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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The case for
imperial liquidation By
Chalmers Johnson
soldiers would
report a unit member for injuring or killing an
innocent non-combatant, while a mere 40% of
marines would do so.
Some militarists will
reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is
always inculcated into the properly trained
soldier. If so, then the answer to this problem is
to ensure that, in the future, there are many
fewer imperialist wars of choice sponsored
by the
United States.
The
military-industrial-congressional complex
Many other aspects of imperialism and
militarism are undermining America's
constitutional system.
By now, for
example, the privatization of military and
intelligence functions is totally out of control,
beyond the law, and beyond any form of
congressional oversight. It is also enormously
lucrative for the owners and operators of
so-called private military companies - and the
money to pay for their activities ultimately comes
from taxpayers through government contracts.
Any accounting of these funds, largely
distributed to crony companies with insider
connections, is chaotic at best. Jeremy Scahill,
author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's
Most Powerful Mercenary Army
, estimates that there are 126,000 private
military contractors in Iraq, more than enough to keep the
war going, even if most official US troops
were withdrawn. "From the beginning," Scahill
writes, "these contractors have been a major hidden story of
the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream
media and absolutely central to maintaining the US
occupation of Iraq" (see All power to US's shadow army in Iraq,
May 1).
America's massive "military"
budgets, still on the rise, are beginning to
threaten the US with bankruptcy, given that its
trade and fiscal deficits already easily make it
the world's largest net debtor nation. Spending on
the military establishment - sometimes mislabeled
"defense spending" - has soared to the highest
levels since World War II, exceeding the budgets
of the Korean and Vietnam War eras as well as the
late US president Ronald Reagan's weapons-buying
binge in the 1980s. According to calculations by
the National Priorities Project, a non-profit
research organization that examines the local
impact of federal spending policies, military
spending today consumes 40 cents of every US tax
dollar.
Equally alarming, it is virtually
impossible for a member of Congress or an ordinary
citizen to obtain even a modest handle on the
actual size of military spending or its impact on
the structure and functioning of the US economic
system. Some $30 billion of the official
Department of Defense (DoD) appropriation in the
current fiscal year is "black", meaning that it is
allegedly going for projects classified highly
secret. Even the open DoD budget receives only
perfunctory scrutiny because members of Congress,
seeking lucrative defense contracts for their
districts, have mutually beneficial relationships
with defense contractors and the Pentagon.
President Dwight D Eisenhower identified this
phenomenon, in the draft version of his 1961
farewell address, as the
"military-industrial-congressional complex".
Forty-six years later, in a way even Eisenhower
probably couldn't have imagined, the US defense
budget is beyond serious congressional oversight
or control.
The DoD always tries to
minimize the size of its budget by representing it
as a declining percentage of the gross national
product. What it never reveals is that total
military spending is actually many times as large
as the official appropriation for the Defense
Department. For fiscal year 2006, Robert Higgs of
the Independent Institute calculated national
security outlays at almost a trillion dollars -
$934.9 billion to be exact - broken down as
follows (in billions of dollars):
Department of Defense:
$499.4 Department of Energy (atomic weapons):
$16.6 Department of State (foreign military
aid): $25.3 Department of Veterans Affairs
(treatment of wounded soldiers):
$69.8 Department of Homeland Security (actual
defense): $69.1 Department of Justice
(one-third for the Federal Bureau of
Investigation): $1.9 Department of the Treasury
(military retirements): $38.5 National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (satellite
launches): $7.6 Interest on war debts,
1916-present: $206.7
Totaled, the sum is
larger than the combined sum spent by all other
nations on military security.
This
spending helps sustain the national economy and
represents, in essence, a major jobs program.
However, it is beginning to crowd out the civilian
economy, causing stagnation in income levels. It
also contributes to the hemorrhaging of
manufacturing jobs to other countries. On May 1,
the Center for Economic and Policy Research
released a series of estimates on "the economic
impact of the Iraq war and higher military
spending". Its figures show, among other things,
that after an initial demand stimulus, the effect
of a significant rise in military spending (as
Americans have experienced in recent years) turns
negative around the sixth year.
Sooner or
later, higher military spending forces inflation
and interest rates up, reducing demand in
interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, notably
in annual car and truck sales. Job losses follow.
The non-military construction and manufacturing
sectors experience the largest share of these
losses. The report concludes, "Most economic
models show that military spending diverts
resources from productive uses, such as
consumption and investment, and ultimately slows
economic growth and reduces employment."
Imperial liquidation?
Imperialism and militarism have thus begun
to imperil both the financial and social
well-being of the American republic. What the
country desperately needs is a popular movement to
rebuild the constitutional system and subject the
government once again to the discipline of checks
and balances. Neither the replacement of one
political party by the other nor protectionist
economic policies aimed at rescuing what's left of
America's manufacturing economy will correct what
has gone wrong. Both of these solutions fail to
address the root cause of America's decline.
I believe that there is only one solution
to the crisis we Americans face. The American
people must make the decision to dismantle both
the empire that has been created in their name and
the huge (still growing) military establishment
that undergirds it. It is a task at least
comparable to that undertaken by the British
government when, after World War II, it liquidated
the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided
the fate of the Roman Republic - becoming a
domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as
would have been required if it had continued to
try to dominate much of the world by force.
For the US, the decision to mount such a
campaign of imperial liquidation may already come
too late, given the vast and deeply entrenched
interests of the military-industrial complex. To
succeed, such an endeavor might virtually require
a revolutionary mobilization of the US citizenry,
one at least comparable to the civil-rights
movement of the 1960s.
Even to contemplate
a drawing back from empire - something so
inconceivable to US pundits and newspaper
editorial writers that it is simply never
considered - Americans must specify as
clearly
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