Sorrows of Empire

Nobody wants to see Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri locked up in an iron cage in Times Square more than I do.

About a year and a half ago Pakistan’s military dictator Musharrif said they were hiding in the mountains of his country’s North West Frontier Province, and there they remain. Catching them would require complex and difficult undercover work by skilled operatives fluent in several languages. They would need to neutralize and if necessary buy off the resistance of the tribesmen who rule that remote region. We’re talking very high-level police work – extremely tough, but doable.

But the Lords of the American Empire don’t like police work. They don’t like any relatively inexpensive solutions. Catching the masterminds of 9/11 wouldn’t give them a chance to use their armies, their stealth bombers, their tanks, or their naval armadas, not to mention their interactive computer maps and flow charts.

And most importantly of all, police work does not give the war machine’s enablers and feeders in the Fed a chance to let out no-bid contracts to their buddies (for a modest consideration, of course).

Militarism in the United States is a multi-trillion-dollar business (invest your son). I’ve been revisiting what may be the best book on this topic ever written, Chalmers Johnson’s “The Sorrows of Empire” (2004), a 312-page dead-center bulls-eye that strikes at the very center of the war machine.

Johnson observes that after the Cold War ended in 1989, the American government and military decided they could “not allow the equally virulent cold wars in East Asia and Latin America to come to an end. Instead of the Soviet Union, the ‘menace’ of China, Fidel Castro, drug lords, ‘instability,’ and more recently terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and the ‘axis of evil’…would have to do as new enemies.”

Indeed, with the advent of the Bush dictatorship in 2001, the war machine grew even larger, more voracious, and more aggressive than it had been at the height of the Cold War. “By 2002…” Johnson observes, “The United States no longer had a ‘foreign policy.’ Instead it had a military empire.”

Despite the fall of our one significant enemy, the 400-billion-dollar-a-year-plus rip off rolled on. Johnson is right in insisting that it had to. He lists all the various groups and institutions whose fortune is linked to the war machine, including financial institutions, energy suppliers, “strategic thinkers” in “think tanks,” and arms suppliers and manufacturers, and concludes, “(I)t is hard to imagine the United States ever voluntarily getting out of the empire business.”

He’s right. But now that the pursuit of empire has brought us to grief, and we’ve been humiliated and bankrupted by an inexcusably stupid and clumsy attempt to subdue a land very far away from us both geographically and spiritually, and considering that this has happened not once, but twice in a generation, it’s time to begin to undermine and dismantle this war machine.

We can’t live with it, for obvious reasons. Chalmers Johnson notes dryly that the Roman Empire was finally brought down by the enemies it had created.

It will take generations of unrelenting effort to dismantle the war machine. But destroying it is a prerequisite of our survival. The most important thing we can do now is to keep the pressure on the Democrats to conduct full investigations of the war crimes of the last three years. We’ll need to keep the pressure on them because I’ve observed they have short memories.