Monday, December 20, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
Friday, December 3, 2010
YouTube - Authors@Google: Dexter Filkins
YouTube - Authors@Google: Dexter Filkins: ""
Dexter Filkins discusses his book TheForever War
Dexter Filkins discusses his book TheForever War
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Monday, November 29, 2010
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
Friday, November 19, 2010
Religion and War
Religion and War
This website is a good staring place with many useful links and resources on Religion and war.
This website is a good staring place with many useful links and resources on Religion and war.
A Force More Powerful
A Force More Powerful
An excellent site with information about films, books, games, and resources for non violence. See the resources section for several links to the important work of Gene Sharp.
An excellent site with information about films, books, games, and resources for non violence. See the resources section for several links to the important work of Gene Sharp.
A Force More Powerful
A Force More Powerful
information on important films about effective non violence and study guides that can be downloaded.
information on important films about effective non violence and study guides that can be downloaded.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Monday, November 8, 2010
Friday, November 5, 2010
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
Mission | OpenSecrets
Mission | OpenSecrets
A good database of players in the revolving doors of the industrial-military complex
A good database of players in the revolving doors of the industrial-military complex
Watch the Chomsky Buckley debate in two parts below
The issues of 40 years ago are still with us, albiet militarism and empire have grown a great deal since this debate. JFG
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Two Documentaries about truth and lies
If I tell you your government lies to you, You will probably say you are "shocked.... shocked " much like .Captain Renault....in Casablanca. However we all need to be reminded just how often and how serious these governmental falsehoods can be to our democracy. One Documentary is The Most Dangerous Man in America. about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1319726/ The full documentary can be seen here http://www.pbs.org/pov/mostdangerousman/ until the 27th of this month.The other is The Pat Tillman Story currently in theaters, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568334/
Clicking on the links will take you to more information and trailers
Both are worth your time. JFG.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Monday, October 11, 2010
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
The Selling Of The Woodrow Wilson Center
The Selling Of The Woodrow Wilson Center
This illustrates the revolving door and the circulation of elites as well as corporate power and influence of money. Speaking of money , one third of WWC is taxpayer supported. JFG
This illustrates the revolving door and the circulation of elites as well as corporate power and influence of money. Speaking of money , one third of WWC is taxpayer supported. JFG
The Woodrow Wilson Center Desecrates Its NamesakeĆ¢€™s Legacy And Violates Its Congressional Mandate
The Woodrow Wilson Center Desecrates Its NamesakeĆ¢€™s Legacy And Violates Its Congressional Mandate
As President Eisenhower warned: beware of the military industrial complex; and several historians have commented on his original notes that included Congress in the complex. Many are now referring to
the military, industrial, Congress, and think tank complex. In these two articles we see how this complex works. JFG
As President Eisenhower warned: beware of the military industrial complex; and several historians have commented on his original notes that included Congress in the complex. Many are now referring to
the military, industrial, Congress, and think tank complex. In these two articles we see how this complex works. JFG
Thursday, October 7, 2010
"winning hearts and minds" ?
Iraq War Veteran Who Rescued Wounded Children in 2007 Apache Attack Describes Emotional Toll of Witnessing Infamous Killings
This is very good for a description of the stigma and coercion against seeking mental health services by
military personnel. Also describes one service mans actions and reactions to the helicopters shooting released on wiki leaks a few years go.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Monday, September 27, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
The Waning of America by Hiro
Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, The Waning of America | TomDispatch
Read for information about China's militarism and rising economic power
JFG.
Read for information about China's militarism and rising economic power
JFG.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Trailer for The Day After Peace Documentary
Enjoy this trailer about what one person with one idea can do.. JFG.
Tariq ali
The costs of militarism are discussed in relation to the worst disaster in UN history. JFG.
Why We Fight Documentary
Excellent Documentary on Militarism. This a full length version courtesy of free internet university and google video. JFG
Charles Bowden article on militarism and Mexico.
An article by Charles Bowden on Mexico and militarism...
http://www.hcn.org/issues/42.4/the-war-next-door/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=
This information as well as the previous posts on militarism and Mexico are thanks to Ryan Bemis of
PCGJ
http://www.hcn.org/issues/42.4/the-war-next-door/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=
This information as well as the previous posts on militarism and Mexico are thanks to Ryan Bemis of
PCGJ
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Related to the posting on an Overview of Militarism by James Grant, you can find
A short bibliography of Militarism on Amazon at :
A short bibliography of Militarism on Amazon at :
Please do not buy me any books, I only put this here because some people like to see and read about the books on Amazon.
Another short bibliography on militarism can be found at WorldCat at:
and a longer bibliographical list is at:
Docs Reveals Blackwater-Linked Companies Provided Intel & Security to Multinationals Like Monsanto, Chevron
The circulating elites and the interrelationships of militarism and the private sector. The Article can be read at Nation http://www.thenation.com. JFG
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Part one of an on going work in progress on Militarism by Jim Grant
Militarism: an Overview of what thoughtful people are saying in our time
by
James F. Grant
jamesfgrant@gmail.com
Researchers and clinicians treating families of alcoholics and addicts summarize the denial of the problem, as the “elephant in the living room.” Ignored, the elephant continues to grow, yet remains invisible to the family members. When the situation becomes untenable, someone finally says, “There is an Elephant in the living room.” Only then do they start seeking treatment for the problem! Other professionals prefer to call this phenomenon “the merry- go - round of denial.
If you substitute country for family, a similar phenomenon exists when it comes to militarism in the USA. Currently, militarism is the “invisible elephant” in the daily lives of the citizens of the United States. While the families of alcoholics or addicts fail to see the Elephant, their friends and neighbors do indeed see it clearly. This seems to be also true of the militarism in the United States, whereas most of the citizens are blind and in denial, other citizens of the world unmistakably see the results of our militarism. We must pay attention to those scholars, journalists, and writers who have been describing what they have seen and are trying to break through our denial and to educate us about militarism.
Basevich in The New American Militarism says that as early as the 1990s the main feature of US policy was the “marriage of a militaristic cast of mind with utopian ends" and he further stated his book would examine the origins of this marriage and his recommendation for its annulment. Bacevich points out that after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, many voices claimed militarism and identified it in the following “books.
• The Sorrows of Empire; Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, by Chalmers Johnson
• Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, by Norm Chomsky;
• Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire, edited by Carl Boggs
• Rouge Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions, by Clyde Prestowitz
• Incoherent Empire, by Michael Mann, with its concluding chapter called “The New Militarism." 1
Chalmers Johnson, a Historian states, “As distinct from other peoples on this earth, most Americans do not recognize-or do not want to recognize-that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, they are often ignorant of the fact that their government garrisons the globe. They do not realize that a vast network of American military bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire.” 2
Boggs tells us, “The ceaseless global expansion of US military power since the early 1940s is matched by an astonishing public refusal to incorporate an understanding of that power into the various discourses political, educational, media, cultural. The more omnipresent power has become, the more it permeates virtually every corner of international and domestic life, the more it seems to be ignored or deflected, suppressed or forgotten, kept safely outside the established public sphere.”3 Howard Zinn, in the graphic adaptation of A People’s History of American Empire wrote, “Throughout US history our military has been used not for moral purposes but to expand economic, political, and military power.” 4
“A century ago, Woodrow Wilson, then an academic, described an America in which “comparatively small groups of men,” corporate managers, “wield a power and control over the wealth and the business operations of the country,” becoming “rivals of the government itself.”.5
All of these writers and others have been telling us about U.S militarism and imperialism. Is the message being heard or are they preaching to the choir?
When I began my research to answer the question: What are thoughtful people saying about militarism in our time, it never occurred to me how many thoughtful people are saying nothing or very little about militarism. Is it denial or educational deficit at work?
As Boggs reports “ A survey of 36 widely used college texts in the fields of history, political science, and sociology- those disciplines expected to address the US role in world affairs- reveals some fascinating but disturbing information. No fewer than twenty-seven of these required course readings, ranging in length from three hundred to six hundred pages, contain absolutely nothing about the American military in any of its dimensions.”6
The mystery of denial also occurs in academia with many disciplines paying little or no attention to militarism. Political Science, for example, in their main professional journal has ignored military power ever since the Vietnam War which was forty years ago. Boggs in his reading of Political Science and International Relations continues to identify major works that he several times applauds for the scholarship of the authors but points out again and again how they either ignore or pay scant attention to the issues of militarism. The disciplines of History and Sociology given their broader perspective and more students and faculty from outside the mainstream would be expected to do a much better job of addressing militarism than the discipline of Political Science but according to Boggs readings the differences in attention to militarism is slight. Boggs continues to be generous in his praise of certain works of sociology, some of which are texts and classic works in the field. He continues to point out the absence or the minimal attention paid to militarism or even the military. There is no “sociology of military" while there is a “sociology of” many other topics. Norm Chomsky, Tariq Ali, and Chalmers Johnson, are identified as writers who will thoughtfully examine, with a critical eye, militarism in the U.S}7
How can it be that militarism is so big and it is neither seen nor discussed? We will need to look at the history of militarisms growth and then describe its size and its global reach. That will be the next installment of what thoughtful people are saying about militarism in our time
1 Bacevich, 2006 p3
2 Johnson, 2004 p1
3 Boggs, 2005 p.xx
4 Zinn, 2008 p.7
5 Chomsky,.2010
6 Boggs, 2005 p xxiv-xxv
7 Boggs 2005, pxxv-xxxii
Galtung on the fall of America's Empire
From a man who has been active in field for over twenty-five years. I especially like what he says about http://english.aljazeera.net/ as I think it and Democracy Now are both good news sites. JFG
From Life & Peace Institute............sites and NGO's.............JFG
Research
Deparment of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University (DPCR)
The Department of Peace and Conflict Research was established in 1971 to conduct peace research and offer courses in peace and conflict studies. At present some 200-300 students are enrolled every academic year. Courses offered include undergraduate and post-graduate courses, as well as a Ph. D. programme. In addition, there are shorter advanced courses and special seminars.
DPCR hompage
European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI)
ECMI’s three main spheres of activity are: (1) Information Services, (2) Research and (3) Constructive Conflict Management.
ECMI homepage
European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation (ECCP) The European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation is a network of European non-governmental organisations involved in the prevention and/or resolution of violent conflicts in the international arena.
ECCP homepage
Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR), George Mason University
The mission of the Institute is to advance the understanding and resolution of significant and persistent human conflicts.
ICAR homepage
International Peace Research Oslo (PRIO)
PRIO conducts research on three main themes: Conditions of War and Peace, Ethnic and Nationalist Conflicts, and Foreign and Security Policies.
PRIO homepage
Peace Research Information Unit Bonn (PRIUB)
Peace Research Information Unit Bonn (PRIUB) is a national and international advice, information, and service centre.
PRIUB homepage
The Richardson Institute
Among the Richardson Institute's aims are to be a centre of excellence in peace and conflict research and to offer opportunities for undergraduate and postgraduate study and research.
The Richardson Institute homepage
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)
Publishers of the SIPRI Yearbook on armaments, disarmament and international security. Conducts a range of research in both "hard" and "soft" security.
SIPRI homepage
TRANSCEND
TRANSCEND is a peace and development network for conflict transformation by peaceful means.
TRANSCEND homepage
Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF)
TFF is a foundation dedicated to researching peace and resolving conflicts with ever less violence to humans, cultures, and nature. TFF believes that alternatives to the main trends of our time, including those of the media, are needed. The website offers critical and constructive analyses and viewpoints.
TFF homepage
United States Institute for Peace (USIP)
Congressionally funded USIP conducts peace research and provides grants.
USIP homepage
Uppsala Program on Religion and Conflict
The Uppsala Program on Religion and Conflict is an attempt to link scholars in different research institutions sharing a research interest in the relationship between religion, conflict, and peace. While not a formal institution, the Program is a platform for research and publication initiatives of cross-scientific nature. It is guided by a steering group consisting of scholars from three different institutions: Uppsala University, the Life and Peace Institute, and the Church of Sweden.
Uppsala Program on Religion and Conflict homepage
Deparment of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University (DPCR)
The Department of Peace and Conflict Research was established in 1971 to conduct peace research and offer courses in peace and conflict studies. At present some 200-300 students are enrolled every academic year. Courses offered include undergraduate and post-graduate courses, as well as a Ph. D. programme. In addition, there are shorter advanced courses and special seminars.
DPCR hompage
European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI)
ECMI’s three main spheres of activity are: (1) Information Services, (2) Research and (3) Constructive Conflict Management.
ECMI homepage
European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation (ECCP) The European Platform for Conflict Prevention and Transformation is a network of European non-governmental organisations involved in the prevention and/or resolution of violent conflicts in the international arena.
ECCP homepage
Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR), George Mason University
The mission of the Institute is to advance the understanding and resolution of significant and persistent human conflicts.
ICAR homepage
International Peace Research Oslo (PRIO)
PRIO conducts research on three main themes: Conditions of War and Peace, Ethnic and Nationalist Conflicts, and Foreign and Security Policies.
PRIO homepage
Peace Research Information Unit Bonn (PRIUB)
Peace Research Information Unit Bonn (PRIUB) is a national and international advice, information, and service centre.
PRIUB homepage
The Richardson Institute
Among the Richardson Institute's aims are to be a centre of excellence in peace and conflict research and to offer opportunities for undergraduate and postgraduate study and research.
The Richardson Institute homepage
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)
Publishers of the SIPRI Yearbook on armaments, disarmament and international security. Conducts a range of research in both "hard" and "soft" security.
SIPRI homepage
TRANSCEND
TRANSCEND is a peace and development network for conflict transformation by peaceful means.
TRANSCEND homepage
Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF)
TFF is a foundation dedicated to researching peace and resolving conflicts with ever less violence to humans, cultures, and nature. TFF believes that alternatives to the main trends of our time, including those of the media, are needed. The website offers critical and constructive analyses and viewpoints.
TFF homepage
United States Institute for Peace (USIP)
Congressionally funded USIP conducts peace research and provides grants.
USIP homepage
Uppsala Program on Religion and Conflict
The Uppsala Program on Religion and Conflict is an attempt to link scholars in different research institutions sharing a research interest in the relationship between religion, conflict, and peace. While not a formal institution, the Program is a platform for research and publication initiatives of cross-scientific nature. It is guided by a steering group consisting of scholars from three different institutions: Uppsala University, the Life and Peace Institute, and the Church of Sweden.
Uppsala Program on Religion and Conflict homepage
Useful Media Sites for News About Conflict and Peace - Peace and Collaborative Development Network
Useful Media Sites for News About Conflict and Peace - Peace and Collaborative Development Network
The International Peace and Conflict web site and organization has a wealth of information
and is a good place to meet "kindred spirits" to talk with. Here they have posted some useful websites. The link will also take you to their website which can be explored. JFG
The International Peace and Conflict web site and organization has a wealth of information
and is a good place to meet "kindred spirits" to talk with. Here they have posted some useful websites. The link will also take you to their website which can be explored. JFG
USIP: Learn about us -- Who we are and What we do
This is an introduction to The USA's USIP and their new building in WAshington, D.C. JFG
Thursday, September 9, 2010
militarism a definition
militarism |ĖmilÉtÉĖrizÉm|
noun chiefly derogatory
the belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests.
DERIVATIVES
militarist noun & adjective
militaristic |ĖmilÉtÉĖristik| adjective
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from French militarisme, from militaire (see military ).
noun chiefly derogatory
the belief or desire of a government or people that a country should maintain a strong military capability and be prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests.
DERIVATIVES
militarist noun & adjective
militaristic |ĖmilÉtÉĖristik| adjective
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from French militarisme, from militaire (see military ).
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Arundhati Roy on global militarism
Arundhati Roy - War Resisters' International, india 2010 from War Resisters' International on Vimeo.
Arundhati Roy is worth listening to and reading. You can read a lot of material on Z mag online or her many books. She is very good on Democracy. JFG
TomDispatch web site and excerpt from How Washington Rules
Tomgram: Andrew Bacevich, How Washington Rules | TomDispatch:
This is a good web site for information on Militarism. Be sure to check out his free podcasts on ITunes , many of which are on Militarism. This link (post) has a excerpt from Bacevich's latest book How Washington Rules. JFG. Click on Tomgram: above
This is a good web site for information on Militarism. Be sure to check out his free podcasts on ITunes , many of which are on Militarism. This link (post) has a excerpt from Bacevich's latest book How Washington Rules. JFG. Click on Tomgram: above
Saturday, September 4, 2010
A People's History of American Empire by Howard Zinn
A wonderful and creative way for Howard Zinn's take on history of militarism and American Empire.
This as a must watch video. You will not be sorry if you watch this. JFG.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Monday, August 30, 2010
Bi-Polar ape (4-part series): Caught Between Love and War
Some views about the roots of violence and nonviolence and the intertwining of love and war.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
dismantling empire by Johnson
y Chalmers Johnson - AlterNet
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The following is an excerpt from Chalmers Johnson’s new book, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (Metropolitan Books, 2010).
However ambitious President Barack Obama’s domestic plans, one unacknowledged issue has the potential to destroy any reform efforts he might launch. Think of it as the 800-pound gorilla in the American living room: our longstanding reliance on imperialism and militarism in our relations with other countries and the vast, potentially ruinous global empire of bases that goes with it. The failure to begin to deal with our bloated military establishment and the profligate use of it in missions for which it is hopelessly inappropriate will, sooner rather than later, condemn the United States to a devastating trio of consequences: imperial overstretch, perpetual war, and insolvency, leading to a likely collapse similar to that of the former Soviet Union.
According to the 2008 official Pentagon inventory of our military bases around the world, our empire consists of 865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas U.S. territories. We deploy over 190,000 troops in 46 countries and territories. In just one such country, Japan, at the end of March 2008, we still had 99,295 people connected to U.S. military forces living and working there — 49,364 members of our armed services, 45,753 dependent family members, and 4,178 civilian employees. Some 13,975 of these were crowded into the small island of Okinawa, the largest concentration of foreign troops anywhere in Japan.
These massive concentrations of American military power outside the United States are not needed for our defense. They are, if anything, a prime contributor to our numerous conflicts with other countries. They are also unimaginably expensive. According to Anita Dancs, an analyst for the website Foreign Policy in Focus, the United States spends approximately $250 billion each year maintaining its global military presence. The sole purpose of this is to give us hegemony — that is, control or dominance — over as many nations on the planet as possible.
We are like the British at the end of World War II: desperately trying to shore up an empire that we never needed and can no longer afford, using methods that often resemble those of failed empires of the past — including the Axis powers of World War II and the former Soviet Union. There is an important lesson for us in the British decision, starting in 1945, to liquidate their empire relatively voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so by defeat in war, as were Japan and Germany, or by debilitating colonial conflicts, as were the French and Dutch. We should follow the British example. (Alas, they are currently backsliding and following our example by assisting us in the war in Afghanistan.)
Here are three basic reasons why we must liquidate our empire or else watch it liquidate us.
1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism
Shortly after his election as president, Barack Obama, in a speech announcing several members of his new cabinet, stated as fact that “[w]e have to maintain the strongest military on the planet.” A few weeks later, on March 12, 2009, in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington DC, the president again insisted, “Now make no mistake, this nation will maintain our military dominance. We will have the strongest armed forces in the history of the world.” And in a commencement address to the cadets of the U.S. Naval Academy on May 22nd, Obama stressed that “[w]e will maintain America’s military dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever seen.”
What he failed to note is that the United States no longer has the capability to remain a global hegemon, and to pretend otherwise is to invite disaster.
According to a growing consensus of economists and political scientists around the world, it is impossible for the United States to continue in that role while emerging into full view as a crippled economic power. No such configuration has ever persisted in the history of imperialism. The University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, author of the important study Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House, 2005), typically writes:
“America is in unprecedented decline. The self-inflicted wounds of the Iraq war, growing government debt, increasingly negative current-account balances and other internal economic weaknesses have cost the United States real power in today’s world of rapidly spreading knowledge and technology. If present trends continue, we will look back on the Bush years as the death knell of American hegemony.”
There is something absurd, even Kafkaesque, about our military empire. Jay Barr, a bankruptcy attorney, makes this point using an insightful analogy:
“Whether liquidating or reorganizing, a debtor who desires bankruptcy protection must provide a list of expenses, which, if considered reasonable, are offset against income to show that only limited funds are available to repay the bankrupted creditors. Now imagine a person filing for bankruptcy claiming that he could not repay his debts because he had the astronomical expense of maintaining at least 737 facilities overseas that provide exactly zero return on the significant investment required to sustain them… He could not qualify for liquidation without turning over many of his assets for the benefit of creditors, including the valuable foreign real estate on which he placed his bases.”
In other words, the United States is not seriously contemplating its own bankruptcy. It is instead ignoring the meaning of its precipitate economic decline and flirting with insolvency.
Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books, 2008), calculates that we could clear $2.6 billion if we would sell our base assets at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and earn another $2.2 billion if we did the same with GuantƔnamo Bay in Cuba. These are only two of our over 800 overblown military enclaves.
Our unwillingness to retrench, no less liquidate, represents a striking historical failure of the imagination. In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner assured an audience of students at Beijing University, “Chinese assets [invested in the United States] are very safe.” According to press reports, the students responded with loud laughter. Well they might.
In May 2009, the Office of Management and Budget predicted that in 2010 the United States will be burdened with a budget deficit of at least $1.75 trillion. This includes neither a projected $640 billion budget for the Pentagon, nor the costs of waging two remarkably expensive wars. The sum is so immense that it will take several generations for American citizens to repay the costs of George W. Bush’s imperial adventures — if they ever can or will. It represents about 13% of our current gross domestic product (that is, the value of everything we produce). It is worth noting that the target demanded of European nations wanting to join the Euro Zone is a deficit no greater than 3% of GDP.
Thus far, President Obama has announced measly cuts of only $8.8 billion in wasteful and worthless weapons spending, including his cancellation of the F-22 fighter aircraft. The actual Pentagon budget for next year will, in fact, be larger, not smaller, than the bloated final budget of the Bush era. Far bolder cuts in our military expenditures will obviously be required in the very near future if we intend to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity.
2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us
One of our major strategic blunders in Afghanistan was not to have recognized that both Great Britain and the Soviet Union attempted to pacify Afghanistan using the same military methods as ours and failed disastrously. We seem to have learned nothing from Afghanistan’s modern history — to the extent that we even know what it is. Between 1849 and 1947, Britain sent almost annual expeditions against the Pashtun tribes and sub-tribes living in what was then called the North-West Frontier Territories — the area along either side of the artificial border between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand Line. This frontier was created in 1893 by Britain’s foreign secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand.
Neither Britain nor Pakistan has ever managed to establish effective control over the area. As the eminent historian Louis Dupree put it in his book Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 425): “Pashtun tribes, almost genetically expert at guerrilla warfare after resisting centuries of all comers and fighting among themselves when no comers were available, plagued attempts to extend the Pax Britannica into their mountain homeland.” An estimated 41 million Pashtuns live in an undemarcated area along the Durand Line and profess no loyalties to the central governments of either Pakistan or Afghanistan.
The region known today as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan is administered directly by Islamabad, which — just as British imperial officials did — has divided the territory into seven agencies, each with its own “political agent” who wields much the same powers as his colonial-era predecessor. Then as now, the part of FATA known as Waziristan and the home of Pashtun tribesmen offered the fiercest resistance.
According to Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, experienced Afghan hands and coauthors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story (City Lights, 2009, p. 317):
“If Washington’s bureaucrats don’t remember the history of the region, the Afghans do. The British used air power to bomb these same Pashtun villages after World War I and were condemned for it. When the Soviets used MiGs and the dreaded Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships to do it during the 1980s, they were called criminals. For America to use its overwhelming firepower in the same reckless and indiscriminate manner defies the world’s sense of justice and morality while turning the Afghan people and the Islamic world even further against the United States.”
In 1932, in a series of Guernica-like atrocities, the British used poison gas in Waziristan. The disarmament convention of the same year sought a ban against the aerial bombardment of civilians, but Lloyd George, who had been British prime minister during World War I, gloated: “We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers” (Fitzgerald and Gould, p. 65). His view prevailed.
The U.S. continues to act similarly, but with the new excuse that our killing of noncombatants is a result of “collateral damage,” or human error. Using pilotless drones guided with only minimal accuracy from computers at military bases in the Arizona and Nevada deserts among other places, we have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed bystanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pakistani and Afghan governments have repeatedly warned that we are alienating precisely the people we claim to be saving for democracy.
When in May 2009, General Stanley McChrystal was appointed as the commander in Afghanistan, he ordered new limits on air attacks, including those carried out by the CIA, except when needed to protect allied troops. Unfortunately, as if to illustrate the incompetence of our chain of command, only two days after this order, on June 23, 2009, the United States carried out a drone attack against a funeral procession that killed at least 80 people, the single deadliest U.S. attack on Pakistani soil so far. There was virtually no reporting of these developments by the mainstream American press or on the network television news. (At the time, the media were almost totally preoccupied by the sexual adventures of the governor of South Carolina and the death of pop star Michael Jackson.)
Our military operations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan have long been plagued by inadequate and inaccurate intelligence about both countries, ideological preconceptions about which parties we should support and which ones we should oppose, and myopic understandings of what we could possibly hope to achieve. Fitzgerald and Gould, for example, charge that, contrary to our own intelligence service’s focus on Afghanistan, “Pakistan has always been the problem.” They add:
“Pakistan’s army and its Inter-Services Intelligence branch… from 1973 on, has played the key role in funding and directing first the mujahideen [anti-Soviet fighters during the 1980s]… and then the Taliban. It is Pakistan’s army that controls its nuclear weapons, constrains the development of democratic institutions, trains Taliban fighters in suicide attacks and orders them to fight American and NATO soldiers protecting the Afghan government.” (p. 322-324)
The Pakistani army and its intelligence arm are staffed, in part, by devout Muslims who fostered the Taliban in Afghanistan to meet the needs of their own agenda, though not necessarily to advance an Islamic jihad. Their purposes have always included: keeping Afghanistan free of Russian or Indian influence, providing a training and recruiting ground for mujahideen guerrillas to be used in places like Kashmir (fought over by both Pakistan and India), containing Islamic radicalism in Afghanistan (and so keeping it out of Pakistan), and extorting huge amounts of money from Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf emirates, and the United States to pay and train “freedom fighters” throughout the Islamic world. Pakistan’s consistent policy has been to support the clandestine policies of the Inter-Services Intelligence and thwart the influence of its major enemy and competitor, India.
Colonel Douglas MacGregor, U.S. Army (retired), an adviser to the Center for Defense Information in Washington, summarizes our hopeless project in South Asia this way: “Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan to make common cause with a United States in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-Muslim: Israel and India.”
Obama’s mid-2009 “surge” of troops into southern Afghanistan and particularly into Helmand Province, a Taliban stronghold, is fast becoming darkly reminiscent of General William Westmoreland’s continuous requests in Vietnam for more troops and his promises that if we would ratchet up the violence just a little more and tolerate a few more casualties, we would certainly break the will of the Vietnamese insurgents. This was a total misreading of the nature of the conflict in Vietnam, just as it is in Afghanistan today.
Twenty years after the forces of the Red Army withdrew from Afghanistan in disgrace, the last Russian general to command them, Gen. Boris Gromov, issued his own prediction: Disaster, he insisted, will come to the thousands of new forces Obama is sending there, just as it did to the Soviet Union’s, which lost some 15,000 soldiers in its own Afghan war. We should recognize that we are wasting time, lives, and resources in an area where we have never understood the political dynamics and continue to make the wrong choices.
3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases
In March, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert noted, “Rape and other forms of sexual assault against women is the great shame of the U.S. armed forces, and there is no evidence that this ghastly problem, kept out of sight as much as possible, is diminishing.” He continued:
“New data released by the Pentagon showed an almost 9 percent increase in the number of sexual assaults — 2,923 — and a 25 percent increase in such assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan [over the past year]. Try to imagine how bizarre it is that women in American uniforms who are enduring all the stresses related to serving in a combat zone have to also worry about defending themselves against rapists wearing the same uniform and lining up in formation right beside them.”
The problem is exacerbated by having our troops garrisoned in overseas bases located cheek-by-jowl next to civilian populations and often preying on them like foreign conquerors. For example, sexual violence against women and girls by American GIs has been out of control in Okinawa, Japan’s poorest prefecture, ever since it was permanently occupied by our soldiers, Marines, and airmen some 64 years ago.
That island was the scene of the largest anti-American demonstrations since the end of World War II after the 1995 kidnapping, rape, and attempted murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl by two Marines and a sailor. The problem of rape has been ubiquitous around all of our bases on every continent and has probably contributed as much to our being loathed abroad as the policies of the Bush administration or our economic exploitation of poverty-stricken countries whose raw materials we covet.
The military itself has done next to nothing to protect its own female soldiers or to defend the rights of innocent bystanders forced to live next to our often racially biased and predatory troops. “The military’s record of prosecuting rapists is not just lousy, it’s atrocious,” writes Herbert. In territories occupied by American military forces, the high command and the State Department make strenuous efforts to enact so-called “Status of Forces Agreements” (SOFAs) that will prevent host governments from gaining jurisdiction over our troops who commit crimes overseas. The SOFAs also make it easier for our military to spirit culprits out of a country before they can be apprehended by local authorities.
This issue was well illustrated by the case of an Australian teacher, a long-time resident of Japan, who in April 2002 was raped by a sailor from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, then based at the big naval base at Yokosuka. She identified her assailant and reported him to both Japanese and U.S. authorities. Instead of his being arrested and effectively prosecuted, the victim herself was harassed and humiliated by the local Japanese police. Meanwhile, the U.S. discharged the suspect from the Navy but allowed him to escape Japanese law by returning him to the U.S., where he lives today.
In the course of trying to obtain justice, the Australian teacher discovered that almost fifty years earlier, in October 1953, the Japanese and American governments signed a secret “understanding” as part of their SOFA in which Japan agreed to waive its jurisdiction if the crime was not of “national importance to Japan.” The U.S. argued strenuously for this codicil because it feared that otherwise it would face the likelihood of some 350 servicemen per year being sent to Japanese jails for sex crimes.
Since that time the U.S. has negotiated similar wording in SOFAs with Canada, Ireland, Italy, and Denmark. According to the Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces (2001), the Japanese practice has become the norm for SOFAs throughout the world, with predictable results. In Japan, of 3,184 U.S. military personnel who committed crimes between 2001 and 2008, 83% were not prosecuted. In Iraq, we have just signed a SOFA that bears a strong resemblance to the first postwar one we had with Japan: namely, military personnel and military contractors accused of off-duty crimes will remain in U.S. custody while Iraqis investigate. This is, of course, a perfect opportunity to spirit the culprits out of the country before they can be charged.
Within the military itself, the journalist Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007), speaks of the “culture of unpunished sexual assaults” and the “shockingly low numbers of courts martial” for rapes and other forms of sexual attacks. Helen Benedict, author of The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq (Beacon Press, 2009), quotes this figure in a 2009 Pentagon report on military sexual assaults: 90% of the rapes in the military are never reported at all and, when they are, the consequences for the perpetrator are negligible.
It is fair to say that the U.S. military has created a worldwide sexual playground for its personnel and protected them to a large extent from the consequences of their behavior. As a result a group of female veterans in 2006 created the Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN). Its agenda is to spread the word that “no woman should join the military.”
I believe a better solution would be to radically reduce the size of our standing army, and bring the troops home from countries where they do not understand their environments and have been taught to think of the inhabitants as inferior to themselves.
10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire
Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:
1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.
2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the “opportunity costs” that go with them — the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can’t or won’t.
3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. In the 1960s and 1970s we helped overthrow the elected governments in Brazil and Chile and underwrote regimes of torture that prefigured our own treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. (See, for instance, A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors [Pantheon, 1979], on how the U.S. spread torture methods to Brazil and Uruguay.) Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.
4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters — along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth — that follow our military enclaves around the world.
5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.
6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world’s largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism. A prime candidate for immediate closure is the so-called School of the Americas, the U.S. Army’s infamous military academy at Fort Benning, Georgia, for Latin American military officers. (See Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire [Metropolitan Books, 2004], pp. 136-40.)
7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.
8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. (See Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater:The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Nation Books, 2007]). Ending empire would make this possible.
9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.
10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.
Unfortunately, few empires of the past voluntarily gave up their dominions in order to remain independent, self-governing polities. The two most important recent examples are the British and Soviet empires. If we do not learn from their examples, our decline and fall is foreordained.
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Excerpted from DISMANTLING THE EMPIRE: AMERICA’S LAST BEST HOPE, published this month by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2010 by Chalmers Johnson. All rights reserved.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), among other works. His newest book, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (Metropolitan Books), has just been published. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Johnson discusses America’s empire of bases and his new book, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.
© 2010 Metropolitan Books All rights reserved.
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