Chalmers Johnson, a patriot who pulls no punches, has emerged as our most prescient critic of American empire and its pretensions. Nemesis is his fiercest book—and his best.”
—Andrew J. Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism
“Johnson s book is a sober reminder that the U.S. has become an empire.... His most searing commentary to date on the current state of U.S. politics.”
—Financial Times
“Nemesis is a stimulating, sweeping study in which Johnson asks a most profound strategic question: Can we maintain the global dominance we now regard as our natural right? His answer is chilling. You do not have to agree with everything Johnson says—I don’t—but if you agree with even half of his policy critiques, you will still slam the book down on the table, swearing, ‘We have to change this!’”
—Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security
and international policy, Center for American Progress
“Each of Johnson’s erudite chapters both enlightens and disturbs.... His writing is often described as ‘epolemic,’ but that doesn’t capture the heartfelt concern that underlies his distress about our country.”
—In These Times
“The three volumes (Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, Nemesis) constitute a well-written, detailed, and stimulating display of the radical anti-imperialist critique of American foreign policy. Nemesis is particularly good in sounding the alarm. Countervailing reactions are now clearly under way once again, and Johnson’s book is a primer on much that needs to be done.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Nemesis is a five-alarm warning about flaming militarism, burning imperial attitudes, secret armies, and executive arrogance that has torched and consumed the Constitution and brought the American Republic to death’s door. Johnson shares a simple, liberating, and healing path back to worthy republicanism. But the frightening and heartbreaking details contained in Nemesis suggest that the goddess of retribution will not be so easily satisfied before ‘the right order of things’ is restored.”
—Karen Kwiatkowski, retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel
“Last fall a treasonous Congress gave the president license to kidnap, torture—you name it—on an imperial scale. All of us, citizens and noncitizens alike, are fair game. Kudos for not being silent, Chalmers, and for completing your revealing trilogy with undaunted courage.”
—Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst;
cofounder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
“Before 9/11, when Chalmers Johnson warned us of Blowback, too few listened. When Johnson then urged us to rethink America’s imperial course in The Sorrows of Empire, he went deeper, exploring the wages of global American militarism. Now comes Nemesis, the third in the trilogy, an urgent warning for a country that, in the words of Dwight Eisenhower, risks ’destroying from within that which it is trying to protect from without.’ Johnson is a national treasure. Let’s hope we listen this time.”
—Eugene Jarecki, director of Why We Fight,
Grand Jury Prize Winner, Sundance Film Festival
“Chalmers Johnson’s voice has never been more urgently needed, and in Nemesis it rings with eloquence, clarity, and truth.”
—James Carroll, author of House of War
NEMESIS
NEMESIS
ALSO BY CHALMERS JOHNSON
The Sorrows of Empire:
Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary
China, 1937–1945
Revolution and the Social System
An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring
Revolutionary Change
Change in Communist Systems
(editor and contributor)
Conspiracy at Matsukawa
Ideology and Politics in Contemporary China
(editor)
Autopsy on Peoples War
Japans Public Policy Companies
MITI and the Japanese Miracle:
The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975
The Industrial Policy Debate
(editor and contributor)
Politics and Productivity: How Japan’s Development Strategy Works
(with Laura D’Andrea Tyson and John Zysman)
Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State
Okinawa: Cold War Island
(editor and contributor)
NEMESIS
THE LAST DAYS OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC
CHALMERS JOHNSON
Holt Paperbacks
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Copyright © 2006 by Chalmers Johnson
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Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, Chalmers.
Nemesis: the last days of the American Republic / Chalmers Johnson. p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8728-4
ISBN-10: 0-8050-8728-1
1. United States—Foreign relations—1989– 2. United States—Military policy. 3. United States—Politics and government—1989– I. Title.
E840.J633 2007
973.931—dc22 2006047200
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premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.
Originally published in hardcover in 2006 by Metropolitan Books
First Holt Paperbacks Edition 2008
Printed in the United States of America
13579 10 8642
NEMESIS
In Greek mythology,
the goddess of retribution,
who punishes human
transgression of the natural,
right order of things and
the arrogance that causes it.
Contents
Prologue: The Blowback Trilogy
1. Militarism and the Breakdown of Constitutional Government
2. Comparative Imperial Pathologies: Rome, Britain, and America
3. Central Intelligence Agency: The President’s Private Army
4. U.S. Military Bases in Other People’s Countries
5. How American Imperialism Actually Works: The SOFA in Japan
6. Space: The Ultimate Imperialist Project
7. The Crisis of the American Republic
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Prologue: The Blowback Trilogy
Who is Osama bin Laden really? Let me rephrase that. What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He is the American president’s dark Doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of “full-spectrum dominance,” its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable.
ARUNDHATI ROY,
The Guardian, September 27, 2001
Nemesis is the last volume of an inadvertent trilogy that deals with the way arrogant and misguided American policies have headed us for a series of catastrophes comparable to our disgrace and defeat in Vietnam or even to the sort of extinction that befell our former fellow “superpower,” the Soviet Union. Such a fate is probably by now unavoidable; it is certainly too late for mere scattered reforms of our government or bloated military to make much difference.
I never planned to write three books about the decline and fall of the American empire, but events intervened. In March 2000, well before 9/11, I published Blowback, based on my years of teaching and writing about East Asia. I had become convinced by then that some secret U.S. government operations and acts in distant lands would come back to haunt us. “Blowback” does not mean just revenge but rather retaliation for covert, illegal violence that our government has carried out abroad that it kept totally secret from the American public (even though such acts are seldom secret among the people on the receiving end). It was a term invented by the Central Intelligence Agency and first used in its “after-action report” about the 1953 overthrow of the elected government of Premier Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran. This coup brought to power the U.S.-supported Shah of Iran, who would in 1979 be overthrown by Iranian revolutionaries and Islamic fundamentalists. The Ayatollah Khomeini replaced the Shah and installed the predecessors of the current, anti-American government in Iran.1 This would be one kind of blowback from America’s first venture into illegal, clandestine “regime change”—but as the attacks of September 11, 2001, showed us all too graphically, hardly the only one.
My book Blowback was not much noticed in the United States until after 9/11, when my suggestion that our covert policies abroad might be coming back to haunt us gained new meaning. Many Americans began to ask—as President Bush did—”Why do they hate us?” The answer was not that some countries hate us because of our democracy, wealth, lifestyle, or values but because of things our government did to various peoples around the world. The counterblows directed against Americans seem, of course, as out of the blue as those airplanes on that September morning because most Americans have no framework that would link cause and effect. The terrorist attacks of September 11 are the clearest examples of blowback in modern international relations. In the initial book in this trilogy, I predicted the likely retaliation that was due against the United States, but I never foresaw the terrorist nature of the attacks, nor the incredibly inept reaction of our government.
On that fateful Tuesday morning in the early autumn of 2001, it soon became clear that the suicidal rammings of hijacked airliners into symbolically significant buildings were acts of what the Pentagon calls “asymmetric warfare” (a rare instance in which bureaucratic jargon proved more accurate than the term “terrorism” in common use). I talked with friends and colleagues around the nation about what group or groups might have carried out such attacks. The veterans of our largest clandestine war— when we recruited, armed, and sent into battle Islamic mujahideen (freedom fighters) in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the 1980s—did not immediately come to mind. Most of us thought of Chileans because of the date: September 11, 1973, was the day the CIA secretly helped General Augusto Pinochet overthrow Salvador Allende, the leftist elected president of Chile. Others thought of the victims of the Greek colonels we put in power in 1967, or Okinawans venting their rage over the sixty-year occupation of their island by our military. Guatemalans, Cubans, Congolese, Brazilians, Argentines, Indonesians, Palestinians, Panamanians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Filipinos, South Koreans, Taiwanese, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and many others had good reason to attack us.
The Bush administration, however, did everything in its power to divert us from thinking that our own actions might have had something to do with such suicidal attacks on us. At a press conference on October 11, 2001, the president posed the question, “How do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America?” He then answered himself, “I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed that there’s such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would hate us. I am—like most Americans, I just can’t believe it because I know how good we are.” Bush has, of course, never once allowed that the United States might bear some responsibility for what happened on 9/11. In a 2004 commencement address at the Air Force Academy, for instance, he asserted, “No act of America explains terrorist violence, and no concession of America could appease it. The terrorists who attacked our country on September 11, 2001, were not protesting our policies. They were protesting our existence.”2
But Osama bin Laden made clear why he attacked us. In a videotaped statement broadcast by Al Jazeera on October 7, 2001, a few weeks after the attacks, he gave three reasons for his enmity against the United States. The U.S.-imposed sanctions against Iraq from 1991 to 9/11: “One million Iraqi children have thus far died although they did not do anything wrong”; American policies toward Israel and the occupied territories: “I swear to God that America will not live in peace before peace reigns in Palestine ...”; the stationing of U.S. troops and the building of military bases in Saudi Arabia: “and before all the army of infidels [American soldiers] depart the land of Muhammad [Saudi Arabia].”3 Not a word about Muslim rage against Western civilization; no sign that his followers were motivated by, as the president would put it, “hatred for the values cherished in the West [such] as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism, and universal suffrage”; no support for New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman’s contention that the hijackers had left no list of demands because they had none, that “their act was their demand.”4
The attempt to disguise or avoid the policy-based reasons for 9/11 fed the rantings of Christian fundamentalists in the United States. Televangelist Pat Robertson, later joined by Jerry Falwell, declared that “liberal civil liberties groups, feminists, homosexuals, and abortion rights supporters bear some responsibility for [the] terrorist attacks because their actions have turned God’s anger against America,” and they launched a hate campaign against all Muslims. Jimmy Swaggart called Muhammad a “sex deviant” and a pervert and suggested that Muslim students in the United States be expelled.5 The Pentagon added its bit of insanity to this religious mix when army lieutenant general William G. “Jerry” Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, argued in public in full uniform without subsequent official reprimand that “they” hate us “because we are a Christian nation,” that Bush was appointed by God, that the Special Forces are inspired by God, that our enemy is “a guy named Satan,” and that we defeat Islamic terrorists only “if we come at them in the name of Jesus.”6
Because Americans generally failed to consider seriously why we had been attacked on 9/11, the Bush administration was able to respond in a way that made the situation far worse. I believed at the time and feel no differently five years later that we should have treated the attacks as crimes against the innocent, not as acts of war. We should have proceeded against al-Qaeda the same way we might have against organized crime. It would have been wise to call what we were doing an “emergency,” as
the British did in fighting the Malay guerrillas in the 1950s, not a “war.” The day after 9/11, Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Times of London, insightfully wrote: “The message of yesterday’s incident is that, for all its horror, it does not and must not be allowed to matter. It is a human disaster, an outrage, an atrocity, an unleashing of the madness of which the world will never be rid. But it is not politically significant. It does not tilt the balance of world power one inch. It is not an act of war. America’s leadership of the West is not diminished by it. The cause of democracy is not damaged, unless we choose to let it be damaged.”7
Had we followed Jenkins’s advice we could have retained the cooperation and trust of our democratic allies, remained the aggrieved party of 9/11, built criminal cases that would have stood up in any court of law, and won the hearts and minds of populations al-Qaeda was trying to mobilize. We would have avoided entirely contravening the Geneva Conventions covering the treatment of prisoners of war and never have headed down the path of torturing people we picked up almost at random in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. government would have had no need to lie to its own citizens and the rest of the world about the nonexistent nuclear threat posed by Iraq or carry out a phony preventive war against that country.
Instead, we undermined the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) alliance and brought to power in Iraq allies of the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran.8 Contrary to what virtually every strategist recommended as an effective response to terrorism, we launched our high-tech military against some of the poorest, weakest people on Earth. In Afghanistan, our aerial bombardment “bounced the rubble” we had helped create there by funding, arming, and advising the anti-Soviet war of the 1980s and gave “warlordism, banditry, and opium production a new lease on life.”9 In Iraq our “shock and awe” assault invited comparison with the sacking of Baghdad in 1258 by the Mongols.10 In his address to Congress on September 20, 2001, President Bush declared that the coming battle was to be global, Manichean, and simple. You are, he said, either “with us or against us” (failing to acknowledge that both Jesus and Lenin used the phrase first). His actions would ensure that, in the years to come, there would be ever more people around the world “against us.”11