Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (American Empire Project) Hardcover – February 6, 2007

Few Americans are aware that 9-11 was the direct result of the Saudi royal family that financed the hijackers, and the US government whose military has built more than 700 military bases around the world. Imagine having a Chinese military base or a Russian or Pakistani military base in Virginia or Michigan or Arizona and you can understand why the people living in the countries occupied by our military are not happy with the United States. Add in our support for dictators and overthrow of democratic governments in Haiti, Honduras, Guatemala, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, and elsewhere and this increases the justified hatred of Americans. We are the recipients of large numbers of refugees who we have forced to flee their bombed out cities having killed their families and their friends and destroyed their homes and hospitals and water treatement plants.

Chalmers Johnson was one of the first Americans to recognize that our actions will have repercussions and he coined the term "blowback". This book is a good introduction to his thinking and will help broaden the perspective and add to the understanding of those with an open mind. I appreciate that having an open mind is not at all common in the United States where bigotry rules the day. It is far easier for the elites to control a population when they are able to set one faction against another.

This author, Chalmers Johnson, has a long history of being right about how US foreign policies have been badly flawed for decades. He broght up to date the term Blowback which was first mentioned in a CIA report in 1953, but most certainly was symbolized by 911. This book recaps the record and suggests it is vital that we review the history of flawed outcomes from our imperial war-making and our world wide web of military bases that constitute an empire. Ever since the American Presidency became truly imperial under LBJ, we have been treated to an endless parade of majestic media images--meetings, speeches and other events which likely would have made Mark Twain cringe. We increasingly kowtow to the office as if its occupant were somehow operating under the Divine Right of Kings. But how have our Imperial Presidents performed on national security? Truly badly. Pushed by the fear of not appearing strong on national defense, one by one they felt into the arms of the arms manufacturers who were the darlings of our military. A number of other writers have eloquently echoed Johnson's perspicacious prognostications about building our empire. For example, Andrew Bacevich in his book, Washington Rules: America's Path To Permanent War, describes the role of two key architects of that empire: Allen Dulles, who planned the Bay of Pigs disaster (which cost him his job), and General Curtis LeMay who drove the Strategic Air Command to obtain nuclear weapons could have blown the planet to smithereens many times over. Bacevich's book by a 20-year military officer, now a professor at Boston University, ranges over the decades since WWII to describe the process whereby America became an Empire, developing what Bacevich calls the "sacred trinity"--global military presence, global power projection and global intervention as exemplified by Korea, Vietnam and finally the Bush-contrived "preventive war" in Iraq. Another author who dedicates the book to Johnson, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's, by Tom Engelhardt, offers a little-heralded paperback masterpiece of only 216 pages which should enlighten anyone who has not already come to the sad conclusion that the US has turned into a dangerous empire. From its first line, author Engelhardt sets the tragic scene: ''War is Peace' was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth or Minitrue in 'Newspeak' the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel, 1984". [America's Tragic Descent into Empire, July 9, 2010] From there Engelhardt's readers are tutored in how our fear of attack was obsessively co-opted by our government and its willing military suppliers. All these authors plausibly describe the spread, like an octopus. of America's presence around the world, in the form of over 700 military bases--most in places where our security clearly wasn't then and/or is not now at stake. In retrospect our forays into Korea, Vietnam and now in the Middle East, proved that war was not the answer. The cost in human lives and treasure and the escalating threat of terrorism cry out for a new evaluation of our present imperial policies, But they have been embraced by all Presidents since WWII--including Obama, who has now bought into Bush's ultimate folly, continuing that "preventive war" in Iraq with no real end to our occupancy there and around the world in sight. For example, we have built our largest overseas embassy in Bagdad and have other large permanent military facilities in Iraq. As in Vietnam, these authors predict the US will eventually come to the point of withdrawal, after the loss of hundreds of lost lives on both sides later and trillions in wasted money. Johnson predicts bankruptcy if we do not. In fairness, all Obama's predecessors since WWII have folded to the wishes of the powerful military-industrial complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us in 1961. Of these three, it is my view that Chalmers Johnson's Dismantling The Empire: America's Last Best Hope represents the best overview of how we got where we are. His most dramatic recommendation--do away with the CIA--may never get traction, but his section on "The Legacy of the OSS" (the OSS was shut down in September 1945 and the Central Intelligence Agency started in 1947) should be enough to persuade most readers that our government should hasten to shut down this incompetent agency, which has been allowed total secrecy on how it has wasted our tax dollars (between $44 and $48 billion a year) and covered up dangerous and outrageous initiatives after they have failed. (Johnson's analysis of "Charley Wilson's War" should be mandatory reading for all Americans.) Yes, we lost 3000 lives on 9/11, plus over 4,000 men and women in the current wars. But we killed three million in Vietnam, then hundreds of thousands in Cambodia and now hundreds of thousands in the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, including many women and children. Our Cold War motivations may have had some validity at an earlier time. But the alleged threats that prompted our military escalations clearly need reassessment now. Looking back on the recent dreary ninth Anniversary of 9/11, and at the decades of bad policies which preceded that "blowback" (a term updated from a 1953 CIA report by Chalmers Johnson), we are reminded of what Pogo said long ago: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

"Nemesis" by Chalmers Johnson is one of several books written recently on the decline and fall of the American System. It is not quite so pessimistic as Morris Berman's "Why America Failed" or Chris Hedges "The Death of the Liberal Class" both of which predicted or implied that America would become a "Banana Republic" in the fairly near future - i.e. that "America will be composed of a large, dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds." Johnson thinks it far more likly that the American system will succumb to political and economic bankruptcy brought on by "Military Keynesianism." This bankruptcy would not mean the literal end of the United States but it would certainly mean a catastrophic recession, the collapse of our stock market, the end of our standard of living, and a series of new attitudes that would be appropriate to a much poorer country.

"Keynesianism" is named for the great British economist John Maynard Keynes who wrote "The Economic Consequences of the Peace" (about the disastrous economic consequences of the Versaille Treaty - which would eventually lead to Hitler), "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" published in 1936 and other influential books. In his writings and public career he developed a scheme to save captitalist economies from cycles of boom and bust as well as the severe decline of consumer spending that occurs in periods of depression. To prevent the economy from contracting and the social unrest that might ensue, Keynes thought that the government should step in, and, through deficit spending, put people back to work. Conversely, during periods of prosperity, he thought government should cut spending and rebuild the treasury. He called his plan counter-cyclical "pump-priming."

During the New Deal in the 1930s the United States put Keynesianism into practice with great success but they also saw the rudimentary beginnings of a backlash. Conservative capitalists feared that too much government intervention would delegitimate and demystify capitalism as an economic system that works by allegedly "quasi-natural laws." They also feared that too much spending on social welfare might shift the balance of power in society from the capitalist class to the working class and its unions. At first they tried to hold back counter-cyclical spending but World War II intervened and unleashed a torrent of public funds for weapons.

The term "Military Keynesianism" was coined in 1943 by the Polish economist in exile Micha Kalecki to explain Nazi Germany's success in overcoming the Great Depression and achieving full employment. Before World War II Hitler was celebrated around for world for having achieved a "German economic miracle." However, this was accomplished by employing counter cyclical pump-priming for military purposes. The military thus becomes an employer of last resort, like the old Civilian Conservation Corps but on a much larger scale. The negative aspects of Military Keynesianism include its encouragement of militarism and the potential to encourage a military-industrial complex. Such a complex sooner or later short circuits Keynes insistence that government spending be cut back in times of nearly full employment - in other words it becomes a permanent institution whose "pump" must always be primed.

The two most prominent generals in our history have given us warnings of the dangers militarism in a democracy. George Washington, in his farewell address, warns about the threat of standing armies to liberty, and particularly republican liberty. And perhaps the more famous one, Dwight Eisenhower, also in in his farewell address, where he invented the phrase "military-industrial complex" - he wanted to say "military-industrial-congressional complex" but was advised not to go that far. Today, fifty years later, the "miitary-industrial-congressional complex" is a fact of life and has permeated into all but a handful of Congressional districts.

The Pentagon tries to conceal the real cost of the military in various ways. There are numerous military activities not carried on by the Dept. of Defense and are, therefore, not part of the Defense Budget. Adding the non-Defense Deptartment expenditures, the supplemental approriations for whatever wars are being fought at the time, and the military contruction budget to the Defense Appropriations Bill actuallly doubles what the government calls the annual defnse budget. It is an amount larger than all other defense budgets on earth. Still to be covered are interest payments for the cost of past wars going back to 1916!

The combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor an imperial presidency. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play: isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialsim and bankruptcy. Our present policies appear to be unsustainable; we can't go on like this indefinitely. As Herbert Stein, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors during the Nixon Administration, once famously said: "Things that can't go on forever, don't."