Page 3 of
4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Why
Nemesis is at the US's
door By Chalmers Johnson
already attempted to explain how
the one clear power they retain - to cut off funds
for a disastrous program - is not one they are
currently prepared to use.
So the question
becomes, if not Congress, could the people
themselves restore constitutional government? A
grassroots movement to abolish secret government,
to bring the CIA and other illegal spying
operations and private armies out of the closet
of
imperial power and into the light, to break the
hold of the military-industrial complex, and to
establish genuine public financing of elections
may be at least theoretically conceivable. But
given the conglomerate control of the US mass
media and the difficulties of mobilizing America's
large and diverse population, such an opting for
popular democracy, as we remember it from our
past, seems unlikely.
It is possible that,
at some future moment, the US military could
actually take over the government and declare a
dictatorship (though its commanders would
undoubtedly find a gentler, more user-friendly
name for it). That is, after all, how the Roman
republic ended - by being turned over to a
populist general, Julius Caesar, who had just been
declared dictator for life. After his
assassination and a short interregnum, it was his
grandnephew Octavian who succeeded him and became
the first Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar.
The US military is unlikely to go that
route. But one cannot ignore the fact that
professional military officers seem to have played
a considerable role in getting rid of their
civilian overlord, secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld. The new directors of the CIA, its main
internal branches, the National Security Agency,
and many other key organs of the "defense
establishment" are now military (or ex-military)
officers, strongly suggesting that the military
does not need to take over the government to
control it. Meanwhile, the all-volunteer US Army
has emerged as an ever more separate institution
in US society, its profile less and less like that
of the general populace.
Nonetheless,
military coups, however decorous, are not part of
the US tradition, nor that of the officer corps,
which might well worry about how the citizenry
would react to a move toward open military
dictatorship. Moreover, prosecutions of low-level
military torturers from Abu Ghraib prison and
killers of civilians in Iraq have demonstrated to
enlisted troops that obedience to illegal orders
can result in dire punishment in a situation where
those of higher rank go free. No one knows whether
ordinary soldiers, even from what is no longer in
any normal sense a citizen army, would obey
clearly illegal orders to oust an elected
government or whether the officer corps would ever
have sufficient confidence to issue such orders.
In addition, the present system already offers the
military high command so much - in funds,
prestige, and future employment via the famed
"revolving door" of the military-industrial
complex - that a perilous transition to anything
like direct military rule would make little sense
under reasonably normal conditions.
Whatever future developments may prove to
be, my best guess is that the US will continue to
maintain a facade of constitutional government and
drift along until financial bankruptcy overtakes
it. Of course, bankruptcy will not mean the
literal end of the US any more than it did for
Germany in 1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in
2001-02. It might, in fact, open the way for an
unexpected restoration of the US system - or for
military rule, revolution, or simply some new
development we cannot yet imagine.
Certainly, such a bankruptcy would mean a
drastic lowering of Americans' standard of living,
a further loss of control over international
affairs, a sudden need to adjust to the rise of
other powers, including China and India, and a
further discrediting of the notion that the United
States is somehow exceptional compared with other
nations. We will have to learn what it means to be
a far poorer country - and the attitudes and
manners that go with it. As Anatol Lieven, author
of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of
American Nationalism, [1] observes:
US global power, as presently
conceived by the overwhelming majority of the US
establishment, is unsustainable ... The empire
can no longer raise enough taxes or soldiers, it
is increasingly indebted, and key vassal states
are no longer reliable ... The result is that
the empire can no longer pay for enough of the
professional troops it needs to fulfill its
self-assumed imperial tasks.
Last
February, the Bush administration submitted to
Congress a US$439 billion defense appropriation
budget for fiscal year 2007. As the country enters
2007, the administration is about to present a
nearly $100 billion supplementary request to
Congress just for the Iraq and Afghan wars. At the
same time, the deficit in the country's current
account - the imbalance in the trading of goods
and services as well as the shortfall in all other
cross-border
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
