Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (49 page)

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).

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
.