Way back in 1999, when I was still a Tomdispatch-less book editor, I read a proposal from Chalmers Johnson. He was, then, known mainly as a scholar of modern Japan, though years earlier I had read his brilliant book on Chinese peasant nationalism — about a period in the 1940s when imperial Japan was carrying out its "3-all" campaigns (kill-all, burn-all, loot-all) in the northern Chinese countryside. The proposal, for a book to be called "Blowback" — a CIA term of tradecraft that, like most Americans, I had never heard before — focused on the "unintended consequences" of the Agency's covert activities abroad and the disasters they might someday bring down upon us. Johnson began with an introduction in which he reviewed, among other things, his experiences in the Vietnam War era when, as a professed Cold Warrior, a former CIA consultant, and a professor of Asian studies at Berkeley, he would have been on the other side of the political fence from me.
In that introduction, he recalled his dismay with antiwar activists who were, he felt (not incorrectly), often blindly romantic about Asian communism and hadn't bothered to do their homework on the subject. "They were," he wrote, "defining the Vietnamese Communists largely out of their own romantic desires to oppose Washington's policies." He added:
"As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulse of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America's imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naïveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong."
It was a reversal of sentiment to which no other American of his age and background, to the best of my knowledge, had admitted. It reflected a mind impressively willing to reconsider and change — and, as it happened, it also reflected a man on a journey out of the world of Cold War anti-communism and into the heart of the American empire. When Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire finally came out in 2000, it was largely ignored (or derided) in the mainstream — until, that is, September 11th, 2001. Then, "blowback," and the phrase that went with it, "unintended consequences," entered our language, thanks to Johnson, and the paperback of the book, now seen as prophetic, hit the 9/11 tables in bookstores across the United States, becoming a bestseller.
Johnson's intellectual odyssey had begun when the Cold War ended, when
the Soviet Union disappeared and the American imperial structure of
bases (and policy) in Asia remained standing, remarkably unchanged and
unaffected by that seemingly world-shaking event. An invitation, five
years later, to visit
the heavily American-garrisoned Japanese island of Okinawa, in turmoil
over a case in which two U.S. Marines and a sailor had raped a 12
year-old Okinawan girl, also strongly affected his thinking. There,
Johnson saw firsthand what our global baseworld looked like and what it
did to others on this planet. ("I was flabbergasted by the 37 American
military bases I found on an island smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian
Islands and the enormous pressures it put on the population there… As I
began to study it, though, I discovered that Okinawa was not
exceptional. It was the norm. It was what you find in all of the
American military enclaves around the world.")
Now, five and a half years after the 9/11 attacks, Johnson has reached
the provisional end of his quest and the single prophetic volume, Blowback, has become "The Blowback Trilogy." In 2004, a second volume, The Sorrows of Empire,
arrived, focused on how the American military had garrisoned the globe
and how militarism had us in its grip; and finally, this year, a
magisterial third and final volume, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic,
appeared. No one should miss it. It lays out in chilling detail the
ways in which imperial overstretch imperils the American republic and
what's left of our democratic system as well as the American economy.
Now, in a step beyond even his latest book, Johnson considers whether we can end our empire before it ends us. Tom
More on the flip.
Evil Empire
Is Imperial Liquidation Possible for America?
By Chalmers Johnson
In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is
almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed
to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of
public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and
imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional
system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies
proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root
causes of the problem.
According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll,
released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country
to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush
administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this
question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a
second term — and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for
their doubts and, above all, what the remedy — or remedies — ought to
be.
The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of
voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself
led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the
system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As
Adam Nagourney of the New York Timesreported,
by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had
already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns
of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney,
Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.
If these people actually believe a presidential election a
year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is
run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich,
author of The New American Militarism, puts it:
"None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with
the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of
the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to
seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to
regain them."
George W. Bush has, of course, flagrantly violated his oath of office,
which requires him "to protect and defend the constitution," and the
opposition party has been remarkably reluctant to hold him to account.
Among the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that, under other political
circumstances, would surely constitute the Constitutional grounds for
impeachment are these: the President and his top officials pressured
the Central Intelligence Agency to put together a National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's nuclear weapons that both the administration
and the Agency knew to be patently dishonest. They then used this false
NIE to justify an American war of aggression. After launching an
invasion of Iraq, the administration unilaterally reinterpreted
international and domestic law to permit the torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at other secret locations around the world.
Nothing in the Constitution, least of all the commander-in-chief
clause, allows the president to commit felonies. Nonetheless, within
days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush had signed a secret
executive order authorizing a new policy of "extraordinary rendition,"
in which the CIA is allowed to kidnap terrorist suspects anywhere on
Earth and transfer them to prisons in countries like Egypt, Syria, or
Uzbekistan, where torture is a normal practice, or to secret CIA
prisons outside the United States where Agency operatives themselves do
the torturing.
On the home front, despite the post-9/11 congressional authorization of
new surveillance powers to the administration, its officials chose to
ignore these and, on its own initiative, undertook extensive spying on
American citizens without obtaining the necessary judicial warrants and
without reporting to Congress on this program. These actions are prima-facie
violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (and
subsequent revisions) and of Amendment IV of the Constitution.
These alone constitute more than adequate grounds for impeachment,
while hardly scratching the surface. And yet, on the eve of the
national elections of November 2006, then House Minority Leader, now
Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), pledged
on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that "impeachment is off the
table." She called it "a waste of time." And six months after the
Democratic Party took control of both houses of Congress, the prison at
Guantánamo Bay was still open and conducting drumhead courts martial of
the prisoners held there; the CIA was still using "enhanced
interrogation techniques" on prisoners in foreign jails; illegal
intrusions into the privacy of American citizens continued unabated;
and, more than fifty years after the CIA was founded, it continues to
operate under, at best, the most perfunctory congressional oversight.
Promoting Lies, Demoting Democracy
Without question, the administration's catastrophic war in Iraq is the
single overarching issue that has convinced a large majority of
Americans that the country is "heading in the wrong direction." But the
war itself is the outcome of an imperial presidency and the abject
failure of Congress to perform its Constitutional duty of oversight.
Had the government been working as the authors of the Constitution
intended, the war could not have occurred. Even now, the Democratic
majority remains reluctant to use its power of the purse to cut off
funding for the war, thereby ending the American occupation of Iraq and
starting to curtail the ever-growing power of the military-industrial
complex.
One major problem of the American social and political system is the
failure of the press, especially television news, to inform the public
about the true breadth of the unconstitutional activities of the
executive branch. As Frederick A. O. Schwarz and Aziz Z. Huq, the
authors of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror,
observe, "For the public to play its proper checking role at the ballot
box, citizens must know what is done by the government in their names."
Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media
actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution
protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is
the bureaucrat's most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a result of
this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively
engaged citizenry did not — and could not — occur. The people of the
United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological
extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives — including
domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the
Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and
profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the
entrenched interests of the professional military establishment —
essentially hijacked the government.
Some respected professional journalists do not see these failings as
the mere result of personal turpitude but rather as deep structural and
cultural problems within the American system as it exists today. In an interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty years one of America's leading investigative reporters, put the matter this way:
"All of the institutions we thought would protect us —
particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the
Congress — they have failed… So all the things that we expect would
normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue,
is the press, because that's the most glaring…. What can be done to fix
the situation? [long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety
percent of the editors and executives."
Veteran analyst of
the press (and former presidential press secretary), Bill Moyers,
considering a classic moment of media failure, concluded:
"The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the
United Nations [on February 5, 2003] seems like something out of Monty
Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more
than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web — with the student
later threatening to charge U.S. officials with 'plagiarism.'"
As a result of such multiple failures (still ongoing), the executive branch easily misled the American public.
A Made-in-America Human Catastrophe
Of the failings mentioned by Hersh, that of the military is
particularly striking, resembling as it does the failures of the
Vietnam era, thirty-plus years earlier. One would have thought the high
command had learned some lessons from the defeat of 1975. Instead, it
once again went to war pumped up on our own propaganda — especially the
conjoined beliefs that the United States was the "indispensable
nation," the "lone superpower," and the "victor" in the Cold War; and
that it was a new Rome the likes of which the world had never seen,
possessing as it did — from the heavens to the remotest spot on the
planet — "full spectrum dominance." The idea that the U.S. was an
unquestioned military colossus athwart the world, which no power or
people could effectively oppose, was hubristic nonsense certain to get
the country into deep trouble — as it did — and bring the U.S. Army to
the point of collapse, as happened in Vietnam and may well happen again
in Iraq (and Afghanistan).
Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our military invaded Iraq
with far too small a force; failed to respond adequately when parts of
the Iraqi Army (and Baathist Party) went underground; tolerated an orgy
of looting and lawlessness throughout the country; disobeyed orders and
ignored international obligations (including the obligation of an
occupying power to protect the facilities and treasures of the occupied
country — especially, in this case, Baghdad's National Museum
and other archaeological sites of untold historic value); and
incompetently fanned the flames of an insurgency against our
occupation, committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi
civilians.
According to Andrew Bacevich,
"Next to nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer lies within
the capacity of the United States to determine the outcome of events
there." Our former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas W. Freeman, says of
President Bush's recent "surge" strategy in Baghdad and al-Anbar
Province: "The reinforcement of failure is a poor substitute for its
correction."
Symbolically, a certain sign of the disaster to come in Iraq arrived
via an April 26th posting from the courageous but anonymous Sunni woman
who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad
Burning. Her family, she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile — joining up to two million of her compatriots who have left the country. In her final dispatch, she wrote:
"There are moments when the injustice of having to
leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to
invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and
live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and
friends.... And to what?"
Retired General Barry McCaffrey,
commander of the 24th Infantry Division in the first Iraq war and a
consistent cheerleader for Bush strategies in the second, recently
radically changed his tune. He now says,
"No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter,
foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul,
nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without
heavily armed protection." In a different context, Gen. McCaffrey has concluded: "The U.S. Army is rapidly unraveling."
Even military failure in Iraq is still being spun into an endless web
of lies and distortions by the White House, the Pentagon, military
pundits, and the now-routine reporting of propagandists disguised as
journalists. For example, in the first months of 2007, rising car-bomb
attacks in Baghdad were making a mockery
of Bush administration and Pentagon claims that the U.S. troop
escalation in the capital had brought about "a dramatic drop in
sectarian violence." The official response to this problem: the
Pentagon simply quit including
deaths from car bombings in its count of sectarian casualties. (It has
never attempted to report civilian casualties publicly or accurately.)
Since August 2003, there have been over 1,050 car bombings in Iraq. One
study estimates that through June 2006 the death toll from these alone has been a staggering 78,000 Iraqis.
The war and occupation George W. Bush unleashed in Iraq has proved
unimaginably lethal for unarmed civilians, but reporting the true
levels of lethality in Iraq, or the nature of the direct American role
in it was, for a long time, virtually taboo in the U.S. media. As late
as October 2006, the journal of the British Medical Association, The Lancet,
published a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad
estimating that, since March 2003, there were some 601,027 more Iraqi
deaths from violence than would have been expected without a war. The
British and American governments at first dismissed the findings,
claiming the research was based on faulty statistical methods — and the
American media ignored the study, played down its importance, or
dismissed its figures.
On March 27, 2007, however, it was revealed that the chief scientific
adviser to the British Ministry of Defense, Roy Anderson, had offered a
more honest response. The methods used in the study were, he wrote,
"close to best practice." Another British official described them as "a
tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones." Over
600,000 violent deaths in a population estimated in 2006 at 26.8
million — that is, one in every 45 individuals — amounts to a
made-in-America human catastrophe.
One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try
to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of
rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result
of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans' mental
make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into
recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed
"rag heads" or "hajis" as murder. The cult of silence on this subject
began to slip only slightly in May 2007 when a report prepared by the
Army's Mental Health Advisory Team was leaked to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Based on anonymous surveys and focus groups involving 1,320 soldiers
and 447 Marines, the study revealed that only 56% of soldiers would
report a unit member for injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant,
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 incredibly 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
occupation of Iraq."
America's massive "military" budgets, still on the rise, are beginning
to threaten the U.S. 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 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% of every 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 our economic system. Some $30 billion of the official
Defense Department (DoD) appropriation in the current fiscal year is
"black," meaning that it is allegedly going for highly classified projects.
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 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
larger than 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 (1/3rd for the FBI): $1.9
Department of the Treasury (military retirements): $38.5
NASA (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,
essentially, 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, 2007, 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 we've 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 our 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 our manufacturing economy will correct what has gone wrong.
Both of these solutions fail to address the root cause of our national
decline.
I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we 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 U.S., 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 American 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 our pundits and newspaper editorial writers that it is
simply never considered — we must specify as clearly 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, we would have to initiate a firm timetable for withdrawing all
our military forces and turning over the permanent military bases we
have built to the Iraqis. Second, domestically, we would have to
reverse federal budget priorities.
In the words of Noam Chomsky,
a venerable critic of American 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."
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 our empire, we would have to launch an orderly
closing-up process for at least 700 of the 737 military bases
we maintain (by official Pentagon count) in over 130 foreign countries
on every continent except Antarctica. We should ultimately aim at
closing all our imperialist enclaves, but in order to avoid
isolationism and maintain a capacity to assist the United Nations in
global peacekeeping operations, we should, for the time being, probably
retain some 37 of them, mostly naval and air bases.
Equally important, we should rewrite all our Status of Forces
Agreements — those American-dictated "agreements" that exempt our
troops based in foreign countries from local criminal laws, taxes,
immigration controls, anti-pollution legislation, and anything else the
American military can think of. It must be established as a matter of
principle and law that American forces stationed outside the U.S. will
deal with their host nations on a basis of equality, not of
extraterritorial privilege.
The American approach to diplomatic relations with the rest of the
world would also require a major overhaul. We would have to end our
belligerent unilateralism toward other countries as well as our
scofflaw behavior regarding international law. Our objective should be
to strengthen the United Nations, including our respect for its
majority, by working to end the Security Council veto system (and by
stopping using our present 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. We
should encourage the UN to begin outlawing weapons like land mines,
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, we should take some obvious steps like
recognizing Cuba and ending our 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. Our
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, we need 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. We 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.
In order to halt our economic decline and lessen our dependence on our
trading partners, the U.S. 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 American 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 U.S. that is widely
perceived as an evil empire and world forces are gathering to stop us.
The Bush administration insists that if we leave Iraq our enemies will
"win" or — even more improbably — "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."
Writings 
Subscribe to this comment's feed
