Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (48 page)

To understand the real weight of military Keynesianism in the American economy, one must approach official defense statistics with great care. They are compiled and published in such a way as to minimize the actual size of the official “defense budget.” The Pentagon does this to try to conceal from the public the real costs of the military establishment and its overall weight within the economy. There are numerous military activities not carried out by the Department of Defense and that are therefore not part of the Pentagon’s annual budgets. These include the Department of Energy’s spending on nuclear weapons ($16.4 billion in fiscal 2005), the Department of Homeland Security’s outlays for the actual “defense” of the United States against terrorism ($41 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs’ responsibilities for the lifetime care of the seriously wounded ($68 billion), the Treasury Department’s payments of pensions to military retirees and widows and their families (an amount not fully disclosed by official statistics), and the Department of State’s financing of foreign arms sales and militarily related developmental assistance ($23 billion).

In addition to these amounts, there is something called the “Military Construction Appropriations Bill,” which is tiny compared to the other expenditures—$12.2 billion for fiscal 2005—but which covers all the military bases around the world. Adding these non-Department of Defense expenditures, the supplemental appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military construction budget to the Defense Appropriations
Bill actually doubles what the administration calls the annual defense budget. It is an amount larger than all other defense budgets on Earth combined.
⁸⁵
Still to be added to this are interest payments by the Treasury to cover past debt-financed defense outlays going back to 1916. Robert Higgs, author of
Crisis and Leviathan
and many other books on American militarism, estimates that in 2002 such interest payments amounted to $138.7 billion.
⁸⁶

Even when all these things are included, Enron-style accounting makes it hard to obtain an accurate understanding of our reliance on a permanent arms economy. In 2005, the Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that “the Pentagon has no accurate knowledge of the cost of military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the fight against terrorism.”
⁸⁷
It said that, lacking a reliable method for tracking military costs, the army merely inserts into its accounts figures that match the available budget. “Effectively, the Army [is] reporting back to Congress what it had appropriated.”

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, and his colleague at Harvard Linda Bilmes have tried to put together an estimate of the real costs of the Iraq war. They calculate that it will cost about $2 trillion.
⁸⁸
This figure is several orders of magnitude larger than what the Bush administration publicly acknowledges. Above all, Stiglitz and Bilmes have tried to compile honest figures for veterans’ benefits. For 2006, the officially budgeted amount is $68 billion, which is absurdly low given the large number of our soldiers who have been severely wounded. We celebrate the medical miracles that allow some of our troops to survive the detonation of an “improvised explosive device” hidden in the Earth under a Humvee, but when larger numbers of soldiers who once might have died in such situations are saved, the resulting wounds, often including brain damage, require that they receive round-the-clock care for the rest of their lives.

We almost surely will end up repudiating some of the promises we have made to the men and women who have volunteered to serve in our armed forces. For instance, the government’s medical insurance scheme for veterans and their families, called Tricare, is budgeted for 2007 at a mere $39 billion. But the future demands on Tricare are going to go off the chart. And we cannot afford them unless we radically reorient our
economy. The American commitment to military Keynesianism and the nontransparent manner in which it is implemented have combined into a set of fatal contradictions for our country.

In
Blowback,
I set out to explain why we are hated around the world. The concept “blowback” does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes—as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001—the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried to provide some of the historical background for understanding the dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on Asia—the area of my academic training—than on the Middle East.

The Sorrows of Empire
was written during the American preparations for and launching of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. I began to study our continuous military buildup since World War II and the 737 military bases we currently maintain in other people’s countries. This empire of bases is the concrete manifestation of our global hegemony, and many of the blowback-inducing wars we have conducted had as their true purpose the sustaining and expanding of this network. We do not think of these overseas deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, brings them to our attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the peoples of ancient Iberia or nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims of foreign colonization.

In
Nemesis,
I have tried to present historical, political, economic, and philosophical evidence of where our current behavior is likely to lead. Specifically, I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent. The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of
government—a republic—that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play—isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.

History is instructive on this dilemma. If we choose to keep our empire, as the Roman Republic did, we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates. There is an alternative, however. We could, like the British Empire after World War II, keep our democracy by giving up our empire. No more than the French and Dutch, the British did not do a particularly brilliant job of liquidating their empire, and there were several clear cases where British imperialists defied their nation’s commitment to democracy in order to keep their foreign privileges. Kenya in the 1950s is a particularly savage example. But the overall thrust of postwar British history is clear: the people of the British Isles chose democracy over imperialism. For this reason, I can only regard Britain’s willingness to join the United States in its invasion of Iraq as an atavistic response.

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.

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.