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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The case for
imperial liquidation By Chalmers Johnson
as possible precisely what
the elected leaders and citizens of the United
States would have to do. Two cardinal decisions
would have to be made. First, in Iraq, the US
would have to initiate a firm timetable for
withdrawing all its military forces and turning
over the permanent military bases it has built to
the Iraqis. Second, domestically, the US would
have to reverse federal budget
priorities.
In the
words of Noam Chomsky, a venerable critic of US
imperialism: "Where spending is rising, as in
military supplemental bills to conduct the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, it would sharply decline.
Where spending is steady or declining (health,
education, job training, the promotion of energy
conservation and renewable energy sources,
veterans benefits, funding for the UN and UN
peacekeeping operations, and so on), it would
sharply increase. Bush's tax cuts for people with
incomes over $200,000 a year would be immediately
rescinded" (see Rulers and the ruled: Dangerous
disconnect, Asia Times Online, April
12).
Such reforms would begin at once to
reduce the malevolent influence of the
military-industrial complex, but many other areas
would require attention as well. As part of the
process of de-garrisoning the planet and
liquidating its empire, the US would have to
launch an orderly closing-up process for at least
700 of the 737 military bases it maintains (by
official Pentagon count) in more than 130 foreign
countries on every continent except Antarctica.
The US should ultimately aim at closing all of its
imperialist enclaves, but to avoid isolationism
and maintain a capacity to assist the United
Nations in global peacekeeping operations, it
should, for the time being, probably retain some
37 of them, mostly naval and air bases.
Equally important, the US should rewrite
all of its Status of Forces Agreements - those
US-dictated "agreements" that exempt American
troops based in foreign countries from local
criminal laws, taxes, immigration controls,
anti-pollution legislation, and anything else the
US military can think of. It must be established
as a matter of principle and law that US forces
stationed outside the United States will deal with
their host nations on a basis of equality, not of
extraterritorial privilege.
The US
approach to diplomatic relations with the rest of
the world would also require a major overhaul. The
US would have to end its belligerent unilateralism
toward other countries as well as its scofflaw
behavior regarding international law. Its
objective should be to strengthen the United
Nations, including respect for its majority, by
working to end the Security Council veto system
(and by stopping using the present US right to
veto).
The United States needs to cease
being the world's largest supplier of arms and
munitions - a lethal trade whose management should
be placed under UN supervision. It should
encourage the UN to begin outlawing such weapons
as landmines, cluster bombs, and depleted-uranium
ammunition that play particularly long-term havoc
with civilian populations. As part of an attempt
to right the diplomatic balance, the US should
take some obvious steps such as recognizing Cuba
and ending its blockade of that island and, in the
Middle East, working to equalize aid to Israel and
Palestine, while attempting to broker a real
solution to that disastrous situation.
America's goal should be a return to
leading by example - and by sound arguments -
rather than by continual resort to unilateral
armed force and repeated foreign military
interventions.
In terms of the
organization of the executive branch, the US needs
to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947,
taking away from the CIA all functions that
involve sabotage, torture, subversion, overseas
election rigging, rendition, and other forms of
clandestine activity. The president should be
deprived of his power to order these types of
operations except with the explicit advice and
consent of the Senate. The CIA should basically
devote itself to the collection and analysis of
foreign intelligence. The US should eliminate as
much secrecy as possible so that neither the CIA
nor any other comparable organization ever again
becomes the president's private army.
To
halt its economic decline and lessen dependence on
its trading partners, the US must cap its trade
deficits through the perfectly legal use of
tariffs in accordance with World Trade
Organization rules, and it must begin to guide its
domestic market in accordance with a national
industrial policy, just as the leading economies
of the world (particularly the Japanese and
Chinese ones) do as a matter of routine. Even
though it may involve trampling on the vested
interests of US university economics departments,
there is simply no excuse for a continued reliance
on an outdated doctrine of "free trade".
Normally, a proposed list of reforms like
this would simply be rejected as utopian. I
understand this reaction. I do want to stress,
however, that failure to undertake such reforms
would mean condemning the United States to the
fate that befell the Roman Republic and all other
empires since then. That is why I gave my book
Nemesis the subtitle The Last Days of
the American Republic.
When Ronald
Reagan coined the phrase "evil empire", he was
referring to the Soviet Union, and I basically
agreed with him that the USSR needed to be
contained and checkmated. But today it is the US
that is widely perceived as an evil empire, and
world forces are gathering to stop it. The Bush
administration insists that if we Americans leave
Iraq our enemies will "win" or - even more
improbable - "follow us home". I believe that if
we leave Iraq and our other imperial enclaves, we
can regain the moral high ground and disavow the
need for a foreign policy based on preventive war.
I also believe that unless we follow this
path, we will lose our democracy, and then it will
not matter much what else we lose. In the immortal
words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is
us."
Note 1. Jim Lobe
reviews The New American Militarism and
Anatol Lieven's America Right or Wrong in
The specter of two
'isms', Asia Times Online, July 9,
2005.
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