Interview By Bruce David and Dan Kapelovitz

In 2000 Chalmers Johnson wrote Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, which warned of the unintended consequences that might arise from our government’s clandestine actions abroad. The book was largely ignored in this country until September 11, 2001, when former CIA benefactor Osama bin Laden’s attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon gave Blowback an eerily prophetic cachet. The tome was subsequently pushed to the top of best-seller lists by Americans desperately seeking answers.

Currently the president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, Johnson was a naval officer during the Korean War and a consultant to the CIA from 1967 to 1973, as well as a self-proclaimed Cold Warrior. But when the Soviet Union fell in 1991 Johnson began to question our government’s actions. Instead of withdrawing our troops from military bases around the world, Washington (it seemed to Johnson) moved at once to find a replacement enemy for the dismantled Communist regime. Whether it be China, drug lords or terrorism, any foe was needed to justify our massive, worldwide military deployment. Johnson began to wonder if the Cold War itself wasn’t a cover for a more fundamental imperial project of the United States, an agenda that now threatens the existence of this country as we know it. Johnson wrote his most recent book, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan Books), in response to the U.S. government’s reaction to 9/11 and the growing evidence of militarism in our society. * * *

HUSTLER: In The Sorrows of Empire, you anchor much of your argument on the 700 or so U.S. military bases that dot the globe.

JOHNSON: These are bases spread around the world, from Greenland to Australia, from Japan to Latin America. They’re in about 130 countries—that is, in other people’s countries. One of the reasons for stressing this fact is my belief that the American public knows next to nothing about this extremely expensive deployment, and they need to know more about it. They can’t possibly appreciate its impact, because there are no foreign military bases in the United States. The actual number, 725, is misleading, in that the Pentagon’s annual Base Structure Report omits all of the espionage bases. It omits many bases that are secret or embarrassing to the United States. It omits the bases, for example, in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan that are all part of our attempt to control Caspian Sea oil. It omits the bases in England that are disguised as Royal Air Force bases. It omits the bases in Qatar, which were, of course, the headquarters of the high command during the recent assault on Iraq. The actual number is not truly known, but it’s clearly more than 725.

HUSTLER: What is the purpose of all of these bases?

JOHNSON: To maintain American military hegemony over the rest of the world.

HUSTLER: So the purpose is empire?

JOHNSON: That’s the argument that I make. It’s a new kind of empire; it’s an empire of military bases. The military base is today the equivalent of the colony in the past. We deploy well over a half-million uniform troops to these bases. This book is an attempt to describe the empire of bases. The airline that connects it [the Air Mobility Command], the comforts that are available, [such as] the Armed Forces ski center at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps, a couple hundred military golf courses around the world, some 71 Learjets to fly admirals and generals to these bases. Your readers who are veterans of World War II, Korea or Vietnam simply wouldn’t recognize life in the armed services today. You don’t do KP anymore. You don’t do guard duty. You don’t clean latrines. All that is farmed out today to private military companies like Kellogg Brown & Root, a subdivision of [Vice President Dick] Cheney’s Halliburton. It’s an extremely lucrative business for them. Of the $57 billion that was appropriated just a couple of months ago for activities in Iraq, a good third of it is going to civilian contractors to supply meals, clean latrines, do the laundry—things of this sort for our various bases.

HUSTLER: In the book, you discuss at length the dangers of militarism.

JOHNSON: One of the things I wish to establish in this book is the umbilical connection between empire and militarism. By militarism I do not mean the defense of the country. No one denies the need to maintain proper forces for defense. By militarism I mean vested interest in the military-industrial complex. What we’re talking about here is immeasurably expensive. Perhaps the two most famous generals who became Presidents of the United States were George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom devoted themselves in their farewell addresses rather famously to warning the American public about the dangers of a standing army. Eisenhower, of course, invented the phrase military-industrial complex. Washington was not an isolationist; he was simply saying, once you build huge, permanently established armies, regardless of any threat, you begin to radically alter the structure of government that we wrote into our Constitu-tion. Power invariably moves toward the Executive branch; it moves toward the Presidency. It undercuts the Congress, and of course, begins to sideline the courts. We see it today. If you had an honest Congress—which we don’t—and they wanted to do oversight on the military, it would have to face the fact that 40% of the defense budget is secret, particularly from congressmen and -women. It has been classified since World War II, when the Manhattan Project built atomic bombs. This secrecy is in direct violation of the first clause of the Constitution, which says that the public shall be accurately informed on how its tax money is spent. Americans have not been accurately informed on that subject for at least 50 years.

HUSTLER: So the current President is not entirely to blame?

JOHNSON: This book is not particularly anti-Bush, because these problems didn’t start with George Bush; they just became exacerbated under his government. You can’t do oversight on the secret intelligence agencies, because all of their budgets are secret and have been since they were created. They amount to a private army in the hands of the President, rather than organizations devoted to collecting accurate intelligence to inform our government. This is militarism, and it’s corrosive. In the current defense budget there’s $10 billion allocated for missile defense, which is not even appropriated. Uniformed officers and representatives of the manufacturers —Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman—get together among themselves and decide how to spend the money. The accounting at the Pentagon is much worse than the accounting standards that were maintained at Enron. Militarism is something that snuck up on Americans.

HUSTLER: In the book you compare the United States to the Roman Empire.

JOHNSON: It reminds me very much of the demise of the Roman Republic after its first two centuries, when it too acquired an empire, then discovered that the empire entailed standing armies, which radically altered the way in which the Roman Republic raised its legions. Over time it led to the rise of leaders who sought to play up to the armed forces and become military populists. Certainly the most famous is Julius Caesar, who was assassinated in the Senate in 44 B.C., which then led to the rise of his nephew, Octavius. In 27 B.C. the Senate simply threw in the towel, ended the privileges of Roman citizens, and the Roman Republic became a military dictatorship.

HUSTLER: Are you saying that the U.S. is heading toward a military dictatorship?

JOHNSON: I recently wrote a comparison for a Web site between the American Republic and the Roman Republic. Two weeks after I published it, Wesley Clark entered the race. I thought, My God, it’s coming with the speed of FedEx. Here’s a four-star general who’s decided to enter the race. He didn’t go very far, but we also had General Tommy Franks—the former CENTCOM [U.S. Central Command] Commander who led the assault on Baghdad—say to us that, if there were another terrorist attack on the United States comparable to Sep-tember 11, 2001, he expected the military would simply have to take over.

HUSTLER: That’s shocking.

JOHNSON: You would have thought that it would have been more widely reported. I wrote The Sorrows of Empire to alert inattentive Americans to the fact that we’re on very thin ice. It took the Roman Empire 300 years [to collapse]. It took the thousand-year Reich of the Nazis only 12 years to go down. It took the [democratized] Soviet Union only from 1989 to 1991. The same sorts of pressures that were working on the former Soviet Union are now working on us quite acutely.

HUSTLER: In your book four sorrows of empire are listed. Would you detail each?

JOHNSON: The first is perpetual war. Attempting to maintain military hegemo-ny over all other peoples on Earth is an extremely ambitious project. Vice Presi-dent Cheney spoke of some 50 countries that he believes we should use military force against to bring about regime change. The President upped him to 60 in his 2002 speech at West Point. Since the new century began, we have been engaged in almost perpetual warfare. The most obvious cases, of course, are Afghanistan and Iraq, but we have numerous activities going on in the Philippines, in Colombia, in the waters off North Korea and the Taiwan Strait, in the Balkans, in Central Asia, and in Haiti, where it’s very probable that we also caused the situation by undercutting the democratically elected government.The great restraint on perpetual war is whether or not we have the manpower to do it. The military is already thoroughly overstretched. Forty percent of the troops in Iraq will soon be National Guardsmen or Reserves who, I can assure you, did not expect that they’d find themselves located at Camp Anaconda north of Baghdad with fairly regular mortar fire coming in on them. The prospect for perpetual war was outlined by the President and Condoleezza Rice in the U.S. National Security Strategy statement of September 2002, which called for preventive war against any country designated by the President as a potential rival to the United States.

HUSTLER: That’s Cheney’s policy, to allow no rival to American power.

JOHNSON: Yes, and it’s not new. They started to discuss this immediately after the Soviet Union fell in 1991. The first draft of it was done by Paul Wolfowitz, who was working for Dick Cheney, [then] Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon. It produced outrage when he first published it. These people, when they were out of power during the Clinton Administration, continued to write about it. They publicize their ideas in an organization called the Project for the New American Century. When they came to power with the Bush Administration in 2001, they more or less took over the Pentagon and hijacked American foreign policy.

HUSTLER: What is the second sorrow?

JOHNSON: I call the second sorrow the end of the republic. If you believe that the struc-ture of government outlined in the Constitution of 1787 bears any relationship whatsoever to the current government in Washington, D.C., you’ve got an argument on your hands. The Consti-tution already looks, in many critical areas, to have simply been suspended. The most important author of the Constitution and defender of it in the Federalist Papers is James Madison. As the Constitution was being ratified, he wrote that the single most important article in the Constitution is the one that reserves the right to go to war to the elected representatives of the people. Never under any circumstances, he wrote, should it be given to a single man; the responsibility is simply too great. In October 2002 both houses of our Congress voted to give the power to go to war to a single man [George W. Bush], on his say-so, including the use of nuclear weapons if he so chooses. The following year, without any international or domestic legal sanction, he chose to exercise that right in a preventive war against Iraq. That [Iraq] was not a threat to the United States, as we now know, has been revealed in the intelligence scandals that swirl around our government and the British government. The Constitutional right of habeas corpus, which states that the government cannot hold you without charging you with a specific offense and [must] allow you to defend yourself, with an attorney to confront the evidence against you, is in suspension. Amendment IV, which says you are free from illegal searches and seizures in your home, is also in suspension. It is not at all clear that you have these rights any longer, since the President has invented a new category known as “bad guy.” If he declares you to be a bad guy, you can be thrown in a naval prison in Charleston, South Carolina, and kept there indefi-nitely, even if you’re a native-born citizen. That’s the case of Mr. [Yaser] Hamdi and Mr. [Jose] Padilla, who are almost classic [examples of] violations of the protections contained in the Bill of Rights.

HUSTLER: What is your new book’s third sorrow?

JOHNSON: The third of my sorrows of empire is the pressure on the government to lie to the public, to put out disinformation. In 2002 the Department of Defense created its own news agency, the Office of Strategic Influence, to give happy news from our battlefields around the world. If there’s one thing that the militarists learned from the Vietnam War, it was to control the media in every possible way and to manufacture news to support their side. For example on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went into the U.N. Security Council, determined to defend our plan to go to war in Iraq. He had the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet, sitting behind him, sort of like a potted plant, allegedly to provide verisimilitude for what he had to say. We now know that everything Colin Powell said that day was a lie. And he had ample reason to know that it was a lie—if he didn’t, he should resign as incompetent.

HUSTLER: The fourth sorrow?

JOHNSON: The last of my sorrows is bankruptcy. If the American public is not interested in the demise of our repub- lic, they’re headed in a way that will produce a crisis, whether they want to defend the Constitution or not. As Herbert Stein, former Republican chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, once noted, “Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.” That’s what we’re into right now. We have half-trillion-dollar defense expenditures every year. In the sense that the defense budget itself is $400 billion, that leaves out the approximately $75 billion per year being spent on Iraq and Afghanistan. It leaves out the $20 billion being spent on nuclear weapons in the Department of Energy. The number actually goes up to well over $700 billion once you add in veterans’ benefits, combat-disability payments and things like that. We can’t afford that. We’re going deeply into debt.

HUSTLER: Would you say that debt would lead to a lack of funding for the infrastructure?

JOHNSON: Yes, of course. That’s precisely the kind of distortion that one would expect. We’re not paying for defense; we’re paying for empire. We have no real military enemies in the world. We could defend this country fairly easily. More-over, the Department of Defense clearly didn’t defend us against 9/11. They have actually made the situation worse, in their reaction since that time. Secretary Rumsfeld, in his so-called long, hard slog memo of last October, said we lack a measure for our progress in the war on terrorism. That’s simply not true. Between 1993 and 2001, including the attacks of September 11, al Qaeda managed to carry out five major bombing incidents worldwide. In the two years since 9/11, down to and including the suicide bombings in Istanbul of the HSBC Bank and the British Consulate and the March 11 bombings of commuter trains in Madrid, al Qaeda has carried out 18 major bombing incidents around the world. We’re clearly losing the war, because we have been pursuing the wrong strategy. We’ve been kicking down doors, rushing into people’s private homes and hollering, “freedom and democracy” in a language they don’t understand. By doing so, we create more terrorists, rather than capturing any.

HUSTLER: How should the government be waging the war on terrorism?

JOHNSON: We know a good deal about how to deal with terrorist incidents, and there’s really only one strategy: to separate the terrorist activists from their passive supporters. That way the passive supporters will supply you with intelligence on the crimes of the activists so that they can be apprehended, brought to justice and incarcerated. The only way you can cause the passive supporters to recognize that the activists are committing crimes is to respond to their legitimate grievances and to alter your foreign policy in response to them.We simply have no credibility today in any Islamic nation. Despite the huge and expensive military that we have, it has probably compounded our problems, made us more susceptible to terrorist attacks than it has solved the problems at all. High-tech military is not appropriate for dealing with terrorist assaults, which are, by definition, assaults against the innocent in order to draw attention to the crimes of the invulnerable. We can’t afford what we’re doing. We don’t manufacture that much in America anymore. We already have the world’s largest trade deficits and have had them for years. We have huge federal deficits. These trade and governmental debts are being financed by loans from other countries, particularly in East Asia. If these countries should ever decide to hold their reserves in Euros rather than dollars, it’s all over for the American empire.