Chalmers Johnson

Metropolitan Books, 2004

400 pages $25

SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, George W. Bush has swept aside diplomacy and international "cooperation" in favor of the unilateral assertion of American interests through the state’s overwhelming military dominance. Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire exposes how the current situation rests on years of building footholds in Asia and the Middle East under both Democrat and Republican administrations, with the single aim of increasing the scope of U.S. imperialism.

Johnson’s 2000 book on U.S. foreign policy, Blowback, prophetically laid out how U.S. presence around the world creates unintended violent resistance. His major argument in the new book is that the actions of the military and the government not only are hidden from the American public but run counter to its interests.

The military has grown steadily since the Second World War, with an increasing presence of permanent military bases, a trend that escalated through the 1990s under Bill Clinton. The "empire of bases" Johnson describes are fortified outposts of American society that pollute, denigrate, and enrage local populations in 135 of the 189 countries in the United Nations. Johnson quotes American television producer Michael Goldfarb describing U.S. bases in Germany in 1970:

It seems like there are more jeeps than police cars, more American soldiers on the streets than German policemen.… We are long past the point of occupation and pacification. The phrase "Roman Legionnaires" goes through my brain.

The bases themselves serve as a massive pork barrel for politically connected contractors–many of whom will be familiar from today’s headlines. Johnson traces the history of Brown & Root, the precursor to Kellogg, Brown, & Root (KBR), today a subsidiary of Halliburton. It went from a well connected Texas oil contractor into a multibillion dollar international conglomerate that subcontracts literally everything from meals to logistics for military bases around the world.

Johnson notes that the 1990s, back when Vice President Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, were a time when "the Pentagon began to contract out every conceivable kind of service except firing a rifle or flying an airplane, spawning a rapidly growing, extremely lucrative new sector of the military-industrial complex."

Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo was built by KBR, and they

continue to do everything there except perform military duties. Under one of the costliest contracts in Pentagon history"…[KBR] maintains the barracks, cooks the food, mops the floors, transports all supplies, and operates water and sewage systems.… The company delivers 600,000 gallons of water daily, supplies enough electricity for a city of 25,000, washes 1,200 bags of laundry, and cooks and serves 18,000 meals per day.… The camp was so overstaffed that offices were cleaned four times a day and latrines a mere three times a day.

Outsourcing to private companies has intensified the unaccountability of the government by transferring responsibility to unelected, profit-driven companies–while shifting billions of dollars into the pockets of a few friends of the politicians.

While Johnson details the gratuitous spending on the bases and the insular culture of the American military, he wrongly attributes to them an independent momentum that runs at odds with the overall aims of American imperialism. He asks whether "the assault against Iraq was driven by Iraq’s actions or by military capabilities in America’s hands? It may be that the ultimate causes of twenty-first-century mayhem in the Middle East are American militarism and imperialism–that is, our empire of bases itself."

To explain the shifts in U.S. policy, Johnson thus focuses on factional conflicts within the American ruling class, where the top military officials do indeed sometimes form a bloc with the corporations that profit from militarism. But in discussing these internal conflicts, he misses the external force that really drives U.S. policy–the rivalry between the whole U.S. corporate class and the world’s other powerful ruling classes over how to divide (or redivide) the world’s economic booty. Shifts in U.S. policy may come out of faction fights within the American elite, but they’re fighting over the strategy to reach their common goal–to protect their own class’s position as the world’s top dog.

The U.S. thus built the "empire of bases" to make permanent its presence in strategically important areas–especially the Middle East and Central Asia. It did this to fill a vacuum left by the collapse of the USSR and to offset possible advances by China and Europe, not to answer to the interests of KBR or the Pentagon. This competition pre-dates September 11. The terrorist attacks created an opportunity to bring the U.S. war machine fully to bear in the equation, to lock in U.S. preeminence.

The military conflicts go hand in hand with economic rivalries, although the opportunities to utilize different levers of U.S. power may change over time. In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, V.I. Lenin emphasized the connections between imperial peace and imperial war:

Alliances prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, giving rise to alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle out of one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics.

Although he doesn’t draw these conclusions, Johnson himself ably documents the continuity that exists in all periods since the Second World War, as successive administrations simultaneously built up military power and forced open the world’s markets through international trade agreements and institutions such as the World Bank.

Johnson is optimistic about the prospects of fighting U.S. power. Comparing the inevitable overreach of all imperialism, Johnson observes that ancient "imperial sorrows mounted up over hundreds of years. Ours are likely to arrive with the speed of a FedEx." He points to the erosion of rights in the U.S. and racism and class oppression in the army as fertile ground for resistance to grow.

The Sorrows of Empire is a powerful indictment of the undemocratic and violent nature of U.S. power both internationally and domestically. Although the book misses the mark in locating the motive behind imperialism, it gives our side vital ammunition against the illusion that the wars our rulers wage are in our interest.

http://isreview.org/issues/35/chalmers.shtml