Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  Britain’s closing down its empire is one of its more admirable legacies. I do not share the nostalgia of contemporary Anglo-American writers who urge the United States to take up the “white man’s burden” and follow in the footsteps of British imperialists. Instead, I have chosen as my role model a Japanese scholar and journalist, Hotsumi Ozaki, about whom I long ago wrote a biography. Ozaki was born in what was then the Japanese colony of Taiwan, and his early childhood was that of a little colonialist, being taken to school by rickshaw. As an adult, he was a prominent journalist and scholar in China, and he accurately foresaw that Japan’s occupation of China would fail disastrously and lead to the blowback of the Chinese Communist revolution.

  Ozaki tried to warn his own government about its misguided ventures. For his troubles he was hanged as a traitor by the Japanese government in the waning days of World War II. I hope not to meet a similar fate, but I am as certain as Ozaki was that my country is launched on a dangerous path that it must abandon or else face the consequences.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE: THE BLOWBACK TRILOGY

  1. The CIA report is entitled Clandestine Service History: Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran, November 1952-August 1953 (March 1954). The author is Donald N. Wilber. For the original typescript and a history of its declassification and publication, including the CIA’s claim that the document had been destroyed and that no copy remained in existence, see, in particular, Malcolm Byrne, ed., “The Secret History of the Iran Coup, 1953,” National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book no. 28, http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/.

  2. Elisabeth Bumiller, “Addressing Cadets, Bush Sees Parallel to World War II,” New York Times, June 3, 2004.

  3. “Bin Laden’s Warning: Full Text,” BBC News, October 7, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/l/low/world/south_asia/l585636.stm. For a somewhat different translation, see “Bin Laden’s Statement: ’The Sword Fell,’” New York Times, October 8, 2001.

  4. Thomas Friedman, “No Mere Terrorist,” New York Times, March 24, 2002. See also Ervand Abrahamian, “The U.S. Media, Huntington, and September 11,” Third World Quarterly 24, no. 3 (2003), pp. 529-44; and a shorter version of the same essay in Middle East Report, Summer 2002, pp. 62-63.

  5. John F. Harris, “God Gave U.S. ’What We Deserve,’ Falwell Says,” Washington Post, September 14, 2001; Oliver Burkeman, “Powell Attacks Christian Right,” Guardian, November 15, 2002; John Sutherland, “God Save America,” Guardian, May 3, 2004.

  6. William M. Arkin, “The Pentagon Unleashes a Holy Warrior,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2003; “Rumsfeld Defends General Who Commented on War, Satan, “Associated Press, October 17, 2003; Douglas Jehl,”U.S. General Apologizes for Remarks About Islam,” New York Times, October 18, 2003; Editorial, “For Religious Bigotry,” New York Times, August 26, 2004.

  7. Simon Jenkins, “Democrats Should Not Fight Fire with Fire,” Times (London), September 12, 2001.

  8. Mai Yamani, research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, “The Rise of Shi’ite ’Petrolistan,’” Straits Times (Singapore), March 5, 2004; Juan Cole, “The United States in Iraq and Shiite Islamic Politics” (speech, San Diego State University, April 19, 2005); Robin Wright, “Iraq Winners Allied with Iran Are the Opposite of U.S. Vision,” Washington Post, February 14, 2005.

  9. Army colonel Hy Rothstein, quoted by Seymour M. Hersh, “The Other War,” New Yorker, April 12, 2004, p. 42.

  10. Humberto Marquez, “Iraq Invasion the ’Biggest Cultural Disaster Since 1258,’” Antiwar.com, February 16, 2005; Ian Frazier, “Invaders: Destroying Baghdad,” New Yorker, April 25, 2005.

  11. Ronald Bruce St. John, “Iraq Blowback Is Global and Growing,” Antiwar.com, December 11, 2004.

  12. On the staggering costs of caring for our maimed and psychologically damaged veterans, see Ronald J. Glasser, “A War of Disabilities: Iraq’s Hidden Costs Are Coming Home “ Harper’s Magazine, July 2005, pp. 59-62.

  13. “Baghdad Burning,” River Bend blog, May 7, 2004, http://www.riverbendblog.blogspot.com/.

  14. Joanna Chung and Alex Halperin, “Arab Attitudes to U.S. Hardening,” Financial Times, July 24-25,2004.

  15. “Millions Marched Against Bush’s War,” February 14-16,2003, http://www.failureisimpossible.com/dosomething/0215.htm.

  16. Shreffler’s complete poem reads:

  Neighborhood Girl

  She’s new to the neighborhood, her family just moved in

  From Greece or somewhere, she’s a great, tall, gawky girl

  With braces and earrings and uneven skin:

  Hormones and acne, her change is coming in,

  And today, she’s playing hooky. January fog.

  Orange lights on the school zone sign beat out their tattoo

  And caution the Homeland’s socked-in morning rush

  With their strobe-light samba: Condition Amber,

  As she sits invisible, swinging her legs to the beat,

  Perched up high on aluminum over

  The uncanny Day-Glo of the key-lime fluorescence

  That says: School at the top of this composition.

  I see her and she lets me. I’m an old family friend:

  Sometimes I play poker with her Aunt Erato.

  Her name is Nemesis and she’s just moved in,

  She’s new to the neighborhood, she’s checking it out.

  17. Micha F. Lindemans, “Nemesis,” Encyclopedia Mythica Online, http://www.pantheon.org/articles/n/nemesis.html.

  18. Richard Wagner, Die Walküre, act 2, scene 4.

  1: MILITARISM AND THE BREAKDOWN OF CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

  1. Newsmax, “Tommy Franks: Martial Law Will Replace Constitution After Next Terror Attack,” November 21, 2003, http://www.propagandarnatrix.com/211103martiallaw.html.

  2. Kevin Baker, “We’re in the Army Now,” Harper’s Magazine, October 2003, p. 46.

  3. Robert C. Byrd, “Congress Must Resist the Rush to War,” New York Times, October 10, 2002.

  4. Editorial, “Last Days of the Republic,” Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, MA), October 12, 2002, http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2002/Republic-Last-Daysl2oct02.htm.

  5. Bill Winter, “The Monarchization of America Under Bush,” Libertarian Party, October 29, 2004, http://nucnews.net/nucnews/2004nn/0410nn/041029nn.htm#680.

  6. Adam Young, “War Gave Us Caesar,” Ludwig von Mises Institute, October 12, 2004, http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1642.

  7. Robin Cook, “Bush Will Now Celebrate by Putting Fallujah to the Torch,” Guardian, November 5, 2004.

  8. Thomas E. Ricks, “Ex-Envoy Criticizes Bush’s Postwar Policy,” Washington Post, September 5, 2003.

  9. Sonni Efron, “Diplomats on the Defensive,” Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2003.

  10. “President Addresses the Nation in Prime Time Press Conference” (White House, April 13, 2004), p. 8, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040413-20.html.

  11. Quoted by John Dillin, “To the Founders, Congress was King,” Christian Science Monitor, January 20, 2005. See also Thomas E. Woods Jr., “Presidential War Powers,” LewRockwell.com, July 7, 2005, http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods45.html.

  12. Lieutenant Colonel Charles J. Dunlap Jr., “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012,” Parameters (U.S. Army War College Quarterly), Winter 1992-93, pp. 2-20; http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/1992/dunlap.htm, p. 6.

  13. “Base Closure List Becomes Battleground,” MSNBC.com, May 13, 2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.eom/id/7834939/print/l/displaymode/1098/; Charles V. Pena, “Base Closing Blues,” Reason, May 20, 2005, http://www.reason.com/hod/cp052005.shtml; Sheldon Richman, “Turning Off Government’s Money Spigot,” Newsday, May 31, 2005.

  14. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), pp. 272-73.

  15. James Madison, “Political Observations,” April 20, 1795, http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/quotes/madison_perpetual_war.html. Madison’s statement
on war continues:” [It should be well understood] that the powers proposed to be surrendered [by the Third Congress] to the Executive were those which the Constitution has most jealously appropriated to the Legislature.... The Constitution expressly and exclusively vests in the Legislature the power of declaring a state of war ... the power of raising armies ... the power of creating offices.... A delegation of such powers [to the President] would have struck, not only at the fabric of our Constitution, but at the foundation of all well organized and well checked governments. The separation of the power of declaring war from that of conducting it, is wisely contrived to exclude the danger of its being declared for the sake of its being conducted. The separation of the power of raising armies from the power of commanding them, is intended to prevent the raising of armies for the sake of commanding them. The separation of the power of creating offices from that of filling them, is an essential guard against the temptation to create offices for the sake of gratifying favorites or multiplying dependents.”

  16. Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated (New York: Nation Books, 2002), pp. 22-40.

  17. Michael J. Sullivan III, American Adventurism Abroad: Thirty Invasions, Interventions, and Regime Changes Since World War II (Newport, CT: Praeger, 2004). The two most complete and accurate compilations of modern American military operations abroad are William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995); and Clara Nieto, Masters of War: Latin America and U.S. Aggression (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003). Also see Bernard Chazelle, “Anti-Americanism: A Clinical Study,” September 2004, http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/politics/antiam-print.html.

  18. Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper, “Lessons From the Past: The American Record on Nation Building,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Policy Brief no. 24, May 2003; Roger Morris (a former member of the National Security Council staff), “Freedom, American Style “ Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2003; Abid Aslam, “U.S. Selling More Weapons to Undemocratic Regimes That Support ’War on Terror,’” Common Dreams News Center, May 25, 2005.

  19. See Richard Norton-Taylor, “Both the Military and the Spooks are Opposed to War in Iraq,” Guardian, February 24, 2003, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4611927-103677,00.html. For a remarkably accurate, if fictional, treatment of how the CIA goes about overthrowing a regime that is no longer useful to the United States and installing a puppet government, see Henry Bromell, Little America (New York: Vintage, 2002).

  20. Walter Karp (1934-1989), a theorist of republicanism and for a decade a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, argues, “There is not a single modern American war which was forced upon the United States by compelling interest of any kind, yet every one of America’s wars since 1898 the party oligarchs gave unmistakable signs of welcoming: by fabricating incidents, by carrying out secret provocations, by concocting far-fetched theories— ’dominoes’ in one war, ’neutral rights’ in another, ’collective security’ in a third—to demonstrate an American interest not otherwise apparent and to hold up to the American people a foreign menace not otherwise menacing.” See Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America (New York: Franklin Square Press, 1993), p. 264.

  21. On secrecy in American overt and covert military activities abroad, see William M. Arkin, Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World (Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2005).

  22. Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 2.

  23. See, inter alia, John W. Dean, Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Warner Books, 2005); James Bovard, The Bush Betrayal (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004); Anthony Lewis, “One Liberty at a Time,” Mother Jones, May-June 2004; Michael Lind, “How a Superpower Lost Its Stature,” Financial Times, June 1, 2004; and Jim VandeHei, “GOP Tilting Balance of Power to the Right,” Washington Post, May 26, 2005.

  24. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963). I have used the revised and enlarged edition, New York: Penguin, 1994.

  25. Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, p. 159.

  26. Ibid., p. 160.

  27. Ibid., p. xxix.

  28. Ibid., p. 187.

  29. Ibid., p. 160.

  30. Mark Danner, “Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story,” New York Review of Books, October 7, 2004, p. 49. The most important book on the history of a distinctively American form of torture, developed by the CIA and employed throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, is Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan, 2006).

  31. Seymour M. Hersh, “The Gray Zone: How a Secret Pentagon Program Came to Abu Ghraib,” New Yorker, May 24, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact; John Shattuck, former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, “On Abu Ghraib: One Sergeant’s Courage a Model for U.S. Leaders,” Christian Science Monitor, May 16, 2005.

  32. Lawrence Smallman, “Rumsfeld Cracks Jokes, but Iraqis Aren’t Laughing,” Al Jazeera (English), April 12, 2003.

  33. Michael Isikoff, “2002 Memo Reveals Push for Broader Presidential Powers,” Newsweek, December 18, 2004.

  34. “Gen. Richard Myers on ’Fox News Sunday,’” transcript, Fox News, May 2, 2004. Also see Gary Younge and Julian Borger, “CBS Delayed Report on Iraqi Prison Abuse After Military Chief’s Plea,” Guardian, May 4, 2004.

  35. Statement of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, December 5, 2005, in “Rice Says United States Does Not Torture Terrorists,” FindLaw, December 5, 2005, http://news.fmdlaw.com/scripts/printer_friendly.pl?page=/wash/s/20051205/20051205124753.html.

  36. “Powell Discusses Future Roles of U.N., Coalition on German TV, April 3, 2003,” State Department transcript, http://www.usembassy.it/file2003_04/alia/A3040414.htm.

  37. See George Hicks, The Comfort Women: Japans Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994); Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Yuki Tanaka, Japans Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the U.S. Occupation (New York: Routledge, 2002).

  38. U.S. Air Force Pamphlet 14-210, February 1998. On the history of concepts like “collateral damage” and their uses as propaganda, see David Barsamian, interview with Noam Chomsky, “Collateral Language,” Z Magazine Online 16, no. 7/8 (July-August 2003), http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Aug2003/barsamianpr0803.html.

  39. “Geneva Conventions,” Encarta Online Encyclopedia, 2005, http://encarta.msn.com/text_762529232l/Geneva_Conventions.html. See also Anthony Gregory,” ’Collateral Damage’ as Euphemism for Mass Murder,” LewRock well.com, April 30, 2005, http://www.lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory72.html.

  40. Quoted by Sheldon Richman, “Iraqi Sanctions: Were They Worth It?” Future of Freedom Foundation, February 9, 2004. For a defense of the attitudes and policies of the Clinton administration, see Nancy Soderberg, The Superpower Myth, foreword by Bill Clinton (New York: John Wiley, 2005), pp. 204-7.

  41. David Cortright, “A Hard Look at Iraq Sanctions,” Nation, December 3, 2001.

  42. Ramzi Kysia, “Biological Warfare in Iraq,” Common Dreams News Center, August 21, 2002; Thomas J. Nagy, “The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S. Intentionally Destroyed Iraq’s Water Supply,” Progressive, August 2001, http://www.progressive.org/0801issue/nagy0901.html; James Bovard, “Iraq Sanctions and American Intentions: Blameless Carnage?” Future of Freedom Foundation, February 9, 2004. In his book Terrorism and Tyranny (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003), Bovard documents how the civilian infrastructure was deliberately targeted. Also see Anthony Arnove, ed., Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War,2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003).

&nbs
p; 43. Barton Gellman, “Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq; Officials Acknowledge Strategy Went Beyond Purely Military Targets,” Washington Post, June 23, 1991.

  44. Colonel John A. Warden III, “The Enemy as a System,” Airpower Journal 9, no. 1 (Spring 1995), pp. 40-55, http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/warden.html.

  45. Gellman, “Allied Air War.”

  46. International Committee of the Red Cross, International Humanitarian Law, full texts, http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/WebCONVFULL10penView.

  47. Jacob G. Hornberger, “Sanctions: The Cruel and Brutal War Against the Iraqi People,” Future of Freedom Foundation, February 9, 2004.

  48. Joy Gordon, “Cool War: Economic Sanctions as a Weapon of Mass Destruction,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2002, http://www.scn.org/ccpi/HarpersJoyGordonNov02.html.

  49. Richman, “Iraqi Sanctions.”

  50. Gordon, “Cool War.”