This is Memorial Day weekend, the holiday on which, in theory anyway, we pause to remember the sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform. It behooves us also to consider what they are being asked to sacrifice for, and whether they or anyone else can claim that those sacrifices are for noble goals like freedom, liberty or democracy. I’ve said before that the most important issue facing this country is one we never talk about: Empire. Since World War II America has been ineluctably sucked toward Empire. Whether those leading us have realized what they were doing is more or less besides the point. Empire is inconsistent with Democracy and inconsistent with freedom. It is also, at least as we practice it, inconsistent with the long term survival of the nation. We are literally bankrupting ourselves in pursuit of a world hegemony that we refuse to admit we are seeking. It may be impossible to reverse course at this point, but we certainly never will if we remain willfully blind to what we are doing to ourselves, not to mention what we are doing to the rest of the world.
There’s a thoughtful article on this issue in the most recent New York Review of Books (Bush’s Amazing Achievement). The achievement?
One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America’s standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation’s foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.
The article consists of a review of three books, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, by Chalmers Johnson, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower, by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Statecraft and How to Restore America’s Standing in the World, by Dennis Ross.
The great thing about the New York Review of Books is that the reviews themselves often stand by themselves as excellent summaries of the subject matter of the books reviewed. Often, the reviewers make only glancing references to the books reviewed. This article is particularly good. The reviewer, Jonathan Freedland, obviously has a lot of sympathy with the views of Chalmers Johnson, who argues that we have a choice between a Republic and an Empire:
Over any fairly lengthy period of time, successful imperialism requires that a domestic republic or a domestic democracy change into a domestic tyranny…. The United States today, like the Roman Republic in the first century BC, is threatened by an out-of-control military-industrial complex and a huge secret government controlled exclusively by the president. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, cynical and short-sighted political leaders of the United States began to enlarge the powers of the president at the expense of the elected representatives of the people and the courts.
The public went along, accepting the excuse that a little tyranny was necessary to protect the population. But, as Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1759, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Our military has become a tool of Empire. We have bases in a majority of countries on the planet, and woe to any country that asks us to leave. In exchange for campaign contributions or short term political advantage, our politicians feed the ravenous maw of the defense industry, building ever more, and often useless, weapons (including, let’s be honest, submarines). For those of us at home, or the majority anyway, nothing is gained by our surrender of our liberties. We are not safer. We spend ever increasing amounts of our national treasure on sustaining and growing our Empire, while only a few corporations and money men (e.g., the Carlyle Group, in which Bush, Sr. has an interest). The empire rots in the center as it expands outward. You can argue about whether the devolution toward Empire is a historical inevitability, but whatever position you take on that score you can’t deny that the Bush Administration has taken advantage of events to hasten the process toward both empire and dictatorship. As with the Romans, the process is reflected in the Senate, which has surrendered its prerogatives to a budding dictator. At least the Romans lost their liberties to first rate men; we Americans have surrendered ours to a bunch of incompetent chickenhawks and their third rate front man. The Roman Empire lasted 500 years, ours is crumbling while we build it.
Freedland, channeling Johnson, summarizes our choices:
Necessarily, it is Johnson, who has diagnosed a more radical problem, who has to come up with a more radical solution. He cannot merely call for greater powers for Congress, because by his own lights, “the legislative branch of our government is broken,” reduced to the supine creature of large corporations, the defense contractors first among them. Instead, he urges a surge in direct democracy, “a grassroots movement to abolish the CIA, break the hold of the military-industrial com-plex, and establish public financing of elections”—but he has the grace to recognize how unlikely such a development is.
So he is left offering not an eleven- or twelve-step program, but rather a historical choice. Either the United States can follow the lead of the Romans, who chose to keep their empire and so lost their republic. Or “we could, like the British Empire after World War II, keep our democracy by giving up our empire.” That choice was neither smooth nor executed heroically, but it was the right one. Now much of the world watches the offspring of that empire, nearly two and a half centuries later—hoping it makes the same choice, and trembling at the prospect that it might not.
Between this Memorial Day and the next we will probably notch more than a thousand more dead military personnel, and who knows how many dead Iraqis. Today we can most honor those who have died already by seriously questioning why our soldiers are being asked to kill and be killed.